Judge Berzon: ‘This train has left the station’
9th Circuit Judge Marsha Berzon asked Idaho attorney Monte Stewart the percentage of children who grow up in what he describes as the ideal environment – being reared by their married, biological mother and father. Stewart said in Idaho, it’s 68 percent up until age 6, and 58 percent up to age 17. That’s among the highest rates in the country, he said.
“What strikes me is that this train has left the station,” Berzon said, “in the sense that the change has occurred in American marriages before all this. ... When women were not able to own property and had to do everything their husbands said and so on, you had a different institution, but that was the core of the heterosexual marriage tradition to begin with. Once all of that changed, yes the number of people who had children in marriage went down considerably, and that may be a bad thing, but it did not have anything to do with this.”
