Some of the most common lines of reasoning have been outlined and responded to, and so I don't want to rehash those here. What I do want to do is use a few statistics, a recent news article and a recent op-ed in the NY Times for some thought-provocation.
I really do understand a lot of social conservatives' fears about gay marriage. I don't feel it, myself, and I have something that they seem to lack (a sense of unmitigated compassion, desire for complete equality and justice...) -- a healthy anti-religious bias. That is, I am biased against arguments merely based upon the presumption of divine revelation, and I require more: arguments from law, humanistic morality and pure reason (sans "God said...").
A lot of conservatives look at what they call the "moral decay" of our society, and they think that marriage is a sort of "last bastion" into which they can retreat and fend off the growing secularization of the country and weakening religious influence ... geez, I have to stop and uncross my eyes even as I write that. Anyway, these sorts of people really see our country in that way -- that there is a violent culture war and marriage is a last stronghold to defend against its enemies. Of course, since these "enemies" are a part of culture itself, then this view has to hold that those persons are destroying their own society. If these people really believe this, then I understand them, and can even sympathize, to a degree. Because then they have a good point about one thing: if indeed marriage slides into oblivion (as it may already be doing), then our society will be irreversibly changed. Most people would think this change would be for the worse -- fewer children born, fewer stable homes and households to raise them in. The real problem is the non sequitur between (1) gay marriage and, (2) the downfall of/attack upon/decline of marriage in culture.
First, without overstating the obvious, gay marriage is another type of marriage. It therefore cannot logically be a reduction in the number of married people, but it must represent an increase in the number of married people. Ergo, the burden on the shoulders of anti-gay opponents is to show how "marriage suffers" [sneer quotes due to the reification fallacy, and anthropomorphic nature of such sentiments]. The op-ed below points out that marriage has been trending down for a very long time in our country, without a legal union between same sex couples.
Why is that?
There are conservatives with concerns about this, and who realize you can't blame gays for the major issues facing the family. After reading an atheist conservative refer to the high percentage of out-of-wedlock births among African-Americans and Hispanic-Americans, it somewhat reawakened me to the reality that there are some people who are nonreligious that are fretting over marriage -- and that they may have reasonable cause (versus those armed with only religious fear). Her stats were simple, bleak, and to the point: 70% of black babies, and 46% of latino babies, are born to unwed parents in America today. I confirmed her stats, and in fact, they are a little low by the last major census look. Her argument is that poverty is strongly correlated to teenage and unwed births [although not always]. This is logical and straightforward -- kids require financial support, and thus going to college and getting a good job become less feasible for teens and for single parents. This is indeed a worrisome trend, because it would represent a serious impediment for this socioeconomic sector to overcome in order to move upwards on the financial ladder. The question I have is: what does gay marriage have to do with this? Is this not about the availability and encouragement of birth control and protected sex?
Another cultural factor to consider is the trend observed with birthrates divided along political lines, [joke: some might argue along IQ lines as well]. The argument here is that the more liberal our society becomes, the less babies they have. Therefore, conservative views are correlated to (whether they cause or not) higher birthrates. But the picture is complex, as illustrated aptly in this '04 The American Conservative article, and modern young liberals may not reflect the same trend as their parents' generation. Consider that at Berkeley, typically agreed as one of the (if not the single) most liberal public campus in the USA, there is no major difference in family planning:
Asked to rate how important an array of different goals was to them personally, the biggest group of 2004 Berkeley freshmen chose "raising a family" as essential or very important, 70.9%. That's just a few percentage points less than the 2003 national average: 74.8% of all U.S. freshmen felt similarly about raising a family.It is thus easy to make hasty generalizations about what liberalization, or gay marriage, impact in terms of our culture. However, it seems that liberal, conservative, straight and gay all experience the same humanity, with its desire to engage in loving, committed relationships and raise children. If that part of the equation were focused on a bit more, perhaps we'd all bicker a bit less.
I would still like to see more empirical data to convince me that the trends of marrying later in life and having fewer children are in any way impacted by gay marriage. I simply don't buy the rhetoric, and think the logic is bogus. Our culture has been trending this way for a long time, without legal gay marriages. The op-ed below examines this trend, and offers some advice for opponents of gay marriage.
November 7, 2006I think this lack of social networking may be a problem in some geographies and some socioeconomic classes. One would think, though, that is this were some panacea for marriage, that churchgoers would be significantly less likely to divorce, since much social networking occurs at church. But, Barna has shown this not to be the case.
Too Close for Comfort
By STEPHANIE COONTZ
Olympia, Wash.
EVER since the Census Bureau released figures last month showing that married-couple households are now a minority, my phone has been ringing off the hook with calls from people asking: “How can we save marriage? How can we make Americans understand that marriage is the most significant emotional connection they will ever make, the one place to find social support and personal fulfillment?”
I think these are the wrong questions — indeed, such questions would have been almost unimaginable through most of history. It has only been in the last century that Americans have put all their emotional eggs in the basket of coupled love. Because of this change, many of us have found joys in marriage our great-great-grandparents never did. But we have also neglected our other relationships, placing too many burdens on a fragile institution and making social life poorer in the process.
A study released this year showed just how dependent we’ve become on marriage. Three sociologists at the University of Arizona and Duke University found that from 1985 to 2004 Americans reported a marked decline in the number of people with whom they discussed meaningful matters. People reported fewer close relationships with co-workers, extended family members, neighbors and friends. The only close relationship where more people said they discussed important matters in 2004 than in 1985 was marriage.
In fact, the number of people who depended totally on a spouse for important conversations, with no other person to turn to, almost doubled, to 9.4 percent from 5 percent. Not surprisingly, the number of people saying they didn’t have anyone in whom they confided nearly tripled.
The solution to this isolation is not to ramp up our emotional dependence on marriage. Until 100 years ago, most societies agreed that it was dangerously antisocial, even pathologically self-absorbed, to elevate marital affection and nuclear-family ties above commitments to neighbors, extended kin, civic duty and religion.
St. Paul complained that married men were more concerned with pleasing their wives than pleasing God. In John Adams’s view, a “passion for the public good” was “superior to all private passions.” In both England and America, moralists bewailed “excessive” married love, which encouraged “men and women to be always taken up with each other.”
From medieval days until the early 19th century, diaries and letters more often used the word love to refer to neighbors, cousins and fellow church members than to spouses. When honeymoons first gained favor in the 19th century, couples often took along relatives or friends for company. Victorian novels and diaries were as passionate about brother-sister relationships and same-sex friendships as about marital ties.
The Victorian refusal to acknowledge strong sexual desires among respectable men and women gave people a wider outlet for intense emotions, including physical touch, than we see today. Men wrote matter-of-factly about retiring to bed with a male roommate, “and in each other’s arms did friendship sink peacefully to sleep.” Upright Victorian matrons thought nothing of kicking their husbands out of bed when a female friend came to visit. They spent the night kissing, hugging and pouring out their innermost thoughts.
By the early 20th century, though, the sea change in the culture wrought by the industrial economy had loosened social obligations to neighbors and kin, giving rise to the idea that individuals could meet their deepest needs only through romantic love, culminating in marriage. Under the influence of Freudianism, society began to view intense same-sex ties with suspicion and people were urged to reject the emotional claims of friends and relatives who might compete with a spouse for time and affection.
The insistence that marriage and parenthood could satisfy all an individual’s needs reached a peak in the cult of “togetherness” among middle-class suburban Americans in the 1950s. Women were told that marriage and motherhood offered them complete fulfillment. Men were encouraged to let their wives take care of their social lives.
But many men and women found these prescriptions stifling. Women who entered the work force in the 1960s joyfully rediscovered social contacts and friendships outside the home.
“It was so stimulating to have real conversations with other people,” a woman who lived through this period told me, “to go out after work with friends from the office or to have people over other than my husband’s boss or our parents.”
And women’s lead in overturning the cult of 1950s marriage inspired many men to rediscover what earlier generations of men had taken for granted — that men need deep emotional connections with other men, not just their wives. Researchers soon found that men and women with confidants beyond the nuclear family were mentally and physically healthier than people who relied on just one other individual for emotional intimacy and support.
So why do we seem to be slipping back in this regard? It is not because most people have voluntarily embraced nuclear-family isolation. Indeed, the spread of “virtual” communities on the Internet speaks to a deep hunger to reach out to others.
Instead, it’s the expansion of the post-industrial economy that seems to be driving us back to a new dependence on marriage. According to the researchers Kathleen Gerson and Jerry Jacobs, 60 percent of American married couples have both partners in the work force, up from 36 percent in 1970, and the average two-earner couple now works 82 hours a week.
This is probably why the time Americans spend socializing with others off the job has declined by almost 25 percent since 1965. Their free hours are spent with spouses, and as a study by Suzanne Bianchi of the University of Maryland released last month showed, with their children — mothers and fathers today spend even more time with their youngsters than parents did 40 years ago.
As Americans lose the wider face-to-face ties that build social trust, they become more dependent on romantic relationships for intimacy and deep communication, and more vulnerable to isolation if a relationship breaks down. In some cases we even cause the breakdown by loading the relationship with too many expectations. Marriage is generally based on more equality and deeper friendship than in the past, but even so, it is hard for it to compensate for the way that work has devoured time once spent cultivating friendships.
The solution is not to revive the failed marital experiment of the 1950s, as so many commentators noting the decline in married-couple households seem to want. Nor is it to lower our expectations that we’ll find fulfillment and friendship in marriage.
Instead, we should raise our expectations for, and commitment to, other relationships, especially since so many people now live so much of their lives outside marriage. Paradoxically, we can strengthen our marriages the most by not expecting them to be our sole refuge from the pressures of the modern work force. Instead we need to restructure both work and social life so we can reach out and build ties with others, including people who are single or divorced. That indeed would be a return to marital tradition — not the 1950s model, but the pre-20th-century model that has a much more enduring pedigree.
Stephanie Coontz, a history professor at Evergreen State College, is the author of “Marriage, a History: How Love Conquered Marriage.”
Although there are some studies which purport to show some protective effect for couples who spend time together praying and attending church regularly, I have argued before in the comments of this post at DC that this confuses the symptom with the disease. The study used to support this notion doesn't take into account all couples, church-attendees or not, who spend some regularly-scheduled and disciplined time together, and engage in activities together due to common interests. One can certainly argue that this latter rationale explains the apparent "protective effect" -- for any faith group, and for even non-faith groups. That is, the fact that you are spending regular time together, and participating in regular activities together -- whether religious in nature or playing golf together -- is a sign of a healthy relationship, and not the cause thereof.
In the end, it may be that the landscape of marriage is forever and irreversibly changed. The forces behind this change may include the empowerment of women and economic pressures disallowing single-parent working homes. A simple solution, and blaming a single factor (like gay marriage), only exposes the naïveté of the one proposing it. The real solution to the decline of marriage may be solved via natural selection -- those who value marriage and childrearing will simply outnumber those who do not bear children, eventually, and values tend to propagate downward through family generations.
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