And one of these days, I am going to have to take you up on that offer of good German beer… :)

In marriages that are successful, the institution is good for families, and even women. Nevertheless, the soaring rate of divorce and infidelity in modern marriages, where both participants have equal rights, is indicative of the institution’s fundamental dysfunction.

That assumes that it’s marriage that’s dysfunctional, rather than the way people treat marriage. I don’t see that at all. There’s nothing inherently wrong with marriage as an institution, it’s that our society has stopped propagating the values that make it (and the rest of society work).

Name one elected Democrat who has made comments of this nature. This is my personal feeling regarding marriage and it has nothing to do with partisanship. Trying to indict the Democratic Party based on my cynical feelings towards marriage is meritless.

Again, politics is about perception. Because of the close ties between radical feminist groups like NOW and the Democratic Party, Democrats are associated with the views of feminist radicals like Caherine McKinnon, et al.

It isn’t “designed” to oppress women, but throughout most of human history, the female has been the submissive party that has given artificial credence to the institution’s “success”. In marriages that are successful, the institution is good for families, and even women. Nevertheless, the soaring rate of divorce and infidelity in modern marriages, where both participants have equal rights, is indicative of the institution’s fundamental dysfunction.

“The idea that marriage is an institution designed to oppress women only proves my point about how anti-family many Democrats really are.”

Name one elected Democrat who has made comments of this nature. This is my personal feeling regarding marriage and it has nothing to do with partisanship. Trying to indict the Democratic Party based on my cynical feelings towards marriage is meritless.

“It’s this kind of attitude that keeps millions mired in poverty and stuck in a permanent underclass – another example of how liberalism creates the very poverty it professes to oppose. ”

The first comment is a fair point. Single parenthood is not affordable, and certainly leads to higher rates of poverty. Whether that means children are better off living in homes with married parents who don’t love each other and are unfaithful to one another is another story. And again, my views are probably shared by fewer than 5% of liberals. Don’t be an idiot and indict an entire political ideology based on the views of one irrelevant guy from the Midwest.

Ever since women realized basic levels of equal rights and ceased to become property, the institution of marriage has been in freefall….because, like communism, marriage is antithetical to human nature.

Our very biology speaks otherwise. Monogamous family relationships almost certainly predate all of human society.

The idea that marriage is an institution designed to oppress women only proves my point about how anti-family many Democrats really are. The reality of the situation is that marriage exists to benefit the female – it takes a huge amount of resources to raise a child, and single parents are orders of magnitude more likely to fall into poverty than two-parent families.

It’s this kind of attitude that keeps millions mired in poverty and stuck in a permanent underclass – another example of how liberalism creates the very poverty it professes to oppose.

With that said, marriage remains romanticized beyond belief and will continue to suck alot of happy people in only to befall decades of subsequent unhappiness on most married couples and their offspring. I fully expect the “party of smaller government” will continue its efforts to “promote” marriage through whatever means they can dream up, inevitably producing a continued decline in the number of successful marriages in a post-suffrage era where the institution isn’t artifically propped up by the subordination of the punching bag female that gave marriage a mirage of “success” in centuries past.

Regarding your economics lesson, there are two conflicting messages from the GOP. The first is the need to consume as much as possible to keep the engines of free enterprise churning at a blistering pace. The second is a scolding lecture on the need to be more fiscally responsible and realize “how dang good you have it.” You can’t have it both ways. The only reason our economy has stayed as strong as it has for most of the last 15 years is the explosive growth of personal debt accrued by a superficial culture on a seemingly infinite consumer binge on plastic. If the consumer binge slows or ends, which it almost has to eventually, so will our fragile economy, and the reality of stagnant wages, outsourcing, diminishing health care coverage, and pension theft will only become more oppressive.