Marriage More Than A Lifestyle Option

If you go to a panel discussion in Washington, D.C., on “Reframing Family Values,” do not expect much attention either to family or values. Instead, you will be flooded with charts and graphs about heads of household and income distribution. The point of this exercise is to show that behavior and values have nothing to do with the crisis of the American family. Everything is economic. If the awkward term “family values” comes up, it will be discussed gingerly as some sort of mysterious and optional product that some households have, while others do not. Then back to the charts.

This was true last week on a panel at the Woodrow Wilson Center. When my turn came, I attempted a few chart-free comments: To bolster the family, we certainly have to come to terms with ‘90s economics but also with ‘60s values, particularly the core value that self-fulfillment is a trump card over all obligations and expectations. By breaking the taboos against unwed motherhood and casual divorce, we have created the world’s most dangerous environment for children - a new fatherless America filling up with kids who are so emotionally damaged by their parents’ behavior that they may have a lot of trouble making commitments and forming families themselves.

The Murphy Brown argument is now over, and Dan Quayle has won - an avalanche of evidence shows that single-parent kids are way more vulnerable than two-parent kids to all sorts of damage, in all races and at all income levels, under all kinds of conditions. The mountain of evidence is just too high to keep arguing that different family forms are equally valuable or that “the quality of the home is the important thing, not the number of parents in it.”

Barbara Dafoe Whitehead, who wrote the “Dan Quayle Was Right” article in The Atlantic Monthly, says that as she travels around the country to colleges, she is struck by the number of angry, emotionally scarred children of divorce she runs into. They can function and often get high marks, so researchers may not pick up the social cost, but it is being paid. And these are the privileged ones.

Since the obvious tends to come as a thunderbolt on Washington panels, much umbrage was taken at my comments. In closing the panel, the comoderator, a well-known economist, said that a woman’s right to have a baby without having the father around is what feminism is all bout. In shaking her hand afterward, I remarked, perhaps a bit ungraciously, that intentionally planning to have a fatherless family was like setting out intentionally to build a Yugo.

It’s impossible to overestimate how deeply our intellectual and cultural elite is implicated in the continuing decline of the American nuclear family. It’s not just the constant jeering at the intact family as an Ozzie-and-Harriet relic of the Eisenhower era. It’s the constant broadening of the definition of what a family is (a New Jersey judge said that six college kids on summer vacation constituted a family), and the equally constant attempt to undermine policies that might help the intact family survive.

Maggie Gallagher, in her forthcoming book “The Abolition of Marriage,” says that marriage “has been ruthlessly dismantled, piece by piece, under the influence of those who … believed that the abolition of marriage was necessary to advance human freedom.” Demoted to one lifestyle among many, marriage is no longer viewed by the elite as a crucial social institution but as a purely private and temporary act.

There are many ways to show this world view in action. At the 1992 annual convention of the American Association for Marriage and Family Therapy, the word “marriage” appeared only twice among the 200-plus topics and subtopics to be discussed. In 1993, the word didn’t come up at all, and in 1994, the convention gave a major press award to a magazine article arguing that fathers weren’t necessary in the home. At last November’s 1995 convention, the status was still quo: two mentions for “marital” on the entire program, none for “marriage.”

This is an odd business. The therapeutic custodians of marriage don’t believe in it any more and seem determined not to bolster, promote or even talk about it much. The M-word seems to have disappeared from the association’s basic vocabulary. Why? Probably because the association is committed to a non-judgmental culture, in which all relationships are equally valuable, endlessly negotiable and disposable. So talking about marriage as a long-term serious commitment that must be shored up or preferred over other “lifestyles” becomes dicey and embarrassing.

The next skirmish in this continuing war between the elite and non-elite world views will be divorce reform. The elite will depict it as a punitive, backward and religious attempt to lock people into bad marriages.

But that’s not it. The point is that wide-open, anything-goes, no-fault divorce has unexpectedly created its own accelerating culture of non-commitment. Under no-fault divorce, marriage increasingly carries no more inherent social weight than a weekend fling in the Bahamas. The goal is not to halt divorce but to make it rarer by trying to restore gravity to both marriage and separation. But given the attitudes of our elite, the battle will be uphill all the way.

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The following fields overflowed: CREDIT = John Leo Universal Press Syndicate