My dear friend and intellectual collaborator Dan Kelly argues today that “marriage is dead.” I respect Dan as a man who says what he thinks without fear or favor; that’s why I value both his friendship and his co-labor. He’s not going to start pretending liberalized divorce is a good idea just because he sees its continued dominance as inevitable. But I feel a need to register my dissent from his forensic diagnosis.
As I have written in this space before, I think marriage is gravely threatened but the battle to save it is winnable. That hasn’t always come through to some people, because I’ve challenged the marriage movement’s strategy and language on some issues. But I do think marriage can be saved. Without the time to go into a lengthy discourse, here are my reasons for dissenting from my good friend and intellectual comrade.
Firstly, I agree with Dan that homosexuality is a distraction; the root cause of our problem is liberalized divorce laws. Liberalized divorce establishes fully and indisputably that marriage is a meaningless piece of paper. (This was the transformative insight I got from Maggie Gallagher’s The Abolition of Marriage, of which I’ve written before.) In my opinion, it is only because liberalized divorce has established that marriage is a meaningless piece of paper that gay marriage makes deep intuitive sense to people, while opposition to gay marriage seems like it could have no cause but irrational hatred. I take it from his comments Dan would more or less agree. Kevin Williamson’s famous comments about gay marriage from earlier this year include some mistaken thinking and conclusions, but he was right to argue that liberalized divorce is the only issue that ultimately matters:
I might be more interested in the politics of [gay] marriage if the legal standing of the institution were not already degraded to the point of triviality. Here is an experiment: Imagine that you have a marriage that you wish to escape and $50,000 of credit-card debt that you do not wish to pay — which claim do you imagine will prove more enduring? Or try unilaterally canceling a contract with an employee, without showing any fault on his part, simply because he no longer suits your taste. Your contract with your cell-phone provider is legally enforceable, and your marriage vows — “forsaking all others until death do us part” and all that — are not. Our present-day defenders of the sanctity of marriage aren’t exactly Thomas More standing up to Henry VIII; they are huddled around the husk of an institution long debased.
Now we come to disagreements. Dan argues that “marriage is dead” because “there is a broad and deep consensus that we are well rid of it, and we don’t want it to come back.” I take him to mean, not that the culture never affirms marriage in the abstract as a value, but that there is a “broad and deep consensus” for liberalized divorce laws.
I agree that there is a broad consensus for liberalized divorce laws, but I do not think it is “deep.” Indeed, I think it is shallow and fragile. It can be broken, if we have the wisdom to redirect our efforts toward breaking it.
The forces at the top of the culture are already waking up on these issues. They have recognized that the breakdown of marriage threatens all their most cherished values: equality of opportunity for all and especially for the poor, equality of dignity across social strata (what some call “social equality”), and protection of the interests of women and children. This has been growing for some time and to my view (these things are subjective) it looks ready to reach a tipping point.
Admittedly, the dominant cultural forces are not yet willing to take that final, Rubicon-crossing step and retract their support for liberalized divorce. But that step is “final” in two senses. It is final in the sense that it is the step that ultimately matters, which is why their failure to take it looks so irreversable in Dan’s eyes; but it is also final in the sense that it comes at the end of a long journey. They have been moving toward it for a generation. Ten years ago, who would have expected the New York Times to run a long think piece about how the breakdown of marriage inevitably creates a two-class society? So who is to say the momentum can’t continue?
They have not yet taken the only step that matters, but they can be made to take that step. That’s why I say the broad consensus for liberalized divorce is fragile. And there is a logical path to breaking it.
It’s to rub their noses in the failure of their preferred solutions. They’ve admitted this is a big problem – indeed, a dire one. But their solutions don’t work. The next step is to offer a solution that manifestly does work and then demand to know: “if not this, what?” There are challenges to doing this effectively – you have to do it in such a way that they don’t feel like they have to sacrifice their position at the top of the culture, their credibility as cultural leaders, by adopting your solutions. We don’t want to displace them from the top of the culture, we want to force them to co-opt our preferred solution and pretend it was their idea all along. That can be done. Numerous social movements have done it on other issues in the past. This is where my concern to “deinstitutionalizing enmity” comes in – we want to defeat liberalized divorce, not conquer our unbelieving neighbors and subjugate them to Christianity.
I also think Dan – characteristically – overestimates the relative importance of the law’s coercive function and underestimates its teaching and formative function. Dan argues marriage has been hollowed out legally because we changed our conception of what it was. I think the causation runs just as much the other way – the hollowing out of our conception of what marriage is has been driven to a large extent by raising several generations successively in a country where marriage’s status as a meaningless piece of paper is not a mere cultural idea floating out there in the ether but an incontrovertable institutionalized fact. Obviously there have always been forces outside the law involved in forming moral expectations, but the change in the law was a huge factor. This implies victories against liberalized divorce, if we won them, would help move the ball back in the direction of marriage not only in terms of institutional arrangements but in terms of what makes deep sense to people and what is seen as irrational and bigoted.
Not having time or space to write a lengthy treatise, that’s my piece for now. I’m sure Dan will continue the dialogue over on Hang Together and we’ll both have much to say.
September 27th, 2012 | 2:33 pm
You forgot to mention that as marriage precedes all cultures, what might be dead is our culture. Marriage will no doubt survive, because it seems to be a basic institution of humanity. But it may only come back after there is nothing much left of Western culture — after a war, a famine, an epidemic, or some other such thing that generally causes people to abandon their bizarre fixations and go back to what really matters. I hope this won’t happen, but I wouldn’t bet on it.
September 27th, 2012 | 3:40 pm
So you agree with me that marriage is dead, but because this death does not represent the moral entelechy on the matter, it will not stay that way. (“Entelechy,” by the way, is a Greg word; he dropped it on me today and I had to ask him what it meant.)
Over the years of friendship with Greg, I have found myself repeating a certain statement with great regularity, viz., “Greg Forster is quite right.” If Greg disagrees with me, I assume I must have gotten something wrong, an assumption I grant only a very few (that small set includes C.S. Lewis and Justice Antonin Scalia, so he’s in good company).
However (and you knew that was coming), I don’t think there is adequate evidence of a returning preference for restrictive divorce laws or sexual continence. Greg sees promise in a social scientist acknowledging the adverse effect of divorce on children, and the terrible economic impact divorce visits on women. But these are firefly flashes in the dark of night. They are noteworthy because they contrast so brilliantly with their backdrop.
So there are a few more people who see the problem with the death of marriage. But even if we were to one day achieve universal understanding of the ill-effects of liberalized divorce and promiscuity, that will not necessarily change anything. It creates the condition in which change can occur. But people may very well look at the data they have and decide that restrictive divorce laws are a price to high to pay to alleviate the damage they acknowledge it would ameliorate.
I hasten to add that I do not discount the importance of what Greg identified. If marriage is ever to return, this is exactly the sort of thing that must occur. So, is it possible we are witnessing fractures in the dam? Yes, but this might also be a species of dead-cat bounce in which we see a feeble hurrah for that which was but is no more.
One final point, by the bye. It is true that I discount the pedagogical effect of the law. In a democracy, law is a trailing indicator of the cultural condition. Liberalized divorce laws followed the cultural conclusion that this was a preferable arrangement. Since then, of course, it has served a normalizing function. But so did restrictive divorce law before it fell by the wayside.
All that is to say that pursuing a legal fix is at once an unlikely solution and an ineffective one. If we decide, as a society, to breath life back into marriage, the law will follow. But if we try use the law as a cortical stimulant, we’ll not only fail to resuscitate the patient, we’ll strengthen the resolve of those who wish it to stay dead.
September 27th, 2012 | 7:01 pm
I think that anti-liberalized divorce arguments have been able to get away without having to grapple with some contrary matters because of the broad consensus in favor of liberalized divorce.
Be careful. If you actually start to move things, then and only then you’re going to have to be ready to dig a lot deeper and have to confront messier things like whether undoing liberalized divorce laws may lead to marked increases in marital violence and murder. Just for example.
In other words, work *very* hard to identify all the undersides to your position. Be sure to inventory and then attack all your own cognitive blindspots first. (The place to start is “What I am ignoring/discounting or likely to ignore/ discount?”)
September 27th, 2012 | 7:37 pm
Anyone who thinks they can de-liberalize divorce laws will find out what being totally crushed is like. The support for the divorce laws as they are is not merely deep, it is in the cultural DNA.
September 27th, 2012 | 8:29 pm
[...] replies to my reply with a challenge: So, Greg, is it your *hope* that the signs of movement represent an interest in [...]
September 27th, 2012 | 9:56 pm
My first thought was Mark Twain’s famous quote responding to reports of his demise. “The report of my death was an exaggeration. My marriage sure isn’t dead and neither are those of our five children who are all happy and open to life. Marriages in my parish are thriving. To say that marriages are dead because many no longer value them is like saying Christianity is dead because so many are heretics and apostates. As long as there are people of integrity who keep there promises to God and each other, marriage will not be dead. It will be one more witness to the world that “knows they are Christian because of the way they love one another.”
September 28th, 2012 | 12:56 am
As a society we need to wake up and realize that it should not be easier to abandon vows before God and man- to love and live together, forsaking all others untill death do we part”- , than it is to get out of that credit card debt.
BUt is is.
Mary Ann Kreitzer- remarked that marriages in her parish are thriving. well maybe that parish has clergy willing to preach the truth about marriage, support couples in distress, counsel those when they fall into dissolusionment as many marriages do at some point- and remind the spouse who wants to run out of their sacred vows and promises. Sadly many of us do not have parishes that offer that support. Sadly many of us once thought we had good committed spouses and one day woke up to find our spouses had chosen selfishly to abandon the marriage, tear apart the children, destroy finances.. meanwhile either the clergy actually supported them in this evil-, under the name of ‘being pastoral”, or they looked the other way.
Often the same clergy offer an almost guarantee of annulment as “consolation.”
Pray you and your 5 children do not suffer .
I never imagined I would either.
Yet here I am. and the church is ( mostly) silent.
September 28th, 2012 | 8:24 am
Bankruptcy.
September 28th, 2012 | 9:26 am
Great! All we need is a marriage equivalent of bankruptcy – the judge takes control of your entire procreative life and rearranges it for the benefit of those to whom you were formerly obligated, and it goes on your permanent “procreative responsibility report” so all future potential spouses will know you’re not to be trusted – and the two would be equivalent.
September 28th, 2012 | 9:35 am
[...] Continue… 0 [...]
September 28th, 2012 | 12:07 pm
Greg Foster –
Hmm. Amend that to “entire procreative life up to that point” and you’re pretty much describing divorce and custody and child support now.
And “permanent ‘procreative responsibility report’”? Credit reports only list bankruptcies for 7 to 10 years based on type. So ‘permanent’ is a bit much for ‘equivalence’, if you’re going all hypothetical.
Potential spouses tend to find out about previous relationships as it is, anyway. (Not universally, I’ll grant, of course – even bigamy still happens. But then, creditors can still lend money to people who’ve declared bankruptcy, if they choose.)
September 28th, 2012 | 3:28 pm
[...] http://www.firstthings.com/blogs/firstthoughts/2012/09/27/marriage-is-not-dead/ My take: If marriage really were dead, people would not respond so powerfully to the idea that marriage matters because children need their mom and dad. Despair is the most potent spiritual weapon the Enemy has against us. If you despair, I respect that, but why try to get others who have hope to despair? Do the things for which you have hope. But you may be wrong about the future. Do not discourage others who have hope from acting on it. My other reaction: Our “traditional” view of marriage was one by the Church over several hundred years of argument with Pagan philosophers. What we did once, we can do again. [...]
October 1st, 2012 | 1:01 pm
While liberalized divorce laws preceded the efforts at radical redefinition of marriage, they are not the cause of yet another problem, but a symptom of a greater problem, so I must disagree with both the author and Ms. Gallagher.
Both issues have a single etiology-the state’s control over and interference with the institution of marriage. As such, we must seek the authors of the idea that the state was the proper trustee or conservator of marriage. Otherwise, as long as the state controls marriage,it will never be restored as a durable and clearly defined arrangement, because there is nothing in the history of government to suggest it that it will ever become a model of restraint, respect or constancy.
Clearly, the idea of state regulation of marriage originated with two old adversaries, Henry the Eighth and Martin Luther. Both, for different reasons asserted state primacy over marriage. Henry wanted a divorce, even though he never apparently thought much of the restraints of marriage, seeking the divorce to pacify an object of adultery, and then became the father of temporary marrriage, taking and disposing of wives at whim, and subjugating church to state generally. Luther imprudently redefined marriage as subject to state regulation in one of a myriad of theological novelties.
Now, some five centuries later, we see the accelerated unravelling of marriage in ways neither of hese men could imagine. Marriage is often foregone, easily dissolved and devoid of meaning because of the assertions of these men that it was a simple contract, with numerous clauses justifying it’s dissolution.
Unfortunately, to examine this requires asking a great many people, content with or dedicated to the rest of of the doctrines of these men to consider them as wrong-headed on such fundamental matter as to subject the entirety of their aassertions to critical inquiry.
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