Van Lathan accidentally makes the case for ‘Black Wives Matter’



Van Lathan is a popular social and political commentator who recently came out in favor of what he called the “gay agenda.” His reasoning was straightforward: Gay people exist and have relationships, so media companies should intentionally promote same-sex storylines to young viewers.

He is right that media is a powerful tool for shaping norms and values. But like many people who comment on modern family dynamics, Lathan focused on adults’ desires rather than children’s needs. Applied consistently, however, his case for using media to shape culture points toward promoting the relationships that bring more children into the world and bind mothers and fathers to them.

These efforts would help restore a culture of strong families in neighborhoods where some black boys grow up believing that ‘marriage is for white people.’

Nearly 40% of U.S. births in 2024 were to unmarried women. In 2019, almost one-quarter of U.S. children under 18 lived with a single parent and no other adult. The share of married adults has fallen since 1970, while the typical age at first marriage has risen. Marriage is increasingly treated as optional to forming a family. Given the association between family structure and child outcomes, that should concern policymakers, pastors, pundits, and parents alike.

Given his frequent commentary on racial inequality, Van Lathan and other progressives should be the loudest advocates of a “Black Wives Matter” campaign that promotes marriage and strong families.

In 2023, 69.3% of births to non-Hispanic black women occurred outside marriage, a share significantly higher than the 40% national figure. The numbers in some cities were even starker. New York City reported that an estimated 65% of births to non-Hispanic black women were to mothers who were not married. The comparable figures were 77% in Washington, D.C., and 83% in Baltimore.

State-level data was also stark: 71% in Georgia, 79% in Alabama, and about 82% in Mississippi, Arkansas, and Louisiana.

Family structure is among the most consequential examples of racial disparity in American social life, yet civil rights organizations and racial justice advocates on the political left largely ignore it. Progressives apply an equity lens to every structure except family structure.

Changing this reality will require black leaders and influencers like Van Lathan to promote and prioritize an agenda that restores marriage as the foundation of family life. My book, “The Vanishing Black Family,” gives them a blueprint for turning words into action and building a social movement to increase the number of black children growing up in a loving home with a married mother and father.

That could mean churches in the Deep South offering marriage counseling to young co-habiting couples; historically black colleges and universities producing new research on attitudes about marriage and family life; and cities running ads about what researchers call the “success sequence”: finish high school, get a full-time job, and marry before having children. Adults who complete those steps have far lower poverty rates; an Institute for Family Studies analysis reports that 97% were not poor in their 30s.

This movement will also need a media environment that normalizes loving relationships between men and women, a drastic change from the gender-war content that dominates online discourse today.

RELATED: Family is a terrible investment — unless you want to be human

Id-work/Getty Images

These efforts would help restore a culture of strong families in neighborhoods where some black boys grow up believing that “marriage is for white people.” That belief is not simply the product of cartoons and movies. It reflects a steadily declining marriage rate and leaders who have been too busy advancing movements that once openly called for disrupting the nuclear family and prioritizing what adults want over what children need.

The decline of stable, married-parent homes is concerning because family structure has a clear and consistent association with positive child outcomes. On average, children raised by their married biological parents have lower poverty and incarceration rates and higher college completion rates. Family structure is not the only cause of those differences, but it is not incidental either.

Those outcomes in the schoolhouse and courthouse receive most of the attention, but the importance of married parents goes beyond measurable indicators. Family also bears on the deeper questions of identity everyone asks at some point: “Who am I?” and “Whose am I?”

The answers reflect the reality that every child is the living embodiment of the relationship between his or her mother and father. The greatest gift parents can give their children is the safety and security of a loving home where Mom and Dad are committed to each other in marriage. That is the only agenda I am interested in promoting.

NEW LOW: The internet has found a way to monetize broken marriages



Marriage rates in the United States have reached historic lows. To compound matters, about one-third of Americans who say "I do" file for divorce. Watching this crisis unfold is depressing enough. Watching corporate marketers turn family dissolution into a luxury consumer category makes it darker still.

Let me be extremely clear: Some marriages are absolute disasters, full of physical violence and emotional cruelty. Escaping a truly toxic partner is a matter of self-preservation, and some people need guidance in finding the best way out.

Transforming the end of a supposedly sacred union into a curated social media event makes something solemn feel frivolous.

The problem begins when divorce itself becomes a product to brand, package, and sell, a disturbing transformation now taking hold in America and beyond.

Splitsville

A painful family breakdown now functions as online content. Unhappy spouses transform personal misery into podcasts and book deals. Sponsored Instagram posts and paid Substack subscriptions follow. What used to be a private nightmare quickly becomes a lucrative career pivot.

When a 20-year marriage ends after months of screaming matches over unpaid bills, social media feeds instantly reframe the wreckage as a fabulous spiritual awakening. Deep personal isolation gets repackaged as radical independence. Selling the family home to pay legal retainers becomes a chic minimalist aesthetic. The destruction of a household becomes definitive proof of personal growth. It’s gross, but not entirely unexpected.

In 1969, California Governor Ronald Reagan signed the nation's first no-fault divorce bill, intending to eliminate perjury and blackmail from courtroom proceedings. He later called it one of his greatest political regrets, having failed to foresee how a legal tweak would morph into a multibillion-dollar lifestyle industry. Reagan meant well, but the road to hell is paved with good intentions.

Eliminating the legal stigma of divorce was a much-needed civil reform. Nobody should be forced to endure flying fists or endless tongue-lashings just to satisfy a local pastor. Financial autonomy and genuine safety are good things. Eliminating the seriousness of divorce is an entirely different matter.

The stakes change completely when children enter the legal equation.

RELATED: Matthew Perry, child of divorce

Mike Pont/Getty Images

Kids suffer most

For a 35-year-old spouse, signing divorce papers might feel like being rescued from an active war zone. For a 6-year-old, it means packed suitcases, split holidays, and perpetual background noise from two stressed-out parents arguing over child support checks.

Longitudinal studies show that children raised in divorced households are less likely to graduate from high school and score lower on academic exams. They also show higher rates of anxiety and greater risk of suicide. Girls from broken homes also have an increased risk of teenage pregnancy, and boys are more likely to be incarcerated. Many children are resilient, that is for sure. But resilience comes from necessity, not necessarily choice. Barely keeping your head above water while running on pure adrenaline is no way to spend your formative years.

These realities make the current commercialization of family breakups feel utterly revolting. Divorce parties are at an all-time high, with Las Vegas leading the global trend for customized "single again" weekend packages complete with tailored cakes and bottle service.

Everyone remains free to live as they wish, and walking away from a destructive marriage may well justify popping champagne. The problem lies with the public broadcasting and the celebration of failure. Transforming the end of a supposedly sacred union into a curated social media event makes something solemn feel frivolous. When a major domestic tragedy becomes photogenic fodder for online engagement, it’s perfectly reasonable to raise an eyebrow (rather than a glass of bubbly).

Nothing to celebrate

We must be able to hold two simple facts in mind at the very same time. Divorce can be an essential escape route from abuse. Divorce also inflicts massive emotional and economic costs on everyone involved. Defending a person's legal freedom to walk away from a contract doesn’t require pretending that breaking up a family is a triumph.

The fundamental flaw in the modern divorce economy is not that professionals are paid to help people sort out the practical consequences when a marriage ends. Human misery has created administrative employment since ancient Rome. The problem is watching tech platforms and marketing agencies incentivize people to treat marital separation as a desirable milestone.

When a bitter custody battle goes viral on TikTok, content creators have a financial incentive to escalate the drama for their audience. Influencers build subscriber bases on continuous conflict. They turn private litigation into serialized public theater. Millions of viewers tune in every day, gradually coming to believe that ending a marriage is no different from ending a job.

This dynamic reveals a deep sickness, and the explosion of the breakup market reflects an increasingly broken society.

Marriage is far from perfect, and pretending otherwise is delusional and disingenuous. Nevertheless, it remains a vital human institution built on sacrifice and mutual duty. A husband and wife separating, even if they come to hate each other, represents a genuine tragedy. The end of a marriage calls for introspection and self-reflection, not a shameless victory lap for strangers on the internet.

Steve Deace unveils the ONE statistic that proves we’ve lost our culture



Americans are increasingly worried about skyrocketing housing costs, declining birth rates, and a generation of young adults struggling to reach traditional milestones. But according to BlazeTV host Steve Deace, those problems are merely symptoms of something much bigger.

“There’s a lot of things that we are pointing to in our culture right now as symptoms, and we’re at many times trying to do symptom masking,” Deace says on the “Steve Deace Show.”

While the reaction to a symptom is often just to treat it and “provide a patient or in this case a culture immediate relief,” the issue is that the underlying disease is not actually being treated.

One symptom America is facing is that the percentage of men and women getting married and owning a home by the age of 30 has declined from more than half the country in the 1960s to just 12% today.


“In 1950, that was half of the country. In 1962, the number actually went up to more than half. That was 52%. 1970, relatively stable, 48%. 1980, we start to see a little bit of slippage now, 45%. But the 80s held things still,” Deace explains. “The ’80s did a great job of treating symptoms.”

While Deace notes that he loves Ronald Reagan, “the ’80s gave us amnesty.”

“And the immigration policy that is threatening to wreck America today ... its origin, its genesis, is the Reagan amnesty of ’86,” he says, explaining that Reagan also signed the 1986 vaccine indemnity act.

“That put us on the very path we’ve been on with Big Pharma ever since,” he says.

And now, only 12% of Americans are getting married and buying homes by the age of 30.

“You could get a $500,000 mortgage, 30-year fixed rate, for $2,100 bucks a month in America in 2021. Today that amount is $3,200 a month on average,” he says.

But it's not just housing costs and immigration.

“It’s more likely that a woman in her 40s will be married and pregnant than a woman who is 19 for the first time in American history,” Deace says, explaining that this “sadly fits into the overall trend line.”

“Fifty years ago in this country, it was way more likely a 19-year-old woman was going to be married with a kid than a 42-year-old woman was going to be having a kid. Way more likely. And when you throw in these other cultural trends now, it is more likely a 30-year-old man will still be living at home with a parent than living in a home with a wife and a kid,” he says.

“This is death-of-a-culture stuff,” he continues, adding that this is the “disease.”

Want more from Steve Deace?

To enjoy more of Steve's take on national politics, Christian worldview, and principled conservatism with a snarky twist, subscribe to BlazeTV — the largest multi-platform network of voices who love America, defend the Constitution, and live the American dream.

America has a marriage crisis — but it has nothing to do with money



For years, we've been force-fed the same sickening story. Young Americans aren't getting married because they simply can't afford to. The economy is disastrous, wages are too low, and housing costs require selling a kidney.

If we could just inject another thirty grand into everyone’s bank accounts, young lovers would magically sprint down the aisle. It’s a beautiful, thoroughly victim-centric fairy tale that makes everyone nod along. It’s also absolute nonsense.

Government handouts and cultural decay have combined to tell men that effort is for suckers.

A recent report from the Institute for Family Studies dismantles the narrative. The data reveals that the slow-motion suicide of American marriage has less to do with stagnant pay and much more to do with a mind virus that has convinced an entire generation they are too poor to love.

We love blaming the system because it absolves us of our crippling neuroses. But the numbers don’t lie, even if our Instagram feeds do.

Money changes everything?

Inflation-adjusted median earnings for young men recently hit a near 50-year high. Meanwhile, marriage rates continued their downward spiral. If money were the magic libido potion that many claim it is, these trends should move together. Instead, they look like two bitter, screaming divorcees tearing away from a shattered home in opposite directions.

Young men today generally out-earn the idealized pipe-smoking fathers of the 1960s and '70s. Those mid-century men somehow managed to marry and breed without first acquiring quartz countertops, stainless-steel appliances, or a diversified stock portfolio. They didn't postpone children until they could afford a five-star Disney excursion. Instead, they embraced the brutal reality of starting with absolutely nothing, expecting to build a life with someone they could love and trust.

Contrary to conventional wisdom, today's married 30-year-olds own homes at roughly the same rate as their counterparts in 1970. And those homes are massive, bloated monuments to excess, full of technology that would have looked like witchcraft a few decades ago. Somehow, grandparents survived the unbearable trauma of raising kids without an automated espresso maker, a smart home cinema system, or three streaming subscriptions to numb the existential dread.

RELATED: Masked daredevil couple climb to top of Empire State Building to unfurl banner with message

L-R: Jason Mendez/Getty Images; Michael Nagle/Bloomberg/Getty Images

Mergers and acquisitions

Somewhere along the line, the classic vow "for richer or for poorer" was replaced with "call me when your credit score hits 800." Marriage is no longer the launchpad for adulthood, but the prize handed out at the end of an exhausting corporate obstacle course. You don’t get married to build a life any more; instead, you do it to signal to your peers that you have successfully conquered capitalism. What was once the beginning of a life is now a form of social proof.

We can thank Hollywood and Silicon Valley for this psychological castration. For decades, pop culture has glorified permanent adolescence and consequences-free swiping. Algorithms have transformed regular, middle-class existence into an agonizing, daily comparison against 20-year-old crypto-millionaires who rent private jets for 10 minutes to take a selfie. When every engagement announcement looks like a royal wedding funded by an oil cartel, an ordinary life feels like an insult.

The sickness runs deeper than mere vanity, though. We are also witnessing a strange strike among prime-age men who have voluntarily withdrawn from the workforce to master video games in permanently darkened rooms. Government handouts and cultural decay have combined to tell men that effort is for suckers. Why bother putting on a pair of pants and clocking in when you can just opt out entirely and vape in peace?

'Know your worth'

Meanwhile, modern relationship advice reads like a venture capital prospectus. Young women are bombarded with articles treating courtship like a hostile corporate takeover. "Know your worth," the influencers scream. "Never settle. Demand a partner who matches your tax bracket." And if you find him, make sure he can cook, make you laugh, and respond to texts immediately.

It sounds empowering, but it’s actually a recipe for dying alone with 12 cats. A dependable plumber making a healthy living is discarded because he doesn’t match the lifestyle of a fake TikTok entrepreneur posing next to a Lamborghini he almost certainly doesn’t own. Reality cannot compete with a manufactured version of it.

The ultimate irony is thick enough to choke on. The richest, safest, most pampered generation in human history genuinely believes it is too destitute to commit to another human being. We’ve systematically dismantled every single rung of the societal ladder and are now standing around scratching our heads, wondering why the birth rate resembles a flatline on a hospital monitor.

Until young Americans recognize that a good marriage is built on character rather than curated luxury, churches will remain empty, dating apps will remain an endless purgatory, and cats will eventually inherit more apartments than children.

Conservatives are afraid to talk about the real marriage problem



The fact that marriage in America is on the decline is concerning, but few people understand how deep the problem goes.

Recent data shows the dismal marriage numbers in the United States. The percentage of married couples, average age at which couples are marrying, and number of children are all in catastrophic decline. The numbers represent a dramatic collapse in the institution that serves as a foundation for successful civilizations.

Conservatives will often place the blame on a lack of individual virtue, and there is plenty of truth to that claim, but the most important factors are baked into the structure of our society in a manner that Republicans are terrified to address.

Once birth control and abortion made pregnancy a choice instead of an inevitability, everything shifted.

When a movement refers to itself as “conservative” you would think the preservation of marriage would be its top priority. However, when marriage does receive any attention from conservative pundits and politicians, it is in the form of glib advice directed at young men telling them to get out of their parents' basement and stop playing video games.

Part of the marriage problem is certainly the lack of initiative on the part of young males, but this is also the easiest and most cowardly attempt to explain away the issue. Our culture encourages placing the blame on young men, who are one of the few groups that can be attacked without consequence. The real answers require taking on far more sacred cows.

When conservatives are feeling a little more adventurous, they will admit that some aspects of our economy are antithetical to family formation.

The fact that the average age of first-time homeowners is pushing past 40 signals how difficult achieving stability for young families has become. College is now required for even the most entry-level jobs, and the cost keeps exploding, consuming the capital that once went into a starter home.

The costs of health care and food continue to skyrocket so that most households require two incomes, forcing mothers to work, while the price of child care also increases rapidly. The economic issues are real and important, but even they do not tell the whole story.

Love, duty, and honor are all factors that hold our social bonds together, but it is dependence that makes them necessary in the first place and continues to undergird them when everything else falls away.

RELATED: Adults are refusing to grow up, and their children are paying the price

Matt Stroshane/Walt Disney World Resort/Getty Images

Modern people do not like to hear this fact because they believe that maximizing freedom and independence is the ultimate good, but there is a point at which autonomy rips society apart.

Men are, of course, dependent on many things, but women, due to their biological vulnerability, were always directly dependent on men.

Women are physically weaker, less aggressive, become pregnant, must care for children, and regularly need the direct intervention of others to ensure their safety and security. Women could not work outside the home while pregnant or raising children, so they remained dependent on their husbands' income.

People will have sex — we are hardwired to pursue it — so the reality was that women and men needed to get married early to secure the safety of mothers and their children. Family formation was part of the rhythm of life. It was largely unavoidable, and this kept marriage rates among young people relatively high.

Once birth control and abortion made pregnancy a choice instead of an inevitability, everything shifted. Single women became a larger part of society, and the state expanded its reach to provide them with broader physical and economic protections.

The newly emancipated woman needed her own stream of income, and corporations were more than happy to provide it. Women doubled the labor pool, driving down wages. In large bureaucratic organizations, where compliance is key, the more agreeable nature of women is considered an asset in a way that it would not be in a more entrepreneurial economy.

Advantages were built into every level of our system to help elevate women due to the perceived biases that existed when mothers were expected to stay home. Universities gave priority to women, who now earn more degrees than men. Corporations gave hiring priority to women, who now make up a majority of their workforce.

Government assistance and scholarship programs were established to ensure that working mothers did not fall through the cracks. It is not that women stopped getting married — every female must be married at some level — they simply became dependent on the men running the government and corporations instead of traditional husbands.

Women do not date men who earn less than they do, even if they think of themselves as independent. Deep down, females know that in the modern world, income signals status and status means protection.

RELATED: Universal basic income is a dangerous delusion

Blaze Media Illustration

Even in our hyper-feminist culture, women still know they could become mothers at any time and naturally seek out protection and stability. The push to elevate women in education and hiring meant that the percentage of well-paying jobs going to men shrank. This resulted in men being systematically removed from the pool of attractive marriage prospects.

Dwindling prospects for both education and career have already set young men on the path to downward mobility, but the lack of prospects for marriage was the nail in the coffin. These changes, coupled with the one-sided nature of divorce and child custody law, means that many men no longer see a reason to bother dating.

Women initiate 70% of divorces in the United States. The truth is that women who do not need men do not marry when they are young and are far more likely to divorce if they do.

To be clear, this is not to absolve men of their responsibility. Both sexes made this mess, both sexes are to blame, and both will need to do hard work to fix the problem.

Men must have the drive and vitality to make something of themselves, no matter what situation they find themselves in. But in the rare instances where conservatives are even willing to address the marriage crisis, they save all their criticisms for young men because they are the culturally approved target.

There are no easy answers to the chaos that modernity has visited on the dating and marriage landscape, but the structural issues are real, and telling men to “get it together” does nothing to change that. Until conservatives are willing to be as honest with women as they are with men about our situation, nothing will improve.

‘Beautiful Chaos Of A Mother’s Heart’: Jessie Buckley Uses Oscar Speech To Honor Husband, Daughter

In the midst of such a disorienting, selfish atmosphere, comments like Buckley's serve as a tether for women who do hope for more.

Another tax credit won’t fix what Sunday schools used to teach



The American dream of owning a home — a yard, a fence, a stake in the neighborhood — is slipping out of reach for many young adults. Policymakers keep treating this as a pure affordability problem. Prices, interest rates, and down payments are all important, but the real culprit lies beneath the numbers: family formation, especially marriage.

First-time buyers made up just 21% of home purchases last year, the lowest share on record. The median first-time buyer is now 40 — up from 33 in 2021 and 29 in 1981. Census data show homeownership for Americans ages 25-34 at about 35%, roughly 19 percentage points lower than in 1980, when mortgage rates were much higher.

We keep treating the symptoms and ignoring the disease.

Affordability helps explain some of that decline. Housing is cyclical, and prices will soften if government stops inflating asset bubbles. But a newer analysis argues the bigger driver is cultural, not fiscal: the drop in marriage.

American Enterprise Institute scholar Scott Winship analyzed census data for the Institute for Family Studies and found that most of the generational decline in young homeownership tracks the collapse in marriage. While overall homeownership among Americans under 35 sits around 35%, the rate for young married couples remains about 63%.

“As recently as 2023, 63% of young married couples were homeowners,” Winship wrote. “That was the same as in 1983 and only 3 percentage points lower than at the height of the 2000s housing bubble. The 2023 rate was also higher than in any year through 1970 and any year from 1985 to 1999.”

That should change the argument. The big generational slide in homeownership hasn’t hit married couples the same way. The bigger collapse is marriage itself. The share of Americans ages 25-34 who are married fell from about 67% in 1980 to about 37% in 2025 — a 30-point drop. That’s the hole in the bucket.

So the answer shouldn’t just be “more programs.” It should address the cultural drivers behind the marriage collapse — because no housing bill can substitute for family formation.

That’s why the usual Washington approach misses the point. After decades of affordability initiatives dating back to the Clinton era, homeownership still hasn’t surged. Yet Republicans in the Senate just passed Elizabeth Warren’s housing bill — another expansion of HUD programs that would rope more people into an inflated market while rewarding the same political class that helped inflate it.

RELATED: Elizabeth Warren’s housing fix could make home buying even tougher

Photo by Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images

We keep treating the symptoms and ignoring the disease.

In the long run, the country won’t face a shortage of houses. The baby boom generation holds a huge share of the housing stock. Those homes will enter the market as boomers age and pass away, often transferring to heirs. The deeper question is whether the next generation will form families stable enough to buy them — and want them.

So, why is marriage declining?

Contrary to a popular assumption, it’s not mainly the housing crisis depressing family formation. The bigger driver is spiritual and cultural: a rejection of God and biblical values. Rising costs can pressure families at the margins. But a slightly higher child tax credit won’t reverse a collapse that began generations ago with the decline of worship and the rise of a culture that treats marriage as optional.

Europe has run the experiment. Many countries tried generous incentives — paid leave, universal child care, expanded benefits — and still can’t restore stable birth rates. Money can ease sacrifice. It can’t create the desire for marriage and children.

But faith can.

Institute for Family Studies senior fellow Brad Wilcox has noted that the birth rate for religiously oriented people has never fallen below replacement. A large Harvard study found that frequent religious service attendance (more than once a week) correlates with a 50% lower divorce rate compared with those who never attend. Strong marriages create the conditions for stable family life — and stable homeownership.

Anyone raised in an orthodox Christian or Jewish home learns the opening chapters of Genesis early: Marriage and children aren’t lifestyle accessories. They’re duties bound up with meaning, responsibility, and love. Faith-based communities also create thicker social bonds and clearer norms — including a dating pool that doesn’t feel like a battlefield.

A new Pew Research survey shows worship and practice dropping across every region over the last two decades. In the South, only 51% say they pray daily — still the highest region, but down 14 percentage points in a decade. The share of religiously unaffiliated Southerners rose to about a quarter of the population. In the West, 35% report no religious affiliation.

That decline makes the marriage decline easier to understand — and it helps explain why young homeownership is falling with it.

If we want more young Americans to buy homes, we should stop pretending this is only about interest rates and HUD programs. We need cultural repair. We need marriage. And to rebuild marriage, we need to rebuild the house of God.

Pro-Divorce Propaganda Takes Over TikTok. What Does the Bible Say? | Ep 1227
play icon

Pro-Divorce Propaganda Takes Over TikTok. What Does the Bible Say? | Ep 1227

‘Black Marriage Day’ Highlights The Most Powerful Remedy For Strengthening Black Families

Black Marriage Day gives young people who live in communities where marriage isn't the norm the chance to 'hear from people who love being married.'

The West Is Killing Marriage, And Its Death Might Kill The West

In an increasingly digitized, relativized, and materialized world, marriage has become the exception rather than the rule.