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How odd! Here, in the early years of the 21st Century, a
massive public debate proceeds about marriage.
On November 7, the citizens of Wisconsin—like the voters in half a dozen
other states—will vote on a Marriage Protection Amendment. Shall your constitution affirm “that only a
marriage between one man and one woman shall be valid or recognized as a
marriage in this state and that a legal status identical or substantially
similar to that of marriage for unmarried individuals shall not be valid or
recognized in this state?” That’s a
mouthful, to be sure. And for many it
raises the questions: Why now? Why is this an issue in 2006?
These questions are amplified by signs
suggesting that conventional marriage is—in fact—in decline. Just two weeks ago, the American media
fixated on a new Census Bureau report showing that “married couple households”
had, for the first time in our history, fallen below 50 percent of all
households. Choosing a related number,
the U.S. marriage rate has fallen by 50 percent since 1960. The proportion of American women ages 25-29
who have never married, about eight percent in 1960, reached 40 percent in
2002, a five-fold increase.
Cohabitation and living alone are the growing lifestyles.
Indeed, we seem to be caught in a
civilization wide shift. Recently, two
European legal scholars—looking at both Europe and America—concluded that legal
structures dealing with marriage that had been “fairly stable over several
centuries have quite suddenly crumbled.”
Where “marriage used to be for life,” an exit through divorce has now
become easy and unilateral. The legal
role of marriage in conferring legitimacy on children has also been swept
away. Informal partnerships have gained
a rough legal equality with traditional marriage. “[E]ven one of the last remnants of traditional family law, the
requirement that spouses and parents be of different gender, has come under
siege,” with some nations—and states—now extending “marriage-like rights to
same gender couples.” As the authors
conclude: “The principles that
uncontestedly dominated family law for hundreds of years have been turned
topsy-turvy.”
The foes of Wisconsin’s Marriage
Protection Amendment would probably agree with this analysis. The times are changing, they might say. New lifestyles are emerging. Marriage itself is changing. Smart people go with the flow.
How should we respond? It is often true, for example, that those
who “go with the flow” crash on the rocks downstream. However, I don’t want to go with that metaphor. Rather, I believe we should welcome
the challenge posed by advocates for “same-sex marriage.” All Americans—here in Wisconsin, in my home
state of Illinois, and in the other 48 states as well—all Americans had grown
complacent and pleasantly confused over the last 40 years about the meaning of
marriage. With little thought or
debate, we had let this vital cultural and legal institution decay. The “same-sex marriage” debate woke us up;
it has clarified the issues at stake; and it raises the vital question: Just what is marriage for? I have five answers:
First and foremost, marriage is about
the procreation and rearing of children.
Our era—the early 21st Century—is not the first time that
marriage has been challenged in Western history. Over 200 years ago, for example, the Jacobins of the French
Revolution also sought to tear down traditional marriage. They argued, just like social
revolutionaries now, for a “freedom to marry” tied to easy divorce.
A great champion of marriage rose in
response: Louis de Bonald. He began by clarifying “that marriage,…at
bottom, has always been a civil, religious, and physical act at once.” Marriage drew the attention of public
authorities because it was “the founding act of domestic society, whose
interests should be guaranteed by civil authority.” However, this new domestic society did not rest on the needs or
desires of spouses. As Bonald
wrote: “the end of marriage is…not
the happiness of the spouses, if by happiness one understands an idyllic
pleasure of the heart and senses.”
Rather:
[T]he
end of marriage is the reproductive and, above all, the conservation
of man, since this conservation cannot, in general, take place outside of
marriage, or without marriage.
By
“conservation,” Bonald meant the care, nurturing, education, and protection of
children, which he believed could occur only in the married-couple home.
Again, Bonald insisted that if
pleasure or happiness was the goal of marriage, then government had no business
being involved. Instead:
[P]olitical
power only intervenes in the spouses’ contract of union because it
represents the unborn child, which is the sole object of marriage, and
because it accepts the commitment made by the spouses in its presence and under
its guarantee to bring that child into being.
Put
another way, a marriage “is truly a contract between three persons, two of whom
are present, one of whom (the [potential] child) is absent, but is represented
by public power, guarantor of the commitment made by the two spouses to form a
society.”
Bonald also explained why the marriage
of a man and a woman who proved infertile, who were unable to create a child,
remained valid. Many of the French
Revolution’s leaders worried about the size of the French population, for they
wanted more children to serve as soldiers in future wars. And so, they called for easy divorce in
cases of failed fertility so that new pairings of men and women might be tried
to produce the needed children. Bonald
replied:
[W]hatever
importance may be attached to population by these great depopulators of the
universe; they would doubtless not dare to maintain that in human marriages one
should, as on stud farms, proceed by trial.[1]
Simply
put, the government should not be in the business of fertility
testing. Rather, it should accept the
potential fertility of all male-female bonds and acknowledge the powerful
positive effects on the wellbeing of children of growing up with their two
natural parents.
On the same point, and much closer to
our time, Valparaiso University Law Professor Richard Stith asks a pointed
question: Why do truly democratic governments leave most forms of friendship
free and unregulated, while continuing to register and legally burden
heterosexual unions? Stith replies:
Everyone
knows the answer: Sexual relations between women and men may generate children,
beings at once highly vulnerable and essential for the future of every
community….Lasting marriage receives public [recognition and support]… because
it helps to produce human beings able to practice ordered liberty.[2]
In
short, the state registers and regulates heterosexual unions for the sake of
the children, real or potential. All other
forms of friendship are left unregistered and unregulated, for the
sake of liberty.
The second purpose of marriage is
to renew concentric rings of community: extended family or kin; neighborhoods;
and faith communities. Marriage is
not just about the love affair of two individuals. Through a wedding, two extended families merge in a manner that
perpetuates and invigorates both, extending the great chain of being, binding
the living to their ancestors and to their posterity. Still in our day, family members will travel great distances to
attend the wedding of a nephew, a niece, or a cousin, acknowledging the
importance of the event to their own identity and continuity. As the great pro-family President Theodore
Roosevelt once wrote, a people existed only as its…
sons
and daughters think of life not as something concerned only with the selfish
evanescence of the individual, but as a link in the great chain of creation and
causation [forged by] the vital duties and the high happiness of family life.[3]
Poets also remind us that marriage is
more than a bond between two people. I
think particularly of the Kentuckian Wendell Berry, who underscores that
marriage exists to bind the couple as “parents to children, families to the
community, the community to nature.”
The new bride and groom “say their vows to the community as much as to
one another, and the community gathers around them to hear and to wish them well,
on their behalf and on its own.” The
very health and future of the community in question depends on the successful
endurance of these vows. As Berry
explains, they bind the lovers to each other, “to forebears, to descendants,… to
Heaven and earth.” Marriage is “the
fundamental connection without which nothing holds.”[4]
Even the touch of one married lover to
another:
…feelingly
persuades
us what we are:
one
another’s and many others’….
How
strange to think of children
yet
to come, into whose making we will be made….[5]
Berry
insists that sexual love, mediated through marriage, “is the heart of community
life,” the force connecting persons to the Creation and to the earth’s
abundance and fertility. Using a
favorite metaphor, Berry says that marriage “brings us into the dance that
holds the community together and joins it to its place.” As he writes in another poem:
Come
into the dance of the community, joined
in a
circle, hand in hand, the dance of the eternal love of women and men for one
another
and of
neighbors and friends for one another.[6]
The third purpose of marriage is to
bind together the sexual and the economic, which is the bond that creates a
home. I underscore that these are scientific
statements, not personal opinion. As
the anthropologist Edward Westermarck explained over 100 years ago: “Among the…[primitive], as well as the most
civilized races of men, we find the family consisting of parents and children,
with the father as its protector.”
Holding this universal family system together was marriage, which
combined “a regulated sexual relation” with “economic obligations.” In Westermarck’s view, distinct maternal,
paternal, and marital instincts all existed, each rooted in human nature.[7] In his great
anthropological survey of 1949,
George Murdoch discovered that “the nuclear family is the universal human
social grouping.” Moreover, he said,
“[a]ll known human societies have developed specialization and cooperation
between the sexes roughly along this biologically determined line of
cleavage.” Murdoch concluded:
[M]arriage
exists only when the economic and the sexual are united into one relationship,
and this combination only occurs in marriage.
Marriage, thus defined, is found in every known human society.[8]
Such statements about human nature and
marriage should come as no surprise to Christians, Jews, or Muslims. All three faiths accept
Genesis, Chapters 1 and
2, where marriage is cast as a never-changing aspect of God’s creation, fixed
from the beginning.
So God
created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and
female he created them. And God blessed
them and said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue
it; and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over birds of the air and
over every living thing that moves upon the earth”… Therefore a man leaves his
father and mother and cleaves to his wife and they become one flesh.[9]
Here
we see marriage affirmed as both heterosexual (“Be fruitful and multiply and
fill the earth”) and economic (the passages regarding “subdue” and “have
dominion”). In its discussion of
marriage, it might even be said that Genesis agrees with the
anthropologists Westermarck and Murdock.
Indeed, more recent research by
paleo-anthropologists—scientists who study the social life of pre-historic
humans—further affirms that what we call traditional marriage lies at
the foundation of human nature.
Notably, C. Owen Lovejoy of Kent State University shows in an article
for Science
magazine that “being human” means “being married.” On the basis of extensive field research, he finds “the unique
sexual and reproductive behavior of man”—not growth of the brain—to be
the key to human origin. The human
“nuclear family” is not a modern development.
Rather, the scientific evidence shows that the pairing-off of male and
female human ancestors into something very like traditional
marriage reaches back over three million years, to the time when our purported
ancestors left the trees on the African savannah and started walking on two
legs. As Lovejoy concludes:
[B]oth
advances in material culture and the Pleistocene acceleration in brain
development [follow after] an already established hominid character
system, which included intensified parenting and social relationships,
monogamous pair bonding, specialized sexual-reproductive behavior, and
bi-pedality. [This model] implies that
the nuclear family and human sexual behavior may have their ultimate origin
long before the dawn of the Pleistocene [era, two million years ago].[10]
It would be going too far to say that
modern science and the Book of Genesis have fully converged. Significant disputes remain over key issues
such as timing. However, it would be
fair to say that modern science agrees with Genesis that humankind—from
our very origin as unique creatures on earth—has been defined by heterosexual
monogamy involving long-term pair bonding and resting on the special bond
of the sexual and the economic: all big words, simply meaning marriage. Put in contemporary political terms, those
who defend traditional marriage today have both religion and
science on their side.
The fourth purpose of marriage is
Standing for Liberty. Said another
way, marriage is political. This is
true in a narrow sense, such as the finding reported in Business Week that women
are more likely to vote Democratic after a divorce and more likely to vote
Republican after a marriage.
I am more interested in marriage as
“political” in the broad sense. It is
no coincidence that the architects of every major political tyranny—from
the Jacobins of the French Revolution to the Bolsheviks of the Russian
Revolution to the Nazis of Germany’s would-be Racial Revolution to the Maoists
of the Chinese Revolution—all targeted marriage for destruction. All tyrants recognize that the family based in
marriage is their most vigorous foe, the primary obstacle to their quest for
total power.
The great English journalist G.K.
Chesterton has said it well. He
identifies the family to be a “triangle of truisms, of father, mother and
child,” an “ancient” institution that pre-exists the state, one that “cannot be
destroyed; it can only destroy those civilizations which disregard it.” Chesterton writes that this “small state
founded on the sexes is at once the most voluntary and the most natural
of all self-governing states.” He
underscores how all modern governments—not just the open tyrannies—seek to
separate or isolate individuals from their families, the better to govern them;
to divide in order to weaken. Yet the
family is self-renewing, an expression of human nature which builds on the bond
of marriage. As Chesterton concludes:
The ideal for which [marriage] stands in the state
is liberty. It stands for liberty for
the very simple reason…[that] it is the only…institution that is at once
necessary and voluntary. It is the only
check on that state that is bound to renew itself as eternally as the state,
and more naturally than the state….This is the only way in which truth can ever
find refuge from public persecution and the good man survive the bad
government.[11]
The
famous French visitor to America in the 1830’s, Alexis de Tocqueville,
emphasized how America’s unique balance between liberty and order depended on marriage,
rightly understood:
There
is certainly no country in the world where the tie of marriage is more
respected than in America, or where conjugal happiness is more highly or
worthily appreciated….While the European endeavors to forget his domestic
troubles by agitating society, the American derives from his own home that
love of order which he afterwards carries with him into public affairs.[12]
As
the U.S. Supreme Court concluded in its 1888 decision in the case Maynard v.
Hill, marriage is
“something more than a mere contract”; it is “an institution, in the
maintenance of which in its purity the public is deeply interested, for it is
the foundation of the family and of society.”
Alas,
our state and Federal court systems have—in recent decades—been far less
reliable in the defense of marriage as a vital American institution. This is why marriage amendments have become
necessary at both the state and local level.
However, America’s culture of marriage survives today in another, much
more-unexpected place: Hollywood. What
do the following popular films have in common:
My Big Fat Greek Wedding; Maid in Manhattan; Sweet Home Alabama; Kate
and Leopold; Notting Hill; Runaway Bride; You’ve Got Mail; Pretty Woman;
Sleepless in Seattle; The Prince and Me; and The Lake House? My daughters call them “chick flicks.” A better label might be “marriage flicks,”
for all of them cast marriage as the great, satisfying, and truly fulfilling
event in a woman’s life…and in a man’s, as well. None of these films, let alone the whole genre, could have been
made in cynical, libertine, post-marriage Western Europe. The Europeans do not believe in Cinderella
or in the promise of marriage anymore; Americans still do. These films are distinctly our own; signs of
a still vital cultural yearning for marriage and home.
Allow
me to summarize. The purposes of civil
marriage are:
• To
promote the procreation and optimal nurture of children;
•
To
renew the concentric rings of community: extended families; neighborhoods; and
faith communities;
•
To
bind together the sexual and the economic, in order to create stable homes;
•
To
oppose tyranny and to stand for liberty;
•
And
to shape and renew the nation, and specifically these United States.
The Marriage Protection
Amendment, on which you will soon vote, protects and advances all of these
goals simultaneously. This is not, I underscore,
just another political issue, where the outcome matters little. Rejecting political distortions, you stand
here in defense of truth, both religious and scientific. Moreover, the protection of children, the
future of communities, the stability of homes, the defense of liberty, and the
long term health of this great state and nation are all at stake in this
debate.
The Family Research Institute of Wisconsin understands this
larger picture. It has shown wisdom and
courage in advancing this Amendment.
FRI has faced the occasional slanders and slurs of the Amendment’s foes
with dignity, responding not in kind but with the truth, openly told. Criticisms of the Amendment range from the
misleading to the irrelevant to the absurd (my favorite example of the latter
is the bogus charge that this Amendment would prevent some people from hunting
deer on family-owned land). FRI has
patiently replied, always pointing to the real issue, above all the need to
do the very best we can for children.
Please give this fine organization your every support.
ENDNOTES:
[1] Louis de Bonald,
On Divorce [1801], trans.
and ed. by Nicholas Davidson (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 1992):
36-37, 63-64, 175.
[2] Richard Stith, “Keep Friendship
Unregulated,” The Cresset (Easter 2003): 47-49.
[3] Theodore Roosevelt,
The Works of Theodore Roosevelt:
Memorial Edition, Vol. XXI (New York: Charles Scribners Sons, 1924):
263.
[4] Wendell Berry,
Sex, Economy, Freedom &
Community (New York and San Francisco: Pantheon Books, 1992, 1993):
120-21, 133, 139.
[5] Wendell Berry,
A Timbered Choir: The Sabbath
Poems, 1979-1997 (Washington, DC: Counterpoint, 1998): 99.
[6] Wendell Berry,
Entries: Poems
(Washington, DC: Counterpoint, 1997): 40.
[7] Edward Westermarck,
The History of Human Marriage: 5th
Edition (London: Macmillan, 1925): 26-37, 69-72.
[8] George Peter Murdock,
Social Structure (New
York: The Free Press, 1965 [1949]: 1-8.
[9] Genesis 1:27-28; 2:24 (Revised
Standard Version).
[10] C. Owen Lovejoy, “The Origin of Man,”
Science
211 (Jan. 23, 1981): 348.
[11] G.K. Chesterton ,
Collected Works: Vol. IV: Family,
Society, Politics (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1987): 256.
[12] Alexis de Tocqueville,
Democracy in America, Book Three,
Chapter XI.
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