Justin Katz of Dust in the Light. has responded to my post describing the drop in the US non-marital birthrate and its the relationship to the campaign for same sex marriage. Mr. Katz suggests my argument is flawed in these ways:
- Either a) I misstate the themes promoted by advocates of same sex marriage or b) I correctly state the themes, but pre-date these themes to some time before either the publication of Jonathan Rauch’s new book, the Goodridge case or the drop in the non-marital birth ratio.
- I fail to address three possible alternate reasons for the distinct drop in the rate of increase in the US non-marital birth ratio.
- Either the drop in the rate of increase in the US non-marital birth ratio is a) not distinctive, or b) it is distinctive, but it is not strongly associated with the key events in the US campaign for SSM.
- I did not expend as much ink as Dr. Kurtz who explains why the campaign for same sex marriage could potentially effect on the non-marital birth ratio.
I think these criticisms are worth serious amounts of ink. I will address the first criticism in this article, and the other criticisms in later articles.
Mr. Katz suggests I misstate the principal themes of the campaign for same sex marriage. More precisely, he thinks I define the themes too narrowly. Mr. Katz is correct to believe that misstating principal themes, defining them either too broadly or too narrowly or predating them would flaw my argument. ( I believe Dr. Kurtz entirely misstates theme of the campaign for same sex marriage; that is one of the flaws in his argument.)
However I think I state correct themes that are neither overly broad narrow nor anachronistic. To support my claim, I will address these three important questions:
To begin, let us compare the themes Mr. Katz and I suggest.
- I believe that the right to make a lifelong commitment and provide a safe haven for families with children rank among the principal themes of the campaign for SSM.
- Mr. Katz suggests “the principle theme of advocacy for SSM has been to assert their rights to marry”.
Our themes differ, yet I do not think his theme is totally incorrect; it is only too broad. It begs the question: to marry and then what?
Nevertheless I must clarify.
The way I define a “principal theme” is related to how I categorizes the numerous campaigns operating simultaneously under an umbrella or parent campaign. In this context, the campaign for same sex marriage falls under the parent campaign for gay rights. I see the assertion of the right to marry as the one of the principal themes of the parent campaign for gay rights. Other themes in the parent campaign include the right to nondiscrimination in employment and housing, and decriminalizing gay sex. Looked at individually, many of the themes of the parent campaigns are themselves campaigns, which we could call child campaigns. Each child campaign has its own principle themes.[1]
The campaign for gay marriage as a child campaign, has its own principal themes which distinguish the child campaign from the parent campaign. Promoting long term commitment and responsible parenthood number among the principal themes of those advocating legalized same sex marriage.
Evidently, Mr. Katz sees the themes I identify this way as being overly narrow. I believe substituting the themes of parent or umbrella campaign as overly broad.
Right or wrong, I will continue to classify themes of campaigns in this way.[2] When evaluating the effect of the campaign for same sex marriage on the nonmarital birth ratio I think it is foolish to focus on the broader theme of the parent campaign. To do so would suggest “the right to marry” and “the right to nondiscrimination in housing” have equal potential effects on the non-marital birthrate.
Interestingly, like me, Dr. Kurtz does not suggest the theme of the parent campaign for gay rights as the theme for SSM. Dr. Kurtz seems to think one of the principal themes of those advocating same sex marriage is the idea that parents should not be married, or that unmarried parents are preferable to married parents.[3] Right or wrong, his theme and mine are equally narrow, and being excessivly narrow is the flaw Mr. Katz finds in my choice of theme.
Since Dr. Kurtz suggested theme and mine are equally narrow Mr. Katz must also find Dr. Kurtz’s theme overly narrow. If Mr. Katz thinks this, I have not yet read Mr. Katz’s criticism.
While I am addressing this Dr. Kurtz’s theme, I want to comment on what I see as its flaw. It is simply incorrect. Better expressions of the theme include this one: “Preventing a loving same sex couple from making a legal commitment to each other can only hurt their children.”8 One of the reasons it hurts their child, and the children of heterosexual couples, is that denying a parents the right to marry communicates the idea that it is acceptable for parents raising children to remain unmarried. Say this often enough, and make it force of law, and the child might actually believe it!
So far, my difference of opinion with Dr. Kurtz seems to me substantive, that with Katz seems to be semantic or at least related to our different methods of classifying campaigns. Possibly, it is simply that he prefers to list extremely broad themes.
I will now provide evidence the themes I suggest are discussed by advocates of SSM and that these themes predate the downturn in the rate of increase in the nonmarital birth ratio which occurred during the mid nineties.
First, let us examine the theme of love and commitment. Andrew Sullivan, a prominent advocate of same sex marriage said:
Jonathan Rauch constantly emphasizes long term responsibility, stability, fidelity and commitment. One could also read newspaper columns and find all sorts of quotes from recent brides and grooms telling us they married to express their love and commitment.
Now, let us examine the child welfare theme. Because Katz specifically state that Sullivan and Rauch, both prominent advocates of SSM do not discuss the welfare of children I will provide links to some of their web articles.[4]
Sullivan discussed the need to unite gays and lesbians with their own children, the importance of marriage as a place to nurture children, and the benefit of providing a stable home headed by a married couple in at least three articles available on the web, published in 1989 [5], 1997 [6], 1998.[7] While promoting his book, Jonathan Rauch observes “…. marriage is the best environment for raising children and wonders why conservatives don’t seem to consider the 28 percent of homosexual couples with children.” He reiterates the importance of marriage to children here.; he laments the trend toward unmarried cohabitation particularly when children are involved here.
Of course, even less well known advocates discuss the importance of marriage. Recently, we have seen the explosion of political blogs; some address the topic of same sex marriage. Surely, Justin Katz has read posts by Gabriel Rosenberg who Mr. Katz often debates in his own blog? Likely, Mr. Katz has noticed the child oriented theme at “Daddy, Pappa and Me”?
Katz’s claim that advocates of SSM do not discuss the idea that legalized same sex marriage would benefit children is simply wrong. They have been advocating this before the nineties began, and still do. Given the evidence that advocates of think we should legalize same sex marriage to because it benefits children, one can wonder where the highly educated, white, Dr. Kurtz, who is employed at an elite think tank, Mr. Katz or other white, educated elites, developed any other idea.
End notes:
(1) Strangely enough, sometimes the themes of the child campaigns conflict with each other. Consequently, while gay rights activists support the majority of the themes in under the umbrella of the gay rights campaign, not all agree as to the importance of every single right. In addition, some groups who are not principally active in the gay rights campaign sometimes promote aspects of one child campaign without necessarily supporting the parent gay rights campaign. This is a constant feature of politics, causing some to observe “Politics makes strange bedfellows”.
(2) I always see principle themes, principle traits of other principle features this way. An analogy for my usage would be can be made by comparing what I would describe as the “principle characteristics of humans” to the “principle characteristics of mammals”. The principle characteristics of mammals are: they bear their young live, they are covered with hair and nourish their young with milk. Our principle characteristics are we are bipedal, we have large brains, we use of language and we use of tools. Certainly, I could simply say “the principle feature of Homo Sapiens is they are mammals”, or possibly primates. However, I would rarely do so. I list as principle the characteristics that distinguish us from other primates and often skip the rest. If on the other hand, someone lists “being a mammal” as the principle characteristic of homo sapiens, I wouldn’t contradict them. However, that principle characteristic fails to distinguish us from other mammals, and thus gives an overly broad answer to the question.
(3) Advocates of same sex marriage do think that the desire to form a lasting commitment is sufficientt reason for marriage. Therefor, jointly infertile couples, or couples who wish to avoid having children should have the right to marry. I do not believe this unlinks the traditional association between children and marriage.
(4) Combining laziness and the desire to let readers simply click to find the sources of these quotes, I have limited my references to those available on web pages. As anyone who familiar with the web knows, this can make it difficult to find older dated material which is often removed from servers. Even when older articles are not removed their rank in search engines tends to fall as it becomes dated.
(5) In this 1989 article, Sullivan mentions the need for marriage to help parents nurture their children. “Like straight marriage, it would foster social cohesion, emotional security, and economic prudence. Since there’s no reason gays should not be allowed to adopt or be foster parents, it could also help nurture children.”
(6) In this article, where Sullivan mostly responds to David Frum’s criticism Sullivan comments: “I have laboriously spelled out: lower rates of promiscuity among gay men, more stable homes for the children of gay parents, less trauma in families with gay offspring, lower rates of disease transmission, more independent and self-reliant members of society, etc., etc.”
(7) In this response to Bill Bennett, Sullivan comment: “What, I wonder, would he think would happen among straights if marriage didn’t exist, if, indeed, domestic partnership didn’t exist, if their relationships were accorded no public recognition and acknowledgment, their children no legal rights to their parents, their commitment to each other no moral or social support? “.
Hehe… reading that through the first time confused me because of the two K–tz names. I was thinking “This Katz/Kurtz fellow… I don’t understand him. Is he arguing against himself?”
Anyway, I largely agree that about parent movements. I’d add, though, that “child movements” are often also the children of many parent movements simultaneously, just as parent movements are often simultaneously parents to many child movements simultaneously. For instance, the anti-Iraq-war movement was a child of power-politics realism (for Scowcroft types), general self-defense pacifism (for many of the more leftist elements; note: I don’t think many anti-warriors were pacifists, but I do think a lot thought it was wrong except in self-defense. I’m stealing this variety of pacifism from GURPS), and simply anger at the Bush administration generally (I think that some people who probably would have been conflictedly supportive of such a war under, say, Clinton, were probably tipped over the side by the fact that Bush has made it a habit of pissing on ALL international mores, from Kyoto to ABM.). The many parents of the anti-war movement might have been part of the reason it was so weak, in spite of the fact that this war is the most weakly-justified war we’ve fought since, I don’t know, the Spanish-American war. The pro-war movement was also divided, among Ken Pollack-type WMD-worrywarts, Friedmanian idealists, and just plain 9/11-made-me-mad-so-I-need-to-hit-something people. However, since the pro-war types had a single voice to unite it, they were stronger (along with media marginalization of opposition as psychos, which I actually don’t really understand, even factoring in Bush’s (rapidly fading, even at that time) 9/11 glow.)
So… uh… rather than a tree, branching out from parent-trunk to child-branches, it’s sorta a flow chart with many movements flowing into other ones. Or something :^). I don’t know if that’s different from what you were saying, or just an elaboration of it.
Oh, and a quick note for you or Amp or whoever could update this site: do you think that the comments sections could have a link, somewhere, to the original post? If you search Google or something for Alas, a Blog posts, you’ll often get comments-segments, and not be quite sure where the original post is.
I think you are describing other parent-child campaign relationships. In fact, I suspect many, many people will think of parent-child relationships all over the place.
(I am somewhat used to the parent-child terminology from writing various types of code, where the terms are standard.)
I do think, the anti-Iraq-war movement is in fact a coalition of separate campaigns. That does lead to mixed, and contradictory themes.
Can anyone possibly identify the “principal themes” of the coalition anti-porn movement consisting of the “anti-porn” Evangelicals, and “anti-porn feminists? I guess it’s “Ban porn”. Other than that, we get entirely different themes if we try to read *why* porn is bad. Both groups were anti-porn for entirely different reasons.
Julian, I’m a visitor here myself (I use the syndicated feed) so I also always end up in the archived “comments” version of the post. However, if you go to the top of the page, right under the neat little graphic, you will see a navigation line which allows you to click through to either adjacent posts or “main”. The “main” will take you back to Alas a Blog‘s home page. Hope this helps.
Jim: You and Julian are actually looking at two different page templates.
Julian: I’m planning to move the whole blog (including the MT archives) over to WordPress sometime in the next two months, so I’m afraid I’m not very motivated to do upgrade work on Movable Type in the meanwhile. (Especially since the online MT manual is now for MT 3.0, which doesn’t help me much.) If you’re a movable type expert and can email me code to cut-and-paste into the comments template, then I’ll be happy to do that; but I’m unwilling to invest the time and effort into figuring out the code myself, since any MT commands I learn will be moot soon anyway.
I know that’s not a very satisfying answer – sorry! But stick with me a few months and I hope the problem will be solved in the new software.
Sorry for the distraction from your thread, Lucia.
Actually, I think that I was just searching the wrong way with Google. There are two pages, (in this case, /blog/000871.html and /cgi-bin/mt-comments.cgi?entry_id=871) only the latter of which is NORMALLY shown in Google searches, the former being omitted as a repeated page unless I click on the “repeated pages” link. If I do click on the repeated pages link, I can go to the permalink rather than the comments page. Problem solved :^).
Back to the thread (sorry ’bout the distraction there!), I concocted a diagram (vaguely inspired by Lucia’s brilliant interpretation of Griswold v. Connecticutt, though only in that it made me do it, not in how it’s actually constructed or anything like that).
I think I’m saying several parent movements can create a single child movement, whereas Lucia’s saying that a child movement can only have one parent, but such child movements can be very similar to the child movements of other parents.
Parent-child movements diagram
Is that what we’re saying, roughly?
I’m wondering if any parallels can be made between heterosexual, unmarried couples with children, together or separated.
Frankly, when I read the “nurtured children” citations, I’m reminded of the arguments fought against single parenthood by evangelical family values activists.
The AMA released studies recently that stated what children need to succeed is a home in which they feel loved – and that home can be comprised of two married, heterosexual parents, one heterosexual parent, two gay parents, one gay parent, grandparents, foster parents, etc. It didn’t matter who comprised that family as long as the child was properly cared for and treated like a valuable human being. Further, other studies show that economic status is more indicative of a child’s success that their family make-up. If this is true, it suggests that one’s parents’ marital status is less relevant than we assert.
If this is the case, the case for SSM as a catalyst for the well-being of children doesn’t necessarily hold. While the civil rights of gays is certainly something to be fought for, I’m not sure that this argument holds water.
In short, the connection between children and marriage is unraveling – not necessarily for better or worse – and our definitions and expectations of marriage and it’s output have certainly changed.
Thus I hope for a more stable parallel that someone can make – prove me wrong, please. Please!
Lauren,
I think what you are showing is that some psychologist studying the family are finding factors other than marital status may be more important than marriage itself . If these findinds are true, that would tend to undermine the argument that marriage benefits children which many advocates of SSM believe and promote.
That said, not everyone believe that data, and many advocates of SSM believe marriage benefits children. They say they believe marriage benefits their campaign for SSM. As far as any effects on out of wedlock births, right or wrong, when advocates of SSM say marriage is good for children, some might believe them. Some might refrain from having children out of wedlock.
So, the AMA data doesn’t negate my argument.
That said, I could see that the AMA data might be used by two groups:
1) Those who oppose same sex marriage. They would use it to justify blocking marriage, since the marriage isn’t necessary for the childs wellbeing. We see articles that suggest since the kids already have a biological mommy and daddy, why let their custodial parents marry people they love? This would tend to “unlink” marriage and child rearing.
2) Those who don’t really care one way of the other about same sex marriage, but some other agenda. For example, there are some who campaign for social programs to help unwed mothers rear their children. They often believe it is important to destigmatize unwed parenthood. Some of these people happen to support SSM; some oppose it; some are indifferent to the topic.
When identifying the theme of the Campaign for SSM, it’s important to recognize that the theme is not deterimed by what people who don’t give a hoot list as reasons for non-opposition to SSM.
I love the gif! I see you merge the campaigns. I think we do need more graphics about political ideas!
BTW. In grad school, a friend of mine had photocopied and article called something like “The Role of Cartoons in Science”. Since we are drawing cartoon graphics of political ideas, and since Amp is a cartoonist, I think it is appropriate we make more!
Lauren,
The difference between unmarried OS couples and unmarried SS couples with children is that both OS parents have full parental rights WRT the children and SS parents do not (without huge expenses to get all or some of those rights). Thus the argument for SSM still holds water in this context.
That should read:
“… and ONE OF THE SS parents does not…”
Jake: I’m not sure this is necessarily true. If comparable to the “primary providers” theory that is prevalent in family law right now, in case of the event that something happens to one parent, the other primary providers are first in line for custody rights.
This is assuming that no prejudice exists, which means…
I just proved my own point wrong. If prejudice exists in the court system, which we know it does, SSM would indeed help children stay with their parents.
*ducks out*
Thus the argument for SSM still holds water in this context.
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