“The President’s Marriage Agenda for the Forgotten Sixty Percent,”
despite the impression its title might give, was released Sunday not
by the Obama administration but by the Institute for American Values
and the National Marriage Project at the University of Virginia. It is a
timely, compelling, and important report, but it falls short in a
basic way: it never once even attempts to say what marriage is. But you
cannot advance a marriage agenda without knowing what marriage is and
why it matters for public policy, as my co-authors and I argue in our
new book, What Is Marriage?
The leadership of the Institute for American Values, after embracing the redefinition of marriage in a high-profile change of heart earlier this year, hopes this report launches “a new conversation on marriage.”
The authors urge political leaders to encourage “community-based and
focused public service announcements that convey the truth about
marriage, stability and child wellbeing to the next generation of
parents.”
Well, what is the truth about marriage?
The report rightly notes that
“marriage is not merely a private arrangement; it is also a complex
social institution.” But the report never says what this complex
institution is, or why it ought to be governed by the standard marital
norms of monogamy, sexual exclusivity, and a pledge of permanence—norms
that many leading defenders of redefining marriage explicitly reject.
Yet without these norms—and the intelligible basis that grounds
them—marriage can’t do the work that the authors want it to do.
That is important work indeed,
as the report explains. It helpfully documents the retreat from
marriage afflicting today’s middle class and how fixing this “is the
social challenge for our times.” While in the 1980s “only 13 percent
of the children of moderately educated mothers were born outside of
marriage,” today that figure has “risen to a whopping 44 percent.”
Indeed, the majority of births to women under thirty “now occur outside
of marriage.”
Although some have tried to
characterize the disappearance of marriage as a problem facing only
lower-class America or the black community, the report notes that
“family instability can now be found in Middle America almost as
frequently as it is among the least educated sector of the population.”
And the disappearance of marriage has social costs, especially
increased poverty and decreased social mobility, as “researchers are
now finding that the disappearance of marriage in Middle America is
tracking with the disappearance of the middle class in the same
communities. . . . This decline of marriage in Middle America imperils
the middle class and fosters a society of winners and losers.”
As a result, more children grow
up without the care and support of their mother and father—and it’s
costing everyone: “The loss of social opportunity for these children
and their families, and the national cost to taxpayers when stable
families fail to form—about $112 billion annually, or more than $1
trillion per decade, by one cautious estimate—are significant.” As the report notes,
economist Ben Scafidi and his team of researchers found that “if
family fragmentation were reduced by just 1 percent, U.S. taxpayers
would save an estimated $1.1 billion annually.”
The authors of the report don’t
suggest giving up on policy, writing that “it is only with respect to
marriage formation that the policy world seems to have decided that
very little or nothing can be done.” This isn’t true, as my colleagues
at the Heritage Foundation and others have promoted policies to strengthen marriage for quite some time, most recently Robert Rector’s special report, “Marriage: America’s Greatest Weapon Against Child Poverty.”
The various policy proposals in
“The President’s Marriage Agenda” deserve more sustained attention and
consideration than I can take here. But a few comments are in order.
The authors encourage President Obama to embrace his position as “a
cultural leader who can inspire citizens, especially young people,”
because “if we are to strengthen marriage and families in America,
ultimately this will happen because young people want to bond with one
another and give their children the gift of their father and mother in a
lasting marriage.” But how can President Obama stress the importance
of fathers and mothers while supporting the redefinition of marriage to
exclude sexual complementarity?
The report’s fourth
recommendation, “End Anonymous Fatherhood,” notes that “the anonymous
man who provided his sperm walks away with no obligation.” Although a
relatively small percentage of parents “use sperm donation or similar
technologies to get pregnant, the cultural power of the idea that it’s
acceptable deliberately to create a fatherless child and for biological
fathers to walk away from their children is real.”
The authors propose that the
United States ban anonymity in sperm donation “and reinforce the
consistent message that fathers matter.” But how does marriage policy
reinforce that message if it redefines marriage to say that mothers and
fathers—one of each—are optional for marriage? How does redefining
marriage to include lesbian relationships not further incentivize the
type of anonymous sperm donation and resulting fatherless children that
the authors protest?
Regardless of your stance on
redefining marriage, the report argues, you can “talk about gay
marriage—and then talk about why marriage is important for the vast
majority of people who identify as heterosexual and whose sexual lives
quite often produce children.” But is this really true?
After all, it isn’t just the
legal title of marriage that encourages adherence to marital norms.
There is nothing magical about the word “marriage.” Instead, marriage
laws work by embodying and promoting a true vision of what marriage is
that makes sense of those norms as a coherent whole.
Redefining marriage would
abandon the norm of male-female sexual complementarity as an essential
characteristic of marriage. Making that optional would also make other
essential characteristics—such as monogamy, exclusivity, and
permanence—optional, as my co-authors and I argue in What Is Marriage? Man and Woman: A Defense.
We show how this is increasingly confirmed by the rhetoric and
arguments of those who would redefine marriage, and by the policies that
their more candid leaders embrace.
I should note that I presented some of this evidence in this post last week at Ricochet,
quoting LGBT leaders Andrew Sullivan, Dan Savage, Victoria Brownworth,
Michelangelo Signorile, New York University Professor Judith Stacey,
and University of Calgary Professor Elizabeth Brake, as they explicitly
rejected traditional norms of marriage.
Indeed, the most interesting—and revealing—comments during my week at Ricochet were
from those who said marriage is simply whatever sort of interpersonal
relationship consenting adults—be they two or ten in number—want it to
be: sexual or platonic, sexually exclusive or open, temporary or
permanent.
That idea sounds like the
abolition of marriage. Marriage is left with no essential features, no
fixed core as a social reality—it is simply whatever consenting adults
want it to be. Some who see this logic, thinking that marriage has no
form and serves no social purpose, conclude that the government should
get out of the marriage business.
If so, how will society protect
the needs of children—the prime victims of our non-marital sexual
culture—without government growing more intrusive and more expensive?
Separating the bearing and
rearing of children from marriage burdens children first and foremost,
as well as the whole community. It’s the community that often must step
in to provide (more or less directly) for their wellbeing and
upbringing. A child born and raised outside marriage is six times more likely to experience poverty
than a child in an intact family—and therefore welfare expenditures
grow. So by encouraging the norms of marriage—monogamy, sexual
exclusivity, and permanence—the state strengthens civil society and
reduces its own role.
But marital norms make no
sense—as matters of principle—if marriage is redefined. There is no
reason of principle why emotional union should be permanent. Or limited
to two persons, rather than larger ensembles. Or sexual, much less
sexually exclusive. Or inherently oriented to family life and shaped by
its demands.
If marriage isn’t founded on a
comprehensive union made possible by the sexual complementarity of a
man and a woman, then why can’t it occur among more than two people? If
marital union isn’t founded on such sexual acts, then why ought it be
sexually exclusive? If marriage isn’t a comprehensive union and has no
intrinsic connection to children, then why ought it be permanent?
This isn’t to say that couples
couldn’t decide to live out these norms where temperament or taste so
motivated them, but that there is no reason of principle to demand it
of them. So legally enshrining this alternative view of marriage would
undermine the norms whose link to the common good justifies state
action in the first place.
This highlights the central questions in this debate: what marriage is and why the state recognizes it. It’s not that the state shouldn’t achieve its basic purpose while obscuring what marriage is. Rather, it can’t. Only when policy gets the nature of marriage right do we reap the civil society benefits of recognizing marriage.
The future of our country,
then, relies upon the future of marriage. The future of marriage
depends upon citizens’ understanding of what it is and why it
matters—and demanding that government policies support, not undermine,
true marriage. Unfortunately, “The President’s Marriage Agenda”
overlooks these questions. How successful can a “new conversation on
marriage” be when its leaders can’t even say what marriage is?
