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Saturday, November 29, 2003
George F. Will weighs in on the SSM debate, but manages to avoid declaring himself on either SSM or civil unions. He does come out against a Federal Marriage Amendment. Interestingly, his main thrust seems to be that excluding SS couples doesn't make much sense in light of the fact that the heteros, thank you, have made a fine mess of marriage in recent decades. I think that, of all the pro SSM arguments out there today, this one -- why worry, now that so much damage has already been done? -- is the one that pains me the most. I can see both sides. If I were gay and wanted to marry, I can imagine feeling just this way: If Elizabeth Taylor is good enough to get in, for goodness sakes, why not me? Why is the crummiest hetero free to marry -- think Donald Trump, for example -- but not the best, most loving homosexual? Where's the justice in that arrangement? If we are going to keep undesirables from marrying, why not start with ... people like Donald Trump? OK, I see that, and it's a strong point. But at the same time, for hetero marriage nuts, who are spending much of their professional lives bemoaning and working to reverse the trend of marital decline, is this idea of "in for a penny, in for a pound" really supposed to be persuasive? If we as individuals and as a society believe that the weakening of marriage is a bad thing, and that redefining marriage in this way might create new risks for the already embattled idea that a child needs a mother and a father, are we really supposed to swallow our concerns and throw in the towel because of today's high divorce rate? Andrew Sullivan writes today that "we do not wish to 'redefine' the institution. We simply want it to stop discriminating against a small minority of citizens." But of course, he does wish to redefine it. If today it is legally defined as a union of a man and a women, and tomorrow, if Sullivan's point of view prevails, it is legally defined as a union of two persons, then whatever else can be said, it is certainly true that we will have redefined the institution. This is what I find so irritating about Sullivan's style of arguing on this issue. It's all about debating, rebutting, and advocating, without balance and without fairness. MADE SIMPLE? For separated or divorced families, the holidays bring awkward exchanges of the children, says Webster Watnik, author of Child Custody Made Simple (Single Parent Press, $21.95, @ 2003). That's because when divorced parents live in different homes, they cannot have the children at the same time ... Watnik offers these suggestions to separated or divorced parents juggling children over the holidays. Divide the day ... a common custody arrangement ordered by family courts requires that the children are exchanged at noon on Christmas day ... Celebrate on a Different Day ... "December 25 is just a date on a calendar ... " Swap Years ... "The money will support a $1 million advertising campaign that started Tuesday with a $60,000 full-page ad in USA Today depicting a lesbian couple from Cheverly, Md., and their three children posing around a Monopoly game in progress. A marriage license, the headline reads, is 'Good for this family. Good for every family.'" Two more quick points on the McCallum essay cited below. The thesis that a child might need a mother and a father makes no appearance in the essay. McCallum does not stoop to rebut the concept; he simply refuses to acknowledge the existence of the concept, the possibility of the concept. Address that idea? McCallum writes as if it would make just as much sense, in this context, to launch into a discussion of Bulgarian architecture. Second, for McCallum, a "parent" is defined as an adult in the home who cares for the child. That's it. I'm increasingly coming to suspect that, as one consequence of the current debate, perhaps regardless of how it turns out as a policy matter, we are likely to witness the complete transmogrification of the word "parent," such that, for those of us who understand the word to bear some connection to kinship and marrriage, the word will simply no longer be available. For our purposes, it won't exist anymore, and we will likely have to come up with a new word to signify what we mean. ONCE THEY'VE SEEN GAY PAREE: Maybe we should spend less time debating who should be allowed to form a union, and more time talking about how to help all couples form, maintain, renegotiate and -- when necessary -- end their relationships.This is an amazing article. In it we learn that SS couples appear to be better parents, and in general it seems better people, than hetero couples. Thus, while getting married may offer some needed protections to some SS couples with children, getting married may also worsen things by pressuring these couples to behave rigidly, narrowly, and jealously -- like heteros -- and may also present new problems and "hassles" regarding the termination of relationships. What's the answer? You have to infer a bit between the lines -- the article would be stronger if the author were less coy and more direct -- but basically this guy is advocating the replacement of a marriage regime with a close relationships regime. It's funny. When people say, what's the big deal? where's the threat? ... we don't want to junk or invert the institution, we just want to open it up to more people ... I find myself being very sympathetic. But then along come people like this guy, who, irrespective of whatever he is saying about SSM, clearly dislikes and distrusts the institution of marriage and ultimately, he is strongly suggesting, would like to get rid of it altogether. In other words, like Nancy Polikoff and I think also in some ways like Katha Pollitt, he is using the SSM controversy to have it both ways: he is "for" marriage in that he is pro-SSM, but at the same time the real prize for him clearly seems to be a post-marriage society, in which we will have replaced marriage as a social institution with new norms, laws, and policies regarding intimate relationships. It's enough to make a marriage nut want to scream. As a purely intellectual matter, there is also no small amount of dishonesty in this way of arguing. So the next time you hear people like Andrew Sullivan and others make "the conservative case for gay marriage," insisting that the only issue on the table is whether to give more people access to the institution, give this argument its due, but remember also that some people -- and they are numerous and influential enough to matter -- are patently using the case for gay marriage to advance a case against marriage. P.S. It's too good to be true that this guy, Larry McCallum, is a senior fellow at the Council on Contemporary Families. Alan Cooperman of the WaPo has a piece on the divisions in the pro-Federal Marriage Amendement camp. Some want only to prohibit SSM; others (mostly evangelical religious groups) want the ban to include civil unions as well. Friday, November 28, 2003
From Foreign Policy: "No, what really threatens Japan�s future is the country�s shrinking population and, more fundamentally, the astonishing disconnect between Japanese men and women that underlies it." (Thanks to Kay Hymowitz.) FROM GERMANY: A rather unique same-sex marriage situation: A Thai man who masqueraded as a woman to wed a German man has failed to get the marriage annulled, and now seems saddled with his husband. A German court dismissed the Thai's request for an annulment because same-sex marriages are not recognized in Germany, and therefore cannot be reversed. Adele Horin can't figure out why, apart from wanting to have a big party, anyone gets married anymore. From a reader's standpoint, I think it's less than promising when columnists write columns saying that they don't have a clue as to why lots of people are doing something. I listened to Tom debate two fathers rights leaders on the radio the other night -- you can listen to it here -- and I thought he made good points. If you want to get a sense of what happens when you try to talk to these guys, check on this charming comment. Here is Tom's letter to the editor. I can't let go yet of Katha Pollitt's argument, which has become a staple of the SSM debate: Since some married people do not have children, it is illegitimate to say that procreation is a central goal of marriage (what married people do) or a central good of marriage (why society supports marriage). Let's say that the editors of The Nation commissioned an article on churches in the United States. What are these things called churches? What do people do there? Why do we have them in the first place? And why are they exempt from paying taxes? (Actually, one could imagine The Nation commissioning just such an article!) Perhaps the journalist would do her research carefully and write an article saying: A central goal and good of churches is to help people know and love God. But wait a minute! Is it true that every single person who goes to church on any given Sunday does so only in order to know and love God? Of course not. In real-life individual cases, motives are usually multiple and mixed; life is complicated; all sorts of things happen. Some people go to church to meet people. Some people go just because that's what everyone else is doing. A guy in Virginia once told me, "We have a pretty nice little town here, even the atheists go to church." But does this rather obvious fact -- after all, this is a huge, multi-faceted institution that involves millions of people under millions of separate roofs -- mean that the journalist is wrong when she suggests that, pretty much at the heart of this church business is something about communicating with God? Of course not. If you took that part of out of the equation, we probably would not have churches at all. When all is said and done, we care about churches and support them as a society in large measure because we favor this idea of people's search for the divine. Of course, some people dislike the whole institution and wish that it would either go away or turn itself inside out. Maybe Katha Pollitt is one of them. (What do you think the odd are?) And perhaps, if this article on "Churches: Why They Exist," were to appear in The Nation, she would pen an indignant reply, seeking to rule the whole argument invalid and out of bounds by pointing out that -- haven't you heard the news? -- there's a little town in Virginia where atheists go to church! GROAN: David has already blogged about this bogus AP story on "a growing legion" of older adults getting divorced. But now the story is one of the "most e-mailed" articles at Yahoo News. Ugh. Jeffrey Zaslow, what have you done? There is one bit of comic relief, however. The article states, "No firm statistics are available, but experts say there is no doubt that breakups among couples married upward of 25 years are becoming more common...." Now what kind of expert would say there is "no doubt" even as there are no reliable statistics? Why, it's none other than (drum roll please)......Constance Ahrons! MARRIAGE MOVEMENT: The Christian Science Monitor has a piece on the marriage movement. It's pretty well done. Wednesday, November 26, 2003
From Stuart Taylor Jr.: "Gay Marriage Isn't an Issue for the Courts to Decide. It's a stretch to claim that state marriage laws flout fundamental human rights" In The Nation, Katha Pollitt asks: Will someone please explain to me how permitting gays and lesbians to marry threatens the institution of marriage? Now that the Massachusetts Supreme Court has declared gay marriage a constitutional right, opponents really have to get their arguments in line. The most popular theory, advanced by David Blankenhorn, Jean Bethke Elshtain and other social conservatives is that under the tulle and orange blossom, marriage is all about procreation ... As many have pointed out, the law permits marriage to the infertile, the elderly, the impotent and those with no wish to procreate; it allows married couples to use birth control, to get sterilized, to be celibate. There's something creepily authoritarian and insulting about reducing marriage to procreation ...Glad you asked that, Katha. Marriage is not "all" about procreation. Marriage is a multi-faceted institution, with a number of important goods and purposes, but marriage has always been deeply, significantly, and even, I think it's fair to say, centrally about bearing and raising children. Don't take my word for it, or Jean's either (we're just "social conservatives," after all). Instead, go to your library. Start your reading with the very first people who began writing marriage laws, in the Nile and Tigris-Euphrates river valleys about 5,000 years ago, stroll through your Greeks and Romans, wander through each of the Abrahamic religions, and then plough through all the legal and social commentaries on marriage, including what all judges and legal theorists in Britain, the European continent and North America have said about why there is a compelling state interest in marriage in the first place, and you will readily see that, for all of these people, almost entirely without exception, whenever they come to the question of "Marriage: Why It Exists", among the very first words that come tripping off their tongues are words about child bearing and child rearing. The fact that some married couples cannot or choose not to have children is interesting, but, from a social standpoint, not particularly relevant. A (fairly small) minority of childless couples does not change the fact that, if human beings did not reproduce almost entirely through mechanism of heterosexual intercourse, we in all likelihood would never have invented marriage in the first place. The issue is not whether every single person who gets married has children; the issue is why we have the institution at all, why we care about it so much. Which brings us to another of Pollitt's observations: Speaking just for myself, I don't like marriage. I prefer the old-fashioned ideal of monogamous free love, not that it worked out particularly well in my case. As a social mechanism, moreover, marriage seems to me a deeply unfair way of distributing social goods like health insurance and retirement checks, things everyone needs.I see. I was on an NPR call-in show last week, and a woman called in to say that she was the unmarried, really great mother of a really great ten year old daughter; and that she thought that marriage was a terrible institution;and that her daughter had not one but two really great fathers -- two gay men who loved her, and loved one another, deeply; and that these two men didn't think much of marriage either, and probably wouldn't get married even if they could; but that it's rotten in her view that they can't, if they ever decided they wanted to. I understand. On another subject, I have very deeply held opinions about The Nation, and strongly believe that the editors should adopt my views about redefining the mission of the magazine and re-organizing the staff, editorial priorities, and list of contributors. I also dislike the magazine, can't identify with it at all, and wouldn't be caught dead reading it. I insist that the editors contact me immediately, so that negotiations can begin. Andrew Sullivan today argues that gay marriages would be better and more stable than hetero marriages, since gays are not hung up about the issue of pre-marital sex. From the AP: "Breakups of Long Marriages More Common." Grab your wallet, here they go again: Harkleroad, 60, is one of a growing legion of Americans confronting the trauma, challenges and opportunities of divorce after a marriage of long duration finally falls apart. No firm statistics are available, but experts say there is no doubt that breakups among couples married upward of 25 years are becoming more common ...Reminder: As we've pointed out lots of times, it's a completely bogus story! That "no firm statistics are available" is a nice touch, isn't it? And unfortunately this particular re-cycling of this piece of sillliness comes from the A.P. -- it's now running in hundreds of papers all over the country and around the world (sigh ... ). If this continues, lots of ordinary older people, whose only crime is reading a newspaper, will actually start believing that "a growing legion" among them are getting divorced. "FUNNY" ANTI-MARRIAGE GEAR: At CafePress.com, there's a section of "anti-marriage" t-shirts. Be blown away by their incisive wit! But it also appears that our friends at the Alternatives to Marriage Project have some items of their own. Now, AtMP always takes pains to note that they aren't "anti-marriage," but here are the "funny" slogans they have on t-shirts, mugs, and bumper stickers: "Don't Marry, Be Happy!"Oh my gosh, they are so funny and rebellious. Take that, bourgeois conformity! But seriously folks...one interesting slogan of theirs is "Love =/= Marriage" (Love does not equal marriage). But isn't that what a lot of pro-marriage advocates have been trying to explain? Now that's kind of funny. Today's column by Maggie Gallagher, on the unpredictable political and ideological terrain of the SSM debate, featuring, well, me. BLACK OPINIONS ON SAME-SEX MARRIAGE: Given widespread black opposition to same-sex marriage, I've also wondered how blacks tend to regard use of the interracial marriage analogy in the ssm debates (even though, as it is, interracial marriage is often a controversial topic in the black community). It's plausible that, as Elizabeth suggests, opposition to same-sex marriage stem from concerns about father absence. But I'd say it's equally plausible, and perhaps even more likely, that most opposition stems from broader anti-gay attitudes (see, e.g., here and here). And here is a fascinating NY Times Magazine article (printable pdf here) on the "down low" subculture of black men who have sex with men but don't consider themselves to be "gay." ABUSE, BOYS, AND FATHERLESSNESS: I�ve been thinking a lot this morning about the ten year old boy in Cambridge, the son of a lesbian couple, whose mother says he fears getting beaten up in school if others learn his parents are lesbians. There is definitely anti-gay hate, and gay men, or those thought to be gay, and probably also the sons of gays and lesbians, are at even higher risk for being beaten up than lesbian women and girls. I�ve known men it happened to. The cult of masculinity is severely enforced by certain boys and men who are caught up in hyper-masculinity themselves. But I wonder too how fatherlessness contributes to children�s vulnerability even when sexual orientation isn�t an issue. When my brother and I were growing up, there was no stigma attached to not having our (different) fathers in our home. On the contrary, all the grownups around us took pains to insist it was fine, and the kids didn�t much seem to care. But as my brother was coming through the younger grades he began experiencing routine threats of violence and fights with other boys. It began with them picking on him, but eventually my brother got pretty strong and he started fighting back. He fought all the way through high school. My brother and I weren�t dealing with a stigma. We were just living the effects of not having our dads at home. I doubt many of our peers really thought, �their father doesn�t live with them, so I don�t like them.� But I think it affected how we carried ourselves. We were shyer about approaching groups, self-conscious, slow to trust but also dying to trust. For me, these effects meant difficulty making friends. For my brother, it meant that he looked vulnerable, and bullies can spot a vulnerable boy a mile away. Eliminating the stigma for gays and lesbians, and their children, will certainly help to reduce the amount of violence directed at them. But there�s a lot more going on in addition to stigma. A child, especially a boy, who lacks the father he needs will, I fear, always be a target. INTERRACIAL MARRIAGE AND GAY MARRIAGE: Advocates for gay marriage love to compare it to interracial marriage, saying that this is another important civil rights issue, one that should be imposed by judges even if the electorate opposes it because history shows that the majority doesn't always do what is right. Gay marriage *is* a civil rights issue, but it's a heck of a complicated one. Interracial marriage secured for children their mother and father; gay marriage automatically denies children either their mother or father. Justice demands recognition of this loss for children. Here's my question to SSM advocates and to African-American readers who oppose or favor SSM. Respond and I'll post your answers on the blog. If we agree that gay marriage and interracial marriage are both civil rights issues, what explains the fact that far greater numbers of African-Americans oppose it compared to the general population? News articles mention this fact and then dance over it. Often religion is mentioned as if Black religion is the culprit. How about this? Could it be the fact that a community that has been dealing for decades with widespread fatherlessness has legitimate qualms about family forms that deny a father or a mother to children? Could it be that Black leaders and others who have seen the downsides of "family diversity" have a perspective that's worth including? WHEN IT COMES TO GAY MARRIAGE, ONLY GAY AMBIVELENCE COUNTS: Also in today�s NYT (where the eds. have seen fit to run four SSM opeds/editorials, all pro) is a front page article acknowledging that, hmm, when it comes to getting the right to marry, a lot of same sex couples who�ve been together a long time are ambivalent. Marriage is unattractive for financial reasons, or because it smacks of patriarchy, or because you feel younger when you�re living an �alternative� lifestyle, or because� One Cambridge woman who has been with her partner for 18 years acknowledges she might get married because the couple�s 10 year old boy is afraid to tell people at school that his parents are lesbians, for fear of getting beaten up. This kind of story makes me weep. I feel very sorry for this kid, whose parents have chosen to live in a place with a high concentration of gays and lesbians, but who nevertheless fears for his safety in school. The sad fact is that if you send a boy to public school who is in any way �different,� his world too easily becomes a struggle between getting beaten up or beating someone up. But will the boy going to school and telling the bullies his moms are �married� change that? Maybe it will help boys like him twenty, thirty years from now, but not this poor kid. Also in the article, another quote to add to your �gays are better than straights� file. One gay activist says, "I don't think you're going to see gay people doing what some nongays do: meet, have a wild weekend together and run off to Vegas to get married�For those who do get married it will mean a whole lot." Last year I met a college student who, when Vermont passed civil unions, ran off to Vermont with his boyfriend, signed a civil union, and was now asking his sociology professor how he could get out of it (she laughed it off). Immaturity runs the gamut from gay to straight and everything in between. WHY DEBATE IT? In this morning's NYT, the fourth -- count em', fourth -- pro-SSM oped or editorial. The count for con? Zero. The count for questioning, mentions of conflicting needs of adults vs children, unintended legal ramifications, etc., of SSM? Zero. Number four this morning was a nice "Happy Holidays" just in time for Thanksgiving. Harvey Fierstein gleefully informs us that he'll be Mrs. Claus in tomorrow's Macy's parade (just what my child's Christmas was missing, a cross-dressing Mrs. Claus). In a spirit of light-hearted fun he makes the identical case that all the other NYT opeds have made, that SSM is already here and is here to stay. Since it's all a big humor piece anyone who might take it seriously can be laughed off as having a lousy sense of humor. But Fierstein still manages to get in a few jabs in the last paragraphs, saying anyone who opposes SSM is stuck in "fear and bigotry" and "intolerance." Thanks my friend. Happy Holidays to you too. FOR THE POLICY WONKS: The Center for Law and Social Policy has a short paper summarizing the marriage and fatherhood provisions of H.R. 4. GOOD NEWS FROM CHILD TRENDS: The percentage of high school students having sex has continued to decline, falling from 54 percent of all teens in 1991 to 46 percent in 2001.Also, Child Trends has published a Healthy Marriage Compendium, "a 511-page compilation of existing measures that have been used to examine couple relationships." That's a lot of pages. It's also available as a searchable CD-ROM. Tuesday, November 25, 2003
According to Brad Sears and Alan Hirsch in the Village Voice: While children don't need one mom and one dad, they undeniably benefit from having two parents.Oh yeah? No dad, no big deal? Is that the new still-trying-to-show-concern-for-the-little-ones slogan that fits the political needs of the moment? Sorry, that statement is a lie. I'm with Elizabeth: Whatever we decide to do about SSM, let's not tell lies about children's needs and experiences. From Christianity Today: "Activists say the Federal Marriage Amendment will be the defining issue in the next election." IMPERFECT HARMONY: Making the email circuit lately is a haunting essay by Joshua Coleman, a psychologist on the west coast. �When a Family Man Thinks Twice� portrays the inner thinking of a father in a troubled marriage, daydreaming about an affair, giving sidelong glances at the �free� divorced fathers hanging out with their kids at the park. At the same time, another voice speaks, representing the divorced father who experienced an electric affair, then the failure of his marriage, and now drops his kids off at their mom�s house, goes home to a terribly quiet apartment, and faces the prospect of a future lacking a close relationship with his children. Dr. Coleman has a new book out, Imperfect Harmony: How to Stay Married for the Sake of Your Children and Still Be Happy. I haven�t read it yet, but I plan to, and what a great title. If we are to reduce the number of children and parents suffering the aftermath of divorce, �imperfect harmony� is indeed what we need to aspire to, and be grateful for. "Not ready for a mini-me": As a reader points out, hardly a word in the article about what marriage might or might not have to do with the author's decision regarding having a child. BIOLOGY, PARENTS, AND MARRIAGE 101: Mike Pignatello replies to my earlier post, found here. This is my new reply to him: Mike Pignatello is predictably cavalier about radical reproductive technologies, as are most people who support adults� rights to do just about anything they want, children be damned. Even standard reproductive technologies, those that try to assist a heterosexual couple�s reproduction without borrowing sperm, eggs, or wombs, from the outside, still produce an awful lot of surplus embryos � a new study I read about yesterday discovered there are about 400,000 embryos in deep freeze in the United States alone, about twice the previous estimate. You don�t have to be pro-life to find that troubling. Of course, if same sex couples want to have a baby of �their own,� they have to borrow or buy sperms, eggs, and/or a womb, in other words, use what I call radical reproductive technologies. I am troubled by straight and gay parents doing this, for the reasons I�ve already stated: children tell us that growing up with little or no relationship with a biological parent opens up a tremendous set of questions in the development of their own identity. Should their complicated identity development alone persuade us to make all of this illegal? Maybe not. But should we ignore what they say, insist they�re fine, and feel good about ourselves for supporting adults� rights to happiness? I have serious problems with that. Pignatello then conflates adoption with every other alternative family form, but it�s clearly not the same thing. Adoption is a special case when children�s own biological parents prove unfit and society places them with other parents for their own best interests. Adoption is child-centered, not adult-centered. I personally feel that it�s fine for same sex couples to adopt, and I especially admire and feel humbled by gay and straight couples who adopt special-needs children. The problem is that changing the definition of marriage, as the Mass court did, to make marriage gender-neutral implicitly supports gay couples using radical reproductive technologies to form their families, and thus creates a socially-approved new alternative family form that is dependent on this technology to have their �own� children, something we have never seen before. The Mass court now affirms that children only need �parents,� but not a mother and father, so by the court�s logic there is no moral argument against children being created intentionally fatherless or motherless. Our society should never have accepted these radical reproductive technologies without great debate in the first place, and now they are practically made the law of the land. If we do try to limit them, we will be accused of discriminating against gay and lesbian married couples. Pignatello also needs to educate himself about stepfamilies. He still seems to think that a single mother marrying a man will automatically make the man the child�s parent. (I never said anything about �biological� parent here, as Pignatello implies.) It typically takes years for children to feel a stepparent is a parent, if it ever happens at all, and the stepparent never becomes the child�s legal parent unless the child�s relationship with a biological parent is severed and the stepparent goes through second parent adoption, the same way same sex couples have to do now, and if they are married. Pignatello concludes: �That a child wonders who her biological parents are has nothing to do with the sexual orientation or marital status of the parents involved. It's a result of an adult's reproductive and family choices that the adult is at liberty to make.� That�s bunk. Same sex couples have no choice but to form families in which the child lacks at least one biological parent. If they do so through adoption, fine. But every other option is seriously questionable. And �marital status� makes a great deal of difference in whether children will know their biological parents. Married people who want children try first to make them the old-fashioned way, and most of them succeed. Further, by staying married they are guaranteeing that only death will part a child from her biological parent. Only when adults have a myopic focus on �adult liberty,� as Pignatello does, could they think that parents� sexual orientation or marital status has �nothing to do with� the likelihood of a child growing up without her biological parents. From the archives of The Atlantic, now online: "The Russian Effort to Abolish Marriage" (July 1926), by an anonymous woman living in Russia "Are Americans Polygamous?" (August 1947), by David L. Cohn "Marriage as a Wretched Institution" (November 1966), by Mervyn Cadwallader "Brave New Marriage" (September 1972), by Melvin Maddocks I recommend the Maddocks article for anyone too young to remember the 1970s, or for those who've forgotten how different the marriage debate sounded during that decade. Monday, November 24, 2003
YOUR CHEATIN' HEART: The modern western woman is now almost as likely to cheat on her partner as a man. In an online survey of 1,427 men and women aged between 25 and 35 by the Hamburg-based GEWIS institute for social research for "Woman" magazine, 53 percent of women said they had been unfaithful to their partner, compared with 59 percent of men.Wow, that's a lot, though I wonder about the methodology of online surveys. But what annoys marriage buffs (in addition to infidelity) is the use of the term "partner" instead of "spouse." Then again, maybe the study isn't looking at the behavior of husbands and wives. Based on their terminology, who knows? This is yet another example of why attempts to be inclusive through the use of vague terms result in a vague understanding of social relationships. I also just hate the term "partner." It's so sterile. P.S. The Wisconsin Badger reports on a different study: The National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago published a survey this year claiming that 12 percent of women cheat, while 22 percent of men cheat. Mickey Kaus (who is pro SSM) has a nice take on Andrew Sullivan's anything-it-takes style of arguing on SSM. I agree. Sullivan is a good advocate for his position, but he has long since stopped thinking about it in a careful way, and is willing to say just about anything that is politically advantageous for his side. "Based on a study of 900 adolescents and teens, the researchers assert that the disruption resulting from divorce � which may include an increase in stress, loss of income, change of household and less quality time with parents � can cause adolescents and teens to develop an addiction to compulsive buying. Roberts suggests that compulsive buying may be a coping mechanism for adolescents and teens during difficult life transitions." An annotated bibliography of recent books about children of divorce, including research, social history, personal stories, faith perspectives, and fiction. SACRED VOWS, SACRED COWS?: Reader John Hinchcliffe takes issue with an earlier post in which I argued that debates about civil marriage should not be about �sanctity� and what�s �sacred�: My [dictionary] gives as a definition of "sacred" - "Worthy of respect; venerable." I think this is the sense in which many people say "(civil) marriage is sacred." I would think that many Americans hold the rights in the U.S. Bill of Rights to be "sacred." It's a rhetorical way of saying "Marriage is a big freakin' deal - don't mess with it!"A fair enough point, to be sure. �Sacred� doesn�t only have religious connotations (though if you look up the word on m-w.com, most of the definitions do relate to religion.) I do think the marriage vow is a sacred vow, even within a purely secular, civil context. But I still also think that arguments against ssm that rely on the �sanctity� of marriage usually (and intentionally) carry religious connotations. More importantly, such arguments just beg the question of how and why same-sex marriages would make marriage as an institution less �worthy of respect, or venerable.� Gregg Easterbrook, cited below by Tom, says: Marriage is, more than anything else, the expression of love. And if two people of the same gender love each other in the fullest sense and wish to express that love by joining their lives, why shouldn't society be happy about that?I suspect that, in a few years, when all the dust has settled, this argument will have carried the day. And maybe it should. Who wants to argue against love? Who can? And who would deny, as the old song puts it, that love and marriage go together? Not me. But can we at least recongize, as I argue is also also the case with David Brooks' NYT article on Saturday, how thinned out, minimalist, and (most of all) completely de-sexualized this definition is? If it were really true, as Easterbrook says, that the core definition of marriage is "the expression of love," then humans almost certainly would never have created marriage as a social insitution in the first place, and there would be no marriage laws for us to argue about today. Societies do not build social institutions to define "the expression of love." States have never, through legislatures and courts, declared a compelling state interest in "the expression of love." In order to figure out why we have marriage at all, you have to look to sexual embodiment, heterosexual intercourse, child bearing, and child rearing. I'm sorry if that sounds too earthy and too specific, compared to fluttery abstactions like "the expression of love." But if we care about what marriage is, we have to care about these things. "Thanks to the new tax law, the long-derided ``marriage penalty'' -- which caused many couples to pay more taxes than if they had remained single -- has largely been divorced from the tax code. Now year-end nuptials are almost sure to bring a wedding gift from Uncle Sam." Sunday, November 23, 2003
RADIO, RADIO: Tonight I'm going to be on a radio show, "His Side with Glenn Sacks," to discuss the question: "The Men's Movement: Legitimate Grievances or Whiners with a Gender Grudge?" I'll be taking the "whiners with a gender grudge" position. And, no, in this case the "men's movement" doesn't refer to a bunch of guys beating drums in the woods, but a bunch of angry white guys who are whiners with a gender grudge. It's on at 9pm P.S.T. and you can listen here. From the St. Pete Times: "Florida officials have plans to offer relationship counseling, under the theory that strong marriages are safer for children." From Alan Cochrum, a writer and copy editor for the Ft. Worth Star-Telegram, a remarkably thoughtful, well-informed essay on Christianity, U.S. culture, and SSM. From Malcolm Turnbull, the outgoing federal treasurer of the Liberal Party of Australia: We know children are in every respect better off if they are living with their biological parents, formally married (as opposed to cohabiting). We know there is a social cost (and not just in dollars) from marriage breakdown and single parenting. Should we not do more to promote the institution of marriage? No-fault divorce is here to stay (for good or ill), but should we not consider instituting more extensive marriage preparation and a different, less unilateral, approach to divorce when small children are involved? Or should not couples have the right, as they are able to do in some parts of the US, to contract to a higher standard of marital commitment so that they voluntarily agree to make divorce harder? |
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