God's
design is indeed what we call traditional
marriage and family life. The Father knows
best. The world has tampered and mangled
marriage and family and sex, and we are
just reaping the consequences. From the
beginning it was not so. Now the beauty
and harmony of Christian marriage and
family life have been lost, and Satan
is out to completely destroy marriage
and family in order to destroy what God
has created. Wake up, world!
Should
we have a sex tax?
The
Editors | Tue Jan 11 13:11 EST | Opinion
January
11, 2011 (Breakpoint.org)
- Politicians are always talking about
taxes. Some of them want to “soak”
the rich; others want to raise “sin”
taxes on alcohol and cigarettes. But
I can think of one “consumer item”
we’ll never see a tax on: sex.
But maybe we should. Sex—the
wrong kind of sex, that is—is
driving up the cost of government.
In
a recent column, marriage expert Mike
McManus explores the high
cost of out-of-wedlock sex. For
instance, over 7 million American couples
live together. Four out of five of those
couples will break up without ever tying
the knot. But, McManus writes, if they’ve
had a baby, many of those mothers and
children will be eligible for Medicaid,
housing and day-care subsidies, and
food stamps.
Second,
even when co-habiting couples do marry,
according to a Penn State study, they
suffer a higher
divorce rate than couples who
don’t live together first. On
average, each divorce involves one child.
And like the never-married mother, the
divorced mom is often eligible for many
government benefits. According to the
Heritage Foundation, McManus writes,
“13 million
single parents with children cost taxpayers
$20,000 each, or $260 billion in the
year 2004.” The total probably
comes to $300 billion today,
McManus says.
And
that’s just the beginning.
A
child born out of wedlock is seven times
more likely to drop out of school, become
a teen parent, and end up in prison.
They are 33 times more likely to be
seriously abused.
And
we’ve all heard of the high
rates of STDs affecting America’s
teenagers—diseases that cost billions
of dollars to treat.
So
maybe we should consider a tax on non-marital
sex—everything from one-night
stands to living together arrangements.
It’s costing us a lot of money.
And such a tax might indeed pay off
the national debt.
All
joking aside, these figures tell us
we need to do more to bring down the
illegitimacy rate—starting with
giving teenage girls the tools they
need to say “no”
to premarital sex. We must also
keep fathers accountable
for the children they help bring
into the world. And we must preserve
traditional marriage—because
redefining marriage to mean nothing
more than a contract between two or
more people of any gender would further
undo the institution of marriage, with
all resulting costs thereafter.
Mike
McManus, who also is the founder of
Marriage Savers, has a few more ideas:
States ought to create a marriage commissions
to encourage marriage over co-habitation.
State welfare offices, he says, ought
to “provide information on the
value of marriage
in reducing poverty and increasing wealth,
happiness, and longer lives.”
And we ought to require public schools
and publicly-funded family planning
clinics to teach kids about the long-term
benefits of rearing children within
wedlock over co-habitation.
If
we did all this, we could save hundreds
of millions of dollars, McManus writes.
Well, he’s correct. I wish political
candidates were brave enough to take
on this issue, but they won’t.
Sex is considered the one great sacred
right in our post-Christian culture.
But
the evidence reveals what
happens when we take it out of the God-given
context of traditional marriage: poverty,
disease, misery—and, yes, higher
taxes for all of us.
This
article reprinted with permission from
www.breakpoint.org
"For
to me to live is Christ, and to die is
gain." (Phil 1:21)