Belle, who favors same-sex marriage, nonetheless says that this is one of the most compelling anti-SSM arguments:
The change SSM advocates propose is a radical one, and we can’t be sure exactly what will happen. The last time a radical change to marriage was enacted on the grounds of maximizing individual liberty and happiness it turned out to be a disaster from a broader point of view, and especially for children.
Even if Belle is just playing devil’s advocate here, I think it’s worth responding.
First of all, it’s not clear that civil recognition of same-sex marriage is itself a radical change. I’ve argued in the past that SSM is just a relatively small side effect of two genuinely radical long-term trends. The first radical change is feminism’s defeat of “separate spheres” ideology: Now that it’s no longer true that women and men fulfill two strictly-bounded, separate roles, the rule that only women may marry men and vice-versa has lost its logical basis in our society. The second radical change is the gay rights movement, which has made huge strides towards acceptance of the equal humanity and dignity of lesbian and gay relationships. It is these two radical trends – which effect so much more than just marriage – which have made SSM a real possibility in our society. And although it’s certainly true that we “can’t be sure exactly what will happen” due to those two radical (and still ongoing) changes, it seems unlikely that either of these trends can be stopped just by opposing same-sex marriage. Second, the most recent “radical change to marriage” wasn’t no-fault divorce; it was the near-total elimination of the marital exemption to rape laws. Although like all changes to marriage, this change was in the works for years before it led to a change in law, most of the actual modifications of the relevant laws took place in the 80s and 90s. Is it possible for someone who takes the anti-SSM arguments seriously to justify the elimination of the marital rape exemption? I’m not sure it is. The Burkean hand-waving approach (short version: we can’t be sure that unintended effects of any change won’t be bad, so all change is bad) would clearly weigh against outlawing marital rape; making it illegal for husbands to rape their wives significantly changed the rules of every existing marriage, with who knew what results? And giving wives the right to refuse sex with their husbands strongly suggests that marriage is not only about procreation, but also includes concern for what’s good for adults – exactly the view of marriage that same-sex marriage opponents always say they oppose. Finally, contrary to the conventional wisdom, no-fault divorce wasn’t an unmitigated disaster. To this day, social scientists argue about no-fault’s impact; many empirical studies have either found that no-fault divorce laws had no effect on long-term divorce rates, or had only a relatively small effect. More importantly, no-fault divorce has literally been a lifesaver for some abused women. Even if we assume that no-fault divorce increased the divorce rate, its benefits may still outweigh its negatives.
Why is increasing the divorce rate held to be a bad thing? Divorce is not, in and of itself, obviously bad — people change, or they make bad decisions in the first place, and having a relatively harmonious way to say “this isn’t working” seems to me a good thing.
Actually, having been through a divorce (and a relatively painless one, at that…) Divorce *is* a bad thing. It’s incredibly painful, can devastate people financially, and literally tears a family apart. My husband and I didn’t have children, but that doesn’t change the fact that when a couple are married, it isn’t just about them: it’s the joining of two families, and when that relationship is severed, a lot of people are affected negatively. In the long run, is it worth it? In some cases, absolutely! It was hard for us, and for our families, but noone was permanantly injured by it. My elder brother and sister, however, were absolutely torn apart when their parents divorced, and both have told me that now that they have children, they would rather stay in an unhappy marriage than put their kids through that.
The opposite side (from a person who’s parents are still unhappily married), is that watching your parents hate each other in close proximity day in and day out, is not neutral territory to begin with. It’s already a situation that’s damaging to children.
From having lived it as a child, I might stay in a dull, or business arrangement type marriage for the sake of the children. But I would never ever stay in an actively unhappy one.
“The opposite side (from a person who’s parents are still unhappily married), is that watching your parents hate each other in close proximity day in and day out, is not neutral territory to begin with. It’s already a situation that’s damaging to children.”
I’ve been there myself, though my parents are now divorced and much happier as a result. I’ve often wondered how much of the damage seen in children of divorced parents was really done by living in a high conflict situation.
So, uh, what was the successfulness of the last time a colony or colonies rebelled against the British empire before the American colonies tried it? If this line of logic were at all accurate, we wouldn’t have a country of our own to be arguing over this in.
I’d like to add my voice as another child of divorced parents. I don’t see divorce as a bad thing. For a married couple, it’s not ideal but if a marriage doesn’t work, then a marriage doesn’t work and no amount of “staying together for the sake of the family” is going to change that.
Did my parents getting divorced affect all of us? Sure. It was hard on my parents, hard on us kids, and hard on the family at large. But what would have been even harder would be to grow up seeing my parents come to hate each other because they were trapped by the idea that divorce is “bad”.
In the end, not one of us children have permanent problems because our parents are divorced. It was a sucky situation that we all adjusted to, just like a million other sucky situations we’ve encoutered over the years. Both our families adjusted to the change. And, most importantly, my parents are much happier now than I ever saw them when they were married.
I know an awful lot of people who would say access to divorce has been a lifesaver, not an unmitigated disaster. People who groan about the divorce rate don’t seem to understand that there is a difference between bad and worse. Divorce is bad, or at least painful, most of the time. No one is disputing this. But being trapped in a loveless or abusive marriage is far worse, for men and women…and for their kids.
Once a bad marriage exists, there are no painless options. Just some that will be better in the long run than others. Which is why it’s so important that people enter into marriage in a mature and thoughtful way, if they’re going to do it at all.
The anti-SSM/anti-divorce types just don’t seem to grasp (or refuse to admit) that before marriage laws were revised, a great many of those “stable” couples were miserable and bitter, cheated on one another, and treated each other horribly. To say expanded rights to divorce are an unmitigated disaster is a flat out lie, in my opinion.
Emjaybee, “unmitigated disaster” is your phrase. The actual text is “a disaster from a broader point of view, and especially for children”.
Your phrasing is indeed incompatible with your observation that for many people, easier access to divorce was beneficial – but the actual phrasing is not incompatible. Something can be a disaster in the broad sense while still being beneficial to selected individuals; generator salesmen thrive in the wake of a hurricane.
Robert, “unmitigated disaster” was my phrase (see the second-to-last paragraph of my post), and it’s likely that’s what Emjaybee was responding to.
“The opposite side (from a person who’s parents are still unhappily married), is that watching your parents hate each other in close proximity day in and day out, is not neutral territory to begin with. It’s already a situation that’s damaging to children.”
Absolutely. I had friends growing up who prayed desperately that their parents would split up: a divided family was better than going home to a war zone every day. My point wasn’t that divorce wasn’t sometimes the lesser of two evils, but rather that it is, in and of itself, an evil. So is amputation, but when you’ve got a gangrened foot, it’s the lesser evil.
Robert, I think your analogy about generator salesmen after a hurricane is much too extreme to accurately illustrate the point, and a bit misleading. Generator sales spike after a hurricane BECAUSE people suffer, among other things, a loss of electricity. The increase in sales is directly caused by other people’s material losses (which are caused by the hurricane). It would be innacurate to imply that the divorcees’ benefits are caused by their children’s distress. Although granted, you didn’t mean to imply that.
Yes, my biggest pet peeve, in case you haven’t noticed, is inaccurate and misleading analogies.
I think a better way to illustrate it would be to compare divorce to evacuation from that hurricane. The marriage is a nice house on or near the coast. When a bad hurricane threatens, do you batten down the hatches and weather the storm, or do you evacuate? Neither option is all that pleasant, certainly, but the option to evacuate needs to be there, and it is not productive at all to have the National Guard stationed at all exit points interfering with that evacuation on the basis that people are evacuating for no good reasson.
By the way, arguments about which is right in which circumstances aside, the negative effects of divorce on children could be lessened somewhat by creating information campaigns and incentives for parents to keep their conflict and hatred and fights strictly apart from their kids, and to provide the kids with counseling about it. I don’t know how one would do this, but making sure that divorcing couples know that fights harm and distress their children, as does belittling the other parent in front of them, using them as messengers, and encouraging/bribing them to make their preferences known in the custody battle. My uncle is in the middle of a divorce, and he’s been very careful to keep divorce stresses separate from his kids. This by no means solves everything, but it’s a case of “we can make this less problematic, so let’s do so.”
Speaking of “access to divorce” one can take a look at what happened to my parents. When I was 14 my parents separated (not divorced). It was a very difficult time for me and for my brother, but especially me since I was the one still living with my parents. But as time went on, their relationship started to mend. About a year later they started dating again, and after two and a half years were fully back together and their marriage is that much stronger for it.
I am constantly proud of them for what they did, it took great courage for both of them after more than 20 years of marriage, to acknowledge that things were not going well and act accordingly. But I wonder what would happen if there was no possibility for divorce. Would there marriage mend if there wasn’t a possibility that it could easily be terminated? I personally highly doubt it.
Raznor, it’s great that your folks were able to rebuild their relationship. More power to ’em.
However, being able to avoid a renegotiation of a relationship through dissolution is not generally a positive inducement to the (probably painful) renegotiation.
My folks have a similar story – but their happy ending was made possible by the fact that neither one of them had done anything that would justify divorce in their own eyes, and so they were left with a choice between fixing things or stewing in their own misery. They chose to fix it. If divorce had been an option for them – if one or the other had thought “things being not great” was sufficient justification to dissolve a lifetime promise – then they would have done that.
I suspect most people follow an incentive-response strategy closer to that of my folks than that of your folks.
Before reasonably easy access to divorce, I believe many marriages were “ended” by simple abandonment. But of course these were not reflected in DIVORCE rates.
That said, it seems to me (anectodal evidence only) that many people do have unrealistic expectations for their marriages, and no fault divorce makes it less likely that they will have/take the time to grow into their marriages. As John Gierach said, things that aren’t perfect have some value in this world, and that’s a good thing because there’s plenty of them.
I think it’s possible to support no-fault divorce while still maintaining that it’s unconscionable to, say, dump your spouse because she’s forty and you really deserve someone younger and prettier. Or because you have this itch to run off to Big Sur and make pottery.
Being able to end a bad marriage has given women, especially, increased bargaining power within the marriages they already have. There is a paper by Wolfers and Stevenson showing that female suicide and spousal murder (of men by women) has gone down a lot since no-fault divorce (and, I’m sure, women’s shelters) has been enacted.
And my guess is that the same men who decide they’d rather have a cute young thang rather than their boring old wife are the same ones who would have taken young mistresses in the past. Perhaps the answer to preventing divorce for selfish or frivolous reasons is to change the consumer-oriented, bargain-hunting view of relationships in our society, or, short-term, to marry someone with a conscience and sense of honor in the first place.
Yes, a disaster from “a” broader point of view, and an incredible success, especially for children, from another, equally broad point of view. It’s dishonest for Belle to implythat there is only one all-encompassing view of no-fault divorce, and it’s a negative one.
I am still waiting for some proponent of fault-only divorce to explain to me how such laws benefit children. The belief seems to be that most people who divorce are just lazy, and if we don’t let them divorce, they’ll grumble and go back to behaving themselves.
It’s not about making it difficult, it’s about punishing people for getting divorced. No, I’m not kidding at all about this.
Not to worry, Mythago, belle has recanted her thoughtcrime.
Robert said:
I thougth thoughtcrime had to, you know, be thought rather than said. I’d say Belle says it pretty loud and clear in her post [emphasis mine]:
And, anyway, where exactly does Belle retract, or even truly examine, her statement? I read through the entire post, even glanced through the more recent posts, and I failed to find it. Is it in the comments or something?
where exactly does Belle retract, or even truly examine, her statement
In the next post of her blog, where she grovelingly apologizes for having dared offend the orthodox.
Read more carefully, Robert. The “next post” in the blog Belle shares with John, in toto:
Now what I think you’re screwed up on is that the post Barry references is the post after her currently notorious exercise in devil’s advocacy, and it does apologize for treating as a high-school debate exercise the cheap bigotry in dismissing utterly the civil rights of the minority to protect the privilege of the majority—an issue of no little concern to some of her regular commenters, to whom she offered an appropriate apology.
Nothing whatsoever about recanting her unorthodox opinion on no-fault divorce: the topic ostensibly under discussion.
Also: no one who knows anything at all about Belle would ever pair her name with the word “grovellingly.” Thanks for the giggle.
Kip, you’re correct. Thanks for the clarification.
Although, you’re just jealous of my great beauty.
Is that what we’re calling it this week?
Remember, when a conservative wins a debate, it’s an exercise of free speech; when a conservative loses a debate, they’ve been shouted down and silenced by the PC majority for comitting thoughtcrime.
I guess this is a good a time as any to pimp my eyeball cake, eh?
Mythago, that’s brilliant. I love your eyeball and your cake-making genius.
Remember, when a conservative wins a debate, it’s an exercise of free speech; when a conservative loses a debate, they’ve been shouted down and silenced by the PC majority for comitting thoughtcrime.
Don’t be silly: a conservative never loses a debate. They’ll move the goalposts and start shouting personal abuse at you if you comment on this, but they never lose.
You can also make a lovely pumpkin-shaped cake by splicing two Bundt cakes together. I have pictures. :)
The idea that, “divorce is a bad thing,” makes me laugh. Is it divorce, itself, that is painful? Or is it that the circumstances that surround divorce are painful?
I don’t find my divorce (or the process that I went through to get the divorce) to be painful. I find the betrayal of trust (among other things) that led to my divorce to be painful. When I look back on it, I don’t regret or grieve my divorce. I regret my marriage and I grieve the loss caused by the betrayal of trust.
I don’t think that I know anybody who has gotten a divorce because they are tired of their spouse or too lazy to try to improve their marriage. But that’s just anecdotal. I don’t recall ever hearing about a study that concluded that many folks use no-fault divorce because it’s “easier” than trying to fix the problems that exist within their marriage.
If divorce saves two people from being miserable, and by extension, making their kids miserable, then I will not call it evil. It’s no more evil than chemotherapy or other unpleasant but lifesaving treatments.
What’s evil is fucking around on your spouse, being verbally/emotionally/physically abusive, trashing your spouse to your kids (yes, married people do it too, y’know), or other misbehaviors. And while it’s shitty and rotten for people to bail out of marriage for a newer model spouse, or a whim, or whatever, it burns me up that people assume that folks get divorced for dumb reasons. Or that it’s “easier.”
How, exactly, is making divorce harder going to help things? ‘Cause you know what? I wouldn’t want to be stuck with a guy who’d rather marry his secretary who’s twenty years younger than me.
We shouldn’t make it harder to get a divorce. We should make it harder to get married. Any heterosexual couple can go through a drive-through chapel in Las Vegas and tie the knot, even if they’ve only known each other a few days. You can get married for truly stupid reasons (oh, everyone I know is married, I always wanted that party, I think I’m supposed to do this, blah, blah, blah) and no one says a word about it. No condemnation there.
Word, Sheelzebub. We should require three or more counseling sessions with a qualified professional, and a background check process similar to buying a gun (with results provided to both applicants), and there should be a waiting period between the time the license is issued and the public commitment ceremony.
Sorry, Sheelzebub, I see an attraction, not an achievement in making it tougher for any adult to marry. If the state is going to be in the business of recognizing relationships and handing out goodies on the basis of such, it should be to any configuration of consenting adults. I say this as someone who feels marriage is passe and should be euthanized as gently as possible. I’m with you on no-fault divorce: to parpaphrase JoAnne Wypiewski, divorce (along with adultery) save the institution of marriage very day.
Speaking of Burkean hand-wringing, Amp, if you’re objections to polygamy stated in your previous post aren’t Burkean handwringing, what is?
I was in an abusive marriage for 16 years. Emotional abuse – screaming, name calling, threats for trivial or non existent reason; slander, isolation; rage, physical abuse, locked out of the house, hit; no title to the house, but I cleaned it on my hands and knees; worked for minimum wages when my millionaire husband was enjoying his European vacations; was cheated on, manipulated….
Six years after the divorce – a travesty of justice or common decency – the pain is still intense. Not of the divorce but of the abuse that I had to live with because I thought nice people didnt divorce. Because of all the trivial, shallow, judgmental arguments of people who haven’t undergone that same suffering and presume to tell others what is good for them as though one size fits all..because of religions and laws written by people who were never married or never married badly..because of ignorant pampered women who clutch Bibles and ram their provincial ideas about what it takes to raise children or be a good wife or anything else down everyone else’s throat. As though anyone knows what will or will not destroy society. As though a man and a woman together are the epitome and peak of human relationships instead of just one…what about brother and sister or friends…
You breed so you’re blessed, right? As though the world has ever lacked for breeders and children. But it’s lacked for love and justice, alright.