May you now live in sin forevermore, By Mark Morford

Here now, a hot factoid of curious news that will stupefy your parents and confound any extant grandparents and make many fundamentalists and most Mormons clutch their dogmas to their quivering breasts in mild but surefire panic.

The item goes like this: For the first time in US history, married couples are no longer the majority of domestic couplehoods in the United States, and have instead been replaced/outnumbered by... what shall we call them? The unsure? The pleasantly stoned? Freedom fighters? Those Who Still Have Somewhat Hot and Mostly Regular Sex?

No matter. For lo, the earth doth tremble and the heavens weep as we learn from the 2010 census that married households in America, once the dominant, inviolable, ironclad foundation of all that is good and righteous and often sort've vaguely unhappy and resentful after about seven years, a couple kids and not nearly enough couples therapy -- now make up a mere 48 percent of domestic partnerships, with 52 percent going to the sinful and the wimpy and the possibly more frequently naked.

What does it all mean? What to make of such strange, historic markers? Do we worry and fear in light of some of the uglier factors at play -- income inequality, education levels, economic instability, wildly conflicting beliefs about the value of home and family? Or do we allow and embrace, understanding it's all of a piece, that no social institution like marriage (or religion, or industrial empire, or gender) can possibly remain fixed for long and simply must evolve with the times, lest it collapse completely? ...

(Full URL: http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/g/a/2011/06/01/notes060111.DTL&nl=fix)

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