(Children from broken homes are more than twice as likely to end up in jail as are children from married homes.)4

• A higher health rate. (Children from married homes are generally healthier physically and emotionally when they reach adulthood than children from unmarried homes.)5

If these were the only benefits traditional marriage provided to society, it would be reason enough to give marriage privileged legal recognition. In fact, traditional marriage does much more; it serves as a kind of national immune system. When our marriage ethic is strong, our social ailments are few, but when our marriage ethic is weak, our social ailments increase. In addition to the positive effects listed above, traditional marriage also has the following benefits:

• It results in lower welfare costs to society.6

• It civilizes men and focuses them on productive pursuits. (Unmarried men cause society much more trouble than married men.)

• It protects women who have given up or postponed their careers to have children from being abandoned and harmed economically by uncommitted men.

• It protects mothers from violent crime. (Mothers who have never been married are more than twice as likely to suffer from violent crime than mothers who have married.)7

• It lengthens the life span of the man and the woman. (Married men, for example, tend to live nearly 20 years longer than single men.)8

• It encourages an adequate replacement birth rate, resulting in enough well-developed and productive young people who can contribute to society and provide social security to the elderly. (The United States is a dying nation — without immigration our population would be declining.)

These positive results of traditional marriage are not new to our twenty-first-century culture. British anthropologist Joseph Daniel Unwin studied 86 cultures spanning 5,000 years and found that the most prosperous cultures were those that maintained a strong traditional marriage ethic. Every civilization that abandoned this ethic by liberalizing their sexual practices began to deteriorate, including the Sumerian, Babylonian, and Roman empires.9

It’s not hard to understand why this is so. Traditional marriage results in procreation and meets the most basic needs of family members: safety, sustenance, and security. A civilized and productive society cannot long endure when its adults abandon this structure (and their children) in order to pursue their sexual desires.

2. HOMOSEXUAL BEHAVIOR IS DESTRUCTIVE TO THE PUBLIC WELFARE

One often-repeated adage says, “Everyone is ent