RIGHT OF CENTER: FAMILY-VALUES ISSUE STILL WITH US

Vanity Fair magazine has revived the family values debate with its upcoming story about Newt Gingrich's alleged infidelity 11 years ago.

Don't imagine that the publishers of Vanity Fair would dream of being so stodgy as to advance monogamous marriage as the moral standard for society. The magazine is more interested in a hit piece on a powerful lawmaker and possible presidential aspirant whose politics run counter to Vanity Fair's. The idea is that anything Newt says about the importance of families and traditional morality can be dismissed as the rhetoric of a hypocrite.

He might be. But that doesn't change the terms of the debate over families, morality and social decline. If an idiot says the world is round, do we discard the empirical evidence and change science? The fact is, two-parent families are the cornerstone of a healthy society, and there is a wealth of data to support the assertion.

Dr. James Dobson's "Focus on the Family" newsletter for August addresses the issue with an article by Glenn T. Stanton titled, "Guess What... God Knows Best." Among the research on the subject, Stanton quotes several authorities. I wonder how often Vanity Fair and other magazines of its ilk report that 68 million Americans have some type of incurable sexual disease.

I wonder how willing they are to cite research that shows sex is more satisfying for those who wait until marriage. A survey by U.S. News & World Report found that, among sexually active people, those who reported being "most physically pleased and emotionally satisfied were the married couples. Physical and emotional satisfaction started to decline when people had more than one sexual partner," researchers said.

Not only is sex better within the bonds of marriage, but married people have better lives. Researchers at Washington University found that cohabiting couples "experienced significantly more difficulty in (later) marriages with adultery, alcohol, drugs and independence than couples who had not cohabited."

As a result, marriages preceded by cohabitation are 50 percent to 100 percent more likely to break up than those marriages of couples who didn't start out shacking up.

Cohabitation is risky in other ways. The Journal of Marriage and the Family found that aggression is at least twice as common among cohabitants as it is among married partners. Further, after reviewing more than 130 studies on the link between well-being and marriage, Dr. Robert Coombs, a biobehavioral scientist at UCLA, found that married people had significantly lower rates of alcoholism, suicide, psychiatric care, and higher rates of self-reported happiness than cohabitants.

Researchers Lee Robins and Darrel Regier have looked at major depression. They found that each year per 100 married people who have never divorced only 1.5 have suffered major depression. The rate is 2.4 for people who never married, 4.1 for those who divorced once, 5.1 for those cohabiting, and 5.8 for those divorced twice.

The U.S. Department of Justice found similar results in the rates of assault. Per 1,000 people, the rate of assault against married men is 5.5 and against married women is 3.1. That rate increases to 13.6 for divorced or separated men and 9.4 for divorced or separated women. Among those who never married the assault rate was 23.4 for men and 11.9 for women.

Other findings cited by Stanton:

- University of Massachusetts researchers found that married people experience less disease and disability and lower morbidity than do those who are divorced or separated.

- Research by Dr. Sara McLanahan of Princeton University found that "children who grow up in a household with only one biological parent are worse off, on average, than children who grow up ... with both of their biological parents, regardless of the parents' race or educational background. Also, "adolescents who have lived apart from one of their parents during some period of childhood are twice as likely to drop out of high school ... to have a child before age 20, and one-and-a-half times as likely to be idle -- out of school and out of work -- in their late 20s."

- Dr. George Rekers, clinical psychologist and professor at the University of South Carolina: "Research has documented that children without fathers more often have lowered academic performance, more cognitive and intellectual deficits, increased adjustment problems, and higher risks for psychosexual development problems."

Two-parent families work. It doesn't matter whether a philanderer or a saint says it. The truth remains. God's created nature has a norm that is unchanging. So too is the norm for family life established with "intelligence and intention," as Stanton writes.

I look forward to the follow-up coverage on this by Vanity Fair.

~Jay Eastlick is the news editor of the Southeast Missourian.