Thomas Mott Osborne: “I am not a constitutional scholar, obviously. I spent 40 years working with approximately 2,000 young people. I actively…”

“I am not a constitutional scholar, obviously. I spent 40 years working with approximately 2,000 young people. I actively recruited those young people to go to the University of Nebraska. I visited annually 60 to 70 of them personally in their homes and met their parents, and I saw firsthand the difference a family makes, for better or for worse. In my experience, the marriage findings of 12 leading family scholars who summarized thousands of studies on child rearing are as follows: children raised by both biological parents within a marriage are less likely to become unmarried parents, live in poverty, drop out of school, have poor grades, experience health problems, die as infants, abuse alcohol and drugs, experience mental illness, commit suicide, experience sexual and verbal abuse, engage in criminal behavior. And then they concluded with this statement that I think is noteworthy: 'Marriage is more than a private emotional relationship. It is also a social good. It is the bedrock of our culture.' And so what I observed was that a father contributes something unique to the welfare of a child. A mother also makes a unique contribution. Several countries, notably in Scandinavia, have changed the traditional definition of marriage. There has always been a decline of traditional marriage and a surge of out-of-wedlock births in these countries, and children born in such circumstances, on average, suffer significant dysfunction.”