THE EUROPEAN FAMILY DEBATE: Maggie replies to Michael Triplett and Jari Koskisuu

Actually, allowing couples to marry but not adopt pretty strongly in itself officially disconnects marriage and childbearing. What is marriage about if a married couple are not considered an appropriate candidate for adoption? Certainly not about creating the right context for having and raising children.

I did not mean my own previous brief remarks to be a comprehensive response to the Kurtz/Badgett debate, which frankly requires a detailed knowledge of European family statistics. Isolating the effects of legal changes using social science methods is difficult. If the mechanism is the cultural meanings of marriage, the consequences are likely to take a generation to uncover and they may be different in different countries. i.e. in cases where marriage and childbearing have already been pretty much legally and culturally severed, SSM may have little additional negative effect. Except of course to institutionalize and therefore make nearly impossible to reverse a destructive set of changes to the marriage idea.

Do people in a country think it is important to marry before you have children? Do they think when they get married they will have children? The out-of-wedlock birth ratio strikes me as the best single indicator of these culture trends, incorporating as it does trends in the likelihood that single people have children and the likelihood that married people don't.

But at a meta-level people who insist SSM has no effect on marriage are making a fundamentally unserious argument. "How can my marriage affect anyone else?" may be a good pop response, but anyone who studies marriage will tell you that ideas about marriage prevalent in a culture have an effect on how people behave. That's what it means to be a social institution or a social norm.

The weakness of our marriage culture makes SSM plausible. Marriage IS being disconnected from childbearing and childraising in a variety of ways. But SSM makes official this new vision of marriage and at a minimum privatizes (and probably stigmatizes) the other, older conception of marriage.

In my opinion, which I will dilate on further at some future point, the very debate about SSM in this country is weakening marriage as a social institution. With the possible exception of Jonathan Rauch, who unfortunately cannot personally determine the meaning of this change or the ongoing nature of the public attacks on the marriage idea, most of the arguments made in favor of SSM are ideas that weaken marriage.

Even Jonathan denies any intrinsic connection to children.

Maggie

P.S. If you don't think you get called a bigot for saying "Children need mothers and fathers and marriage is how you get that for people," you haven't tried, lately.
posted by Eve at 1:27 PM | link

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