7 Comments

Blake
June 10th, 2011 | 1:33 pm

That is because people do not realize the ways in which marriage protects both the woman and the man (and also – especially – any children of their union).

Jeremy
June 11th, 2011 | 9:44 am

We should be careful about equating a relationship with the rights that the State confers upon that relationship. Whenever you stand on gay marriage, simply crossing a political geographical line can be the difference between official recognition and non-recognition.

Furthermore, an unmarried woman and her children have rights — even a prostitute could get pregnant and sue for child support — no marriage required. We also have common law marriages as well.

Blake
June 11th, 2011 | 2:16 pm

We should be careful about equating a relationship with the rights that the State confers upon that relationship.

Yep – notice how the state tries to confer all the benefits of marriage on unmarried women with kids, and yet the unmarried woman with kids still ends up alone, unprotected, in poverty?

That is because the entire institution of marriage has always been about protecting family members.

Women gain protection from being used then abandoned.

Men gain protection from “baby games”.

And children gain protection from being abandoned by one or both parents.

Check the statistics – you’ll find that unmarried women are abandoned during their time of vulnerability, unmarried men are unable to have a healthy relationship with their child even when they want and actively pursue that relationship, and the children? Well -

After all the social engineering and blah blah blah, families built on the bonds of kinship + legal ties + affection are still stronger, and better at effectively passing down family resources to younger members, than families that try to skip one of these steps.

Children with parents who did right by them grow up securely bonded to both sides of their family.

Children whose parents justified – “not my fault, kid will be fine, not my fault, blah blah blah” – tend to get exactly what the court gives them, and usually not even that.

Marriage is an institution that is about making and raising healthy families. The social engineering types who wanted to believe marriage could be whatever they wanted were just wrong, and have been proven wrong by the fact that in being wrong have done great harm – demonstrable, measurable harm.

Now it’s just a matter of getting past the denial and the disappointed expectations, and learning to accept reality.

Jeremy
June 11th, 2011 | 8:57 pm

“Women gain protection from being used then abandoned.”

That depends on state laws governing divorce.

Also, marriage is not always in the best interests of the children or adults involved. As a simple example, when one parent is an abuser, certainly a single-parent is better.

Michael PS
June 12th, 2011 | 6:23 am

Is not the true modern form of concubinage not unregulated cohabitation, but the civil union that, in Europe, is becoming increasingly popular with opposite-sex couples?

Typically, such unions are terminable at will, with no conclusive presumtion of paternity and, consequently, no obligation of sexual fidelity (certainly, none that a third party is bound to respect) and with no guaranteed succesion rights. Indeed, it is difficult to argue thatt hey confer a civil status at all, but are rather private contracts

pentamom
June 13th, 2011 | 9:09 am

“Also, marriage is not always in the best interests of the children or adults involved. As a simple example, when one parent is an abuser, certainly a single-parent is better.”

This post is about concubinage, not marriage vs. actual singleness. The lack of marriage does not protect a child in any way from abuse from an abusive present parent who’s around anyway. In fact, it exposes him more because a birth parent is more likely to be succeeded by a live-in non-parent down the road, who is statistically even more likely to be an abuser.

Blake
June 13th, 2011 | 1:18 pm

“Women gain protection from being used then abandoned.”

That depends on state laws governing divorce.

“Also, marriage is not always in the best interests of the children or adults involved. As a simple example, when one parent is an abuser, certainly a single-parent is better.”

In both cases, this is not true if there are children involved.

A woman who is married and then divorced will be in a better situation than a woman who was never married, whether abuse occurred during the relationship or not.

Unmarried women with children lack important protections.

Of course, if we weren’t actively teaching our young people that marriages are disposable/easily dissolved, they would take more care with finding their partner in the first place.

Also, it’s important to note that domestic abuse, unlike stranger attack, is not something that happens to women randomly. Troubled women seek out troubled men. How much abuse they – and their children – endure is not related to whether they marry or not (if anything, the woman who marries shows a greater self respect, which is an encouraging sign, than the woman who merely gives herself away for free).

How much abuse such a woman ends up taking depends on two factors: herself and her community.

Herself in that it is ultimately up to her to learn to overcome whatever it is that makes her choose bad men in the first place. If she herself cannot or will not learn, she will either keep going back to the same abusive man or she will find another man who is just the same.

The community in that even a woman who wants to change can’t, if nobody is available to teach her how. The single biggest risk factor for whether a woman will be abused or not is her network (what sort of network she is connected to and how well-connected she is). Most abused women have no network at all.

Of course, in a healthy community, when one of the women experiences mistreatment the response of the community intervention – the women pull the woman aside and talk to her, while the men pull aside the offending male and teach him tips and techniques on how to better deal with situations.

Which is another reason why the institution of marriage matters: it is linked not only with the well-being of individual men and women, but also with the stability of neighborhoods – that in turn affect the well-being of families and their members.

It’s interesting to note that an abused woman’s best scenario – to have a community intervene to help her and her spouse work things out and become a healthy, functioning couple (preferably before things get out of hand) – is exactly opposite what “progressives” want to do in cases of spousal abuse, which is to judge situations worthy of intervention only after they get serious, and then separate the couple and play hardcore “blame games” – escalating the violence (no wonder most women who are killed by their husbands experience this fate after leaving him, when you’d think they’d be “safer”!)

It’s tempting to blame the man for spousal abuse, but the actual well-being of the family – including the woman and including the child – is best served by keeping them together as much as possible and having the whole family go through cognitive behavioral therapy (including but not limited to anger management classes, also including skills training in other relevant areas – stress management, communications skills, how to manage time/money/resources together, etc.)

The bonds that hold people together are not negotiable. They are either-or. Either you respect and honor them, or they do not exist.