Stop being pro-marriage. You're just hurting children.

I understand the modern reluctance to permit family law to get too far afield from the facts on the ground -- e.g., as cultural norms surrounding divorce changed, fault-based divorce laws gave way, in part, in order to prevent faithful but unhappy spouses from having to perjure themselves by fabricating tales of adultery.  I have a harder time understanding the emerging reluctance to permit extralegal normative standards from getting too far afield from the facts on the ground.  In family matters, does falling short of a standard require abandoning the standard?  In yesterday's New York Times, for example, Katie Roiphe implores us to "abandon the fundamentally frothy question of who is wearing a ring" in discussions of marriage and child-rearing:

If there is anything that currently oppresses the children, it is the idea of the way families are “supposed to be,” an idea pushed — in picture books and classrooms and in adults’ casual conversation — on American children at a very early age and with surprising aggressiveness.

Is statistical evidence of what contributes to positive outcomes for children still fair game?  Not really.  Though Roiphe cites one researcher whom she likes, in general, she is "not a huge believer in studies because they tend to collapse the complexities and nuance of actual lived experience and because people lie to themselves and others." 

So moralizing has no place in talking about marriage and parenting.  Statistics don't really belong either, it seems.  (Talk about setting up a debate that you can't lose!)  What are we left with?  A free-for-all of personal revelation dressed up as moral absolutes, such as this gem: "What the studies don't show is that longing for a married father at the breakfast table injures children." 

As a society, should we support the children of single parents?  Of course.  Should we refrain from saying that having married parents is good for kids?  The relevant statistics urge caution, but if we've moved beyond statistics in our efforts to capture "actual lived experience," then all bets are off.