UPDATE: Part 10 in the series is up! Here is where the various strings and thoughts start coming together concerning the fragility and the importance of how we treat marriage (or not).
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The Amazing Power of The Culture (Part 10) [Maggie Gallagher]
Between 1960 and 1980, cultural elites (those with cultural power, the power to name reality) increasingly defined marriage as the problem and family fragmentation as the solution. But between about 1980 and 2000, elite opinion on marriage did something remarkable: It changed.
In 1990, if you said, "The ideal for a child is a marriage mom and dad," many scholars, reporters, policymakers, and writers vigorously contested the idea; the counterfactual or contest response was, "Single mothers are just as good as married mothers, and the idea that marriage is special hurts women’s freedom."
By 2000, if you said, "The ideal for a child is a married mom and dad," people began to say, "Duh, that’s obvious." (At least, if you added, "provided that marriage is not high-conflict or violent.")
A lot of work went into that consensus shift in elite opinion. I was a bit player; David Blankenhorn and the scholars he gathered around him at the Institute for American Values deserve the lion’s share of the credit, but I watched it happen. And I also saw that it never happened in Europe, even though the social-science data was the same.
Some policy shifts happened as well: Changes in property distributions muted some of the worst effects of no-fault, welfare reform was enacted, and in 2000 the president of the U.S., without much public resistance, appointed a marriage czar to Health and Human Services who began to reshape the culture of the nation’s social-welfare bureaucracy into a more marriage-positive direction.
And over the same period — it could be an accident, a mere correlation — we began to see some signs of a marriage turnaround. Divorce rates peaked in the early 1980s and began to decline — especially among the college-educated. Unmarried childbearing, after galloping up and up — began to tail off. By around 2002, it looked as if the out-of-wedlock birthrate may have peaked — perhaps we would begin a new period in modern American history, one where each year more babies, rather than fewer and fewer, would begin life with a mom and dad committed to caring for their baby together, in one family.
(To be continued)
The Amazing Power of the Culture (Part 7) [Maggie Gallagher]
But with apologies, the marriage fights didn’t begin in 2003.
Between roughly 1960 and 1980, marriage came under a rather fierce and multi-faced ideological attack.
Five great strands of contemporary liberalism — the sexual revolution, the gender-role revolution, the expansion of welfare for the poor, the movement for racial equality, and the environmental movement — came together to support de-norming of marriage, knocking it off its pedestal and de-legitimating, in various ways, its privileged cultural postion.
Why? The monologue ran something like this: Moral norms disapproving of illegitimacy must be overturned to make room for expanded financial supports for poor single mothers; concern for married childbearing was implicitly and sometimes explicitly racist; marriage trapped women into unfulfilling domestic roles and interfered with the sexual pleasure that should be available equally to men and women. The fear of the slut within must be conquered. Abortion must be elevated to a constitutional right or women cannot be just like men in bed or in the workplace. And the population explosion reinforced the sexual revolutionaries’ idea that the generative capacity of women — our power to create new life — was a problem, not an asset.
And roughly between 1960 and 1980, the divorce rate and the out-of-wedlock birth rates tripled. (I do not say this was cause and effect, I simply note that both things happened at roughly the same time in mutually reinforcing ways).
Pause: What did I learn during this era from personal experience, my first 20 years?
I learned that if women have sex for long periods outside of marriage they are quite likely to get pregnant at least once. I saw how this big, obvious truth was repressed in culturally privileged speech, where highly credentialed people repeated as a mantra: We have separated sex from reproduction. Meanwhile, the girls around me kept getting pregnant. I saw that without abortion as a backup, that truth would be obvious even to Yale girls and the boyfriends and fathers and professors of Yale girls.
Women are people who, when we have sex, sometimes create new life. This truth deeply colors relations between men and women — even men and women who never have children together, indeed, men and women who never have sex together. Men impregnate, women are not impregnable. A society which tries to deny these facts ends up doing great and lasting damage to its own children, and to both men and women.
I learned the key indicator of contraceptive success was not technological efficacy but motivation of the user. Only women highly motivated to avoid out-of-wedlock pregnancy stand a chance of avoiding pregnancy by any of the conceivable methods.
Marriage as a legal institution and as social ideal, I came to perceive, was regulating the sexual behavior of the unmarried as well. (e.g. avoiding unmarried pregnancy becomes especially challenging if it’s hard to figure out whether or not you are married, or if you and your partner have differing views on this important question, as often happens with cohabiting couples).
Moreover, I came to understand in an immediate, personal way that the happy talk of the cultural elites around the visible decline in marriage was not (as they liked to tell themselves) rooted in science; it amounted to a new sexual taboo — a polite way of avoiding big, obvious truths by covering them up with pretty-sounding words. A society in which marriage was weakened was not simply a society where women had more freedom. It was a society in which women were more vulnerable and millions of babies are less protected.
I learned this truth: Connecting sex, babies, love, money, and mothers and fathers is hard.
Hard at the individual level, and hard at the societal level. A society where marriage is the normal, usual, and generally reliable way to raise children is a great cultural achievement, not a law of nature.
Why, then, is marriage a universal human social institution? Because, over time, cultures that do not find a way to some minimal version of this achievement die out and are replaced by cultures that do. I saw as well that our own culture’s task of building an effective marriage culture is greatly complicated — and also ennobled — by our essential commitment to the equal worth and dignity of every human being. Many, many cultures resolve problems created by babies by being concerned only about protecting marital and/or wanted children. Non-marital children are disposable, often literally left to die.
I learned: When marriage is privatized, women and children get hurt.
(This, as Jennifer Roback Morse recently pointed out, is the central flaw in the “get government out of marriage” solution to our culture wars.) (To be continued. . .)
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The Amazing Power of The Culture (Part 6) [Maggie Gallagher]
What will happen to marriage once the government and the law insist that same-sex unions ARE marriage, “whether you like it or not”?
First, this set of ideas about marriage will necessarily be privatized: that male and female point to each other, that marriage has deep roots in the necessity of bringing men and women together, because society needs babies, and babies need their mother and father in one family.
Next, because the prime argument for gay marriage is an equality argument, this traditional view of marriage will also be stigmatized: that is, treated as a discarded and discredited relic of bigotry that we have happily overcome.
I remember most vividly — it’s just an anecdote, yes — a very smart young Harvard law student asked me, her voice dripping with suspicion and disdain: “Why are you so upset about same-sex marriage; how is it going to affect you anyway?”
When I pointed out to her how the law treats people who oppose interracial marriage in our society — professional licenses at risk, school accreditations potentially denied, state and federal tax-exempt statuses put into play — I watched her eyes open wide. She had never thought of this at all. And then I watched her turn on a dime and say, “You’re right. That’s how bigots SHOULD be treated in our society.”
Ideas are powerful things.
Evan Wolfson, one of the lead architects of the gay-marriage movement, understands this very well. That’s why he told National Journal, according to Neil Munro: "Once same-sex marriage is accepted across the board, he said, there won’t be any need for a term to distinguish gay or straight couples who marry to raise children from those who wed to love and help each other."
It’s quite an interesting article. Among the other folks quoted is my old pal, Fred Karger, who founded Californians Against Hate. He’s right now in the middle of trying to prove that the National Organization for Marriage was secretly founded by the Mormon church as a front group — good luck with that one Fred — as part of a broader personal campaign to harass, threaten, and intimidate members of the LDS church who exercize their core civil rights to support marriage. He’s very open about it. ‘That is my goal . . . We’re chasing them now, and they don’t like it,’ he said. "They better get used to it.’"
"The word ‘marriage’ needs to be used to describe all relationships of two people who are loving and committed to each other," says Sara Beth Brooks, the lead organize
r of a march in San Diego on November 15. "To deny that semantic attachment to our relationships is the exact same thing as denying an African-American person the right to attend the same schools as a white person."
Right. Why do they keep saying that? Because they mean it.
Gay marriage will not leave marriage undisturbed. If gay marriage becomes the law of the land, then this thing called marriage that I care about, and that most human societies have specially protected, will become nameless in the public square — also, unmentionable in polite society.
(Will polygamy be next? For me, this is a side issue. But Evan Wolfson would say — he said this one time when I debated him on Long Island — that’s up to the polygamists to launch a movement and find out. I say: Don’t ask me, ask the guys at Harvard Law school. Because as far as I can tell they work these things out for themselves and let us know afterwards.)
(To be continued . . . )
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Part 1
This is not a response to Deroy’s last post, wherein he repeats his views that denouncing an adulterous business’s website, which he himself is unwilling to put out of business, is the ultimate measure of seriousness about marriage. We will just have to agree to disagree about how silly that sounds.
(One might possibly observe that Deroy never denounced that website until he figured out a strategy to use that denunciation to attack me and others on the gay-marriage issue. . . but, nonetheless, I believe he is sincere in denouncing both the adulterous website and me).
Plus, I do thank Deroy for the column. Since its publication, a number of creative lawyers have written to me suggesting other ways to make the website’s life miserable. Perhaps something good will come of that; we shall see what is possible.
I do want to explain, in a serious way, for anyone who is seriously interested, what I mean about how and why the public meaning of marriage matters. Call it: the Amazing Power of the Culture.
Many belittle the very notion — it’s the anti-intellectualism of the intellectuals — by reducing it to an argument in which "correlation is not causation" (a point of which I am well aware and even mentioned myself) is taken to be an apt, witty, zinging, and complete rebuttal.
How do ideas have consequences? I want to share over a couple of posts, what I think I have actually seen — a report from the front, as it were. More to come. . .
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What is culture? Sometimes we use that word as the opposite of economics or law. Here I mean something very specific. Culture, as James Davison Hunter put it, is the power to name reality.
In this sense, law is not the opposite of culture, but a particularly powerful player. What the law names as reality, is (in America at least) probably the single most powerful player in our shared reality.
If you doubt that, think about divorce for a minute…
When no-fault divorce was passed, its proponents promised us that the change in the law would not affect marriage generally — it would only affect bad marriages, which should be dissolved. And in recent times, gay-marriage advocates I’ve debated have asserted that my views about marriage, after gay marriage, will have a similar status in law and culture, to my views about divorce. (I’m Catholic). Now I think they are wrong about this analogy — because we didn’t pass no-fault divorce laws out of a concern for equality or using equal-protection arguments. And equality norms (at the heart of the SSM case) expand the power of government to suppress (though not criminalize) dissent in our system, which is why it is so striking to me to see so many libertarians, like Deroy, clambering aboard that train, as if SSM represents an expansion of liberty . . . but that’s a digression.
When the law actually endorsed unilateral divorce, it changed the terms of everybody’s marriage. Now the happily, romantically married may not notice this in practice. But not only the bad marriages, but the so-so marriages, the good-enough marriages were and are profoundly affected by the law — not only directly, but by the cultural changes in the public understanding of marriage that the law only partly caused and but certainly reinforced and institutionalized.
If you have a right to divorce at will, what you lose is the right to make an enduring marriage — at least if you live in consensual (shared) reality.
Are you with me so far?
No-fault divorce represented not only a change in incentives for individual married couples but a broad cultural change — and/or marker for change — in the public understanding of marriage.
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As I said, the law creating unilateral divorce changed not only individuals’ incentives before the law, it privatized the older concept of marriage as a permanent vow — indissoluable in the Catholic tradition (which was never the law in this country) and severable only for serious cause in the Protestant common-law version.
I can still hold the view that divorce is wrong — that I have no right to divorce because I made a vow to stay married. But with the advent of unilateral divorce, my views became a privatized view of marriage, not part of the shared reality defined by the law. We privatized this view of marriage precisely when the law privileged the progressive view of divorce.
Maybe you think this was a good change. I will not stop to argue the point now. What I’m trying to point to (for those geniuinely striving but challenged to understand my argument) is that the law mattered. And that the consequences of this legal change was not, in a simple sense, the expansion of liberty, but a change in power, driven in significant part by the cultural power of the law’s power to name reality.
I can maintain as a Catholic that my marriage is indissoluble. But if I or my husband wants a divorce, the law will consider my views, and even our original marriage agreement, irrelevant. I can maintain that I’m still married to him, even as the law divides my property, redefines his support obligations, gives him a legal right to separate me from my children for designated periods, and gives hearty consent to his right to engage in sex, bearing children, and marriage with someone else.
I know a few Catholics who have tried to maintain and act on in public the sacramental vision of reality (the purely religious view) after the law has endorsed and actualized their spouses’ right to divorce. Such religious people come perilously close to appearing mad in their insistence that somehow they are still married to the obviously divorced spouse. (Isn’t that what madness is — a private reality?)
So yes, if you follow the analogy to divorce, parents will still be able to teach their children their own views about what marriage is. But the law will be constantly repudiating that view in a number of public visible ways. Parents are having a very hard time fighting the progressive views of sexual culture, enshrined at law, in any number of ways. This will make it much harder.
When people say the "law is an educator," that’s true, but it doesn’t go far enough. In this case, the law is an arbiter of reality: Who is really married? Who is really divorced? Who is having an out-of-wedlock child? Who, for that matter, is committing adultery?
The law’s power to name reality matters.
By the way, I do und
erstand that is why the "name" matters to gay-marriage advocates. That’s what makes this battle difficult to compromise. But all I ask, of the intellectual class at least, is they stop saying therefore that the defintion of marriage in law (which matters so much to Adam and Steve) won’t matter at all to anyone else.
Particularly since gay marriage, as I mentioned above, is not like divorce in some key ways. . . (to be continued)
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To recap: Changing divorce law did not only affect the "exit requirements" from marriage, it affected the shared vision of what marriage consists of, what the marriage vow means. The law names the reality of who is married and who is divorced in a way with which merely private definitions have a hard time surviving, much less competing.
How much did the legal change of unilateral divorce increase divorce? This is surprisingly hard to figure out, using social science tools (Prof. Doug Allen’s and my recent take on the social science is here).
We don’t, in my view, have very good social science tools to measure cultural effects caused by law for a variety of reasons. Individual and private communties resist or adopt the new meanings promoted by legal change at differential rates, for example.
So, for example, despite the law’s change, older views of marital permanence persisted privately for some time — up into the mid-80s, family lawyers report they would still occasionally run into clients who would utter bits of 1950s movie dialogue like: "I’m not giving him a divorce!" As if they had a choice.
It takes a while for the new meanings encoded by the law to percolate and permeate the culture. Also, the law in one state can certainly affect the cultural meanings in another states (making isolating the effects of legal change more problematic). If polygamy were legal in, say, Oregon, that would almost certainly affect the understanding of marriage in Massachussetts. Monogamy might remain the most common public understanding of marriage, but, by definition, no longer a core or essential feature of marriage in American society. Similarly, when California adopted unilateral (no-fault) divorce, something visible had changed in our understanding in the U.S. of what the marriage vow meant — even if it was another ten years or more before say, Louisiana adopted a similar law.
So, yes, correlation is not causality. But consider acquiring another proverb: Do not mistake all we can accurately measure for all that is real.
Another similarity between unilateral divorce and gay marriage: Both legal changes were driven by elite opinion, not a mass hunger for change. Only a minority of Americans in the late sixties thought divorce laws needed to be loosened. Elites are called elites for a reason: They are very powerful, relative to mere majorities.
Whew. I know I’m being very long-winded and perhaps interesting very few folks besides myself. But I’ve never set this down before. More to come. . .
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Here’s another way that gay marriage and no-fault divorce are similar: Elites coalesced in favor of this legal change — and firmly downplayed the very idea it could have any cultural effects at all. Unilateral-divorce laws were passed by insider experts, "the best and brightest," who firmly swore that the objections and reservations of religious people and of the masses were uninformed, ignorant, and unlikely.
Because, after all, how could letting Anna and Evan disrupt their horrible, violent marriage more easily possibly affect your marriage?
Being Americans, even the smartest among us find institutional effects easy to deny and hard to take into account.
And so the experts banded together to downplay that changing the law of divorce would affect marriage at all. (Read Herbert Jacobs’s The Silent Revolution for the best account of how we got to unilateral no-fault divorce in just a decade).
This, perhaps, is another example of the anti-intellectualism of the intellectuals.
But here’s one big way that unilateral divorce is not like gay marriage: Nobody passed unilteral-divorce laws on the grounds that failing to do so would constitute discrimination, a violation of equal protection.
Unilateral divorce was promoted as some kind of cross between an individual-liberty right, a public-policy good, and a minor administrative change of little consequence to any broad public theme.
The heart of the same-sex marriage argument, by contrast, is this: There is no rational, relevant difference between same-sex and opposite-sex couples — and anyone who disagrees is engaging in illegitimate discrimination, similar to people who opposed interracial marriage.
I know gay-marriage advocates honestly believe this to be true. That’s not in question. My question is: How can an intellectual both say this and also say that same-sex marriage is not going to affect anyone besides gay couples? (e.g.: How exactly do we treat people and institutions that oppose interracial marriage these days? In law? In culture?)
Is this really a position that is "smart, civil, and honest" — the standard that Lara Schwartz layed out at the panel at Brookings to discuss the Rauch/Blankenhorn civil-unions proposal? (To be continued. . .)
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