"As Memorial Day marks the official beginning of grilling season, many men will find themselves almost genetically drawn to throwing hunks of raw meat onto a fire and poking them with tongs.

...The high-end grill market, which generally refers to any grill that costs more than $1,000, started quietly in 1990 when Dynamic Cooking Systems, a company based in California, introduced the DCS Professional Grill. The 48-inch-wide $5,000 appliance, which included H-shaped cast-iron commercial-quality burners, a heavy-duty side-burner and more B.T.U.'s per square inch than any other grill then on the market, was adopted by a few deep-pocketed souls on the grilling vanguard.

...Now the high-end grill market accounts for 3 to 4 percent of the 14.5 million grills sold last year, said Don Johnson, the director of market research for the Hearth, Patio and Barbecue Association, the grill industry trade group. It includes about a dozen players."

"[I]n a circle at a grief camp over Memorial Day weekend, Taylor Downing, a 10-year-old with wavy red hair and a mouthful of braces, offered up her own detailed description. 'My dad died four days after my birthday, on Oct. 28, 2004,' Taylor said quietly of Specialist Stephen Paul Downing II. 'He got shot by a sniper. It came in through here,' she added, pointing to the front of her head, 'and went out there,' shifting her finger to the back of her head.

'Before he left,' Taylor said, 'he sat me on his knee and he told me why he had to go: because people in Iraq didn't have what we did. They didn't have enough money. They couldn't go to school. And they didn't have homes.'

An estimated 1,600 children have lost a parent, almost all of them fathers, to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq."

President Bush has called for the federal funding of marriage-skills education in hopes of improving the marital prospects of low-income Americans. While the proposal has merit, a study by sociologists at Ohio State University suggests out-of-wedlock childbearing may be the greater barrier to living happily ever after among poor women, as their study found that such behavior significantly reduces both the likelihood of marriage and the quality of marital partners.

Looking at data representing 103,000 women, ages 18 to 34, who participated in the June supplements of the Current Population Survey between 1980 and 1995, the researchers explored differences in the marriage and mate-selection patterns between women with unmarried births and those without unmarried births. Controlling for age, education, and survey year, single mothers of all racial groups (white, black, and Hispanic) were more likely to cohabit than to marry (p < .01 for all three groups).

More importantly, unmarried childbearing was also found to increase the likelihood of a woman settling for a less-than-ideal mate. In models that controlled for age, education, and survey year, women with unmarried births were less likely to have formed a union (married or cohabiting) with a man with some college education relative to their peers without unmarried births. In addition, those with unmarried births were more likely to have a mate who is at least six years older and, among whites, to have a mate of a different race.

Probit models that adjusted for selection bias confirmed that the poor marital prospects of unwed mothers were independent of the ability of women, including unwed mothers, to attract well-matched or economically attractive partners. The researchers conclude: "Women who bear children outside of marriage are at a considerable disadvantage in the marriage market." Not only are they less likely to find a well-matched mate, they are also "less likely to experience upward marriage mobility."

While the researchers uncover nothing about mating that has not been known for generations, their findings confirm that elected officials in Washington who want to promote marriage may need to focus less on creating new social programs and more on scaling back existing programs that enable or subsidize illegitimacy in low-income communities.