WHAT DO THEY TALK ABOUT AT THOSE CONFERENCES ANYWAY? David Wagner reports from several law conferences on SSM--part two

So much for the constitutional hydraulics. Then I move on and talk about what marriage is for, drawing openly from James Q. Wilson, George Gilder, Maggie and Eve. It's for tying men to the children they sire, and to the women who will have to take care of those children alone if the men aren't tied to them in some way that law and society will respect, enforce, and valorize. Men are the problem: marriage is the solution.

At the U. of Richmond event, an opposing panelist spoke up at this point and said (I'm quoting from memory, but as precisely as I can): "You conservatives are in a hopeless contradiction on this. You're full of sympathy for that poor unwed mother and her poor child when it's a matter of protecting traditional marriage, yet you don't support the government programs that could also help them."

"Well yes," I said, "if she can't marry the father, she can at least marry the government. This is why the pro-marriage argument has a libertarian angle: If husband-fathers aren’t there, the government will have to be. The decline in the ability of marriage to fulfill its traditional role means the growth of government."

Those who see nothing wrong with the growth of government were presumably unimpressed, but I was just glad that this point--usually a hard one to get across--had in effect been made for me by an opponent.

Inevitably, someone wanted to know how, precisely, SSM would diminish the ability of traditional marriage to fulfill the benevolent role that I have sketched for it.

SSM is not the only threat that marriage faces. Divorce is another one. So is adultery. To the extent that these have increased, or that the social stigma against them has weakened, these are also setbacks for marriage. Preventing SSM is only one part of a broad effort to restore a marriage culture. It's necessary, but not sufficient.

What's more, without the mainstreaming of divorce, and the partial relaxation of our condemnation of adultery, the present SSM movement would be unimaginable. Straights have turned marriage into something gays would want. Procreation, permanence, and sexual fidelity are seen today as either irrelevant to marriage, or at most mere ancillaries to it. Before the SSM movement came along, straights had turned marriage into a mere social celebration of a presently existing love-relationship, plus a great many legal benefits.

So SSM would undermine the traditional purposes of marriage--which focus on that mother and child and how to get the father involved, not just as a source of money (though that's important too), but as a source of love and willing protection as well--but divorce and other changes in modern marriage undermine it too. That's why nearly all of us who are currently making the case against SSM are also veterans of (and/or current combatants in) the struggle to curb divorce.
posted by Eve at 9:03 AM | link

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