Marriage: A Social Justice Issue?
Liberal politicians divide and conquer through class warfare. They pontificate about how the “rich” don’t pay their fair share of taxes or how that nice, safe neighborhood isn’t diverse enough, so the government ought to build low-income housing to mix things up.
So-called social justice, the impetus behind government policies like racial preferences, drives the Democratic platform. But no matter how level the proverbial playing field, individuals will always possess different levels of drive, initiative, intelligence, motivation, skill, and talent. Individuals will never have equal amounts of stuff. Equality of outcome cannot exist. We are equal where it counts in a free, pursuit-of-happiness kind of country: under the law.
One factor driving the inequality liberals claim they’re concerned about is family instability. As research and common sense have borne out, marriage benefits the whole of society, the adults who made the vows, and the products of the union — the children. An article in the New York Times making the rounds, “Two Classes, Divided by ‘I Do,’” compares and contrasts two women with several similarities and one important difference, especially where children are concerned: one has a husband and the other doesn’t.
Mrs. Faulkner lives in a house with her husband and children. Miss Schairer lives in an apartment with her children and no husband. The married woman’s children do lots of activities. The unmarried woman’s children don’t, because she can’t afford it and doesn’t have the time. Although the married woman works outside the home, her children still are better off.
The unmarried woman grew up with married parents, but her kids don’t have that good fortune. Miss Schairer had three children out of wedlock with a man who didn’t marry her and sounds as though he didn’t like to work. Now she’s struggling alone, with three children. She’s also received cancer treatment. Life can be difficult even with a spouse, but life’s problems are exacerbated when the family is unstable. An excerpt:
[S]triking changes in family structure have also broadened income gaps and posed new barriers to upward mobility. College-educated Americans like the Faulkners are increasingly likely to marry one another, compounding their growing advantages in pay. Less-educated women like Ms. Schairer, who left college without finishing her degree, are growing less likely to marry at all, raising children on pinched paychecks that come in ones, not twos.
Estimates vary widely, but scholars have said that changes in marriage patterns — as opposed to changes in individual earnings — may account for as much as 40 percent of the growth in certain measures of inequality. Long a nation of economic extremes, the United States is also becoming a society of family haves and family have-nots, with marriage and its rewards evermore confined to the fortunate classes.
The Life of Julia, promotes behavior that creates poverty and bad lives for women and their children. Why would Pres 0bama and his political party promote behavior that causes dependency? I can’t bring myself to believe that they want women and children to have miserable lives. Julia made sequentially bad life decisions. And the government is going to save Julia from the consequences of those decisions. That’s intensional deceit.
Sure as hell the Obama administration wants women and children to suffer. After all, BHO is a Muslim. And Obama’s Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, is literally in bed with a Muslim Brotherhood mole.
Any more questions?
I realized back in the 70′s what was going to happen. One day, society would wake up a realize that those “evil men” the were the fathers and husbands who committed the heinous crime of working, paying bill and taxes and being part of the family, actually weren’t the root of the problem, but the core strength of society. Regular guys were long ago demonized by Hollywood, replaced by the bad boy women abusers, drug addicts and metro sexuals, who are all the rage.
Be careful what you wish for, you just might get it….
You are my choice for Vice President! Its physics really,crack the atom (the family) to unleash the power. The democrats play chess by removing the king as soon as possible to capture the whole board,throwing the children in the garbage can and saving the queen for later! They wait in ambush in family court for the fathers to plead their case,what a power trip! View the contrast; an America of solid families or an America devastated and in need of assistance.
I’m all for the stable two-parent family unit. That is what is best for the child. Boys need a father to model themselves after and a mother learn how to relate to women. Girls need a mother to model themselves after and a father to learn how to relate to men. But there is a caveat. A successful union requires responsible biological parents.
The solution to the problem is not merely advocating marriage. That is superficial and naive, because the marriage contract is exploitative of and the courts are discriminitory against men.
A man marries a woman. He has an affair and gets his girlfriend pregnant. That’s a lose-lose situation for him. Not only is he legally required to pay child support for his illegitimate child, his wife will divorce him, take half of everything, the house, the kids, and he is legally required to pay child support for them as well. That’s a sure-fire path to bankruptcy and utter ruin, not to mention that you now have two sets of children being raised by single mothers.
A woman marries a man. She has an affair and gets pregnant by her boyfriend. Under current law, she can now divorce her husband, take half of everything, the house, have her boyfriend move in so they can raise their love child together, all the while living off her ex-husband who is legally required to pay child support. That’s the road to riches and comfort for her. She gets money, a house, her baby, and her boyfriend, and there is absolutely nothing the betrayed ex-husband can do about it, not in any court of law. He’s still on the path to bankruptcy and ruin. Adultery is only a crime when it’s committed by a man. Women are rewarded for it.
Until that changes, marriage will remain a bad life decision for men. And what exactly is the divorce rate these days, 50% in the first four years? Not to mention the millions of men who are paying court-ordered child support for children they did not conceive.
This is not a Republican vs. Democrat issue, or a conservative vs. liberal issue, as if the former supports married couples and strong families and the latter supports welfare queens and illegitimate children. This is an issue about the law, the terms and conditions of a contract, the court system, and the culture which will continue to decay if none of these are changed.
Replace presumptive patertinity with determinitive paternity. Perform a paternity test after every birth. Require the biological parents to support and raise the child, regardless of their marital status at the time of conception.
Replace no fault divorce with just cause divorce. There are ligetimate reasons for divorce, adultery being one of them. Allow the betrayed husband to sue for damages, just as the betrayed wife is.
Otherwise, look forward to living in a country of broken homes, welfare queens, illegitmate children, and bankrupt men, all with miserable lives.
It’s not about the sacrament of marriage, which is pure. It’s about the contract, which is corrupt. It’s about men and women taking responsibility.
Change the law, change the court system, change the attitude of the modern woman and her feminist surrogates, if you want to change the culture. Anything else is just posturing.
There was a time when the system leaned heavily towards the husband in divorces and often left women destitude, often through no fault of their own. In trying to correct this injustice the pendulum swung too far in the other direction and I really see no plus side for men to marry anymore.
No-fault divorce also did a lot to break this system. There SHOULD be a penalty for the person who broke their vows. Adultery is a selfish act that in every case is incredibly destructive to the entire family. Children often have a hard time entering into a trusting relationship because of this.
Alternatively, if you want to keep no-fault divorce, make no-fault divorce into filer-fault divorce. That is, the one who initiates the divorce loses unless fault can be proven on the part of the other party.
No plus side for men to marry. You have to be kidding me. Marriage is still a good deal for men and thats no going to change much anytime soon.
Writing from Germany, I can say similar problems are happening with the ensuant welfare of non-married or divorced one woman families. As much trouble as I have with Islam, I can say the many Muslim famlies on my street are familially superior to the sexualized for fun partnerships, with or without marriage, that dominate so much German society and are affecting it negatively. The problem may solve itself as demographics point towards the slow dying out of the Germanic hordes here. That is a sad solution, but adverse feeling against marriage are resulting in declining birth rates. Thank you for your article and for connecting inequality with failure of solid marriage. Over and over, friends in America who support Obama are crusading around under the banner of inequality of income and demanding redistriubition as THE answer. Final question: Are the reports I get correct that 70% of black pregnancies are to an unmarried woman? If so or even approaching that statistic, what does that mean for the social health of the black community? Will further income inquality augment?
I fear that this is what radical feminism has wrought. Through their radicalism, they’ve created a situation where the only viable alternative model is Islam. If this strengthens the family, well and good, but where does this leave women?
My comment refers only to the Muslim families that I experience here in Germany. The German gov. is trying to bring about an European Islam, effectively moderating if not changing the radicality of historical Islam. Success? The Muslim families are not in a strict Islamically controlled environment. They are not open to the same pressure, though the Turks get to hear neo-Sultan Erdogan’s recrimminations against the assimilation of Turkish Muslims to German culture. My estimate is that there is going on a sort of inner conflict in Muslims here, some just love greater freedom and others, the Salafists, opposing (and watched by German police). There are honor killings, etc. here. The Muslim population is growing, the German population is slowly diminishing. I can only hope that the Western experience of many Muslims wins out. Whatever, I find the familial mores of Germans (not every family) to be becoming “liberal” (in the American sense), the effective separtion of German and State seems like State vs. Religion. Negative factors, problems, etc. But, despite all I am positively impressed by familial solidarity of Muslim famalies within the range of my experience. I see such healthy solidarity lacking in my experience of many German families. What the heck, Europe is undergoing the same historical pressures as the USA!
Well said (about a verboten subject)!
This is completely insane. Your proposal would destroy Black America as we know it and restore Black America as we knew it. Where are the votes in that? They’re certainly not on my side of the aisle!
It’s a bit baffling to me that James Holmes is considered a monster for killing 12 and wounding many others but Democratic politicians are considered heroes for destroying the lives of millions of Blacks and abetting the murder of many thousands. There really ought to be another social justice issue – the right to not have your life destroyed by lying, thieving, power-mad politicians. Maybe some sort of “truth in governing” law? But, again, where are the votes in that? The truth may set you free but it won’t get me elected and setting you free is not an option.
Because everything in this article makes perfect, obvious sense, lefties will reject it utterly. There’s no possibility of getting them on board. They’re only interested in revoking reality — that’s their whole program. Warring against reality makes them feel smug about themselves as the “evolved” vanguard elite of a new utopia. These are people who can cheerfully destroy the “traditional” family, then accuse the “white power structure” of systematic animus against the poor. Like Obama, they can spend their whole lives feeding at the cornucopia provided by private enterprise, yet have nothing but contempt for private enterprise. They will vote once again to elect the man who wants to realize Europe here even as Europe implodes in real time. They’re delusional and powerful, so we simply have to out-elect them at every level, and soon.
The problem, as I see it, is with men not being men. There are too many men who want the benefits of sex but not the responsibility that comes with it. This is not a black-white-latino issue but a fathers carrying out the duties and yes burdens of fatherhood issue. We can all blame society, politics, feminism, easy divorce and divorce laws that punish men but every man that fathers a child has two choices: accept responsibility for raising that child or flee and do the same with another woman.
I know that individual circumstances differ and that the welfare system rewards multiple illegitimate children but in general most women, even in these times, want a man that is indeed a man, that will support and protect her and their offspring. That is God’s plan and purpose and it is not easy and often it is just plain hard. There is a lot of sacrifice there. I have friends whose wives have flaked out on them and they picked up the burden and raised their children. They have been rewarded by children that love and respect them. By the way, I am a father and just relaying my experiences after being married to the same and only wife for over 40 years.
La Shawn Barber, a very good and timely article.
As a woman, I disagree with you. Why would a man enter into marriage when in a few years he can have his whole life’s work wrested from him in a court of law simply because his wife isn’t “in love” anymore?
I, personally, blame feminazi man-haters who have somehow brainwashed women into thinking that being a whore is their right. That staying at home and raising their children is somehow beneath them. That having a career is more important than raising the next generation of healthy well-rounded human beings that can be safely let loose on society isn’t worth their time or effort.
well, it’s not just at the bottom. Anne Marie Slaughter has a very open, heart-felt article about mothering at the high end. She sounds like a complete twit, or moral imbecile- I’m not sure which is more descriptive. She wants to raise her son, and get him into her upper-class, without, you know, doing any of the work- or being present. I don’t know that she knows how she got where she did, or that she’s grateful to her parents, or anything. I’m still kind of freeped out that she looks up to Hillary Clinton- who countenances her husband preying on vulnerable, poorer, young women. That’s predatory. Would Ms Slaughter be upset if her husband strayed with a Princeton undergraduate? Or would she understand? Would she be more upset, or less, if he strayed with a townie, which is what Bill Clinton preyed on?
I think one of the sharpest observations about this is in a Susan Isaacs novel: the upper-class girl raised by the nanny and the maid ends up being very good at what they do- cleaning, baking cupcakes and sewing. She’s not like her parents at all. She’d be very happy if a carpenter proposed to her, I think. Well, an Italian one who would take her to the opera, probably.
It is work. It’s not necessarily the visible work- as I’ve pointed out before, both Bethlehem Steel and Nucor have paperwork, but one is successful, and one went bankrupt. It’s not the dishes, necessarily. The work doesn’t look like a politically correct psychological manipulation. I love Ethan Canin’s story where the immigrant father kicks the sh** out of his kid who is wavering about medical school. I get guilting, and manipulation, and crying, and lecturing and the staring of doom, and the weeping over this or that. That’s what the immensely successful dean of a section of the university remembers about his incredibly poor, probably not literate, immigrant dad- he’d weep over the kid, and rail about homework- and the guy has a PhD, and an incredible amount of gratitude and respect for his dad.
We know what we’re looking at when we see a psychiatrist’s office. Nobody asks if the psych vacuums the office, or if some maid does it. The patient is always seen as worthwhile, and working. Well, if I’m feeding my kid cookies after school, and listening about every little good or bad thing all day- is that as important? I’d say so. Why isn’t my kitchen table considered a psychological work space? When I make them wash dishes, why isn’t that “unconventional character therapy’? They’d pay to wash dishes in a Buddhist retreat. Why not here?
And, wives? That’s like, what, five chapters of Proverbs? It’s not like it’s a new problem. Who do you trust for life? And husbands.
Or,say, gossip. I knew what my husband was like for, what, ten years prior to us meeting, b/c of gossip and curiosity. I know when I read Jane Austen, the young women are foolish, the parents aren’t much better, but there’s a sum of information from gossip and speculation, that leads to happiness, eventually. But somehow,now, gossip and enquiry about character are a bad thing, or retrograde. Why? I would think the only people despising information would be cads. My husband- uniformly- everyone spoke incredibly highly of him. I was so excited to get to go out with him- I knew I desperately wanted us to work- and that was before the first date. It’s like he was wearing a crown that only I could see. People were genuinely happy that we worked out- bystanders want nice people to succeed in life.
Kids take work. It looks like work when you’re bossing them around, as if you were Jack Welch, distaff-side. But- he got discarded, and then they found out all the things he was covering up. I know parents like that. They look surprised when their teenagers drop out of school, or take up drugs.
And, well, pop culture has done a number on married love and physical satisfaction. The sexless boobs? married, inevitably. Lydia Netzer is saying something radical, when she gives marriage advice- but it’s true- practice makes perfect.
somehow, some odd single men have become gurus to other guys? about relationships? I’d say my husband is more consequential- two marriages, two commissions in the army, several men following in his career path, and infants being born, rather than aborted. He’s a regular guy in a regular job. He’s just a man in full, and it’s obvious. He’s got a family, and we love him and look up to him. The guys around him want what he’s got.Some made a checklist, and a how-he-did-it booklet, and are going down the list.
And, well, the imaginative leap? Do books about girls getting married get sneered at? I say they do: Twilight provokes rage. Yet movies about girls seeking to not marry are charming- Brave, or Tim Burtons’ Alice in Wonderland. When will there be movies and books about poor girls marrying nice guys? And all the gaming and maneuvering it takes, to get a guy to marry one. It was a staple of women’s fiction for centuries. Where did it go?
Well you probably couldn’t call Winry Rockbell poor, nor Fullmetal Alchemist a book, per se, but Fullmetal Alchemist does have a plot involving a girl falling in love with and marrying her childhood friend and neighbor, despite the both of them getting mixed up in a war the nation’s leadership had been planning for centuries. The author also uses the series to call out her own culture on the wrongs they have done. The downside: the hero is, at least for most of the story, an atheist. Mind you, this too is a lesson, since his atheism is born from his own arrogance and issues with his father abandoning him as a boy.
I believe that among African Americans currently 75% of children are born out of wedlock. Addressing this failure and promoting loving marriages and stable families should be of far greater concern than other social issues in the churches that work among these communities.
However the callous disregard of responsibility needs to be addressed. When a man makes a woman he is not married to pregnant, he should surely bear a substantial share of the cost of raising the child. If he does not pay child support and does the same thing to another woman, then surely he should be punished by a quick, simple operation called a vasectomy. This is a low cost sterilization (female sterilization is six times as expensive and a much riskier operation). This would drive home the need for men to be responsible and begin to recognize that sexual intercourse should be part of a loving, protecting, lifelong relationship – not selfish sexual gratification. This would also address and greatly reduce the horrific number of abortions.
Ronald Reagan signed the first no fault divorce law. This innovation did more to ruin lives and society than all other social innovations combined. Any smart, achieving kid knows that marrying and fathering children is the riskiest decision he will ever make.
“The solution to reducing inequality isn’t more government, but more marriage.”
71.6 percent of out-of-wedlock births are to African American women. See: http://blog.heritage.org/2009/03/19/out-of-wedlock-birthrate-out-of-control/
No matter how you slice it or dice it, this is what is causing most of the ills in the black community. Not only do kids from broken families do poorly in schools and are more likely to end up getting into trouble, they also tend to have kids out of wedlock when they grow up. It is an endless cycle of failure and dependency on government handouts. And both African-American men AND women are to blame. Nobody is holding a gun to the heads of these women to have sex, let alone to have babies out of welock. And for African-American men to so callously and blithely abandon their responsibilities as fathers and responsible members of society makes them look like selfish, irresponsible, undependable, and foolish.
And government does nothing but encourage this sort of behavior. There was a brief glimmer of hope in 1996 when Bill Clinton passed the welfare reform act, but now Obama is gutting that very act which was designed to get people off of government support. Now Obama wants to turn the clock back to before 1996, when women were actually getting paid to have more babies and were encouraged to milk the system for every dime they could get. We are actually going backwards, not forwards, and we have the Obama administration and his liberal army of enablers to “thank” for it.
I don’t know how you teach responsibility to people who don’t seem to have any. But so long as the black community keeps playing the victim, so long as they don’t take any responsibility for their own behavior, they are never going to amount to much. And that’s not a result I would wish on ANY ethnic community in this country.
I think that comments like yours reflect less an actual concern about blacks than they do a desire to get your own frustrations with blacks off your chest. I find commentary like this to just not seem very sincere in its professions of concern for how these social trends may ultimately play out in the black community.
Timely and helpful article. Children need stability, protection and nurturing (that whether we like it or not) can be best found in a family where the adults are partners commited to raising stable, protected, and nurtured children. Personally, I prefer a woman/man partnership but can understand how a single gender partnership could work. Boys and girls raised by a single parent yearn for the missing parent. Just ask them.
A recent study noted that children in same-sex relationships do approximately as poorly as other “nontraditional” families. I noticed that “two-male” partnerships produced better outcomes than “two female” ones; I’m guessing it has to do with the lack of a womb? (children have to be-gotten lol from a woman so the men have to show some fitness in order to get a child, whereas a woman just needs to find some sperm)
Well done, Ms. Barber. Now who will be brave enough to stand with you in the public arena?
Thank you Ms Barber for describing the elephant in the room, or maybe a better analogy would be the alligator in the room, because an elephant is far too passive to describe the damage that has been done to the country by liberal (i.e., marxist) policies that have destroyed the black family and are in the process of destroying families of all races..
And the factor that is unspeakably outrageous is that the destruction of society’s most important and civilizing social unit has been done for only one reason…to insure the power of criminal politicians, marxists and their equally evil power-mad partners in crime…of all political persuasions.
It’s known beyond any shadow of a doubt that destroying the marital bond destroys the culture. We are living in the latest cruel experiments.
It’s beyond tragic. The Aurora Joker killed a dozen. Family destroying policies kill a dozen in Chicago, every day, 365 days a year. In the country, make that thousands and thousands of livs shattered every day, whether the people are killed or not, the destruction of the marraige bond destroys their lives and worse, the lives of innocent children.
Romney, of course, prefers to focus his attention exclusively on the number 8.2. That way he can lose with what his associates consider honor.
Fine essay, Ms. Barber. In return, I hope you understand that our (yours and mine) argument with the Democrats is not about what is the more effective means to achieve the goal we all share. Rather, it is the Democrats’ goal to destroy the black family, as they have done since the 19th century, on the way to destroying all families, in order to create a helpless, dependent class that will look to the government, and in particular, the government party, the Democrats, for their daily bread.
I don’t know that you can stuff that genie back in the bottle. B/c talking about the two women- you’d have to talk smack about the poorer one. I have questions like- why didn’t her parents scream, cry and raise holy hell with that boy that knocked up their girl? Two underage girls got pregnant in my neighborhood. One, the family moved the boy into their home. Five years later, the guy has a stable life, a good job, he’s raising his kid, and he’s still scared to marry the mother of his child. The other, the family of the girl went nuts- the guy married the girl, they moved in with her family- and the guy got turned into a man. They have a second kid on the way, he’s on his way to becoming an electrician. She has a job. So, it seems to me that the mother’s family has a lot more room to maneuver than people consider.
And then, society. One neighbor had gotten his girlfriend pregnant. when she had the baby, he went knocking on every apartment door, announcing that he had a son! Every neighbor, literally every naighbor, went into their house and found something to give to him- a can of tuna, baby gear, toys, books, all kinds of things. And after that, he was acknowleged as So and So’s dad. Somehow, he went from prison guy to upright married guy by being treated like upright married guy.
And, well, why not accept that marriage is a negotiation? that means all the horrible stuff like estimations of value, bargaining, all of it. Men seem to have a horror of women who use their brains to get married and stay that way.
marriage for the sake of marriage with the expected result of magically creating stable relationships sounds quite a bit like the theory that putting welfare “recipients” in middle class neighborhoods would result in the free loaders getting a work ethic by osmosis.
Point taken, Mark E.; however, we as a society must start somewhere. And where better than in making an attempt to restore the nuclear family?
Consider: Couple of decades ago, smoking was beginning to be targeted in public schools as something to abstain from; many (perhaps most?) teachers, however, smoked, and continued doing so. Hypocritical? Indeed: But still, smoking rates have fallen.
Marrying “for the kids” is, and will be for the foreseeable future, the same way. Many who would be called upon to advocate for the marriage model won’t themselves be married, and won’t ever choose to get married. Nevertheless, we should still make it a bully pulpit policy (note I did NOT say a regulatory policy). It should be shouted from the political rooftops that a stable marriage promotes all the benefits that are now touted by the social justice cult followers.
It should become part of the curriculum of whatever it is now called in high school, that single parenthood is the most accurate predictor of income inequality. It should be pointed out that the correlation between single parenthood and poverty is incredibly high; enough so that perhaps more than correlation is indicated–causation is also strongly indicated. It should be emphasized in high school health/wellness classes that out-of-wedlock pregnancies are a near guarantee of future poverty. It should be pointed out to female minors that “single parenthood” is spelled “single motherhood”. They should be made intimately familiar with the law, and with the actual dollars and cents an out of wedlock child is worth, including both revenue and liabilities–and that the liabilities will outpace the revenues from government entities soon enough that they will be guaranteed to be stuck in poverty before they can go from diapers to training pants.
When the women reinforce these things to their men, and insist on a commitment to responsible fatherhood, then–and only then–will this trend turn around. 71.6%. Before LBJ’s “Great Society” the Black family was statistically as intact as white suburbia’s family. Liberal policies have been the prime mover of this whole trend. They must be reversed.
I wholeheartedly agree with your assessment. Positive cultural norms must be identified, fully encouraged and promoted by every means possible. Pessimism and abandoning the fight is a dereliction of our responsibility. Think of just how recently spousal abuse and public drunkenness were not only condoned, but something to laugh at (think Honeymooners and Red Skelton or Dean Martin).
Not really. If you watch those things you’ll notice a couple of things. Drunks don’t drive – they took cabs. Males may threaten to send their wives to the moon but it’s all bluster. Even on I Love Lucy, when his wife was clearly demented, Ricky never laid a hand on Lucy even though she knew she deserved it at times.
My dad always told me why buy the cow when you get the milk for free. The feminists always talk about sexual parity, but that’s a myth. Women for the most part have sex because they are “in love” with the guy; guys have sex because it feels good. There can never be sexual parity because women have babies and men don’t. When hollywood got rid of morality clauses, easy access to abortion and uncle Sam’s open pocket book, couples go into a relationship thinking there is a safety net where responsibilities can be pushed to someone else.
I like the concept of a shotgun wedding. For better or worse you made a child and unless there is something like abuse, drug use or mental issues, divorce should not be an option. You would think that as much as you might dislike each other you would forge something for the benefit of the child.
TEST
UN PRESIDENT TIM KALEMKARIAN, US PRESIDENT TIM KALEMKARIAN, US SENATE TIM KALEMKARIAN, US HOUSE TIM KALEMKARIAN: BEST MAJOR CANDIDATE.
You dumbass.
UN PRESIDENT HUGH HEWITT, US PRESIDENT HUGH HEWITT, US SENATE HUGH HEWITT, US HOUSE HEWITT, GOVERNOR HUGH HEWITT, LT GOVERNOR HUGH HEWITT: BEST MAJOR CANDIDATE.
UN PRESIDENT MIKE GALLAGHER, US PRESIDENT MIKE GALLAGHER, US SENATE MIKE GALLAGHER, US HOUSE MIKE GALLAGHER: BEST MAJOR CANDIDATE.