THE DIVORCE THING: Dale. v. Maggie
I found this passage from Maggie's response to Andrew interesting:
"Unmarried childbearing has leveled off (albeit at high levels); divorce rates have declined modestly (very modestly); recent surveys show the commitment to marital permanence is rising, not falling, among married couples and marital happiness is increasing; marital fertility appears to be up. Polls show young people hate divorce and want lasting marriage."
It can't be repeated enough that all the bad trends Maggie and I bemoan--high divorce rates, children born out of wedlock, etc.--began long before the most radical gay activists ever thought of gay marriage. Gay marriage didn't create these lamentable trends in heterosexual ecology, the question is whether we should have any reason to believe gay marriage will add to them.
What strikes me is that the modestly positive recent developments Maggie points to are happening even as Americans have grown more comfortable with gay people, tend less to think of homosexuality as immoral, tend more and more to oppose job discrimination, have witnessed an explosion of gay characters in movies and on TV, and as they have seen the growth of quasi-marital recognition of same-sex couples from government and private businesses in the form of civil unions and domestic partnerships. The gay-positive trend is most striking in young people, who now actually support gay marriage. And this is the very group that "hates divorce and wants lasting marriage" for themselves.
Perhaps these developments are just coincidental. Or perhaps Americans are capable of holding in their minds at once what Maggie may think are contradictory ideas: they value their own families but don't think valuing their families requires them to denigrate gay families.
posted by maggie at
10:31 AM | Link |
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