No, Divorce Isn’t ‘Fine For The Kids’

New details are emerging about the suspect in the shooting that took place at Abundant Life Christian School.

The Washington Post has reported on the “troubled home life” of the shooter:

The 15-year-old girl who killed two people and wounded six others at her small Christian school here Monday had a turbulent home life, according to court records, which show that her parents divorced and remarried multiple times and that she had been enrolled in therapy. …

“There are always signs of a school shooting before it occurre[s],” Madison Police Chief Shon Barnes said at a Tuesday news conference, where he asked the public for patience as authorities investigated [the suspect’s] social media activity and state of mind leading up to the rampage. 

The teen is one of just nine female school shooters in the last 25 years, according to a database maintained by The Post. She is also among the younger recent shooters. … [The suspect’s] father is a Christian who often shared pictures of his dogs and his daughter, according to a review of his Facebook profile. …

But one post, from August, has attracted more scrutiny than others. In it, a photo appears to show [the suspect] wielding a gun and taking aim at a firing range. 

Obviously, this means the Left is going to name and focus on gun control as the chief issue.

But, it seems to me, there is a bigger issue here: family turmoil.

I know these are the issues we are not supposed to discuss in American life. We are supposed to believe in a libertarian social ethos that says: When parents have a child and they break up for their own well-being and for the preservation of their own happiness, that has no impact on children whatsoever.

This has been a lie since it started in the 1950s and 1960s in the United States. The divorce rate in those days was significantly lower than the current divorce rate. Today, the divorce rate in the United States shows roughly half of all marriages end in divorce.

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Many people will divorce and remarry multiple times. According to The Washington Post’s review of court records, the suspect’s parents first married in 2011, about two years after she was born. All social science demonstrates that living together before marriage is often a bad idea because it is an indication that people are not willing to make the commitment to marry before having a child.

Marriage should be the predicate for sleeping together and then having children. I acknowledge these are old-fashioned ideas, but they existed for a reason, just as social institutions did. It was deemed a smart idea to get married before living together because it channeled sexual passions into family building.

A man had to give up his waywardness and make a commitment to a woman before getting one of the things he wanted out of the relationship with the woman. And it meant a woman would have to be pretty discerning about just with whom she chose to have sex, as doing so could result in pregnancy.

The opposite perspective has been quite bad for the West in general. We have declining birth rates, unhappy families, broken families. None of this has been a boon to the West as a general matter, despite all of the West’s promises that a libertarian sexual ethos would make everyone happier.

Zero evidence exists that a libertarian sexual ethos makes everyone happier. General happiness surveys across the West show a radical decline since the 1970s, particularly among women who are supposed to be the people most liberated by the new sexual ethos.

In this particular case, the mother of the suspect had been previously married and divorced; then, she had another daughter with a different man, to whom she was never married. Court records indicate this girl had other permanent legal guardians. The half sister is now 20-years-old. The suspect’s parents divorced for the first time in 2014, agreeing to joint legal custody of their shared daughter, but specifying she would live primarily with her mom.

From the Post:

The couple remarried in 2017 and divorced for a second time in 2020, again agreeing to share custody but, the court records show, dividing [the suspect’s] time more evenly between them. During this period, [the suspect] would spend two days with her father, two with her mother, then three more with her father, before reversing the schedule the following week.

Shortly after [the suspect’s] parents split up for the second time, the couple remarried once more. But by April 2021 they were petitioning for a third divorce. A judge granted it a month later but noted that “parties [were] admonished concerning remarriage,” according to court records.

After seeking mediation to determine custody of [the suspect], they agreed in July 2022 that they would share legal custody but that the girl would now live mostly with her father. By this time, [the suspect] had been enrolled in therapy, which was supposed to help guide decisions about which parent she would spend weekends with, the records show. 

The 2022 custody papers said [the suspect’s] parents were on cordial terms. “The parents report a generally positive co-parenting relationship,” the document reads, “and will continue to communicate with one another by text messages and phone conversations.” 

Let’s get real: It doesn’t matter if mommy and daddy get along when they’re not living together. What matters is the impact on the child.

This is what happens when the actual value of marriage is substituted for a transitory perception of passion and romance. Marriage is not built predominantly on feelings. It is predominantly built on duty. 

I know this is a strange idea to many people who are living in the post-modern West. But the reality of the world is that marriage was built on commitment.

Marriage itself is an institution that requires fealty to the institution, not merely to the other person who is part of the institution. This bizarre notion that marriage was supposed to be about a sort-of formalization of romantic love as opposed to a shared value system that was capable of building the next generation is a wrong idea.

And it has been a mistake for the West to embrace that.

Romance is an enormous part of marriage. But it is not the chiefly important part of marriage when children become secondary as opposed to the primary purpose. Not only is marriage defeated, but the children are also defeated.

The idea of romance being the primary focus of marriage took hold during the Romantic Period in the 19th century. But it turned out that human biology thwarted the plans of romantic love to overcome the institution of marriage. The institution, like all institutions built by civilization, was built by human beings in order to channel human passions. Then, they were made sacred by human beings in order to civilize their passions.

We build entire civilizations in order to channel those passions in positive directions. One of the most fervent passions people have is the passion for sexual relationships. It’s very powerful.

It can also be incredibly destructive. This is why marriage is such an important institution. The institution of marriage channels that passion toward the production and rearing of children, as opposed to simply leaving little boys and girls all over the landscape without proper mothers and fathers in functioning households.

Treating women poorly is what happens in a free-love system, which is how women currently feel. They feel men treat them like trash.

And many of the men are looking at the system saying it’s a consensual system. What’s the problem?

The answer is that the consent women are typically looking for is not merely sexual consent. It is consent to a long-term relationship that is meaningful, spiritual, and purposeful.

When a society lacks these things, the result is tremendous human suffering, true human suffering.

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This belief in a concept of “free divorce, easy living, get back together, break up, get back together, break up, find new partners, and the kids will just be fine, because, you know, kids can take it,” is a blight.

The kids can take it? No, you can take it. You’re the adult.

Is what happened in the school shooting the parents’ fault? Given the fact they were living the way they lived, it’s a reasonable question.

If you treat your children like a bizarre form of chattel, shuttling them between parent and parent because you want to live your best life, guess what? Things go wrong.

Once you have kids, you are no longer first priority. You’re not even second priority. As a father, you’re third priority. First priority: your kids. Second priority: your wife. And then comes you.

A disproportionate number of people who commit these types of acts are children of broken homes. And it turns out a disproportionate number of people who commit violent crimes are also products of broken homes.

Longstanding social science data indicates delinquency radically increases when no father is present in the home. Crime radically increases; teenage pregnancy radically increases.

This is what happens when a society decides it is very important to disengage from the institutions and civilization that channeled passions and, instead, just humor those passions and let everything else be left by the wayside.

I think the American people are ready for a serious conversation about what the good life looks like. There’s a lot of talk in politics these days about the common good and what we all hold together. What is it? What is sacred? What ought to be put beyond political debate?

It used to be beyond political debate that family comes first.

I think the American people are tired of all this, tired of the deep libertarian sexual ethos. I think we are in the middle of what could be a cultural renaissance.

That kinship principle — to be with your family in your home, to raise your children so that their children will have healthy children, to build familial wealth over the course of generations, to sit on the porch when you’re 80 years old with your grandkids playing in the yard, to know you lived a good, dutiful, purposeful life and will continue contributing to future generations — that is what Americans yearn for.

Because without it, the country falls apart.