“This hollowing out of marriage in mainstream America is among the most consequential social facts of our era,” declares A Call for a New Conversation on Marriage, just released by the Institute for American Values. “It’s contributing to the growth of inequality, harming countless children, and weakening, perhaps fatally, our formerly strong middle class. And amazingly, if you listen to political leaders of both parties and opinion leaders from both the left and right, you’ll discover that very few of them appear even to have noticed what’s happening.”
Making a point our editor has made several times, the Call notes that “marriage is rapidly dividing along class lines, splitting the country that it used to unite. While marriage is stable or strengthening among our college-educated elites, much larger numbers of Americans, particularly in middle and working-class America, are abandoning the institution entirely, with harmful social and personal consequences.”
The current conversation, it explains, focuses on the question of gay marriage, thinks of the problem as one of welfare and of the young, treats the problems of middle-class marriage as a therapeutic matter, and assumes that nothing can be done. The new conversation asks who (regardless of their position on gay marriage) wants to strengthen marriage, thinks of the problem as one of inequality and one affecting people of every age, treats marriage as a practical matter, in particular associating marriage and thrift, and insists that something can and must be done.
The 74 signatories include Jean Bethke Elshtain, this year’s Erasmus Lecturer, and Amy Wax, who recently wrote for us. Other signers are David Blankenhorn, who runs the IAV, gay-marriage activist Jonathan Rauch, popular Atlantic writer Caitlin Flanagan, the Catholic writer Peter Steinfels, marriage scholars Barbara Dafoe Whitehead, Kay Hymnowitz, and David Popenoe, and Commentary’s editor John Podhoretz.
Bravo, in general, I think. The signers offer a bolder and more substantial defense of marriage than one hears from many of its public advocates, who have often—and I fully understand the temptation—narrowed their interest to opposing gay marriage and limited their concern to the problems of the marginalized and not those of the affluent. It’s easier to complain about homosexual couples or poor men fathering children by several mothers than to confront the upper-middle-class friends divorcing and remarrying with insouciance.
Though the Call’s not completely bold: In its third point, for example, it asks questions rather than giving answers. It says: “If unwed child bearing is not good for teens”—it’s firm about that—“is it good for twenty-somethings? Thirty-somethings with good jobs? As the huge Baby Boom generation (the generation that led the divorce revolution) heads toward retirement and old age, does marriage matter for older and empty-nest Americans, and if so, why?” Not a ringing assertion of the importance of marriage for anyone but the young. I would have thought, given the Call’s overt commitments, it would have said something more definite, like “don’t divorce and remarry with insouciance.”
But still, bravo in general. Yet it’s not something I would sign. Much, admittedly, can be done by this kind of alliance, like pressing for laws making divorce more difficult, and this kind of effort has long been David Blankenhorn’s often lonely work. He is due much thanks.
But the result, and perhaps in some cases the intent, is to reduce or deflate opposition to the reinvention of marriage through the inclusion of same-sex couples, by the seductive call to do something more important and more effective. It’s not just a call to defend marriage, it’s a call to give up working for marriage as traditionally understood. More fundamentally, some of us believe that the effort to strengthen marriage while redefining it is ultimately pointless—that, to put it another way, gay marriage is itself one of the problems the Call ought to engage.
I’m all for pragmatic alliances, and dislike the partisan’s habit of rejecting anything not up to his standards, but this is an alliance I think more idealistic than pragmatic. Even while saying bravo.
January 29th, 2013 | 3:53 pm
“We ignore the unchanging nature of the axiomatic link between morality and equality at our own peril.”
Excerpt from KNIGHT ON A WHITE HORSE.
http://www.scribd.com/doc/17346242/Knight-on-a-White-Horse
January 29th, 2013 | 4:04 pm
This document will provide cover for those who want to appear pro-marriage but also support SSM.
I note this document does not really tell us what marriage is.
January 29th, 2013 | 4:56 pm
I went to a high school with ~250 births to 700 girls over the 4 years of high school. (Some girls had more than one baby, so you can’t calculate the motherhood rate from those numbers.)
What percentage of poor/working class men have jobs that realistically enable marriage and childbearing without government assistance (if that is the goal) even with a working wife?
I entered engineering so I could support myself without marrying, if needed.
Many poor/working class women will remain childless if they hold to standards described here. I was willing to do it, but not all women are.
What would happen to birth rates, I wonder?
January 29th, 2013 | 6:58 pm
But, this is not a new observation, nor a new sociological or demographic reality. However, with oddly different results in logic…Christianity created the sacrament of marriage and renewed tribal life by creating larger communities based on marriage and not concubinage. Same in pagan areas in all continents, not just Europe. Where the natural law was missing, the missionaries brought order and stability.
The Catholic Faith created Europe, with families, not concubinage, and the entire system of wealth and property benefited.
Too bad American and Western History have been taken out of required coursework for high
schools.
The decay of family life hits the poor, and uninvolved first, and then spreads upward into the ranks of the middle and upper classes. The gays want us to accept their lifestyle and do not care if civil marriage undermines the old, Christian bourgeoisie.
Sex is more important than the common good. Therefore, I disagree with the conclusion of the argument here.
January 30th, 2013 | 6:28 am
Kathleen Parker of The Washington Post approves:
January 30th, 2013 | 9:08 am
“The decay of family life hits the poor, and uninvolved first, and then spreads upward into the ranks of the middle and upper classes. The gays want us to accept their lifestyle and do not care if civil marriage undermines the old, Christian bourgeoisie.”
How?
(I note that you say “civil marriage”, not “same-sex marriage.” Does that mean that you’d prefer marriage to be an exclusively religious rite?)
January 30th, 2013 | 4:55 pm
[...] In many ways I was saddened by the responses of Rod Dreher at the American Conservative and David Mills over at First Things. [...]
January 30th, 2013 | 9:44 pm
Cool, I hope the new conversation will not exclude the issue of same-sex conception using lab-created “female sperm” or “male eggs.” I wonder if Blankenhorn still believes that would violate children’s rights?
And I think that reminding people that marriage approves and allows conception, and affirming that men are necessary to reproduce, would strengthen marriage and make it something people wanted to do and respect more.
January 31st, 2013 | 8:51 am
It’s great to see those with good will on both sides of this needlessly contentious debate try to listen to each other. Not only is it morally unseemly for some individuals, on each side of the “marriage” issue, try and demonize some on the other side, but it quite understandably thwarts any progress, in developing common ground. I support same sex marriages. I think that they will facilitate monogamy, and help decrease promiscuity. But I have no doubt that those who reject SSM’s are not “homophobic”, and clearly want the best for gay people and society. This must be the premise that we start with: that those on the “other side” are decent people, who have good reasons for believing the way they do.
February 1st, 2013 | 12:38 am
Perhaps I’ve missed something, but I did not understand participation in The Call to require surrendering any point of view or any advocacy. I understood that it merely looked for opportunities to strengthen marriage regardless of people’s views on same-sex marriage. It creates a forum to explore what can be done to strengthen marriage while the debate about same-sex marriage rages in other forums — but the Call does not imply the elimination of those other forums.
Mills seems to say that same-sex marriage is a necessary issue to be resolved in any discussion of marriage policy, and all other issues must inevitably be held hostage to that one. The fact that divorce rates have risen and fallen, that kids are increasingly born out of wedlock, that these problems correlate with social class, and that all of these dynamics preceded the adoption of same-sex marriage in the United States are all irrelevant, according to Mills. Unless and until we resolve the same-sex marriage issue, we are helpless to address any other issue.
If this is Mills’s view, he is right to dismiss participation in The Call. It just seems like an implausible view.
February 4th, 2013 | 2:35 am
The SSM side has held marriage as hostage, nobody.reaally. The SSM campaign has sucked all the air out of the room.
Support for SSM is not compatable with support for the preferential status of marriage. It is incompatable with strengthening marriage.
The pro-marriage side has been at work on these other issues that do impact marriage. The SSM side — not so much. SSM is symbolism and not the hard stuff of affirming a social institution in everyday terms. At every turn the SSM idea will be a roadblock — a deadend — for effectively strengthening marriage. Even Blankenhorn acknowledges that SSM is an effacement and that is is a conceptual mess.
If he gave up after just 3 years of participating in the SSM issue, why does he imagine that his two decades of pro-marriage advocacy will suddenly succeed where he has failed before?
I think he now underestimates the symbolism of SSM and its impact on the social institution. We’ll see, I suppose.
Links
Blogs
Find Us
Contact