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If you are going out to dinner to celebrate St. Valentine's Day, be sure to set your VCR to record Marriage: Just a Piece of Paper? on PBS.

Before you react to that unfortunate title, realize that one of the documentary's experts, John Witte of Emory University, compares marriage to other important pieces of paper: a winning lottery ticket and a 30-year mortgage. In the minds of this program's creators, to say marriage is a piece of paper invests it with hope and long-term responsibility.

Oh, about setting that VCR: This is one of the few programs that PBS has mandated for all 300 of its stations to broadcast in the same time slot (10 p.m. Eastern, 9 p.m. Central, 8 p.m. Mountain, 7 p.m. Western). Obviously, someone at headquarters thought the issues this program discusses were important enough to dictate programming to the nation's loose alliance of public television stations.

When you play the videotape, you will hear many important things. Marriage is undergoing a "historic crisis":

• Currently, one-third of ever-married couples have been divorced or are going through a divorce. Experts project that eventually one-half of all marriages will end in divorce.
  
  
• In the 1960s, only one-twentieth of American children were born to unmarried women. Today, the fraction is one-third. Among African Americans, the figure is closer to two-thirds.
  
  
• More than one-half of first marriages are preceded by cohabitation. But the typical cohabiting couple (if it doesn't upgrade the relationship to marriage) breaks up after about one year. Three-quarters of the children of cohabiting couples will see their parents split before they turn 16. (Compare this with one-third of children born to married parents.)
  
  
• One half of unwed mothers receive no child support at all. Among those in the other half, only one-quarter get the full amount they are due.
  
  

These are incredibly disturbing facts. Veteran journalist Cokie Roberts hosts this program with the same smiling demeanor and professional poise with which she greets guests on ABC's This Week. This is too bad, because the marriage crisis calls for outrage. Nevertheless, the facts and the experts speak for themselves.

Long-term Christianity Today readers will recognize many of the experts who make regrettably brief cameos: for example, divorce expert Judith Wallerstein, the National Fatherhood Initiative founder Wade Horn, and Community Marriage Policy advocates Mike and Harriet McManus.

The expert behind the experts is the documentary's scriptwriter Barbara DaFoe Whitehead. Whitehead was the author of the 1997 book The Divorce Culture and the controversial 1993 Atlantic article, "Dan Quayle Was Right," which defended the message behind the vice president's much maligned Murphy Brown remark. Whitehead has long been a take-no-prisoners defender of the institution of marriage and has participated in the University of Chicago Divinity School's Religion, Cutlure, and Family Project. She is well-versed in the social-science data on marriage, divorce, family, and child-rearing. The project could have hired no better scriptwriter.

Social and theological conservatives have long loved Whitehead's work. So they will be bit puzzled by the awkward insertion of a pro-gay marriage expert near the end of the video. "There's enough marriage for everyone to share," he says in an obligatory PC nod that misses the point. "It's not like gay people are going to come in and use up all the marriage licenses." But this is PBS, and the Religion, Culture, and Family Project has been careful over its history to incorporate Left, Right, and Middle. In the context of Whitehead's otherwise sober script, the comment delivers an almost comic moment.

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February (Web-only) 2002, Vol. 46