A few weeks ago on MarraigeMovement.org – a blog owned by The Institute for American Values – David Blankenhorn wrote:
I should mention that David Blankenhorn is the president of the Institute for American Values. In fact, according to the Institute’s personnel page, he founded the institute.
So I don’t think I’m inferring too much if I assume that The Marriage Movement: A Statement of Principles, published in 2000 by the Institute for American Values, was produced with David’s approval. So what did the Institute think about marriage before opposing gay marriage became their primary shtick?
Marriage has at least six important dimensions:
Marriage is a legal contract. Marriage creates formal and legal obligations and rights between spouses. Public recognition of, and protection for, this marriage contract, whether in tax or divorce law, helps married couples succeed in creating a permanent bond.
Marriage is a financial partnership. In marriage, “my money” typically becomes “our money,” and this sharing of property creates its own kind of intimacy and mutuality that is difficult to achieve outside a legal marriage. Only lovers who make this legal vow typically acquire the confidence that allows them to share their bank accounts as well as their bed.
Marriage is a sacred promise. Even people who are not part of any organized religion usually see marriage as a sacred union, with profound spiritual implications. “Whether it is the deep metaphors of covenant as in Judaism, Islam and Reformed Protestantism; sacrament as in Roman Catholicism or Eastern Orthodoxy; the yin and yang of Confucianism; the quasi-sacramentalism of Hinduism; or the mysticism often associated with allegedly modern romantic love,” Don Browning writes, “humans tend to find values in marriage that call them beyond the mundane and everyday.” Religious faith helps to deepen the meaning of marriage and provides a unique fountainhead of inspiration and support when troubles arise.
Marriage is a sexual union. Marriage elevates sexual desire into a permanent sign of love, turning two lovers into “one flesh.” Marriage indicates not only a private but a public understanding that two people have withdrawn themselves from the sexual marketplace. This public vow of fidelity also makes men and women more likely to be faithful. Research shows, for example, that cohabiting men are four times more likely to cheat than husbands, and cohabiting women are eight times more likely to cheat than spouses.
Marriage is a personal bond. Marriage is the ultimate avowal of caring, committed, and collaborative love. Marriage incorporates our desire to know and be known by another human being; it represents our dearest hopes that love is not a temporary condition, that we are not condemned to drift in and out of shifting relationships forever.
Marriage is a family-making bond. Marriage takes two biological strangers and turns them into each other’s next-of-kin. As a procreative bond, marriage also includes a commitment to care for any children produced by the married couple. It reinforces fathers’ (and fathers’ kin’s) obligations to acknowledge children as part of the family system.
In all these ways, marriage is a productive institution, not a consumer good. Marriage does not simply certify existing loving relationships, but rather transforms the ways in which couples act toward one another, toward their children, and toward the future. Marriage also changes the way in which other individuals, groups, and institutions think about and act toward the couple. The public, legal side of marriage increases couples’ confidence that their partnerships will last. Conversely, the more marriage is redefined as simply a private relationship, the less effective marriage becomes in helping couples achieve their goal of a lasting bond.
Is it just me, or could 99.9% of what the Institute was saying about marriage just three years ago could be used, today, as excellent arguments in favor of same-sex marriage? Every need that marriage fulfills – according to their 2000 statement of principles – is a need that same-sexers have, too.
Notice how little their 2000 “dimensions of marriage” talk about “child well-being” – nowadays they think marriage is almost exclusively about children, but back then children barely made their list of marriage’s important dimensions. Notice also that just a few years ago – before the gay marriage controversy was so mainstream – their core “dimensions” of marriage didn’t include a word about “heterosexual intercourse.”
So, contrary to David’s claims, it’s evident that talking about “heterosexual intercourse” and the like is something they “just thought up five minutes ago in response to a political controversy.” They’ve been redefining what they say is important about marriage, because their old definition wouldn’t have been convenient to their new goal of excluding gays.
Let’s hope they someday get their 2000 principles back.
ADDED NEARLY TWO YEARS LATER: I should have acknowledged, when I originally wrote this, that the claim that children do best when raised by their own biological, married parents appears in this statement (although not present in their list of “at least six important dimensions” of marriage), and is clearly important to the writers. What’s missing is the claim that biological parenthood is the ONLY reason for marriage that counts, and that without that marriage is empty of meaning – a claim that’s essential to anti-SSM arguments today. Clearly, before they began fixing their thoughts around the need to oppose SSM, they realized that biological child-rearing was not the sole important dimension of marriage.
UPDATE 10/28/05: David responds (to andrew sullivan, not to me!), and I respond in turn..
Smokin’ catch. Bravo!
Agreed, good catch. I also wonder why they’re so against marriage for people who are impotent or otherwise uninterested in sexual intercourse?
Ohh, very nice, Amp. Once again, you have impressed me, sir.
—JRC
It’s not just gay relationships that involve a “legal contract” or a “financial partnership” or a “personal bond,” or what have you. While most of those characteristics may be true of gay relationships, as you point out, they are also true of some friendships or some business partnerships. The list is just describing marriage in general, not describing what makes marriage so unique that society should grant special privileges to it. Unlike the 2000 document, the current debate is focused on why society should care to recognize marriage. And the central question on that issue is what to do with children.
Even in the 2000 document, you might have noticed that the last item on the list deals with children:
Marriage is a family-making bond. Marriage takes two biological strangers and turns them into each other’s next-of-kin. As a procreative bond, marriage also includes a commitment to care for any children produced by the married couple. It reinforces fathers’ (and fathers’ kin’s) obligations to acknowledge children as part of the family system.
This factor is NOT true of gay relationships. There are NO “children produced by” gay relationships. Two men, or two women, simply cannot reproduce together. No child has “two mothers” or “two fathers” — it’s a biological impossibility. The only way they can produce children is by engaging in heterosexual activity, or by using expensive technology that takes the place of heterosexual activity. And even then, they have not reproduced as a couple. One of them has reproduced heterosexually with someone else, and the other person is a mere bystander.
Not all heterosexual couples reproduce. True. But that’s irrelevant. What is relevant is that ONLY heterosexual couples have even the possibility of producing children as a couple. That is the main reason why the rest of society has an interest in making sure that parents (fathers in particular) are incentivized and pressured to be responsible for the children that they might produce. I don’t see how society has any interest, however, in promoting gay pairing.
Conception and pregnancy are only a small part of what creating a child entails. Raising a child to be a productive adult and a good human being are extremely important. I’ve seen no good evidence that these functions can’t be accomplished just as well by a gay couple as a straight one (or by a straight couple other than the biological parents).
People (gay or straight) who want children will get them one way or another, whether it’s the old-fashioned way, adoption, IVF, or whatever. It’s in society’s interest to promote the best environment for raising those children. I see no reason why biological parents and children should get special consideration.
I don’t see how society has any interest, however, in promoting gay pairing.
. . .except of course, that gay and lesbian couples can and do have children, either through artificial insemination, surrogacy, or adoption, and society has a vested interest in promoting both healthy, loving, financially secure homes and legal, recognized, non-stigmatized families for those children.
Other than that, yeah.
Perhaps you would care to explain (using actual evidence, please) why you believe society has any interest in discouraging financial and legal stability for two parent families.
—JRC
Joe M,
It’s only FERTILE heterosexual couples that have the possibility of conceiving a child within the two-person relationship without outside “help”. For your thesis to be valid, you have to restrict marriage to ONLY fertile heterosexual couples. No more marriage for post-menopausal women, for instance. But this isn’t on the agenda, is it, so this point is very relevant. It points out one (one of many) ways in which the anti-gay marriage forces are hypocritical.
I don’t see why society has any particular business “promoting” any sort of marriage myself.
Joe, I half agree with you. Or maybe a third.
As I see it, marriage is indeed about families. It’s about people making a formal commitment to stay together and support each other, bond their destinies together.
And yes, I agree with the people who say marriage probably wouldn’t have been invented if not for children. Children need a stable place to grow up, a family, and marriage is how families are made. And marriages are best built on love.
But I don’t think children are an inherent part of families; I’m perfectly fine with people getting married without having children. (I do think people who have children really ought to get married.)
Where we part ways is at your emphasis on the married couple needing to be the child’s biological parents. Sure, maybe that’s usually the best route, but it’s not the only route, and I’m not one to let the perfect be the enemy of the good. I see no reason why a couple shouldn’t be allowed to marry and raise adopted children, or children of one partner’s earlier marriage, or children born out of one partner having been raped, or whatever. And I therefore see no reason that those two partners need to be the same sex.
And, of course, no reason why same-sex couple should need children (or the biological potential to have children) to get married, any more than opposite-sex couples do.
Good one, Amp.
I’ve noticed before how principles suddenly arise out of nowhere, or virtually nowhere, in order to make political points.
Take the fetus, for instance. Up until a few years ago nobody considered it “a person,” however much individual women might mourn their miscarriages. The fetus has never been counted in the census, and it was never necessary to say that it was excluded. (Slaves were counted in slavery days, and not as 3/5ths of a person, either: the 3/5ths part only related to congressional representation.) Fetusus that never lived outside the womb were almost never buried in regular graves unless they were full-term miscarriages. I’m still waiting for the anti-choicers to carve conception dates instead of birth dates on their tombstones, or to start agitating for things like voting age to be measured from conception date instead of birth date. If they really think a fetus is equally as human as any born person, they’ll do these things. And name and bury every spontaneously miscarried zygote, of which there are millions every year, far more than all the induced abortions.
Sex is fun.
.That is the main reason why the rest of society has an interest in making sure that parents (fathers in particular) are incentivized and pressured to be responsible for the children that they might produce. I don’t see how society has any interest, however, in promoting gay pairing.
For this statement to be true, divorce would have to be harder to obtain, or more obsticals placed before re-marriage when children are involved. Otherwise, what incentive is placed on heterosexual couples to stay together with those children? Also, why the focus on reproduction when you don’t have bloodties as a requirement for hetorsexual couples? Does it really matter that two men or two women can’t reproduce children naturaly when they have children now? Preventing SSM does nothing for these children.
The ‘made up 5 minutes ago’ thing is silly. As far as I can tell, Christianity and before that Judaism (and Islam) held that marriage was the union of a man with a woman. And the first commandment given to them was to have children (if possible). I know any opposing viewpoint here is flamed but I just would like anyone looking here to consider: society has been based on particular roles for men and particular roles for women for milennia. Often these roles have not been quite as they should be, but they are much closer to ideal than families based on ‘same gender’ parents can be.
I suppose that after dropping the foundations which established our society, we will only be able to sort this out by ‘trial and error’ but I have this feeling that the social mores which have been established for longer than anyone really knows were really close to what is ideal, although sometimes women have been mistreated or undervalued, children have been neglected, families have failed.
The well-being of children really is what is important, men really are different than women, and the ideal family situation is where a father models manhood and the mother womanhood, parents love each other, and share work as best they can. You can find many examples of happy men and women that follow these roles, and their lives are a witness to what I say. I wonder if we will live to see the day when ninety-something year old gay couples will be on the news because they have just enjoyed a 60th anniversary. There might be an occasional oddity, but I don’t expect to see it in my lifetime.
men really are different than women, and the ideal family situation is where a father models manhood and the mother womanhood, parents love each other, and share work as best they can.
See, you can assert this, and you can assert this some more, and you can restate it in a variety of different ways, but I’ve never seen any coherent reason why I should believe this rather than thinking that two people who both care about the child’s welfare make the best parenting combo whatever plumbing they may have.
Oh, and speaking of plumbing, who should I (pre-everything FtM, birth mother of a baby girl) partner with to give my daughter the “ideal family situation”?
i’m the first to admit that i may lack understanding of many words in common use. could you explain exactly what “manhood” and “womanhood” actually are?
according to dictionary.com:
does this mean that women cannot model “courage, determination, and vigor” to their children? and is it only a parent that can model what an adult male is, or “the state of being human” for children?
interestingly enough, dictionary.com defines “womanhood” as:
apparently, women do *not* model “the state of being human” according to dictionary.com. i know a fair number of women who would take issue with that, myself included.
i wonder what the ” composite of qualities thought to be appropriate to or representative of women” actually are – or at least those “qualities thought to be appropriate to or representative of women” that men cannot also model.
perhaps you could provide some insight into that.
i’d also venture to say that i could find many examples of families that consist of men and women who do *not* follow the roles of which you speak, and offer direct contradiction to the well-being of their children.
and other than their reproductive function, i wonder how “men really are different than women”. what, exactly, are those differences and how do those differences contribute to the “well-being of children”?
A marriage is way (theoretically) of signalling “hands off” to the rest of the community, clan, etc. The paternaty is thus assured. It is also a way of society telling the male he must support the female; i.e., not abandon her after impregnation. Marriage is a protection for the female. Our very reproductive strategy is partnership, something quite rare in the animal kingdom.
Having said all of that though, we have to view our evolutionary progress against the structures we have created. The human animal’s glory is its ability to adapt. We have created societal structures where it is possible for a female to survive and raise offspring without the male being closely attached. This was impossible at one time because who would hunt for them?
Society, in order to nuture and protect it’s “breeding pairs” has given marriage all sorts of protections, tax incentives, etc.
So what is marriage now? In the traditional sense gay marriage seems pointless. But, in the traditional sense, heterosexual marriage without an intent to procreate seems equally pointless. Gays, not without reason, point to hetero couples of advanced age getting married and getting all of the goodies they are denied.
Society is not ready to equate gay unions with traditional marriage. Score last election cycle 0-11. But I think the main objection is giving tax breaks, etc. to people just because they decide to live together. I have an objection to supporting a union, gay or straight, with tax dollars unless there are children (who all society has an interest in). I don’t think society objects to other rights like successorship, medical decisions, inheritance, etc.
I think it is wise to have something other than marriage open to straights and gays to signal a stable relationship but without the intent to procreate. Civil Unions provide that. Traditiona Marriage should be reserved for “breeding pairs” but the only societal benefits should attach are to the children not the couple per se. Gay couples raising children should receive those same benefits.
The Right wishes gays would just go back in the closet but it ain’t gonna happen so we have to deal with reality sooner or later.
I think it is wise to have something other than marriage open to straights and gays to signal a stable relationship but without the intent to procreate. Civil Unions provide that. Traditiona Marriage should be reserved for “breeding pairs” but the only societal benefits should attach are to the children not the couple per se. Gay couples raising children should receive those same benefits.
Wow. What a myopic view of marriage. Marriage serves purposes other than breeding – designating next of kin for one example. What an ignorant view of how taxes work wrt marriage. What a lack of knowledge of anthropology & history – without even going into the huge missing understanding of evolution, etc. Why am I even reading people like this any more?
Jake:
Let me ask then, what is endemic within the institution of marriage that may not exist without it? Love? Certainly not. One does not have be married to have or designate a next of kin or a beneficiary. I’m not married and yet I have a “pair bond” that has endured 20+ years. Marriage is indeed about breeding.
Perhaps would would care to enlighten me about evolution. Perhaps you’d assist me to enlightenment. Perhaps would would compare the breeding strategy of other high primates to humans.
Magis: Let me ask then, what is endemic within the institution of marriage that may not exist without it?
Nothing. Did you mean to ask some other question? One that makes sense?
One does not have be married to have or designate a next of kin or a beneficiary.
Really? I can just name my bestest buddy in the whole world my next of kin & that will be legally recognized if we are not already recognized as next of kin due to familial relationship and if we are not married? Last I checked, there is no way for me to name, say, Magis as my next of kin & have it be legally recognized in matters of inheritance or medical decision making/visitation.
And besides that, what Omar said.
And here I am once again. Sucked into the immense vacuum created by appalling ignorance. Bleh.
Jake,
You can designate anyone to make your legal and medical decisions by virtue of a durable power of attorney (If I’m not mistaken), and you can choose to leave your estate in its entirety to anyone you wish through a will.
Mendy,
As to your estate… Yes, but it is still open to being challenged by actual legally recognized kin.
As to durable power of attorney… In theory, yes. In pratice, it ain’t that easy. It’s much easier if the person making medical decisions is your wife/husband/son/daughter/mother/father. Especially if your wife/husband/son/daughter/mother/father is around to contest against the person that you’ve designated.
Besides which, those were merely two examples of the legal rights that next of kin possess with regards to you. There are lots of others.
and you can choose to leave your estate in its entirety to anyone you wish through a will>
Not quite. You generally can’t disinherit a spouse and it’s difficult to disinherit children.
Our very reproductive strategy is partnership
The many polygamous societies throughout history and cultures, as well as other higher primates, would be surprised to hear they don’t exist and never did.