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In my part of the United States, the upper Midwest, one finds many
descendants of immigrants from Sweden. “Ole and Lena” are a mythical
Swedish-American couple, probably residing somewhere in Minnesota, and notable
for their remarkably dysfunctional marriage. One story goes like this:
Ole and Lena had grown
old, and one day Ole became very sick. Eventually, he was confined to his
upstairs bedroom, barely conscious, bedridden, and growing ever weaker. After
several weeks of this, the Doctor visits and tells Lena: ‘Vell, Ole’s just
about a goner. I don’t tink he’ll survive the night.’
So Lena, being a
practical woman, decides she had better start preparing for all the guests who
would be coming to Ole’s funeral. She begins to bake, starting with loaves of limpa, a Swedish sweet rye bread. The pleasant smell of baking bread is
soon wafting through the house.
Suddenly, upstairs, Ole’s
nose twitches and his eyes bolt open. “Limpa!” he says. He jerks up into a
sitting position, swings his legs around, and climbs out of bed. It’s like a
miracle! Half walking, half stumbling, he crosses the room, enters the hallway,
and starts working his way down the stairs. “Limpa!” he says again.
He reaches the ground
floor, stumbles across the kitchen, and pulls himself into a chair by a table
where a loaf of freshly sliced bread sits. He reaches over to take a slice.
“Stop that Ole!” shouts
Lena, as she whaps his hand with her spatula. “That limpa bread is for
after the funeral.”
We can still laugh at Ole and
Lena, even here in Sydney, Australia, because they are now out of time,
characters from an earlier era of Swedish immigration into America. Their
“ideal type,” we might say, no longer exists.
More importantly, their dysfunctional marriage also
belongs to another era. Several generations ago, when there were real
“Oles and Lenas,” divorce would have been rare in their community. For better
and worse, persons stayed in unhappy or troubled marriages, perhaps “for the
sake of the children”; perhaps for religious reasons.
Successful jokes usually involve making fun of
institutions that are strong and stable. The “marriage joke,” a staple of
comedians during the 1950’s and 1960’s, seems to be fading in our time.
Symbolically, Rodney Dangerfield, perhaps the last American master of the
marriage joke, died last year.
Australia is, in many ways, a blessed country. One
recent blessing that you received was the 2004 agreement between your political
leadership, left and right, to fix a solid definition of marriage within your
nation’s Federal law, as involving [quote] “the union of a man and a woman, to
the exclusion of all others, voluntarily entered into for life.” As a result,
it seems, Australia has avoided the most contentious aspects of the “same-sex
marriage” debate, an issue very much at “high boil” across the United States (as
testified to by events last week in California).
All the same, Australia has not been immune from
other legal changes over the last several decades, which taken together have
weakened marriage as an institution. These include:
• the elimination of legal distinctions between births in- and
out-of-wedlock;
•
abortion laws that ignore the claims of the husband/father;
•
the acceptance of cohabitation as a legal status, providing some of the
benefits of marriage without the corresponding duties;
•
the elimination of “fault” in divorce proceedings, which has had the
effect of rewarding infidelity while ― in practice ― ending the community’s
interest in marriage preservation;
•
and the broad leveling of gender roles specific to marriage and the
rearing of children, which undercut in turn historic “family wage” regimes;
while these systems were not perfect, they did commonly reinforce the best
interests of children.
And so, in the year
2010, we in the Western world are left with a “social-biological” construct, no
longer an “institution” admired by all, one that is ― in truth ― battered
and bruised, and in some respects but a shadow of its former legal and cultural
self. It is important to remember that most of this change came before “same
sex marriage” was an issue.
More oddly, for the
first time in human history, natural marriage has to justify itself in
democratic countries before the court of public opinion. What had been obvious
to most prior human societies, over the centuries and around the globe, is now
“an issue.” The main reason for this, I think, is the modern superstition that
the past has nothing to teach us: the assumption that our ancestors were all
moral barbarians, ethical troglodytes full of prejudice and mainly devoted to
attacks on human dignity and human differences. This might be called the
arrogance of Presentism. For the same reason, religions resting on inherited
dogma stand as particularly suspect.
There’s an old comment
about truth claims: in the 17th Century, any political leader
seeking to support an opinion would quote Holy Scripture; in the 18th
Century, he would quote Shakespeare; in the 19th Century, perhaps a
philosopher such as Kant, Hegel, or Emerson; but in the 20th Century,
he would quote a sociologist. I am not sure if this is progress. In any case,
this preference for sociology still seems alive and well. Three years ago, when
several same-sex couples sued Polk County, Iowa (the place where I was born and
grew up), arguing that the state of Iowa’s marriage law discriminated against
them, county officials asked me to serve as an expert witness in court. My task
was to explain why it was rational for the State of Iowa to restrict legal
marriage to opposite-sex couples, of proper age. As an historian, I would
explain why most human societies have understood the virtues of natural marriage
and have given to such marriage extra-ordinary support and attention. I filed
an appropriate “Summary Report of my Relevant Opinions,” and went through a
day-long deposition by opposing attorneys for the Lambda Legal Defense
Association. (As an aside, if you’ve never been deposed as a witness, I can
report that it can be a grueling process. For a writer, though, it’s actually a
great thrill: Lambda’s team of lawyers had clearly and carefully read
everything I had ever written. And while I knew they were looking solely
for inconsistencies, contradictions, and errors, which they could use to attack
my so-called “expertise,” such grand acts of reading are that of which authors
dream!)
Back to the main
story-line. When the trial judge issued his bench ruling on the case the next
year, he dismissed my testimony as irrelevant: he said that history ― the
record of human triumphs and tragedies, follies and successes ― history had
nothing to teach the law about the issue of “same sex” marriage; only “number
crunching” sociology would be allowed as evidence. Partly for this reason, the
judge in question found in favor of the plaintiffs. The Iowa Supreme Court
subsequently upheld the judge’s ruling, and my home state ― not so long ago a
bastion of rural conservatism ― became the fifth American state to embrace
same-sex marriage.
Actually, the judge
was wrong here, in more than one sense. Appealing to social science, he
concluded that the evidence favored same-sex marriage. The opposite is actually
true. So, in that judge’s somewhat tedious spirit, foreswearing history and
embracing social science, I want to address the question at hand: “Why
Australia Needs a Renewed Culture of Natural Marriage.”
First, though, allow
me to explain what I mean by “natural marriage.” Actually, I simply agree here
with Evan Wolfson, the acknowledged leader of the same-sex marriage movement in
America, that there is something “natural” about the intimate relationship of a
man a woman. As Wolfson put it in his book, Why Marriage Matters:
At first glance, the “basic biology”
argument seems to make some sense. After all, it doesn’t take more than a
fourth-grade health class education to know that men’s and women’s bodies in
some sense “complement” each other “and that when a man and a woman come
“together as one flesh” it often leads to procreation. (Why Marriage
Matters, 2004).
Yes, indeed, albeit ― in my case
― this is true on the ‘second’ and ‘third’ glance, as well.
So: First
and foremost, Australia needs a culture of natural marriage for the good of the
children. Thousands of recent research projects in the fields of sociology,
psychology, anthropology, and medicine all testify to one truth: children
predictably do best when they are born into a married-couple home and raised by
their two natural parents. This might be the most unassailable truth in all
social science. Why? According to a recent American Academy of Pediatrics
Panel, “Marriage is beneficial in many ways” because people “behave differently
when they are married. They have healthier lifestyles, eat better, and mother
each others health.” Looking at the effects on children, the Panel stressed
that this advantage is not found in step family households nor in households
headed by unmarried cohabitating parents. (Pediatrics, 2003)
Another research team found that the advantages given to children by intact
marriages extend beyond the individual child: the existence of such marriages
also predicts the overall health of a school and a neighborhood → that is,
intact families are essential for creating “a social world [that] is ordered in
ways that generally favor young persons.” (that from the Journal of
Research in Crime and Delinquency, 2004)
This advantage of the
natural parent, marriage-based home holds up when compared to sole-parent,
step-parent, same-sex, cohabitating, or communal households. Sometimes the
advantage is extraordinary. Regarding child sexual abuse, for example, data
from Canada showed that preschool-age children living with their natural parents
are forty times less likely to become abuse victims than are those
children living in alternative arrangements. (Ethology and Sociobiology,
1985)
The children from such
homes are ― on balance ― also much healthier, in both mind and body, than those
growing up in any other setting. They earn higher marks in school; indeed,
family structure is superior to all other competing theoretical explanations for
differences in child achievement. (Journal of Early Adolescence,
2000; Social Problems, 2000)
Over two hundred years
ago, the French statesman Louis de Bonald ― also sometimes called the first
social scientist ― explained why the state had a vital interest in each new
marriage. As he wrote in his 1801 book, On Divorce:
Political power only intervenes in the spouse’s
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
... under its guarantee to bring that child into being [and to raise it well].
Nothing of
significance has changed since: natural marriage is for the good of the
children, which every healthy government need acknowledge.
The second reason
Australia needs a renewed culture of natural marriage is because it is good for
adults.
•
Natural
marriage gives life.
Researchers from Princeton University report that married men and women live
longer ― on average ― than unmarried peers (be they never-married, divorced, or
widowed). (Demography, 1990) Indeed, marital status is the most
consistent predictor of longevity among women. As the title of an article on
women’s health, appearing in Social Biology, has put it: “Perils
of Single Life and the Benefits of Marriage” [1987].
•
Natural
marriage gives health.
A French study found that married mothers with children at home enjoyed
significant improvement in their health. (Social Science and Medicine,
2000) Even in Sweden, where lone mothers receive generous welfare benefits,
they experience important health disadvantages when compared to married mothers
(Social Science and Medicine, 2000). Indeed, single or lone
mothers are three times more likely to have experienced “a major depressive
disorder.” (Journal of Marriage and Family, 1997)
•
Natural
marriage creates greater wealth.
This wealth-generating effect of wedlock crosses racial and gender lines. As
one study put it, “the power of marriage to deliver affluence for women is
particularly strong.” Married individuals, compared to the unmarried, gain
nearly three times as much wealth over their lifetimes. (Journal of
Marriage and Family, 2003) Natural marriage accomplishes this because
“it provides institutionalized protection, which generates economies of scale,
task specialization, ... access to work-related fringe benefits, ... broader
social networks and higher savings rates.” (Journal of Marriage and Family,
2002)
•
And natural
marriage brings happiness.
Research shows that the optimal state of mental health, labeled “flourishing,”
is more prevalent among the married than the unmarried, be the latter widowed,
separated, divorced, or never-married. “Deep depression” is rarest among
the married. (Journal of Health and Social Behavior, 2002) A
survey of seventeen nations found married adults reporting significantly higher
levels of personal happiness than their unmarried peers. Contrary to feminist
claims that wedlock benefits only men, the study showed that “marriage protects
females just as much from unhappiness as it protects males.” (Journal
of Marriage and the Family, 1998)
The third reason
that Australia needs a renewed culture of marriage is because it is good for the
commonwealth, or the state.
The children of
natural marriage are less likely to abuse drugs or alcohol or to
enter the juvenile justice system. This means in turn that they are much less
likely to become expenses for the state, be it through rehabilitation programs
or as prisoners.
To the contrary, the
children issuing from natural marriage are more likely to do well in school,
earn university degrees, be gainfully employed, and ―in consequence ― become
taxpayers (rather than wards of the state).
Young mothers who are
married are much less likely to require means-tested welfare benefits than their
never-married or divorced counterparts. As with their children, they are a net
plus, a fiscal boost, for all levels of government.
As noted earlier,
married adults are ― on average ― much wealthier than the unmarried and enjoy
significantly higher lifetime earnings. They, too, represent a gain ― rather
than a net loss ― for governments at all levels, by providing a reliable tax
revenue stream.
Well, I think you get
the point. The children and the adults found in homes built on natural marriage
are far more likely to be or become responsible citizens, wealth creators, and
taxpayers; those found in other arrangements are ― to varying degrees ― more
likely to be or become dependents on government, and a net drain on the public
treasury. For this reason alone, the state has a compelling interest in raising
to the maximum the number of children born into and growing up within natural
parent, married couple homes.
However, there is
another ― and more profound ― reason for seeking to renew a culture of natural
marriage. Briefly put, marriage ― as conventionally understood ― is a bulwark
of liberty. Here ― despite the bigotry of Iowa judges against the past ― I
revert to history. The telling reality is that every modern totalitarian
movement ― every enemy of a free society ― has moved early and aggressively to
disrupt or destroy the institution of natural marriage.
This began in the
French Revolution, where the Jacobins first swept away the legal
preference shown to births within marriage and then sought to weaken the
marital bond through easy, unilateral divorce.
The Communists, who
seized power in Russia through the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution, immediately
targeted marriage and the family for extinction. As the Communist advocate
Alexandra Kollontai explained at the time: “the old type of family has had its
day.... [T]he task of bringing up the children ... is passing more and more
into the hands of the collective.” This occurred, she said, so that the child
might “grow up a conscious communist who recognizes the need for solidarity,
comradeship, mutual help and loyalty to the collective.” Divorce could also now
“be obtained at the [simple] request of either partner in a marriage”; all
distinctions between cohabitation and marriage were abolished.
The National
Socialists of Germany also worked to destroy the autonomous natural family. As
historian Claudia Koonz explains in her fine book, Mothers in the
Fatherland:
Far from honoring the family, .... Nazi policy
aimed at eroding family ties among victims and its own “Aryan”
followers. In both cases, the goal was the same: to break down individual
identity and to render people susceptible to whatever plans Hitler announced:
eugenic breeding schemes for the chosen “Aryans” and genocide for the selected.
In Communist China
during the late 1950’s, authorities forced 90 percent of rural Chinese
households into huge communes. Relative to food, they also outlawed family
gardens, family kitchens, and the family meal. The family woks were melted down;
the law forbade home cooking; all must eat in communal halls. The result was a
wave of gluttony, followed by mass famine: 30 million deaths through starvation
and an estimated 33 million lost or postponed births: “the greatest politically
inspired disaster in human history,” according to the journal Economic
Development and Cultural Change (1997).
Even in the land of
Sweden, during the so-called “Red” phase of Social Democratic rule in the
1970’s, the primary ideological target was natural marriage. Policy there aimed
in particular at eliminating the mother-at-home and the provider-role long held
by husbands and fathers. To achieve full equality, the socialists held that all
citizens ― adult men and women as well as children ― must be made equally
dependent on the welfare state. Feminist Historian Yvonne Hirdman explains the
result:
New ideas of gender replaced old-fashioned ideas
about the couple. We witness [here] the birth of the androgynous [or ‘sexless’]
individual (and I speak about the explicit ideal) and the death of the provider
and his housewife. (The Importance of Gender in the Swedish Labor
Movement, Or: A Swedish Dilemma, 2002)
Why this common
hostility by totalitarian and authoritarian regimes to natural marriage? The
great English journalist G.K. Chesterton explains the reason in his provocative
1920 pamphlet, The Superstition of Divorce: He writes:
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 the 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.
Or, as Chesterton put it in his
1910 book, What’s Wrong with the World:
It may be said that this institution of the home
is the one anarchist institution. That is to say, it is older than law,
and stands outside the State....The State has no tool delicate enough to
deracinate the rooted habits and tangled affections of the family; the two
sexes, whether happy or unhappy, are glued together too tightly for us to get
the blade of a legal penknife in between them. The man and the woman are one
flesh ― yes, even when they are not one spirit. Man is a quadruped.
Chesterton, as usual
for him, was an optimist about the future of marriage. In the end, he held, the
totalitarians ― the social engineers ― would always retreat before the inherent
strength of the four-legged creature formed by natural marriage. And so it has
been in the past: in the end, the French Revolutionaries failed; so did the
Communists in Russia: so did the German National Socialists; and so did the
Maoists in China. In their time, each seemed to be unstoppable; each appeared
to represent the inevitable future. Yet in every case, they collapsed or
retreated, because they violated human nature.
Those who seek to
deconstruct marriage today are, it is true, more clever than their
predecessors. Using what might be called “the Swedish model,” their propaganda
machine is much more effective. Their promises are more seductive. And they
sometimes seem unstoppable. However, I am confident that they too will fail,
and for the same reason: they misunderstand the nature of the human being.
So go forward with
confidence as you work to rebuild in Australia a culture of natural marriage.
Human nature, innate human longings, human biology, and human
history are all on your side.
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