|
1. My name is Allan Carlson. I was born and raised in Des Moines, Iowa, and
currently reside in Rockford, Illinois. I am President of The Howard Center for
Family, Religion & Society and International Secretary for The World Congress of
Families. From 1988 to 1993, I served via Presidential appointment on The
National Commission on Children. My primary research field is the history of
marriage, family, and population policies in the United States and Europe. In
1978, I received my Doctorate degree in Modern European History from Ohio
University. Since that time, I have engaged primarily in publishing, research,
and writing. I have received research fellowships from The American
Scandinavian Foundation, The National Endowment for the Humanities, and the
Earhart Foundation.
2. I have authored ten books (eight published, and two due out in 2007),
including Family Questions: Reflections on the American Social Crisis
(1988), The Family in America: Searching for Social Harmony in the Industrial
Age (1993; 2003), The ‘American Way’: Family and Community in the Shaping
of the American Identity (2003), Fractured Generations: Crafting a Family
Policy for Twenty-First-Century America (2005), and Conjugal America: On
the Public Purposes of Marriage (2006). Most of these volumes have been
published by Transaction, the nation’s leading publisher of record in the social
sciences. I have also published over 100 articles on issues of marriage and
family in America. I have testified as an expert witness on these subjects
before committees of the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives, the U.S.
Attorney General’s Taskforce on Family Violence, The Presidential Commission on
the Assignment of Women in the Armed Forces, and in Federal and State Court. A
true and correct copy of my curriculum vitae is attached as Exhibit A. I have
agreed to serve as an expert witness on a pro bono basis, asking only the
normal travel and subsistence costs.
3. I intend to address the history and public purposes of marriage in the
United States and the relationship of marriage to broader family policy. My
most recent book, Conjugal America, identifies five public purposes of
marriage. Specifically, these are to:
(a)
encourage the responsible procreation and optimal rearing of children;
(b)
create the vital connection of the sexual and the economic
as the basis of the private home;
(c)
bind the marital couple to five concentric rings of
community--unborn children, kin, neighborhood, faith
communities, and the nation;
(d)
build a zone of liberty and autonomy which makes a free and ordered society possible; and
(e)
shape the unique character of the American nation-state.
4. I will now elaborate on several of these points. Viewed historically,
marriage has been a universal institution, found in virtually every known human
society, and focused first and foremost on the procreation and rearing of
children. This statement certainly holds true for The United States and for the
State of Iowa. While legal marriage surely performs other tasks—such as
creating stable households and arranging for the transmission of property—even
these are primarily directed toward one goal: the protection of progeny and the
binding of the generations. This goal, in turn, serves public order.
5. Civil authority in America, as elsewhere, has intervened in the spousal
contract of union because such authority represents the potential child or
children, the first object of marriage, and because civil authority has accepted
the implicit promises made by the spouses to create and to rear that child in a
stable home. Only the sexual relation between a man and a woman can naturally
create a child, something which can occur at any time. This is why civil
authority has a deep interest in the regularization of male-female sexual
relations: it is for the sake of children, potential and real.
6. It is true that the marriage of a woman and a man who are unable to
conceive a child has been considered valid in the United States. Reasons for
this include the reluctance of governments to enter into the business of
fertility testing and, even in recent times, the imprecision of judgments about
infertility. In addition, these marriages model the relationship best suited
for procreation and childrearing, and thereby promote the government’s general
interest.
7. The historical record, common sense, and social research all affirm that
children do best when they are born into and reared by a family composed of
their two natural parents bound in marriage. Any deviation from this model
raises the probability of negative outcomes for the children involved. Children
raised by their married natural parents are more likely to be healthy in mind
and body and to succeed in school, work, and in life. They are less likely to
be physically, sexually, or mentally abused, to use illegal drugs, to be
involved in the juvenile justice system, to become wards of the state, or to
attempt suicide. Marriage law has privileged the sexual relation of man to
woman because of these positive and protective effects on children, which have
also made valuable contributions to society. Governments have logically sought
to insure that the maximum possible number of children grow up in stable,
natural parent, married couple homes.
8. While marriage has enjoyed a “privileged status” in America, it has
also carried certain burdens. For example, marriage law has put restrictions on
an individual’s right to end the relationship. Again, these restrictions on
liberty have been justified primarily because of the married couple’s
relationship to children. Other human friendships have commonly been left
unregulated, and unregistered, in the interest of liberty.
9. It is, of course, true that positive changes in marriage law have
occurred over the decades and centuries, including enhanced protection of
women’s property rights and an end to racial restrictions on marriage. But the
prior conditions in these cases were either unrelated to, or directly hostile
toward, the core purposes of marriage: the procreation and rearing of children.
Thus, these changes have never affected the essential characteristic of marriage
that it be between a man and a woman. In this sense, marriage does not
“evolve.” Public authority uses law either to strengthen or weaken this
natural, universal human institution.
10. Indeed, negative change is possible. Research shows that the
introduction of “no fault” divorce independently drove up the divorce rate and
that children have emerged as the true victims of this reform. Predictably, the
children of divorce are more likely to face psychological disorders, to suffer
from poorer physical health, to perform worse at school, to use illegal drugs
and alcohol, and to resort to suicide. Except where physical violence is
involved, even homes with unhappy marriages prove to be better places for the
children involved.
11. The historical record also shows that marriage—always and
everywhere—has been a community event. The couple is actually surrounded by
concentric rings of relationships. The first circle of community, as noted
earlier, is that of parents and their actual or potential children. The second
circle is that of extended family, or kin, since each true marriage merges two
families in a manner that perpetuates and invigorates both. The third circle is
that of neighborhood or local community which also has a vital interest in the
stability and fecundity of the newly married couple. The fourth circle is the
religious community, which commonly builds on and supports the marital bond.
The fifth circle is that of the nation-state, which holds a deep concern in the
birth and best-possible rearing of children. As the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in
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
society.”
12. Conventional marriage has played a vital part in American history.
Prominent early observers, including Benjamin Franklin, Adam Smith, and Alexis
de Tocqueville, all commented on the special role of marriage in shaping the
American identity. As Tocqueville put it: “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….” America’s culture
of marriage worked in the 20th Century to effect the assimilation of
new immigrants into national life, to carry the nation through global war and
the Great Depression, and to undergird successful American efforts to face down
Nazi and Communist totalitarianism. Marriage, with its focus on children, has
proven to be a key source of the unique balance between liberty and order that
has defined and sustained our democratic republic. As such, it is a vital part
of America’s unwritten constitution.
Respectfully submitted,
Allan Carlson, Ph.D.
|
