MARRIAGE DOOMSDAY NEVER COMES
Conservatives have a bad track record predicting family apocalypse
The debate around the recent Supreme Court decision Obergefell v. Hodges overturning state bans on same-sex marriage generated a lot of commentary, including a large number of doomsday predictions from people on the political right, especially religious conservatives. GOP presidential candidate Mike Huckabee said gay marriage is a key factor threatening the “foundation of our society and culture,” while GOP Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal saw the decision as paving “the way for an all out assault against the religious freedom rights of Christians.”
To those of us who know something about the history of marriage and gender in the USA, this is déjà vu all over again. These predictions of imminent social disaster have been made every time that marriage and gender roles have undergone legal or social changes. ‘LOVING’ MARRIAGE When marriage moved from being arranged or based on economic considerations to being based on love, social commentators said marriage, and therefore the social order, would never survive if it were based on such a flimsy foundation.
When the legal doctrine of coverture was overturned and married women acquired the right to own property and engage in contractual relationships, observers said this would destroy marriage and society by making women too independent.
Even the automobile was predicted to harm marriage by enabling people to have premarital sex. It was called “a house of prostitution on wheels.”
More directly relevant to the same-sex marriage debate was the reaction to the idea of interracial marriage in the lead up to the 1967 Loving v. Virginia case that overturned state bans on the practice. What is forgotten is that even various judges who defended such bans made predictions of disaster: The children of interracial marriages would be physically damaged. The Alabama Supreme Court worried that an interracial marriage of one family member would undermine the one-race marriages in the rest of the family.
In Loving, the Virginia solicitor general argued that “the problems which a child of an interracial marriage faces are those which no child can come through without damage to himself.”
The same fear of damaging children has been raised both be- fore and after Obergefell.
As conservatives rightly make fun of all the failed predictions of economic and ecological collapse peddled by progressives since the 1960s, they forget their own failed predictions of social collapse every time the institution of marriage changed. ‘END OF MARRIAGE’ Rising female labor force rates, rising divorce rates, the pill, and the advent of no-fault divorce were also claimed to be the “end of marriage,” if not Western civilization itself. No doubt marriage has changed as result of those events, but in the wake of a historic Supreme Court decision that validates the desire of millions of Americans to enter the institution of marriage, it’s hard to say those events killed marriage, either secular or religious.
It’s true that the divorce rate has risen since the 1950s, but it leveled off in the 1980s and has slowly fallen over the past two decades as people have adjusted to changes in gender roles and marriage. Single parenthood continues to be a concern for the welfare of children, but it is often the result of misguided public policies that aren’t directly the result of changes in marriage itself. The War on Drugs has imprisoned countless potential African-American husbands, and the tax code and structure of welfare payments have made marriage a bad economic deal for many, especially the poor.
Yet the institution of marriage is far more resilient than conservatives give it credit. When economic and social circumstances have changed, gender roles, marriage and family have been able to adapt. The wealth created by capitalism ended the family’s role as the site of production; marriage responded by becoming increasingly about love. The improved economic status of women produced more divorces, but it also led to far more equal marriages.
Same-sex marriage will not be the end of marriage. If we are concerned about the institution, we should be more worried about other policies.
For all the importance conservatives attach to marriage, their perception of its fragility is surprising. It has adapted successfully in the face of far bigger changes than more people being allowed to participate in its benefits.