Sam Brownback: “I understand some of my other colleagues will be coming to the floor. I urge them to get to the floor to make…”

“I understand some of my other colleagues will be coming to the floor. I urge them to get to the floor to make statements. Tomorrow there will be more individuals coming in. It will probably get crowded. So if people want to make an opening statement, this will be an excellent time to do it. While we are waiting for individuals to come to the floor, I want to share some of the information we put together on this institution of marriage so we can use the time profitably while we have this debate on the floor. I want to talk about the issue of what happens to children in this institution of marriage. I believe I am saying some of the things my grandparents would say: Well, of course that is true, this kind of basic thought or idea that you get in a society. But I think there are things that need to be reiterated. Now we have social data in the United States to say what happens when you walk away from a fundamental institution, and one like marriage, that it has as much trouble as it has. I want to point to the number of children born out of wedlock in the United States and where we have been going with this data. In the 1930s, 4 percent; 1950s up to 5.3 percent, now up to 34.6 percent. We have roughly a third of the children in the United States born to single moms. It is not that you cannot have a good child-rearing situation there, but, as we will show later on, it just gets much more difficult to raise that child.…”