Alas, a Blog

Family Scholars blog is having an online symposium on marriage policy, featuring responses to their new “State Of Our Unions” report from various folks with an interest in family and policy.

One thing that’s interesting is that this is a discussion about marriage and policy which is NOT, by and large, about same-sex marriage. The big exception was anti-marriage-equality activist Ryan Anderson, who pretty much argued that there can be no pro-marriage policy that is not premised on opposition to same-sex marriage. I really liked David Blankenhorn’s response to Ryan in comments:

Nothing good can happen until we all agree with him on matters of definitions and core principles? Really? I must have missed that memo. My own idea is that we have reached the place in our national discussion where it is not only possible, but also desirable, for people who disagree on gay marriage, or who aren’t sure about gay marriage, to come together in a broader conversation focussed on strengthening marriage as a social institution for all who seek it. And for those who, like Mr. Ryan, can only say “Oh no! You must jump in my little definition box until I say it’s OK for to come out and do something else,” I say, no thank you. And, no thank you.

My comment from that same thread:

I really hate the idea that “child-based” and “adult-based” are inherently contradictory, as if families are never good for the needs of adults. Surely healthy families are beneficial to the entire family, not just to the children.

As for gay marriage being “adult-based,” as Kevin says, that’s obviously an unfair generalization. Families headed by same-sex parents typically make the children’s well-being the organizing principle behind a huge number of their life choices (what hours do you work? What job do you take? What neighborhood do you live in? Who are your friends?). This is, of course, also the case of heterosexual parents.

In a less obvious sense, I’d say that any fully child-centered society needs full equality and acceptance of lgbt people. This is because a huge number of children – over one in twenty – will at some point realize that they are lgbt.

This is not a minor point. Lgbt children are just as important and worthy or protection as the non-queer children. And many of them will find it difficult to grow up healthy in a society that tells them that they cannot one day grow up and form families of their own.

I think a lot of it simply comes down to love. Queer people – and many other stigmatized minorities, such as the disabled, fat people, and others – are taught by our culture that we are unworthy of being loved. A lot of people overcome that message, of course, but even having to overcome it is a terrible effort that I’d rather kids not have to go through. For those who don’t manage to overcome that message, the result is that we have trouble even loving ourselves, or imagining how others could love us.

In a comment on Barbara Defoe Whitehead’s post, I wrote:

I’m all for efforts to increase the number of happy families with married parents. But I’d also like to see more done to study single-parent families whose kids do seem to have gotten what they need to survive and become happy adults. What makes those families different from those single-parent families whose kids turn out more troubled? Is there something that can be done on the policy level to make more single-parent families thrive?

La Lubu said “THIS” to that comment, which made me feel terribly happy, since La Lubu’s comments on FSB are consistently among the best writing I’ve read on any blog.

This entry by law professors June Carbone and Naomi Cahn was interesting:

…while we approve of many of the Project’s proposed policies, we doubt that these policies, good or bad, can fully address the issue. Instead, we need to place greater attention on the creation of good jobs, the relationship between employment stability and family health, and the societal responsibility to ensure that the next generation of children is not left behind. While the class-based decline in marriage is a symptom of growing inequality and economic privation, an exclusive focus on marriage cannot by itself restore family health.

Regular “Alas” readers won’t be surprised that I agreed with that. But then they said something I didn’t know:

Over the last thirty years, greater economic inequality has done something very unusual: it has shifted the cultural strategies at the top and the bottom of the economic order in different directions. At the top, the dedication to stable two, parent families has come not just from a cultural commitment to marriage, but from the fact that the gendered wage gap for college graduates has increased. As a result, high-earning men outnumber high-earning women to a greater degree today than in 1990, and all but the wealthiest men need high-income women to afford middle class life in the fastest growing and most expensive metropolitan areas. Today, executives no longer marry their secretaries; they marry fellow executives. And in these dual-earner families, the maid cleans the toilets while the parents trade-off homework supervision and Little League attendance.

I was surprised that the gendered wage gap for college graduates has increased, since overall the gender gap has been slowly declining. Looking around, I found this graph, which does indeed show that the gender gap for recent college graduates has been getting larger for the last decade.

I’m not sure their picture of what wealthy families do is all that useful, though. Although the middle class has been declining, my suspicion is that middle-class married couples still far outnumber couples who can afford hiring a maid.

I don’t think that there are a lot of good-paying jobs in America’s future. The manufacturing base has for the most part left America and won’t come back, and automation may well continue making human workers less necessary. As a culture, we should rethink our picture of the good life, and find a way for more families to be happy and content with less wealth and income. I think that’s possible, because what’s most important is not economic plenty but economic security. I think more people could be happy with less income if they felt secure in their housing, their health, and their food.

Finally, you might also want to read Kevin Maillard’s harsh critique of the entire project.