The late Mildred Loving in 2007, remembering her marriage to Richard Loving and the landmark legal case that struck down state laws banning interracial marriage. The U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling in Loving v. Virginia was issued on June 12, 1967.
In her later years, Loving became a strong proponent of same-sex marriage.
freedomtomarry has the full text of Loving’s comments here. Image via LovingFilm.com
Scott Keyes writing in washingtonpost
In cooperation with the Family Research Council and the National Organization for Marriage, socially conservative politicians have been quietly trying to make it harder for couples to get divorced.
The conservative rationale: If divorces are tougher to obtain fewer marriages will end— and having more married couples is not just desirable in its own right but is a social good, conservatives say.
Some of the bills discussed by Keyes in his op-ed:
Read the full Washington Post piece here
(Image via Wikipedia)
From 2000 to 2010, the federal government spent more than $600 million through its Healthy Marriage Initiative (HMI) to promote marriage and discourage divorce. Now the National Center for Family and Marriage Research at Bowling Green State University has crunched 10 years’ worth of data and concluded that all that money — much of it directed toward marriage education, skills training, mentoring programs, and PR campaigns — has had virtually no effect.
Not only did the U.S. marriage rate continue the steep and steady decline that began in the 1970s (down 26 percent over the decade), but the divorce rate held mostly stable — except, it’s worth noting, during the recession, when (as other studies have found) the high cost of breaking up made divorce economically unfeasible for many couples. As the economy improved, the chart shows, the divorce rate seems to have started ticking up again.
Since 2010, states have received another $200 million or so in HMI funding, bringing the total to around $800 million. More on the story here.