FOR SOCIETY, MARRIAGE IS MORE THAN A "LIFESTYLE": Jennifer Marshall

...Remember the flap over Vice President Dan Quayle's criticism of TV's Murphy Brown? Unwed births had reached a new high in the early '90s, and Quayle lamented the nonchalant way the show's producers treated single motherhood. Social science has since vindicated his argument: Decisions about sex, marriage and childbearing aren't merely personal. They have profound social consequences, especially for children. ...

Social science indicates the intact family -- defined as a man and a woman who marry and raise their children together -- best ensures the welfare of children and society. Adolescents in intact families are healthier, less likely to be depressed, less likely to repeat a grade and have fewer developmental problems. By contrast, children in other family forms, as a group, are likelier to experience poverty, abuse, behavioral and emotional problems and lower academic achievement.

A free society requires a critical mass of individuals living in stable households independent of the state. The most secure household, available research shows, is the intact family. No other family form has been able to provide the same level of social security. In all other common arrangements, the risk of negative individual outcomes and family disintegration is much greater, increasing the risk of dependence on state services. This explains government's interest in marriage, and why marriage has always had a special legal status, as the foundation of the intact family.

A serious policy debate about reinforcing and restoring marriage emerged in the '90s on the basis of social-science data. Policies such as welfare reform were grounded in such data. We have seen some of the fruit of those efforts in declining rates of teen sex and childbearing.

The debate over same-sex marriage hasn't been adequately framed in social-welfare terms. The interest of children and general social stability are largely neglected. Back is the discredited Murphy Brown rationale: Personal fulfillment and individual rights trump all other considerations.

Overhauling marriage is not anchored in sound research. We know little about long-term effects of homosexual relationships on partners -- even less on children raised in such households. This lack of data should give us pause before reconfiguring the basic institution of society. Advocates of same-sex marriage want us to institutionalize a social experiment, i.e., same-sex coupling and parenting, by elevating it in law to the status of the oldest of institutions: marriage. To do so would be a mistake.

Americans have become more tolerant of other types of experimentation -- extramarital sex, cohabitation, single parenting -- but don't equate them with marriage. None of these experiments has been regarded in law as the equivalent of the intact family. Yet this is precisely what we're being asked to do with same-sex marriage.

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posted by Eve at 10:53 PM | Link |

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