ST. GEORGE, Utah, Nov. 20 — The polygamous leader of a fundamentalist Mormon sect was sentenced Tuesday to 10 years to life in prison for forcing a 14-year-old girl to “spiritually” marry her 19-year-old cousin and commanding the naïve bride to submit to sexual relations against her will.

The defendant, Warren S. Jeffs, 51, was convicted by a jury in September of two counts of acting as an accomplice to a rape...

The [fundamentalist] sect’s teachings state that a man must have at least three wives to reach the highest realms of heaven. The sect split more than a century ago from the mainstream Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, which disavowed polygamy in 1890 in a political compromise to gain statehood for Utah. The mainstream church excommunicates anyone practicing polygamy...

...In 1965, when [Daniel Patrick Moynihan published his infamous report on the problems of the black family], suggesting that the out-of-wedlock birthrate and the number of families headed by single mothers, both about 24 percent, pointed to dissolution of the social fabric of the black community, black scholars and liberals dismissed it. They attacked its author as a right-wing bigot. Now we’d give just about anything to have those statistics back. Today, 69 percent of black babies are born out of wedlock, while 45 percent of black households with children are headed by women...

The sad truth is that the civil rights movement cannot be reborn until we identify the causes of black suffering, some of them self-inflicted. Why can’t black leaders organize rallies around responsible sexuality, birth within marriage, parents reading to their children and students staying in school and doing homework?...

Abstract:
This article defends the claim that sexual penetration is a prima facie wrong: it requires justification. We defend this claim by reference to considerations relating the use of physical force required to achieve sexual penetration, the occurrence and risk of harm posed by sexual penetration, and the negative social meaning of sexual penetration in patriarchal societies. The step we take in this article is a preliminary part of a larger project. We are not here directly concerned with questions of criminalisation; we aim simply to map the moral landscape of sexual penetration.

Fifteen years ago, a deep pessimism seemed to be stalking the American landscape...

[N]ow, a decade-and-a-half [later], improvements are visible in the vast majority of social indicators [including crime, teenage drug use, welfare, abortion, the divorce rate, educational scores, the birth rate for teenagers, sex among high-school students, and teen use of alcohol and cigarettes].

[But] some of the most vital social indicators of all—those regarding the condition and strength of the American family—have so far refused to turn upward. Even as the teenage birth rate has fallen, out-of-wedlock births in general have reached an all-time high: 37 percent of all births in 2005. Over half of all marriages are now preceded by a period of unmarried cohabitation, and marriage rates themselves have declined by almost one-half since 1970...

[These] two starkly divergent trends, taken side by side, should cause us to reconsider certain common assumptions concerning just how culture, behavior, family, and society interact, and how they change...

...[M]any scholars and front-line caseworkers who monitor America's families...note an ever-increasing share of America's children grow up in homes without both biological parents, and say the risk of child abuse is markedly higher in the nontraditional family structures...

Among the findings [of various studies]:

• Children living in households with unrelated adults are nearly 50 times as likely to die of inflicted injuries as children living with two biological parents...
• Children living in stepfamilies or with single parents are at higher risk of physical or sexual assault than children living with two biological or adoptive parents...
• Girls whose parents divorce are at significantly higher risk of sexual assault...