The family, headed by married parents, is “an anti-queer factory for producing productive workers, rife with power asymmetries and violence,” feminist luminary Sophie Lewis writes. Lewis is on the fringes of the commentariat and academia, but certainly among our tastemakers, it is distasteful to say that marriage is good and better than the alternatives.

Poor Melissa Kearney, an economist at the center-left Brookings Institution, got her liberal card pulled for documenting, empirically, the benefits to children of being raised by a pair of committed parents instead of just one.

It doesn’t take a moralist, though, to see the benefits for children, and thus for a community, of marriage.

Children of married parents are far more involved in the community, sports, and activities, according to a new study by a nonpartisan, nonideological nonprofit organization called 50Can.

The group polled parents about their satisfaction with their children’s schools and opportunities and sliced the data along all sorts of axes: religious attendance, income, ideology, and, crucially, whether the parents were married or at least living with a partner.

Children being raised by two parents were 8 points more likely to participate in summer programs, 43% to 35%, according to this survey. Most children being raised by two parents sang, played an instrument, or did artistic programs, while a minority of those were in single-parent households.

The biggest difference: Children from two-parent households were 12 points more likely to play sports than other children.

So children being raised by one parent or by divorced couples are the ones who surely need coaches, mentors, and tutors more, and they are the ones least likely to have these supplemental authority figures.

Most importantly, children with married or cohabitating parents were much more likely, 35% to 24%, to participate in religious activities or faith-based programs. Likewise, children from married or cohabitating homes volunteered much more.

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Unsurprisingly, coupled parents were much more likely to attend parental meetings at school. On no score did children from divorced, single, or separated families have better outcomes.

It turns out that the traditional family and the arrangements closest to it don’t merely produce “good workers.” They produce good citizens and well-rounded adults.