HOPE Focus on the Family President and CEO Jim Daly has submitted a letter to Time praising the magazine for its latest cover story, "Is There Hope for the American Marriage"?

The story, in the newsweekly's July 13 issue, is an essay by Caitlin Flanagan in which she asks a grammatically simple but culturally complex question: What is marriage?

"Is it — given the game-changing realities of birth control, female equality and the fact that motherhood outside of marriage is no longer stigmatized — simply an institution that has the capacity to increase the pleasure of the adults who enter into it?" she writes. "If so, we might as well hold the wake now: there probably aren't many people whose idea of 24-hour-a-day good times consists of being yoked to the same romantic partner, through bouts of stomach flu and depression, financial setbacks and emotional upsets, until after many a long decade, one or the other eventually dies in harness."

"Or is marriage an institution that still hews to its old intention and function — to raise the next generation, to protect and teach it, to instillin it the habits of conduct and character that will ensure the generation's own safe passage into adulthood?" she adds. "Think of it this way: the current generation of children, the one watching commitments between adults snap like dry twigs and observing parents who simply can't be bothered to marry each other and who hence drift in and out of their children's lives — that's the generation who will be taking care of us when we are old."

Where Flanagan comes down on the question, quite obviously, is the latter.

"An increasingly fragile construct depending less and less on notions of sacrifice and obligation than on the ephemera of romance and happiness as defined by and for its adult principals, the intact, two-parent family remains our cultural ideal, but it exists under constant assault," she writes. "It is buffeted by affairs and ennui, subject to the eternal American hope for greater happiness, for changing the hand you dealt yourself. Getting married for life, having children and raising them with your partner — this is still the way most Americans are conducting adult life, but the numbers who are moving in a different direction continue to rise. Most notably, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported in May that births to unmarried women have reached an astonishing 39.7 (percent).

"How much does this matter? More than words can say. There is no other single force causing as much measurable hardship and human misery in this country as the collapse of marriage. It hurts children, it reduces mothers' financial security, and it has landed with particular devastation on those who can bear it least: the nation's underclass."

Daly applauded Time in his letter for publishing the essay.

"We at Focus on the Family know firsthand the hurt done to children and families by divorce, marital infidelity and the skyrocketing rate of out-of-wedlock births," he noted. "We hear from thousands of people each month to whom this pain is not just a troubling trend noted in a newsmagazine, but all-too-real devastation which they need resources and support to struggle through."

The Focus president singled out for specific praise Flanagan's noting that popular reality TV couple Jon and Kate Gosselin were more famous when their marriage split up recently than when they were depicted onscreen trying to make it work.

"We see that daily, too. About 94 percent of our time, money and effort is spent on helping husbands and wives successfully navigate their marriages and raise their children," Daly wrote. "Only 6 percent involves public-policy and political issues – yet that's the work that has generated the vast majority of headlines for our organization.

"Maybe, just maybe, Time's decision to put Flanagan's essay on its cover signals a shift, at least in one publication, toward giving appropriate weight to stories that don't just spotlight conflict for conflict's sake, but actually help families to face conflict in healthy ways and overcome it.

"Now, that would be news." Gary Schneeberger, CitizenLink editor reporting.

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