So some social conservatives decided to stick a butter knife into America's wall socket by coming up with "The Marriage Vow," which makes the admittedly incendiary assertion that, "a child born into slavery in 1860 was more likely to be raised by his mother and father in a two-parent household than was an African-American baby born after the election of the USA’s first African-American President." Yet the best the New York Times can come up with is a refutation that actually doesn't refute anything in the aforementioned vow.

That life was much worse for most former slaves immediately after emancipation is something that's been known in anthropological circles for at least twenty-five years. The guy who literally wrote the book on it was my college adviser, and I handled and examined some of the evidence myself. I'm not sure it's possible to prove that black kids in the 1870s were more likely to grow up in an intact home than they were in 2009. I don't think statistics like that were kept, or kept reliably at any rate, during reconstruction.

I am sure it's possible to prove that kids of all races were more likely to be raised as part of an intact family in the 1950s than they were in the 1980s, and probably even today. Because of that I think the assertion is ham-fisted but more likely to be true than not. I'm also sure that being a professor at Princeton makes you damned good at writing an impressively intimidating thousand-word essay that never quite gets around to refuting the central point. I just wish I could figure out how to do it and get paid like this one did.