Adults engage in bizarre, uncouth practice of marrying and having children

I've mentioned the phenomenon of liberal shock at reality before, but this quintessential dog-bites-man story from the New York Observer takes the cake. It would seem, according to author Lizzy Ratner, that there has arisen an alarming trend of twenty-somethings engaging in the highly offensive and tasteless practice of getting married, buying houses, and having children.

In commenting on a piece like this, one hardly knows where to begin. The entire thing is suffused with a worldview so completely inverted from normality and sanity that to a traditionalist reader it speaks for itself, and to a reader who shares the author's views, one despairs of being able to explain its wrongness.

Then she opened her mouth, and it was if one had been transported back—oh, 150 years or so. “We had been talking about getting married since we got together,” Ms.—or perhaps we should write Miss—Miller said, describing how her friend Noelle had, early on, asked her beloved his “intentions”; how he had proposed last autumn, presenting the diamond ring that now glittered in the cloud-light on her left hand. “Ever since I met him, I felt like we’re a strong unit that would be a great foundation for a family,” she said demurely. “We’re very settled in and cozy; we’re like Hobbits in our little place.”

There was a time, not too long ago, when the young and the aimless hightailed it to New York City in pursuit of an altogether different urban experience than the domestic bliss enjoyed by Miss Miller and many of her bosom companions. High on a cocktail of recklessness and abandon, they came here to find their id, lose their superego, shake up the world, or simply shake their thang. Then they promptly chronicled these exploits in confessional sex columns.

Obviously, the world would be a better place if we had more confessional sex columns chronicling the exploits of the young and aimless as they bed-hop with reckless abandon. But now the Miss Millers of the world are throwing a wrench into the works, what with their talking about getting married and thinking that they and the men they're seeing would make a great foundation for a family. Why, imagine this:

Down in the West Village, we have Liv Tyler, barely 30, the daughter of Aerosmith’s Steven Tyler and legendary rock-star muse Bebe Buellwho’s now contented wife to Royston Langdon and mother of 2-year-old Milo.

Married and the mother a two-year-old at "barely 30!" Who ever heard of such a thing?

Perhaps the most disturbing passage is this:

The adultery-filled pages of John Updike’s best novels now seem like dispatches from a foreign land. One need only mention the word “affair” in the chatroom pages of Urbanbaby.com to get quickly excoriated as a “slut” and a “home wrecker”; the New Victorian morality is not one that permits nuance or discretion.

I've never seen such a cavalier dismissal of the idea that there's something wrong with adultery. I mean, I think I understand how liberals think, but sometimes they still manage to surprise me. No nuance or discretion here; the author actually thinks there's something wrong with excoriating adulterers as "sluts" and "home wreckers." How do these people expect to be able to maintain a civilization at all?