Wednesday, September 10, 2025

Part I

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Children Should Have the Advantage of a Mother and Father: Economists Point to New Research Supporting the Priority of the Two-Parent Family

We believe the family to be part of creation order, part of God’s design for creation. We don’t believe that it is merely a sociological development. But if you are assuming that the family or marriage is just a sociological development, you have to ask the question, “Well, just how important might it be then?”

It is very interesting to note that out in the secular world, where you wouldn’t have people who at least are going to talk openly about God’s intention for the family nor the family being a part of creation order, they’re nonetheless coming to the rather unsurprising conclusion that the family is important and that family identity, family thriving has everything to do, for example, with what children learn and how they learn in school and elsewhere, how they develop, especially in terms of resourcefulness and self-confidence and self-discipline, the things that are necessary for functioning in the workforce.

Just in recent days, a pair of economists wrote a piece for The Wall Street Journal. Again, it’s coming from economists. They know how to analyze these kinds of statistics. They’ve come back to make the argument that when many people are asserting, for example, that ZIP Code of residence has a great deal to do with whether or not the children in those ZIP Codes succeed, they come back to say no, there’s actually a more fundamental issue that has to do with sorting. And that just means that in many communities the one thing that’s most important is not the ZIP Code, but the fact that there’s a thriving family in the home, and especially the two-parent issue becomes very, very clear.

The two economists are James L. Heckman, who by the way is a Nobel Laureate, and Sadegh Eshaghnia. And the title of the article, the headline is, “ZIP Code is Destiny? It Turns Out That’s Bunk.” Well, it’s not exactly bunk, it just isn’t the most basic issue. That’s the argument being made by these two economists. They’re looking at the fact that there is a disparity, and this is something that’s now politically active in conversation. You have politicians saying we need to remedy the ZIP Code disparity. Children in these ZIP Codes are doing far better than children in other ZIP Codes.

Now, for one thing, we understand you can’t take economic viability out of the question. You can’t take economic resources out of the question. But even just taking that into consideration, these two economists come back and say that ZIP Code thing is real. It’s real. Children in these ZIP Codes do better than children in others ZIP Codes. But the Liberal answer to that is let’s put more of the underperforming children in better ZIP Codes so that they will do better.

But what these two economists demonstrate is that that really doesn’t work, and that’s because they’re onto something, and that is the fact that there is sorting in these ZIP Codes. That simply means these ZIP Codes tend to have working families, thriving families, operational families, intact families, and they’re making the controversial, but I think very true and essential argument, that the family issue is prior to the ZIP Code issue. The ZIP Code issue is about sorting. The more basic issue is the family.

Speaking of the idea that it’s the ZIP Codes that matter, these two economists say, “Advocates of this policy ignore serious flaws in the research. The methods used in this literature falsely link the disparity of outcomes across locations to the causal effective neighborhoods. In reality,” they say, “the difference is due to the parents who self-sort into neighborhoods. Those who move to better neighborhoods early on tend to be more affluent, more educated, more likely to have intact families. They move to better neighborhoods with people similar to themselves. Just as later movers who are less affluent and less educated, move to less affluent neighborhoods.”

“These findings,” they say, established by their team at the Center for Economics of Human Development at the University of Chicago, “provide a different explanation for the factors and policies that improve later life outcomes.” They then argue that the right focus should be on the family and they say explicitly, “Focusing on the family rather than the neighborhood changes the conversation around intergenerational mobility.” That means social economic mobility. It means the likelihood that a child growing up in this home will actually be able to move up the economic, up the ladder.

Now, as Christians, we understand we should be concerned to encourage that the maximum number of children will thrive in terms of being able to move into economic mobility and functional adulthood, but we also need to be really honest about what is required, what’s prerequisite to that, what has to happen if that’s going to happen. And I think it is very, very interesting that these researchers say the ZIP Code’s not wrong, it’s just not right.

It’s not the ZIP Code that matters, it’s the fact that the families living in those ZIP Codes have sorted themselves such that in these ZIP Codes you have, well, a lot of intact families, you have a lot of two-parent families, you have a lot of family health, you have a lot of family thriving, and the children in those families tend, in general, to do quite well. Certainly much better than those who are not having the same advantage. They argue the ZIP Code itself is not destiny. But the flip side of this is that, to some degree, family is destiny.

Now, there are cases in which young people can escape deprivation. They can escape all kinds of situations, and the last thing we want to do is suggest there is no hope. No, there is hope, but the problem is we need an honest conversation, and Christians need to be at the forefront of an honest conversation which is informed by Scripture, and Christian theology, and biblical theology in order to say it’s not an accident that where the family is present and the family is strong and the family is healthy, good things happen, good things flow from that.

And that’s actually central to the blessings that God gives to humanity. It shows up in Scripture over and over and over again; the blessing given to parents in their children, the blessing given to children in their parents, the blessing of being in a family, the blessing that flows from right order. And so we come back to this issue. I think it’s very, very interesting that it shows up in The Wall Street Journal in this kind of opinion piece. And these economists, they’re not so much making an argument about even what ought to be. It’s not written that way. It’s written about what is. And that’s also interesting.

This is data being provided to us. You’re either going to accept this data or you’re going to reject it. But there’s also a reading of the data, and this is what I think is really important because there are so many people in this country who want to say family really doesn’t matter, having two parents in the home really doesn’t matter. And let’s be clear, that means a mother and a father at the home. That really doesn’t matter. You can be laissez-faire, you can be creative, you just do what you want, you be you, the kids are going to turn out all right. Evidently, that’s not true, and we as Christians understand that’s because these children are at a significant disadvantage.

One of the interesting studies that has been done, for instance, on the two-parent privilege or the two-parent advantage, and I’m using privilege there, understanding there’s some on the Left who want to make that something that is bad, a symptom of oppression, that no children should have that privilege. Our argument is every child should have that privilege, or at least society should order itself in such a way that most children, the vast majority of children have that privilege, they have that advantage.

And yet you’ll have people who don’t want to point to the two-parent reality because that’s morally significant. Then they’d have to say, well, that behavior is not as good as this behavior. They might actually have to say that behavior’s wrong, which is something in this morally confused age a lot of people, especially politicians, don’t want to do. But it is really important these two economists, one of them a Nobel Laureate, comes back to say, “It’s not enough to look at ZIP Code. The question is how did the picture reflected in the ZIP Code take place?” And they speak of sorting, and that is something that’s also morally significant.

When you have say a mom and a dad and their kids, the reality is they really want to live in the midst of other mothers and fathers and their kids. When you have families, they naturally want to live alongside other families. They want their children to have friends. They want their kids to be on little league teams and soccer teams and field hockey teams and all those things. They want them to be in a thriving environment. And that’s quite natural. And let me just say, there are many in the Left who want to say that’s wrong, and our answer to that is no, that isn’t wrong.

It kind of gets back to one of the early distinctions between freedom in the West and communism in much of the world where the old joke that Ronald Reagan used to tell is that you had a Russian man standing on the curb who saw a limousine pass by, and he says, “No-one should ride in a car like that.” And he compared that with an American blue-collar worker in a city like Chicago. A limousine goes past and he says, “Everybody ought to drive in a car like that.” And that’s a fundamental distinction. We need to be clear, Christians are saying all children should have that advantage. It should be our goal, and it certainly should be the goal of our teaching and preaching and our public witness that the two-parent context for the family, the mother and the father married to each other in the family, is not accidentally advantageous for children. It’s advantageous for a very clear reason. All right. So I think that’s a very interesting clarifying argument coming from those economists.

Part II

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A Divorce Law with Encouraging Results: Equal Custody Laws are Leading to Fewer Divorces in Kentucky

The Wall Street Journal, the very same newspaper, just over the weekend ran another article, and they gave this a full-page in print just to introduce the article. The headline is, “Divorce Plunged in Kentucky. Equal Custody for Fathers Is a Big Reason Why.” Rachel Wolfe wrote this article. And I’m speaking to you from Kentucky, as you know, and it is interesting to see that in this state the divorce numbers have been going down, way down.

Now, we should be thankful that the divorce rate has been going down, at least marginally in most states. That’s a good thing. Of course, there’s also a problem with that, and that is that you have to match that with a lowering of the marriage rate as well. Let’s just state the obvious. People who aren’t married don’t need divorces. But it’s a good thing. Let’s be clear. It’s a good thing that divorce numbers are going down. In Kentucky, 25%. That’s really clear, just over a short period of time. And this is The Wall Street Journal’s reporter asking the question, “Well, why?”

And it turns out that the state of Kentucky, in 2018, became the first state, as The Wall Street Journal says, “To pass a law making equally shared custody the default arrangement in divorce and separations.” We’re told that four other states, and by the way, these are also red states, Arkansas, West Virginia, Florida, and Missouri, at least are often red, “have since passed their own versions of Kentucky’s custody bill. Around 20 more are considering or close to passing similar laws, according to the analysis by the National Parents Organization.”

Now, listen to this. “The law has become a model for other states, not least because Kentucky’s divorce rate has plummeted between 2016 and 2023. It fell 25%, according to an analysis by the National Center for Family and Marriage Research at Bowling Green State University.” So, why? Well, Matt Hale, who’s the vice president of the National Parents Organization, goes on to say, “Giving kids equal access to both their parents is just common sense.” Okay, let me just come back and say, yes, that’s right, it’s just common sense. But it’s common sense because it’s creation order. Okay, let’s be clear about that.

But he also says that the drop in the divorce rate was a “unintended bonus of the custody law.” According to The Journal, Hale suggested “that parents are increasingly likely to stay together because they realize they’ll be in regular touch regardless, so they might as well work it out.” So in other words, if you’re going to have to share custody equally, it just might be that the mother and the father, who might given the ease of divorce law in this country, decide, “Hey, this is the quick way out of our problem.” The court saying no, you have equal custody, means you’re going to have to relate to one another all the time anyway, so you might as well live in the same house.

I don’t want to be simplistic, but that is the simple analysis offered here. In other words, I’m not reductionistic in order to say that’s all there is to it, but I think it is simple in the truest sense, it is profoundly simply true. And it is also very interesting to note that the big issue here often falls, the impetus on this falls on women, on mothers, because in the situation of divorce law previous, you often had mothers given by far the majority of custody, and that meant many fathers really were cut off from relationships with their children. One dad mentioned in this article said that his contact with his children was so little that he felt that to them he was more of an uncle than a father.

And there are all kinds of issues behind this. For one thing, if indeed both parties are equal in a marriage, then, especially when children are no longer nursing, they’re no longer toddlers, it’s really hard to argue that the default position should be that mothers should be given more custody than fathers–a greater percentage of that custody. 50/50, there’s something Solomonic in that, isn’t there, just in terms of the Old Testament logic? And it turns out that in a similar pattern to the Solomonic logic found in the Old Testament, it turns out that at least some parents finding out that they’re going to share custody anyway, come to the conclusion, “Well, maybe we can work that out.” I’m going to suggest that’s a very good thing.

One of the ways order is sustained is by creating obstacles to disorder. So I’m going to say it is a morally good thing to put an obstacle in the way of divorce. It’s also astoundingly a morally good thing to say children come first, because once you have mother and father married together and they have children together, the important thing is now, in terms of society’s interest, that those children receive the benefits of father and mother. This law change in Kentucky underlines that, it affirms it, and now there’s data coming in compared to other states, the fall in divorce rates in Kentucky, pretty spectacular. And I think it’s also interesting that a newspaper like The Wall Street Journal took notice of this and tied it to the issue of divorce. Divorces plummeting and this law put into place, little cause and effect there.

Part III

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12th Grade Educational Scores in the U.S. are Plummeting: Our Educational System is Broken, and Our Children are Showing It

But next I want to turn to a related story. This one, another avalanche of headlines just this week, the results released about the national assessment of educational progress. Okay, here’s The New York Times headline, “Reading Skills of 12th Graders Hit a New Low.” Headline in The Wall Street Journal, “12th Grade Math and Reading Scores in US Hit New Low.” And I know many people, and certainly the teacher unions and others, are going to come back and say, “Well, it’s all explained by COVID.” Except here’s the problem. The shortfall, the fall off in these numbers began before COVID. There is no question that COVID accelerated them, and you can see it in the data, but the reality is there’s something more fundamental than COVID going on here. And coming out of COVID, kids aren’t doing better, they’re doing worse. And let’s just remember, we’ve got a couple of years of data now to back that up.

The fact is that an astounding number of high school seniors can’t read. Here’s a very interesting line. This is in The Wall Street Journal’s account. “In reading, two thirds of seniors could determine the purpose of a persuasive essay.” Okay, so I guess that’s good news; two thirds could get the point. But then this, “Only one in five was able to draw a conclusion from such an essay supported by the text.” So let’s do the math. I mean, we’re told that high school seniors by and large can’t, but let’s do the math. 20% is one out of five, and it’s one out of five who could make the point. That means four out of five couldn’t. And I’m trusting that you are getting the point now.

I thought it was very interesting how The New York Times described the problem; about a third of 12th graders did not have basic reading skills. Listen to the next line. “It was a sign that, among other skills, they may not be able to determine the purpose of a political speech.” Yeah, that’s not the first thing I would get to. It’s not unimportant, but it’s not the first thing I would get to. It might also be that they can’t hold a job or read a book. But that’s not where I would think to start. I mean, you look at this and you recognize there’s a lot more going on here than understanding a political speech. How about holding a job, having a functional set of skills in society, being able to read a book? There’s just so much that is troubling here.

We are told, of course, COVID is a part of the picture. The New York Times said, “They,” meaning the new numbers, “are yet another sign that adolescents are struggling in the wake of the virus when schools were closed for months or more.” I’m not saying that has nothing to do with it, but I am saying that it’s important to recognize these trend lines began before COVID. COVID, if anything, probably did accelerate these trend lines, and that also indicates a big problem. It was largely the teacher unions and the administrative state who wanted to keep kids out of schools, even when that was not always indicated in any sane or rational policy.

And even long after people were back in the workforce, back in other arenas of life, you still had teacher unions–very liberal, I mean, almost more Liberal than can be succinctly described–they were saying they’re not going to go back in the classroom until these certain demands are met. It’s one of the major enemies of education in America are these teacher unions.

It’s pretty much across the board, by the way, when you look at fields. So, reading is the headlines, and that’s because it’s absolutely necessary. The old academic formula is you learn to read so that you can read to learn. You break that and the read to learn just doesn’t happen. But it’s also science and math, and that should be troubling to just about everyone when you have screaming headlines about how China is making all these advances when it comes to technology and all the rest and their students are, at least, complaining they’re under too much academic pressure. In the United States, that doesn’t appear to be too much of an actual risk.

Part IV

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Sympathy for the Murderer? Charlotte Mayor Embroiled in Controversy From Comments After the Murder of Iryna Zarutska

Finally, I think many of us, aware of the fact that these news stories can just leap onto our smartphones, many Americans have seen at least some video of the attack that took place on a light rail train in Charlotte where a young Ukrainian immigrant was murdered by a man who had a very long criminal history. The young woman, who was Iryna Zarutska, she was 23 years old. It was, as the media reported, an unprovoked attack, and it was one that was largely filmed, at least in the original part of the attack when Ms. Zarutska came onto the train and sat down, it turned out, in front of the man who would murder her, and then the violence broke out.

The Telegraph of London reports the fact that Vi Lyles, the mayor of Charlotte, North Carolina, in responding to this brutal murder, said she didn’t want to villainize the man now alleged to be the murderer, pretty much caught on video, Decarlos Brown Jr. She said, that’s the mayor of Charlotte, said that it is Charlotte the city that “must do better” for people like the accused murderer who is homeless, saying that “they need help and have no place to go.” This has led to fury in Charlotte and beyond, because here you have the mayor of a major city who seems to be expressing sympathy for the murderer rather than the murdered, rather than the victim.

Now, there’s almost always more to the story, but there is in this case, not less to the story. This is what the mayor said, and this is also against the background of the fact that the man who’s now been arrested for the murder has been arrested 14 times in recent years. 14 times. He has been seen as a threat, he was convicted of robbery and larceny, he spent time in jail. He now faces, of course, first-degree murder charges. As the Telegraph says, “Disturbing surveillance footage released by the Charlotte Area Transit System shows the young woman boarding the train and taking a seat in front of Mr. Brown, who appears agitated and restless in his seat. Five minutes into the journey, Mr. Brown appears to pull out a fold-out pocket knife, before standing up and swinging his arm high, before allegedly stabbing her three times in the neck.”

It’s a horrifying story. It’s horrifying in every single way. But it’s also horrifying in a moral sense that here you would have some kind of statement which suggests solidarity, at least in some sense, I’m trying to be as careful as I can be, at least in some sense to associate sympathy with the murderer rather than the murdered. And it’s part of a larger pattern. The mayor went on to make the argument that when you look at this particular man, who’s homeless and been arrested so many times and clearly has some kind of mental health problem. That’s acknowledged. It was known at least to some of the community before this happened. The mayor said, “I want to be clear that I’m not villainizing those who struggle with their mental health or those who are unhoused. Mental health disease is just that; a disease like any other that needs to be treated with the same compassion, diligence, and commitment as cancer or heart disease.”

Okay, morally there’s a right and a wrong we need to recognize in that almost immediately. We do recognize that there are realities we can describe as mental illnesses, but to say they are just the same as cancer or heart disease, that’s not true. And I think the average person has enough moral sense to know that’s not exactly true. Someone else’s tumor is not going to attack someone on a train. And we are talking about morally-accountable behavior here. And so you don’t have to deny that there are people who are deeply troubled, to recognize that that trouble can’t be used to justify in any sane society this kind of action. And by the way, the mayor did not refer to the victim by name, at least in the statement, at least according to The Telegraph.

This is a huge problem. And look, this is a part of what’s playing out in the streets of cities like Washington and Chicago, part of what’s very much playing out with the White House taking a very aggressive stance that’s unprecedented, by the way, just in terms of putting National Guard troops on the streets in Washington DC. I can tell you, just having been there, you don’t see some of the things you used to see on the streets of Washington DC, which makes you feel, I would say, appreciably better about being on the streets of Washington DC. And President Trump has said he’s going to take this elsewhere. There are legal challenges to that, to be sure, but the Liberal regime of trying to deal with everything by making it a pathology and associating sympathy with the perpetrator rather than the victim, that’s got to stop. That’s just got to stop. It’s moral insanity. And this is just another example of where we are.

And by the way, homelessness is a problem. And of course, the politically correct way to say that now is the unhoused. You remember the report from Third Way I mentioned earlier this week that says, “Now don’t change your ideas to the left, just change the language.” Well, the problem is, and by the way, this article underlines the problem. It says we need more resources to help such people. Well, here’s the thing. Those resources in so many cases are readily available, they are just not wanted. A part of what has happened in this country is an embrace of a certain pathology of anarchy on the streets, and lawlessness, a refusal to join in keeping the rules of an ordered society, a rightly ordered society.

And this is where the distinction between order and disorder is an absolute moral imperative, and any sane society works towards achieving maximum right order for right human flourishing in order for a community to function and do well, and in order for people to be safe getting on a light rail train. And that video, it’s shooting all over the internet, and there are many people saying it can be misinterpreted. I think the big danger for many, they recognize, is that it can actually be pretty accurately interpreted. It should be very, very troubling to Americans that this young Ukrainian woman fled violence in her country to where she thought she would be safe. That’s an indictment on any ideology or political policy that would make living in this country less safe.