Less than two weeks into Massachusetts’ judicially imposed
experiment in gay marriage, its boosters were ready to proclaim it
an unambiguous success. After all, the sky didn’t fall, did it?
If this analysis seems unnecessarily flippant, peruse the
opinion pieces and news stories leading up to the big day when
same-sex nuptials began in the Bay State. Repeatedly you will see
the phrase “the sky won’t fall” being offered to reassure the mushy
middle and dissuade traditionalists from acting to stop the Supreme
Judicial Court’s Goodridge ruling in its tracks. The
ubiquitous same-sex marriage supporting pundit Andrew Sullivan’s
words in the Philadelphia Inquirer were representative:
“Will heterosexuals now stop marrying because gay people can? Will
the birthrate plummet? Will the sky fall?”
A New York Times story on the issue concluded with a
lesbian cousin of Massachusetts House Speaker Thomas Finneran, a
conservative Democrat who opposes gay marriage, saying that after
she exchanges vows she will send him a card asking, “Did the Earth
shake? Did the sky fall?”
So now that Massachusetts’ sweeping redefinition of marriage has
proceeded for a number of days without precipitating such dire
geological consequences, those of us in the other 49 states should
presumably get with the program. Of course, the sky didn’t
immediately fall when divorce was liberalized, out-of-wedlock birth
rates began to rise, and broken families started to proliferate
either. We were assured at the time that each of these changes in
our culture of marriage would be harmless. It took at least a
generation for the social science to confirm what tradition and
common sense already told us: Children need mothers and fathers,
and when they don’t get them there are repercussions for said
children and society at large.
Even controlling for race, income, parents’ education, and
suburban versus urban residence, children born in non-intact
families have higher rates of criminal behavior, welfare
dependency, educational failure, and a host of other social
pathologies. Writing over a decade ago in the Atlantic,
Barbara Dafoe Whitehead observed that the connection between
fatherlessness and crime was “so strong that controlling for family
configuration erases the relationship between race and crime and
low income and crime.”
The consequences of family breakdown are so pronounced that few
people still dispute their existence. But the culture has been so
thoroughly transformed while we were waiting for the sky to fall
that even once the damage became well known, even fewer would dare
to be so judgmental as to advocate going back to the old ways of
doing things.
ALL OF THIS SHOULD BE A cautionary tale for those who want to
recklessly plow forward with same-sex marriage. The full effects of
social changes like this take years to become apparent; you need to
wait longer than a few days or until the next election to truly
determine if those socially conservative Chicken Littles might be
on to something. Worse, if you allow enough cultural drift there is
no easy way back even if the sky does fall. Past deviations from
the marriage idea have in fact come at a great price. And the
problems associated with fatherless families and illegitimacy
occurred even though there are many loving single parents who do an
excellent job.
It’s often assumed that objections to same-sex marriage are
premised on the belief that gays and lesbians as people will
somehow contaminate the institution of marriage, that their
participation in the institution of matrimony will cause
heterosexuals to recoil in shock and horror and either begin to
divorce en masse or refuse to marry at all. Some
gay-marriage foes, who see this as more of a debate over the social
acceptance of homosexuality than the nature of marriage, work
overtime to reinforce this perception.
But this is not the reason many of us believe gay marriage is
likely to push society further along the painful path of family
breakdown. We do not see Massachusetts as merely extending an old
institution to a new group of people. Instead, our concern is that
the policy mandated by Goodridge rewrites the definition
and assumptions of marriage as an institution.
Gay marriage completes the separation of marriage and parenthood
in a way that is fundamentally incompatible with the presumption
that children need fathers and mothers. As Elizabeth Marquhardt and
Don Browning have written, marriage would instead be reduced
“primarily to an affectionate sexual relationship accompanied by a
declaration of commitment.” It would hardly be the first reform to
do so, but this is no consolation — these reforms have tended to
weaken, rather than strengthen, family ties. Affection is
impermanent but it is all that is increasingly holding marriage
together.
STANLEY KURTZ HAS MADE the argument that cohabitation, toleration
of high out-of-wedlock birth rates, and legal acceptance of de
facto gay marriage are mutually reinforcing phenomena that have
expedited the decline of marriage in Scandinavia and the
Netherlands. While critics have assailed his work, none have
explained how society can promote a culture where children are
raised by mothers and fathers while treating such couples no
differently than every other possible arrangement.
Maybe concerns about same-sex marriage will prove unfounded. Or
maybe it will lead to a situation that is less than ideal, like
many of the changes in marriage that have so far reduced family
cohesion, but we will muddle through tolerably well somehow. But it
would seem prudent to make that judgment after a carefully thought
out discussion of what marriage is for, rather than those who
dismiss such thoughts wave and sniff, “Ah, the sky won’t fall.”
We’ve heard that one before and still ended up with social
problems raining down on our heads.
