Last night’s “historic”
vote for “gay marriage” in New York ought to be a wakeup call
to the Republican Party and social and cultural conservatives more
generally. We are fighting, I regret to say, a losing battle — and
I say that as someone who strongly supports traditional marriage,
and who believes that further attempts to undermine its special and
privileged place in our society will have serious, baleful
consequences.
Of course, liberals and “progressives” mock our concern. “For
some reason,” tweets
The Atlantic’s Jeff Goldberg, “I suddenly feel that my
heterosexual marriage is under threat.”
Goldberg’s marriage isn’t under threat, but the institution of
marriage is — so much so that marriage rates in America have
plummeted and out-of-wedlock births have skyrocketed.
National Review’s Rich Lowry
notes, for instance, that the number of Americans in intact
first marriages has dropped from 73 percent in the 1970s to as
little as 39 percent today, depending on socioeconomic status. And
the poorer and less educated you are, the more likely you are to
suffer from the political and cultural degradation of marriage.
Just 45 percent of moderately educated, middle-income Americans
are in intact first marriages. For the poorest and least-educated
Americans, the corresponding figure is 39 percent.
Why does this matter? Because the best and most effective way to
avert crime, poverty, drug abuse and other social pathologies is to
have strong, intact families. “Being raised in a married family
reduces a child’s probability of living in poverty by about 80
percent,”
writes the Heritage Foundation’s Robert Rector.
Last week was Father’s Day. Yet, according to a new Pew
Foundation study,
27 percent of Americans younger than 18 live apart from their
fathers. In 1960, the corresponding figure was 11 percent.
The percent of children born out of wedlock, meanwhile, has
increased from just six percent in the mid 1960s to more than
40 percent today.
“Nearly half of the children born to Hispanic mothers in the
U.S. are born out of wedlock, a proportion that has been increasing
rapidly with no signs of slowing down,”
reports the City Journal’s Heather Mac Donald
“Fatherlessness,”
notes David Frum, “is associated with an array of negative
outcomes, including aggravated likelihood of drug and alcohol
abuse, reduced educational achievement, and increased odds of
prison incarceration.”
But what does this have to do with gay “marriage”? Everything.
Sure, this breakdown in the family has occurred
independent of the push for “marriage equality.” But it is still
part and parcel of an overarching effort to undermine and deprecate
traditional marriage and the traditional family.
It is still part of a broader political and cultural movement to
decouple marriage from its principal purpose, which is the care and
raising of children.
Instead, marriage must become (as it has become) mainly about
personal self-fulfillment — and it must mean whatever each of us
wants it to mean, and it must be culturally optional. No one’s
marriage and no one’s family (or the lack thereof) is better (or
worse) than any other. These are all individual lifestyle
choices.
That would be fine, perhaps (or at least less of a problem), if
we all lived in isolation and were wholly self-dependent and
self-sufficient family units, but we’re not. We live in
communities, and we make demands upon the state for family
“assistance” and other remedial, governmental actions.
And we do this because there really is no substitute for the
traditional family, with a mother and a father. So when our new and
more modern “families” fail, the state must intervene. So it is
that the seeds for the bureaucratic welfare state, the
redistribution of wealth, and economic liberalism are sown in
social and cultural libertarianism.
This doesn’t mean, obviously, that some children without fathers
and mothers don’t turn out well and are necessarily consigned to
failure. Of course, some fatherless (and motherless) children do
quite well. But the odds are against them. And the more we
undermine the institution of marriage through misplaced notions of
“equality” and “rights,’ the more we stack the deck against
them.
