In his column in today’s The New York Times, Ross Douthat reflects on the implications of last week’s federal court ruling overturning California’s voter-approved ban on same-sex marriage. He notes that what we call “traditional marriage” (a husband and wife—and their children—living together as one unit) is an invention only a couple of centuries old. Before that, “married” couples and their kids lived much more communally, usually in an extended family. Douthat also points out that there are many viable ways—both within Western culture and in other cultures—that the sexes live well together, and raise their children well, other than our traditional American-style marriage. He then reaches a startling, if subtle, conclusion about our traditional marriage. It’s worth quoting here in full:
The lifelong commitment of a gay couple is more impressive than the serial monogamy of straights. And a culture in which weddings are optional celebrations of romantic love, only tangentially connected to procreation, has no business discriminating against the love of homosexuals. But if we just accept this shift, we’re giving up on one of the great ideas of Western civilization: the celebration of lifelong heterosexual monogamy as a unique and indispensable estate. That ideal is still worth honoring, and still worth striving to preserve. And preserving it ultimately requires some public acknowledgment that heterosexual unions and gay relationships are different: similar in emotional commitment, but distinct both in their challenges and their potential fruit.
Douthat seems to be saying, “Look, traditional marriage is clearly irrational in this day and age, but it’s still worth preserving because it derives from uniquely Western ideas about love and commitment.” Defending traditional man-woman marriage while simultaneously refusing to bash gays for wanting to participate in it, Douthat indicates that the institution enjoys a “unique and indispensable estate” within Western culture.
There comes a point in a culture, however, when the gap between people’s ideals and their actions becomes so enormous that the ideals, instead of being inspirational, and helping us to be better than we are by nature, become cumbersome jokes, mocking us as we struggle to be good and decent human beings. With the passing of the Middle Ages, when life was no longer organized by fiefdoms, medieval ideas of courtly love disintegrated. Similarly, in contemporary times, when the feasibility of a wage-earning husband supporting a wife and family all by himself has become next to impossible for the majority of American families, romantic ideas of romantic marriage cannot long persist.
Still, couples—both straight and gay—continue to be in a marrying mode, blithely ignoring the statistics and going for traditional weddings. Brides, especially, spend heaps of money on that white dress with the virginal veil, while grooms buy tuxes and families throw extravagant parties where friends and family observe the exchange of vows. Increasingly, however, “I do” means something more along the lines of, “I do—right now, at any rate. Mind you, I sincerely believe this ‘I do’ right now, during this wedding ceremony, where I’m saying it in front of all of you.”
Although Americans overwhelmingly say they still believe in American-style marriage, they nevertheless divorce at a rate of around 50 percent. The Bible Belt in the southern part of the U.S. experiences, as it happens, divorce rates that are among the highest rates of divorce in the country. Since “traditional marriage” is not quite the pillar of Western civilization fundamentalist Christians make it out to be, the United States has the lowest percentage of children growing up with both biological parents in the Western world—hardly what you’d call ideal. The American ideal of marriage is vanishing in the fading, barely visible light of June and Hugh Cleaver, boogying to the trashy new rhythm of “Real Housewives of New Jersey.”
In this context, I think it would help to have a more reasoned, less theologically constrained, discussion about what a healthy “postmodern” family might look like.
Real American families are desperate for a new set of ideals for what can help them thrive instead of succumbing to dysfuntion. So why not begin to speak much less about “forever” romance and much more about firm contractual obligations toward property and the rearing of children? Granted, that doesn’t sound as elegant or beautiful as the aftermath to a big church wedding with a champagne reception under a billowy tent on a vast green lawn. But precisely worded legal commitments, entered into with at least as much care and seriousness as a young couple leases a car, are better than a lot of histrionic “Marriage = One Man + Woman” rhetoric, and the broken promises left in its wake. Broken promises are neither elegant nor beautiful.
27 Responses to A New American Marriage
livefreeordie2 - August 9, 2010 at 5:01 pm
A number of points come to mind. First, family can be defined by almost any grouping of people. So, that’s not much of a big deal and really hasn’t been. I’m sure there are people who go nuts about a gay couple raising children, but they should get over it. As long as they are meeting the same standards as anyone else, it really shouldn’t be a problem.Second. The judge in California made a mistake. Whenever these idiot judges try to write new law, rather than allow the legislative process to proceed, it screws things up. Gay “marriage” is legal in the state where I live because the legislature passed a bill and the governor signed it. It may be that they all get tossed out on their butts and it gets repealed, and down the road, it gets passed again, but it was the legislative process at work. When the people decide rather than some idiot judge, and it takes a good bit of the emotion out of it. Finally, let’s remember that this decision does nothing except co-opt a word. Gay couples in California could avail themselves of civil unions with the same legal rights as marriage. That was true in my state as well. And that’s why I’m opposed to gay “marriage.” Marriage is a word. It means something. As above, “Marriage = One Man + (one) Woman.” Most people are quite happy with that definition and don’t want it changed. And I’ve heard all the arguments about progress and evolution and blah, blah, blah. Marriage is one man and one woman. I’m for people being able to legally partner with whomever they wish – call it civil unions. . .make up a word for it if you want. But it isn’t marriage. And in the minds of a lot of people, no judge or legislature will ever really change what that word means. You can call a pig a horse all day long. . .but at the end of the day, it’s still a pig.
jffoster - August 9, 2010 at 5:54 pm
Read Douthat’s article early this morning I did, and I do not see where he is claiming that “traditional marriage is clearly irrational in this day and age…” — your quotes, not his. You refer to an often stated claim that Americans “divorce at a rate of around 50 percent”. 50% of/per what?
goxewu - August 9, 2010 at 6:30 pm
“Marriage = One man + One woman.” Fine. But the government should get out of the marraige business. Marriage–as many of its defenders as a heterosexual-only institution claim–is ordained by “God,” and is a religious business. So, let clergy perform “marriages,”but let them have no other function than a religious one. No legal significance. All couples who want to be legally joined should have civil unions, in which all the legal perqs of marriage are contained. The ones who want religious frosting on top of the cake can get religious marriages. Civil unions, should be performed by civil officials and perhaps, under certain circumstances, captains of ships, et al. But somebody with a divinity degree and a religious ordination only, should not be allowed to join people legally.Questions to those who propose “civil unions” for gays and “marriage” for straights: What if any, should be the legal differences between civil unions and marriages, i.e., what benefits should a marriage confer upon a heterosexual couple that a civil union cannot upon a gay couple? And why should there be any legal differences?
suzannewayne - August 10, 2010 at 6:07 am
I guess I am a “glass is half-full” kind of person. And if half the marriages are NOT failing, I don’t think you can say it is “vanishing” just yet. And if half are working, why would that mean the concept of marriage isn’t working and should be done away with or drastically changed?
dank48 - August 10, 2010 at 9:49 am
Once upon a time most marriages were for “forever,” which in practice meant either that the couple stayed married for the rest of their lives, whether the marriage itself happened to be happy/good/productive/positive/etc. by our standards–or by the standards of the time–or that they stayed married until the wife died in childbirth, by no means a rare event. Those are not good old days we want to return to. The point, it seems to me, is that despite the fifty-fifty odds of success, people get married for the same reasons people have been getting married for all along. And I don’t really think those of us who aren’t getting married have much relevant to say about it. That is, we can produce all the hot air we want, but it just doesn’t matter.Those of us who think the Second Amendment wasn’t just kidding about the right to bear arms have to recognize that the meaning of “arms” has changed over a couple centuries; otherwise we’d believe that in 2010 American citizens merely enjoy the right to bear flintlocks. Similarly, as this article makes clear, the meaning of “marriage” has changed, not according to some sinister plan, but because there has been a lot of social change over time. Maybe it’s Ward and June; maybe it’s Ward and William or June and Jane. Fifty years ago a lot of people were as exercised over marriage between two people, not because what was in their shorts was too similar but because the colors of their skins were too different.One thing for sure: other people are just as interested in our opinions about their sex lives as we are in theirs about ours. I think that people who worry, stew, fret, and get worked up over other people’s sex lives should, quite literally, learn to mind their own f—ing business.
mabeelrc - August 10, 2010 at 10:00 am
“In this context, I think it would help to have a more reasoned, less theologically constrained, discussion about what a healthy ‘postmodern’ family might look like.”Trust me, Ms. Fendrich, it won’t be pretty.
dank48 - August 10, 2010 at 10:29 am
Life goes along like a popular song,A medley of extemporanea.And love is a thing that can never go wrong,And I am Marie of Roumania. –Dorothy ParkerAnybody who thinks marriage is “pretty” hasn’t got past the honeymoon. And, for what it may be worth, it’s been my observation that the strength and duration of the marriage tends to be inversely related to the expense and ostentation of the wedding. Good luck, Chelsea. You’re going to need it. Everybody who gets married needs it.
wendylove - August 10, 2010 at 11:07 am
Some religious traditions have maintained ceremonies which are much more attuned to the contractual nature of marriage than the typical Christian (or Christian-like) ceremonies we’re most familiar with. The Jewish ketubah or the Muslim nikah are both binding contracts which can be customized by the couple or their representatives but are fundamentally about “firm contractual obligations toward property and the rearing of children.” It might be worth keeping those options in mind when we lament the alleged romantic imprudence of “traditional marriage.”
11893310 - August 10, 2010 at 12:05 pm
goxewu, above, observed:”But the government should get out of the marraige business. Marriage–as many of its defenders as a heterosexual-only institution claim–is ordained by “God,” and is a religious business. So, let clergy perform “marriages,”but let them have no other function than a religious one. No legal significance.”Which, more or less is the position of historic Christianity as represented in the Catholic and Orthodox churches. God ordained marriage and only sacramental unions have “marriage” validity. The state has an interest in a well-ordered society and its contracts, and thus regulates marriage as a civil event. But the state neither creates nor dissolves true marriage, which, from the beginning, has been indissoluble. However, a “church” sanctioned union can be recognized subsequently as not a sacramental marriage and thus “annuled” even as the state calls it a divorce. So, yes, I am one Christian who would like to see the state get out of the “marriage” business and maintain a system of civil “marital” unions for those eschewing the real thing which can be had only sacramentally. And yet, the Roman Church founders here, somewhat, when it assures converts that their existing (Protestant, Jewish, Muslim, Las Vegas wedding chapel, Maryland Justice of the Peace at midnight) non-sacramental unions are real and their children are not bastards, but, no communion for you folks until your marriage is convalidated (sacramentalized) in a Roman church.GK Chesterton noted, “”The whole pleasure of marriage is that it is a perpetual crisis” and, “Marriage is a duel to the death which no man of honour should decline.” Laurie Fendrich and Ross Douthat, for all their faux objectivity, are the unfortunate losers in not recognizing real marriage, man and woman, as the core of successful human existence in this life.
dank48 - August 10, 2010 at 1:29 pm
Marriage, pace various commenters, has been around a lot longer than any existing church (or other religious organization). The fact that adherents of any particular religious body can consistently claim that “their” scriptures define or at least assume that marriage involves exactly one man and one woman is beside the point. According to the OT, some apparently godly men had e.g. seven hundred wives and three hundred concubines, and there’s no mention that six hundred ninety-nine of those marriages were invalid. According to the Qu’ran, a man may have up to four wives. According to the teachings of the Church of LDS, early on, polygamy was okay, but the main LDS body has since had a revelation to the contrary, although there are still splinters. So, religion or not, it wasn’t always Ward and June.And so far as the Old Testament is concerned, imo it’s legitimate to refer to the OT if and only if you keep kosher, including not wearing blended fabrics and not working on the sabbath; otherwise, you’re a text-mining tourist.11893310, it seems to me, for all his or her fancied word of finality, is an unfortunate loser in not recognizing real marriage, between two people who are willing to make a lifelong commitment to each other, let the rest of the world go as it will, as the core of successful human existence in this life. The plumbing, when we come down to it, is the least significant aspect of the matter.
goxewu - August 10, 2010 at 1:51 pm
Re #9:A feint in the direction of reason (“I am one Christian who would like to see the state get out of the ‘marriage’ business”), then some having it both ways (“[The state] maintain[ing] a system of civil ‘marital’ unions for those eschewing the real thing”), and finally the inevitable hetero-religio conceit: “Laurie Fendrich and Ross Douthat, for all their faux objectivity, are the unfortunate losers in not recognizing real marriage, man and woman, as the core of successful human existence in this life.”What!? Not only gays, but every man and woman who doesn’t happen to get married lack “the core of a successful human existence in this life”? (I suppose 11893310′s saying “successful” instead of “fulfilling” or “purposeful” or some other less career-oriented term is a big psychological clue.) And two writers who don’t recognize that every man and woman who doesn’t happen to get married lacks “the core of a successful human existence in this life” are “losers” for it?In the words of that great marital philosopher, John McEnroe, “You can’t be serious!”
crunchycon - August 10, 2010 at 2:54 pm
goxewu — your porposal that the government’s role in all of this should be to legally bind two people in a contract – a civil union – and that couples can seek solmnization in their churches/mosques/temples, etc., is already practiced with respect to heterosexual marriage throughout latin america – and perhaps beyond. The “state” does not recognize a church marriage as legal. Couples have a legal ceremony with a judge, but continue to live apart (if they have prior to the ceremony, which most have), and then a week or two later, those who can afford it or who are “religious” have a church ceremony, after which they go on a honeymoon, if possible, and live together.
crunchycon - August 10, 2010 at 2:54 pm
oops. solemnization. forgot the “e”
livefreeordie2 - August 10, 2010 at 10:16 pm
goxewu #3 – I’m half tempted to agree with you about leaving marriage to religion, but only half tempted. There’s no reason why marriage should be changed in any way. To answer your question, I think that civil unions should have essentially the same legal rights as a marriage. I say essentially because I’m not sure how the tax system should be affected – if at all. The income tax, that despicable tool of progressives to effect social control, recognizes marriage because it has always been in the best interests of the government to encourage marriage. Besides, for generations in the 20th Century, many wives stayed at home and didn’t earn income, so it was “fair” to count the income against both people. Not sure how relevant all that is today. Best solution? Do away with the income tax and its myriad loopholes and deductions and replace it with a flat tax. That way, everyone, rich and poor, married and single, gay and straight, pays the same percentage of their income as tax. It makes marriage a moot point for the tax man. Other than that. . . make civil unions and marriage legally the same.
shelling - August 10, 2010 at 11:04 pm
Douthat’s second claim — that lifelong heterosexual unions represent an ideal distinct from homosexual ones — seems muddled at best. What makes one form of union distinct from the other? Is it the fact that heterosexuals can bear progeny who contain genetic material of both partners in equal measure? That hardly sounds like an “ideal” worth validating above the fact that both heterosexuals and homosexuals form unions to become healthy parents together — or not to parent at all. Given the prevalence of all sorts of reproductive technologies, and our increasing awareness as a society of the dangers of genetic discrimination, it seems logical to me that we would direct our social energies to supporting parents regardless of genetic relation to their children, and to promoting the social value of extended emotional commitment with or without children. I can’t see how the gender or sexuality of the partners should make any difference to either of these goals.
trendisnotdestiny - August 11, 2010 at 12:46 am
@ livefreeNot the only way…. sometimes all we have to do is make a list of absurd things that bigots say using their own words…. See, that way us lefties don’t just rely on labels, we apply stupidity in context…..Kind of like your comment last week…. You remember this one?QUOTE FROM LIVEFREE”Having wrapped up this comment, I think I’ll grab a cup of non-fair trade coffee! Have you ever noticed how much better a cup of coffee tastes when you know that indigenous peoples have been exploited just so you could drink it? Ahhhhh. . .” If the bigot shoe fits……. You might find a better crowd elsewhere than CHE. I hear Rand Paul is buying drinks (kidnapping not included)
livefreeordie2 - August 11, 2010 at 6:49 am
trendisnotdestiny #19 – No contribution to the topic at hand. . . do you have an opinion on Fendrich’s essay? Or are you just hanging around under the bridge?And by the way. . .I fully embrace the above quote. It’s one I use to poke liberals and watch the more dense among them run around like stuck pigs. I mean. . .do you seriously not get that your chain was being yanked? Too funny!For Goxewu – this person is a “prudent liberal?” Really?
grondelski - August 11, 2010 at 7:02 am
Two issues:1. The whole marriage debate has been affected by a strong dose of nominalism, the 14th century philosophy (given new leases on life by the Protestant Reformation in the 16th century and legal positivism in the 19th and 20th centuries) that held that nothing has any intrinsic essence, but that it’s all a name, all a tag. If we were not nominalists, we would not even be having Judge Walker’s frankly silly debate: marriage is not about two androgynous PEOPLE but about a man and a woman. “Same-sex marriage” is as much an oxymoron as a four-sided triangle: it’s not geometric “discrimination” to say the four angled polygon ain’t no triangle, nor is it civil discrimination to say two men or two men do not a marriage make.2. If we could overcome the intellectual ballast of nominalism, then we would find that an understanding of the meaning of marriage goes back millenia. Augustine was talking about the goods of proles and fides in the fourth century. Law recognized for centuries that if you rejected those goods, that content of marriage (e.g., if you positively excluded children) when the marriage was entered into, you rejected an essential element of marriage and, therefore, it was null and void from the start (annulment was a CIVIL as well as an ecclesiastical category). Of course, neither Judge Walker nor the Obama Administration could admit that procreation is essentially linked to marriage, which is why the latter refused to mention that argument in its defense of DOMA and the former wrote it all off to “gender roles.”So, while the author is correct in affirming that we should more clearly spell out what belongs to marriage, in a certain sense nihil novi sub soli.
goxewu - August 11, 2010 at 8:15 am
Re #21:Nice touch, the Latin for “There’s nothing new under the sun.” It’s supposed to shore up, one presumes, the wandering around to Augustine in the 4th century, philosophy in the 14th century, the Protestant Reformation, legal positivism (what happened to logical positivism?) in the 19th and 20th century, nominalism, etc., to parrot the old, discredited-in-both-principle-and-practice idea that if a couple isn’t capable of producing children (“e.g., if you positively excluded children”), they shouldn’t be allowed to be married. There goes marriage for infertile men and women and, of course, there goes marriage for people past childbearing age. None of this silly business about two people who fall in love in the old age home being able to tie the knot.”Of course, neither Judge Walker nor the Obama Administration could admit that procreation is essentially linked to marriage.” Yep, as any middle-school biology course will tell one.All that pseudo-scholarly smoke to hide the homophobia that opening up the legal benefits of marriage to homosexuals will somehow deprive heterosexuals of something. Nihil novi sub soli, indeed. Note to trendisnotdestiny, a prudent liberal: You know you’ve hit home when your disputant says in effect, “I was only joking,” after making a reckless statement whose basic sentiment he obviously shares.
livefreeordie2 - August 11, 2010 at 8:54 am
goxewu #22 – I didn’t see anything in #21 that spoke to denying anyone legal benefits. That may be his viewpoint, but since he didn’t say it, it’s wrong to assume it. With the availability of civil unions in so many states, an attempt to tie legal benefits to marriage is about as inane(in this day and age)as trying to tie marriage to childbearing. And to suggest, quite disappointingly I might add, that grondelski’s support for marriage is proof of homophobia is neither logical nor thoughtful. It’s name-calling for the purpose of trying to discredit an fellow commenter’s argument – an ad hominem attack, the refuge of all liberals when losing an argument. . It just goes to show that praising a lefty is always misguided. I suggested elsewhere that you were a thoughtful liberal – I guess that’s kinda like calling a “four angled polygon. . . a four-sided triangle.” (btw, nicely done, grondelski) I mean, aside from the homophobia nonsense, you can’t even tell the difference between a joke and a poke in the eye. Sad.
trendisnotdestiny - August 11, 2010 at 1:22 pm
@ Goxewu,Yeah, livefree writes in these black and white certainties that is offensive to just about everyone’s experience that does not follow the dominant cultural trend of the last thirty years: corporatism with a side of self interested cloaked in a bigoted bias@ livefree,Cannot wait to see what golden pearls of wisdom you have betrowthed upon for this week…
dank48 - August 11, 2010 at 1:38 pm
Okay, now, does anyone still have any questions about why the popular cliche of professors persists?
mystery345 - August 11, 2010 at 2:55 pm
@goxewu description was exactly what happened when I was married. This was in a foreign country. We had three different ceremonies. We married in a legal office. This was a ceremony with close family and friends. It was directed by a government official and we signed a legal contract in front of witnesses. That same day we had a religious ceremony, once again with close family and friends. The next day we had our big wedding which involved neither religion nor legal documents. Instead it involved a lot more people, a lot of really annoying music, dancing, and the pinning of money and gold coins on my wedding dress. It was quite an interesting two days for this American who had never experienced anything quite like it. I have learned over the years that this is how it works in this country – a country with a very low divorce rate.
goxewu - August 11, 2010 at 4:27 pm
Re #21 & 23:In my youth, I lived in a place (probably one of many places, maybe even most places in the U.S) where it was legal for somebody selling a home to deny somebody the opportunity to buy the home just because of that somebody’s race. Political conservatives of the time supported the restriction, while liberals opposed it.(So much for “free markets” back then.) The idea was that if black or Hispanic people could freely buy homes in a white neighborhood, then home ownership would be ruined for everybody because property values would decline. Of course, this was a self-fulfilling property on the part of white people. (Sell your house to a non-white and property values will go down because whites don’t want houses sold to non-whites because property values will go down because whites don’t want…and so on). After years of bitter political fighting, a law was passed and upheld by court decisions, to the effect that one could not discriminate on the basis of race in the housing market. Decades later, it seems rather unimaginable that such a restriction–and similar restrictions, such as miscegenation laws–were ever allowed to be in place.Similarly, there seems to be an idea in place that allowing gays to, in effect, move into the neighborhood of marriage, will devalue marriage for everybody. Just as we have come to see gay cohabitation, gay partner/survivor benefits, gay daters at concerts and movies, etc., etc., as not harmful to straight cohabitation, partner/survivor benefits, or concert and movie dates, I think–or at least hope–that the time will come sooner rather than later that the mindset of the society in general, which is already tipping that way, will regard gay marriage in the same way.And in my proposed situation, where every married couple, straight or gay, has only the civil union and attendant contracts conferring the legal benefits of marriage, and religious ceremonies conferring only non-legal, religious benefits, gays could also enjoy religious ceremonies in religious venues that permit them. So, in the end, voilá!, no difference at all between “marriage” and “civil union” if the couple in question doesn’t want there to be one.
satris - August 11, 2010 at 6:08 pm
Some math on divorce statistics: Suppose we have two groups of 6 people. In each group there are three males and three females. In the first group, Group A, the first male marries the first female, the second male marries the second female, and the third male marries the third female. And nobody gets divorced. But in the second group, Group B, the first male marries and divorces each of the three females, the second male marries and divorces each female, and the third male does the same. Altogether, there are twelve marriages, and nine of them end in divorce. So, 75% of the marriages end in divorce. Yet, half of the males and half of the females got married and remained married. P.S. June Cleaver was married to Ward (not Hugh) — and they were obviously in Group A ;)
goxewu - August 11, 2010 at 8:04 pm
Re #25:In the U.S. each year, there are about twice as many marriages as divorces, hence the rather crude statistic of a “50 percent divorce rate.” With other stuff* factored in, a couple marrying today has a statistical chance of about 45 percent of that marriage ending in divorce. Many marriage proponents point to the fact that the divorce rate per capita has actually been declining over the past 30 years or so. But then again, fewer and fewer heterosexual couples, even those having children together (I could mention the daughter of a certain Vice-Presidential candidate and her off-again, on-again, off-again fiance), are declining to get married.* I’m not a statistician, so I’ll leave it to those who are to parse the exact factors.
falzf - August 11, 2010 at 8:57 pm
Satris (#25), thank you for the correction re June being married to Ward, not Hugh. How could I make such an error! I loved that Cleaver family! Laurie