Commitment: Divorce rate in the U.S. is declining; grass-roots group hopes to keep the trend going

The year 2004 brought good news for marriage. Nationally, and in Utah as well, the divorce rate is going down a bit.

If you are a religious leader, or a politician, or a social scientist — if you are someone who has worked for or studied healthy marriages — you have to be glad. And you have to wonder, "What is happening?" And, "How can we do more of whatever it is we are doing right?"

Enter "The Marriage Movement" (www.marriagemovement.org) to help figure out why there's good news and what we should do next. The Marriage Movement is a consortium of more than 100 experts in the field of marriage. They are professors and priests and ministers and lawyers and heads of public policy institutes in places as diverse as Berkeley, Calif., and Dallas, Texas, and Provo, Utah.

These experts don't necessarily agree on all the big issues. (They are still debating whether same-sex marriage should be permitted. If legal marriage does add to family stability, the proponents of same-sex marriage want to make sure children of gay parents have the same chance for a stable home as other children.)

The fact that these leaders aren't in complete agreement didn't stop them from coming together back in 2000 to make a commitment. They said: We are at the grass roots. And, they said: We pledge that in this decade we will turn the tide on marriage and reduce divorce and unmarried childbearing, so that each year more children will grow up protected by their own two happily married parents, and so that each year more adults' marriage dreams will come true.

Since they came together five years ago, the leaders have met and held conferences. They put together the www.marriagemovement.org Web site to give regular Americans some resources. Recently, they published a 20-page paper titled "What's Next for the Marriage Movement?"

In this new paper, they listed divorce rates from the National Center for Health Statistics. The divorce rate per 1,000 people in 2002 was 4, but in 2003, that dropped to 3.8 people out of every 1,000. In 2004, it was also 3.8 per 1,000. (In Utah, preliminary numbers show the rate going from 4 per thousand in 2002 to 3.76 per thousand in 2003.)