Bring Back The Stigma On the normalization of cohabitation

The Overton Window is shifting among Catholics. Because evil is so widespread in the world, and sin hits close to home more and more, we have started, and are able, to settle for less. I am not here referring to the debate that comes every election about choosing a candidate that is the lesser of two evils – meaning, bad, but still not as evil as the other option. While that, too, concerns “settling,” it is not so much the secular world I am concerned with as that which has to do with the Catholic Faith and the lives of the faithful; namely, morality.

The term “Overton Window” is a term derived from political science, and which I was not familiar with until sometime last year when I first heard it on a Catholic podcast. The theory was first developed by political analyst Joseph P. Overton, and originally known as “The Window of Political Possibilities.” It was renamed after Mr. Overton following his death. According to Britannica, the term means, “...the range of policies considered acceptable by the majority of a population at a particular time.” While the concept was invented specifically as a study of politics, it can also be applied when measuring how moral standards are viewed by society over the years.

The generation of my parents, although living in a post-1960s world and far from a society where morality still reigned supreme, for the most part still had a goal in mind: to find someone they could love, and marry. Marriage was still viewed as the proper endgame of a romantic relationship; cohabitation was taboo. As the children of that generation have become adults and started their own lives, the place marriage has in society has changed, as most of the people in my generation (the generation known as Gen Z, or Zoomers) skip marriage altogether.

Continued below.