I've mentioned the social and economic chaos that springs from males unwilling to be men (get married, be loving & faithful, support a family), and females unwilling to be women (get married, be loving & faithful, be a suitable helper (especially with children)).
Mitch Perlstein discusses this in this week's Weekly Standard in an article entitled "Broken Families, Broken Economy" (evidently a short summary of his forthcoming book "From Family Collapse to America's Decline).
Two key excerpts (entire article highly recommended). Bottom line: there's a growing income gap in America that's largely traceable to changing sexual mores.
Kay Hymowitz, in Marriage and Caste in America: Separate and Unequal Families in a Post-Marital Age, describes “poor or working-class single mothers with little education having children who will grow up to be low-income single mothers and fathers with little education who will have children who will become low-income single parents—and so forth.” That perverse cycle is producing what Hymowitz calls “a self-perpetuating single-mother proletariat.” She asks, “Not exactly what America should look like, is it?”
Moderately educated Americans are decreasingly likely to embrace “bourgeois values and virtues” such as delayed gratification, temperance, and an emphasis on education—the “sine qua nons of personal and marital success in the contemporary United States.” Most highly educated Americans, by contrast, still “adhere devoutly” to the sequence education, work, marriage, and only then childbearing, thus maximizing their chances of “making good on the American dream and obtaining a successful family life.”
The second paragraph reminds me of Shelby Steele's discussion in "The Content of Our Character" of the shift in black identity in the 60's which rejected traditional moral values as being "white."
A final suggestion: the following two MP3 recordings are from Southern Baptist Theological Seminary's recent Recalibrate conference; the "Boy to Man" is excellent; haven't listened to the other one yet.
From Boy to Man: Biblical Manhood in an Adam-ized World - Al Mohler, Jr
Women of the Word: Biblical Womanhood in a Eve-ized World - Mary Mohler
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