Remarks By Governor
David M. Beasley

National Leadership Summit on Abstinence
August 2, 1997


*Note: The Governor sometimes deviates from text.

I'd like to thank MISH and Dr. McIlhaney for inviting me to be a part of this historic dialogue tonight. It's a great honor to stand among such fine company.

My wife and I have been using our bully pulpit back home in this mission to promote abstinence and lives of virtue.

So it's especially encouraging for us to be around folks who share that passion...who are working every day in the medical profession, in public policy, in the neighborhoods and schools...to turn back the clock on 30 years of "if it feels-good-do it" and turn the tide of our culture.

You've heard a lot of ideas these past two days on how we can promote abstinence. But tonight I'd like to look at the larger question: why we should promote abstinence.

The young ladies from Best Friends may have shed some light on the most important reason...that teenagers, despite what the media tells you, are desperate to find hope and dignity for their lives.

Just look at the heroes of this generation...people like rock icon Kurt Cobain from the group Nirvana. His were the classic struggles of the youth culture: Drugs. Despair. Disillusionment.

But I'd like you to also consider this scene as well.

Not long before his death, Cobain stood before his wife, Courtney Love...the mother of his little girl and a woman he'd had a rocky relationship with.

Cobain stood there with a gun pressed against his temple. With a trembling finger on the trigger, he said to Courtney Love these words, "I'd rather die than divorce."

That's a statement that shocked me. Here was the symbolic leader of a counterculture being driven to desperation by a broken marriage.

It wasn't until after his death that those who studied his life found out what a huge turning point his own parents' divorce had been.

But what was it about a man like this, what was it about his marriage and his parents' failed marriage, that held Kurt Cobain so tightly?

I would suggest to you that it was the power and the weight of the institution itself. In spite of all our imperfections and struggles, marriage is truly the ultimate of all human relationships. And it impacts all of our lives in a more profound way than pop culture would ever lead us to believe.

A couple of years ago, renowned social scientists from across the political spectrum -- including Dr. David Blankenhorn, William Gallston and Barbara Dafoe Whitehead-- collaborated on a landmark report, entitled Marriage in America.

"The divorce revolution," it said, "has failed. It has created terrible hardships for children, incurred insupportable social costs, and failed to deliver on its promise of greater adult happiness. The time has come to shift the focus of national attention from divorce to marriage and to rebuild a family culture based on enduring marital relationships."

Our world may view marriage...like sexual purity.... as passČ. But economically, emotionally and sociologically, no relationship has ever met our needs any better.

Marriage's link to prosperity has certainly been well-documented.

In fact, nearly three-quarters of all children from single parent homes will experience poverty. But a fraction of that...only 20 percent...of children from two-parent homes will be poor.

Married couples simply have that extra incentive to work hard, to save for the future, to give their children better than what they had.

Yes, marriage is a vehicle for success. But if you look at it purely on economics, any government computer can generate a check.

Marriage provides far more to us and to our children than any amount of money ever could. The most important transactions in this life come from loving glances from my wife...and from three little ones running into my arms at the end of a long day.

Those are the trace elements of life...love born of commitment, security born of trust, and happiness born of companionship.

Benefits like those found in marriage say a great deal about our quality of life. It's a fact that research proves. Consider these statistics.

* The average life span is shortened more by being unmarried than by being poor, overweight or having heart disease.

* Divorced men are far more likely to die prematurely from disease than married men.

* Married women are 30 times less likely to become victims of violence.

* Depression is twice as high for single women than married.

* Studies show monogamous married couples to be the most sexually satisfied people in America.

But when the trace elements of love and commitment are removed from a life, when marriages fail, when children are born with no intention of a marriage being formed, the children suffer most.

Those children are more likely to be abused, use drugs, do poorly in school, and get in trouble with the law.

I met with a group of young men at our juvenile prison not long ago. They're behind bars for everything from drugs to manslaughter, and every one of them grew up without a father in the home.

We talked a while about how they'd ended up there. Then I finally asked point blank: Would it have made a difference if your dad had been around...if he'd helped you with homework or played ball with you, if he'd been there to teach you right from wrong?

That's when I actually saw tears starting to well up in their eyes. And I had my answer. It would have made all the difference.

Those kids knew deep down what Kurt Cobain knew...what the most distinguished social scientists know...and what you and I know: that marriage is the most profound relationship in the human experience.

No other relationship provides society with the benefits that marriage does. No other relationship transforms young men and women into more productive, less selfish and more mature adults. And no other relationship affords children such a safe and stable environment. It is truly the most basic building block for a prosperous nation, a virtuous people, and a civil society.

That is why we teach abstinence to our children.

Of course, we tell them to wait for their physical and emotional protection.

But we also tell them so they can fully enjoy that intimate commitment of man and woman...bound to one another for life.

Marriage is the one place where sex is really safe...where love is truly lasting...where the sexual union is perfectly celebrated.

Hugh Hefner and Larry Flynt didn't create the concept. Madonna had nothing to do with it. It was God who thought it up at the beginning of time.

And His creation continues to be the foundation upon which people of virtue and nations of greatness are born and built.

Despite all of that, marriage is an institution under attack.

Too many couples seem to enter marriage with almost flippant disregard. Some have even changed their vows from "as long as we both shall live" to the fleeting "as long as we both shall love."

Messengers in the media have twisted marriage into just another outdated "lifestyle choice." Government has spent decades and billions of dollars paying children to have children and bribing parents not to marry....while poverty and illegitimacy just exploded.

Parents have trivialized marriage to fit their purposes. Miss Manners actually wrote that parents should explain divorce to their children this way: "I'm sorry, but this suits us. And you're just going to have to live with it."

Well, studies are showing that children just don't know how to live with it...that the trauma of a shattered family life runs deeper and wider than almost any disaster we can experience. No study had to tell me that. If there was one event in my life I wish had never happened, it would be the break up of my mom and daddy's marriage.

I know from experience that when we wink at the decline of marriage, we are writing a prescription for disaster.

I know it, and so did Kurt Cobain.

In fact, no society that's abandoned the intrinsic value of marriage has ever survived.

One Harvard sociologist did a study of cultures spanning several continents and thousands of years. And he found that every society that had fallen from political revolution first went through a sexual revolution where the family was devalued.

It's the home where we teach the natural laws and social norms that distinguish civil societies from barbaric.

So when marriage loses ground, societies tumble.

Am I suggesting that everyone who is single, divorced or growing up in a single parent family is doomed? Absolutely not. Most of those families do well...and contribute immeasurably to the good of society.

Just like my family did, they work hard and love deeply.

But what I am saying is that the ultimate model for health, happiness and prosperity is found in the context of marriage...where moms and dads love each other, stay together and take care of their kids together.

I've quoted a lot of statistics tonight to make that point. But at the end of the day, statistics are not what compel me.

My wife is what compels me. She is the most important person on this earth to me.

And the greatest gift I can give my children -- far greater than anything I can buy, or any accomplishment I can earn, or any college I can send them to -- is to daily demonstrate my deep and abiding love for their mother.

On the day President Theodore Roosevelt proposed to his wife back in 1880, he wrote this in his journal:

"The aim of my whole life shall be to make her happy and to shield her and guard her from every trial. How she, so pure and sweet and beautiful, can think of marrying me, I cannot understand, but I praise and thank God it is so."

All I can say is, Amen to that. I can't understand why Mary Wood did it, but I do thank God every day that she did.

Certainly Mary Wood and I have a lot of demands that we are constantly juggling...a lot of late hours and long trips apart. And at the end of long days, it would be easy not to save time for each other.

But when all is said and done, it won't be policies or programs or my victories as governor that will measure my success.

At the end of my life, if I can say that through God's perfect love, I loved my wife, that we loved and nurtured our children, in spite of all our human frailties and imperfections, I can say my life was a success.

We must hold the banner of marriage high. We must model well to those who have been wounded...so that they can know that marriage is the cornerstone of a virtuous, honorable and prosperous America.

And by God's grace -- as President Roosevelt did -- that is what I, David Beasley, husband and father, purpose to do. For our children and for our nation, that is what we must all purpose to do.

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