From Politico: Marriage, at least in the U.S., isn’t what it used to be. Over the past 50 years, marriage rates nationwide declined by 60 percent. Forty percent of U.S. children are now born to unmarried mothers, twice as many as in 1980. One widely covered poll last year found that 2 out of 5 GenZ-ers and millennials consider marriage an outdated concept.

Such stats have inspired a volley of columns, blog posts, think pieces and books, arguing why we should (or shouldn’t) care. The decline of marriage, after all, joins other social changes such as falling birth rates and a “loneliness epidemic” — the new crusade of Surgeon General Vivek Murthy — that arguably could be solved by more marriage. So conservatives, broadly, have preached a return to tradition: In the New York Times, David Brooks advised younger readers “to obsess less about your career and to think a lot more about marriage.”

Liberals, meanwhile, have often argued that society’s problems are too deep to be fixed with a wedding band: In New York Magazine, Rebecca Traister pushed back against scholars and politicians who “have routinely imposed marriage — as if it were a smooth, indistinct entity — as a cure for the inequity, dissatisfaction, and loneliness that plague this nation.”

But opinions haven’t always shaken down along the usual partisan lines. University of Maryland economics professor Melissa Kearney made the case for marriage to her fellow liberals in her widely discussed book The Two-Parent Privilege: How Americans Stopped Getting Married and Started Falling Behind. “This is still so wrenching to discuss,” wrote Times columnist Nicholas Kristof, in a column that essentially agreed with Kearney’s point that liberals should be concerned about the collapse of the traditional family.

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