Originally Published: WashingtonPost.com • June 10, 2014
With all the talk about marriage these days, there is a tendency in certain corners to promote it as a panacea for social ills. You see this approach, for instance, when people suggest marriage as a cure for poverty, as if one thing causes the other. Now comes the latest argument for marriage – that it protects wives and children from violence.
In a fairly regressive argument, W. Bradford Wilcox and Robin Fretwell Wilson, in an essay for The Washington Post, argue that women should get married so their husbands can protect them from other men. I’m all for these “married biological fathers” that Wilson and Wilcox, using a stack of statistics, praise as the supposed solution to women getting abused, assaulted and raped. Heck, I’m even married to one. But the authors are cherry-picking the data, and to disturbing ends.