The Confession
Have same-sex-marriage advocates said too much?
Suppose a large group of same-sex-marriage activists came together and made the following confession to a group of same-sex-marriage skeptics:
“Look, we’re going to level with you in a way that we haven’t up to now. We all support same-sex marriage, but for many — even most — of us, gay marriage isn’t an end in itself. It’s a way-station on the path to a post-marriage society. We want a wide range of diverse families — even ‘polyamorous’ groupings of three or more partners — to have the same recognition, rights, and benefits as heterosexual married couples. In short, your worst fears are justified. The radical redefinition of marriage you’ve been worried about for so long is exactly what we want.
“Oh sure, some of us are more radical than others. But even the most committed and prominent mainstream advocates of same-sex marriage largely support a radical family agenda. A few advocates who back a ‘conservative’ interpretation of same-sex marriage may regularly engage you in debate, yet their views carry relatively little weight within the gay community. Some of these ‘conservative’ supporters of same-sex marriage have claimed that there is no significant political constituency for polygamy-polyamory, or for a general legal deconstruction of marriage. That’s just wrong. As gay marriage gains acceptance, we’re going to have a polygamy-polyamory debate in this country. And among those sponsoring that debate will be many of the very same people and groups who’ve already pushed for same-sex marriage.
“So why haven’t we told you all this before? Simple. We’ve been censoring ourselves for fear of scaring away public support for same-sex marriage. You see, it’s all about timing. Our plan is to establish same-sex marriage first, and then, as our next step, to demand that the rights and benefits of marriage be accorded to all types of families. After all, when the call for yet another radical redefinition of marriage comes from married same-sex couples, it’s going to be that much more persuasive. Up to now, truth to tell, if any same-sex marriage backers pushed this radical agenda in public, we pressured them to keep silent. But now we’re telling you the truth.
“You see, despite what you’ve heard about the ‘conservative case’ for same-sex marriage, the more radical argument that ‘love makes a family’ has played a huge role in the success of the drive for same-sex marriage. And the ‘love makes a family’ idea requires recognition, not only for gay couples, but also for polygamous and polyamorous families.
“And consider the complex families created when three or even four gay men and lesbians combine through, say, artificial insemination, to bear and raise children. We want recognition for these sorts of unconventional families too, even — or especially — if such recognition leads to legalized polyamory. Pretending that certain aspects of the gay community don’t exist only weakens our diverse families. The way we live is the way we live. Up to now, we’ve tried to hide it. But at last we’re ready to own up to reality, and to push for legal recognition for all types of families, even if that expands the definition of marriage until the very idea of marriage itself is stripped of meaning.”
Beyond Same-Sex Marriage
For all practical purposes, this confession has already been offered. A good part of the substance of the above message was conveyed this past July, when hundreds of self-described lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) and allied activists, scholars, educators, writers, artists, lawyers, journalists, and community organizers released a manifesto entitled, “Beyond Same-Sex Marriage.” Among other things, that statement called for recognition of “committed, loving households in which there is more than one conjugal partner.”
That hundreds of gay-marriage supporters, including big names like Gloria Steinem, Cornel West, Rabbi Michael Lerner (of Tikkun Magazine), and Barbara Ehrenreich have signed onto a statement openly demanding recognition for polyamorous families is important enough. But the really big news is what’s been happening in the months since the release of the Beyond Same-Sex Marriage statement. The ongoing discussion of that manifesto on popular blogs, and particularly in the gay community’s own press, confirms that even many prominent mainstream advocates of same-sex marriage support a radical family agenda — and plan to push it when the time is right. In other words, a careful look at the Beyond Same-Sex Marriage statement — and especially at its public reception — indicates that the above “confession” does in fact represent the plans and convictions of the greater part of the movement for same-sex marriage.
The Beyond Same-Sex Marriage statement is nothing if not radical. It calls for extending government recognition beyond traditional married couples to groups of senior citizens living together, extended immigrant households, single parent households, “queer couples who decide to jointly create and raise a child with another queer person or couple in two households,” unmarried domestic partners, polygamous/polyamorous households, and many other diverse family forms.
And although the statement advocates moving “beyond” same-sex marriage, it also clearly endorses gay marriage itself. The argument on offer is that same-sex marriage is, and ought to be, only one part of a larger effort to redefine our idea of the family. So in contrast to the “conservative” argument, which holds that gay marriage will strengthen the unique appeal of marriage itself, the Beyond Same-Sex Marriage statement claims that gay marriage is a critical step in a larger evolution away from the preference for any specific family form. In other words, the sponsors of Beyond Same-Sex Marriage hope to dissolve marriage, not through formal abolition, but by gradually extending the hitherto unique notion of marriage to every conceivable family type.
The Beyond Same-Sex Marriage statement has attracted hundreds of signatures from a wide array of prominent figures. In addition to national liberals like Steinem, West, Lerner, and Ehrenreich, over 90 professors have signed on, a great many from top schools like Harvard, Yale, Princeton, the University of Chicago, Columbia, Georgetown, Brown, Cornell, Williams, Smith, Bryn Mawr, Barnard, the University of Pennsylvania, NYU, Dartmouth, and U.C. Berkeley. Quite a few of these schools had more than one faculty member sign on. Popular writers like Terrence McNally, Armistead Maupin, and Susie Bright joined big-name academics like Judith Stacey and Judith Butler on the Beyond Same-Sex Marriage lists. Quite a few professors from top law schools (e.g., Yale, Columbia, Georgetown) also endorsed the statement. So we are not talking about fringe figures here. The Beyond Same-Sex Marriage manifesto was put forward by a large and prestigious slice of activists, artists, and intellectuals on the cultural Left.
Radical History
The Beyond Same-Sex Marriage statement evoked swift and diametrically opposed responses from opponents and supporters of same-sex marriage. Princeton philosopher and social conservative Robert P. George said the statement had “let the cat out of the bag” by revealing that “what lies ‘beyond gay marriage’ are multiple sex partners.” The same day, Jonathan Rauch, the leading exponent of the “conservative case” for same-sex marriage, answered George: “...there’s nothing new here. Left-wing family radicals have been saying all this stuff for years.” So which is it? Is this public endorsement of multiple-partner marriage by hundreds of prominent same-sex marriage supporters an important new revelation, or just irrelevant old hat?
It’s true, as Rauch claims, that left-wing family radicals have been calling for both polyamory and a broader deconstruction of marriage for years. Yet Rauch’s dismissal neatly glosses over some key historical shifts. When the same-sex-marriage issue became a topic of public debate, in the first half of the 1990s, the gay community was deeply split. Despite support for same-sex marriage from a few prominent gay conservatives, the gay community’s powerful phalanx of cultural radicals disdained same-sex marriage as a misguided attempt to ape an oppressive and outdated heterosexual institution. By the time the Defense of Marriage Act was debated by Congress in 1996, however, the mood in the gay community had shifted. Although many gays continued to view marriage itself as outmoded and patriarchal, same-sex marriage came to be seen as a pathway to public acceptance, and as the opening item on a much larger and more radical menu of family changes to come.
So from the mid-Nineties on, the gay community suppressed its divisions and united behind the public battle for same-sex marriage. Radicals in the academy laid their plans for both polyamory and a more general deconstruction of marriage, yet for the most part the radicals avoided floating such controversial proposals before the public. The mainstream media (itself part of the broader movement for same-sex marriage) cooperated by largely ignoring the many legal and academic advocates of polyamory and family radicalism. Instead, the media focused on gay couples who were as close to traditional heterosexual families as possible.
Having passed through a period of skeptical division on the marriage issue, followed by a period of unity, the gay community may now be moving into a third phase, the groundwork for which was laid by the 2004 election. With President Bush endorsing the Federal Marriage Amendment, and with local marriage amendments drawing out voters in battleground states like Ohio, the public handed Republicans a victory in 2004, while dealing the gay marriage movement a significant setback. Liberals who’d once lauded the Massachusetts supreme court for its courage now excoriated it’s justices for handing the election to the Republicans. Over the following two years, judges who had once felt free to impose same-sex marriage on an unwilling public grew hesitant. Surprise decisions against same-sex marriage by liberal state supreme courts in New York and the state of Washington in 2006 seemed to confirm that the movement for gay marriage had been stymied. (For a take on this history by a signer of Beyond Same-Sex Marriage, go here.)
Frankly Speaking
In this new atmosphere, the radicals had far less reason to hide their long-term plans behind a facade of unity. Politically, there was little left to lose. A good decade after the beginning of the movement for same-sex marriage, it was increasingly obvious that the fight could continue for yet another ten years. Rebelling against the thought of 20 years of self-censorship, the radicals began to speak up. The March, 2006, debut of HBO’s polygamy television serial, Big Love (created by a two pro-same-sex marriage radicals), was merely a sign of things to come. Meeting in April of 2006 to draw up their manifesto, just as Big Love was sparking a public debate about polygamy, the authors of the Beyond Same-Sex Marriage had reason to believe that their ship had finally come in.
So then, is the Beyond Same-Sex Marriage statement, as Rauch would have it, just irrelevant old hat? Not at all. Calls for polyamory and other forms of family radicalism may be nothing new to those already familiar with the history of the gay community’s internal debates, or with the quiet plans of legal academics. Yet a collective and very public declaration of the family-radical platform, endorsed by scores of prominent scholars and other nationally known figures, signals a new phase in the struggle. Once again, as in the early 1990s, the radicals are out in the open, unwilling to silence themselves for the sake of a united front.
Take Michael Bronski, a radical academic, popular New England columnist, and long-time proponent of same-sex marriage. Bronski favors same-sex marriage for its potential to destabilize the traditional organizing principles of Western culture. In a piece explaining why he’d signed the Beyond Gay Marriage manifesto, Bronski said that he and his fellow family radicals were tired of being treated like “skunks at a garden party” for honestly owning up to their radical reasons for supporting gay marriage. Bronski then told the story of a radio appearance in which his conservative opponent had claimed that gay marriage would “change society as we know it.” Instead of denying it, Bronski agreed with this family traditionalist that gay marriage would indeed provoke a broader cultural transformation, adding that this was a good thing. “That afternoon,” Bronski recalled, “I received a barrage of e-mails from marriage equality supporters complaining that I had committed a major faux pas and should not do media on the issue of marriage again unless I was willing to state the ‘official’ marriage equality line, which is that gay marriage is about nothing more than equal rights for couples who love one another.”
In the aftermath of the Beyond Same-Sex Marriage statement, it was easy to see that the “‘official’ marriage equality line” has served to disguise the views of many same-sex marriage supporters. Numerous reports in the mainstream media, and in the gay community’s own press, described the censorship and self-censorship that has kept the reality of marriage radicalism out of the public eye. The New York Times reported that gay family radicals “say they have muffled their own voice by censoring themselves.” Yet now, said the Times, these radicals “increasingly feel that they have nothing to lose [by speaking out] given ‘that there has been defeat after political defeat.’”
Meanwhile, Geoffrey Kors, a leading California gay-marriage activist, noted that the movement’s silence on polyamory is not necessarily a matter of actual opposition to the practice, but simply about “not allowing the right wing to steer the conversation.” Molly McKay, media director of Marriage Equality USA, spoke of the need to limit some conflicts and conversations to “internal dialogue.” Otherwise, said McKay, it could be “very confusing for non-gay allies” who support gay marriage on the assumption that the gay community wants marriage for its own sake. McKay was concerned that mainstream support for same-sex marriage could suffer if the broader public began to think that “your own community [i.e. the gay community] doesn’t support this issue.”
Muzzled Again?
Having broken the taboo against a public avowal of their radical goals, the sponsors of the Beyond Same-Sex Marriage statement were soundly chastised for their strategic error by Chris Crain, former executive editor of The Washington Blade. Crain blasted the manifesto’s signatories for “diverting attention” from the sort of fairness claims that resonate with the American public: “...[the signatories’] no doubt well-intentioned effort really is the radical redefinition of marriage and family that the conservatives have been braying about for so long. Realizing the Right’s worst fears is the last thing the movement needs to do at this critical juncture.” Then Crain added a twist: “Opening up marriage to gay couples is liberation enough for most of us, at least for now.” “At this critical juncture...At least for now” — we’ll come back to those lines in Part II of this piece. What’s notable now is that Crain’s strictly pragmatic and political objections to the idea of realizing “the Right’s worst fears” amounted to a demand for continued self-censorship on the part of family radicals.
With Crain and others blasting the radicals’ new-found honesty, Joseph De Filippis, of Queers for Economic Justice, chief spokesman for the Beyond Same-Sex Marriage manifesto, tried to put out the fire. De Filippis maintained that the statement had actually been meant to “promote discussion within the LGBT community not mainstream America.” Yet having recruited nationally known allies like Steinem, West, Lerner, and Ehrenreich, that claim was hardly credible. As long-time critic of same-sex marriage Maggie Gallagher remarked, “This is quite new and quite extraordinary....I’ve debated marriage a long time without ever seeing one visible public defender of polygamy. Now we have a major statement, signed by mainstream liberal thinkers, suggesting that this is now the Left’s consolidated position.” The cat was out of the bag, all right, thereby revealing an ongoing pattern of censorship and self-censorship.
So Robert P. George was right. The Beyond Same-Sex Marriage statement means that something important and new is going on. Marriage and family radicals have cast aside years of self-censorship and are broadcasting their agenda to the world (even as an angry, strategically-based response by prominent backers of same-sex marriage has begun to put the muzzle back on).
Marginal or Mainstream?
Yet it isn’t just a question of openness versus secrecy. “Conservative” same-sex marriage advocate Jonathan Rauch had a second point to make to Robert George. According to Rauch, the folks who signed on to the Beyond Same-Sex Marriage manifesto are a bunch of unrepresentative radicals, few of them actual leaders in the movement for same-sex marriage. The radical signatories of Beyond Same-Sex Marriage “favor marriage, not as an end in itself,” said Rauch, “but as a way-station toward a post-marriage society.” “There’s no denying that they speak for a prominent element of the gay rights movement...,” Rauch admitted, “but I don’t think they’ll prevail even within the gay universe, most of which is neither radical nor ‘queer.’”
But what if Rauch is wrong? What if the newfound openness and honesty of pro-same-sex marriage radicals is more than the revelation of a prominent faction’s existence? What if a radical view of family issues has already prevailed “within the gay universe”? What if quite a few mainstream leaders of the movement for same-sex marriage, even if they may not have personally signed onto the “Beyond Same-Sex Marriage manifesto, have already expressed public agreement with all or most of that statement’s radical goals? What if the bulk of the gay community is already on board with the lion’s share of the Beyond Same-Sex Marriage agenda? And what if even Jonathan Rauch himself has come surprising close to acknowledging this?
— Stanley Kurtz is a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center.
article.nationalreview.com
Beyond Gay Marriage
weeklystandard.com
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The End of Marriage in Scandinavia
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MARRIAGE IS SLOWLY DYING IN SCANDINAVIA. A majority of children in Sweden and Norway are born out of wedlock. Sixty percent of first-born children in Denmark have unmarried parents. Not coincidentally, these countries have had something close to full gay marriage for a decade or more. Same-sex marriage has locked in and reinforced an existing Scandinavian trend toward the separation of marriage and parenthood. The Nordic family pattern--including gay marriage--is spreading across Europe. And by looking closely at it we can answer the key empirical question underlying the gay marriage debate. Will same-sex marriage undermine the institution of marriage? It already has.
More precisely, it has further undermined the institution. The separation of marriage from parenthood was increasing; gay marriage has widened the separation. Out-of-wedlock birthrates were rising; gay marriage has added to the factors pushing those rates higher. Instead of encouraging a society-wide return to marriage, Scandinavian gay marriage has driven home the message that marriage itself is outdated, and that virtually any family form, including out-of-wedlock parenthood, is acceptable.
[ BTW every now and then, some liberal propagandists will claim "family values" are better in liberal areas mainly because of a lower divorce rate. Whats ignored is liberal areas have lower marriage rates ... and if people don't get married, they can't get divorced ... but a low divorce rate due which is caused by a low marriage rate isn't a sign of social health. ]
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Scandinavian marriage is now so weak that statistics on marriage and divorce no longer mean what they used to.
Take divorce. It's true that in Denmark, as elsewhere in Scandinavia, divorce numbers looked better in the nineties. But that's because the pool of married people has been shrinking for some time. You can't divorce without first getting married. Moreover, a closer look at Danish divorce in the post-gay marriage decade reveals disturbing trends. Many Danes have stopped holding off divorce until their kids are grown. And Denmark in the nineties saw a 25 percent increase in cohabiting couples with children. With fewer parents marrying, what used to show up in statistical tables as early divorce is now the unrecorded breakup of a cohabiting couple with children.
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Spedale's report of lower divorce rates and higher marriage rates in post-gay marriage Denmark is thus misleading. Marriage is now so weak in Scandinavia that shifts in these rates no longer mean what they would in America. In Scandinavian demography, what counts is the out-of-wedlock birthrate, and the family dissolution rate.
The family dissolution rate is different from the divorce rate. Because so many Scandinavians now rear children outside of marriage, divorce rates are unreliable measures of family weakness. Instead, we need to know the rate at which parents (married or not) split up. Precise statistics on family dissolution are unfortunately rare. Yet the studies that have been done show that throughout Scandinavia (and the West) cohabiting couples with children break up at two to three times the rate of married parents. So rising rates of cohabitation and out-of-wedlock birth stand as proxy for rising rates of family dissolution.
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[Liberal policies kill families whether in inner cities America or in Scandinavia. ]
And now that married parenthood has become a minority phenomenon, it has lost the critical mass required to have socially normative force. As Danish sociologists Wehner, Kambskard, and Abrahamson describe it, in the wake of the changes of the nineties, "Marriage is no longer a precondition for settling a family--neither legally nor normatively. . . . What defines and makes the foundation of the Danish family can be said to have moved from marriage to parenthood."
So the highly touted half-page of analysis from an unpublished paper that supposedly helps validate the "conservative case" for gay marriage--i.e., that it will encourage stable marriage for heterosexuals and homosexuals alike--does no such thing. Marriage in Scandinavia is in deep decline, with children shouldering the burden of rising rates of family dissolution. And the mainspring of the decline--an increasingly sharp separation between marriage and parenthood--can be linked to gay marriage.
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Two things prompted the Swedes to take this extra step--the welfare state and cultural attitudes. No Western economy has a higher percentage of public employees, public expenditures--or higher tax rates--than Sweden. The massive Swedish welfare state has largely displaced the family as provider. By guaranteeing jobs and income to every citizen (even children), the welfare state renders each individual independent. It's easier to divorce your spouse when the state will support you instead.
The taxes necessary to support the welfare state have had an enormous impact on the family. With taxes so high, women must work. This reduces the time available for child rearing, thus encouraging the expansion of a day-care system that takes a large part in raising nearly all Swedish children over age one. Here is at least a partial realization of Simone de Beauvoir's dream of an enforced androgyny that pushes women from the home by turning children over to the state.
Yet the Swedish welfare state may encourage traditionalism in one respect. The lone teen pregnancies common in the British and American underclass are rare in Sweden, which has no underclass to speak of. Even when Swedish couples bear a child out of wedlock, they tend to reside together when the child is born. Strong state enforcement of child support is another factor discouraging single motherhood by teens. Whatever the causes, the discouragement of lone motherhood is a short-term effect. Ultimately, mothers and fathers can get along financially alone. So children born out of wedlock are raised, initially, by two cohabiting parents, many of whom later break up.
There are also cultural-ideological causes of Swedish family decline. Even more than in the United States, radical feminist and socialist ideas pervade the universities and the media. Many Scandinavian social scientists see marriage as a barrier to full equality between the sexes, and would not be sorry to see marriage replaced by unmarried cohabitation. A related cultural-ideological agent of marital decline is secularism. Sweden is probably the most secular country in the world. Secular social scientists (most of them quite radical) have largely replaced clerics as arbiters of public morality. Swedes themselves link the decline of marriage to secularism. And many studies confirm that, throughout the West, religiosity is associated with institutionally strong marriage, while heightened secularism is correlated with a weakening of marriage. Scholars have long suggested that the relatively thin Christianization of the Nordic countries explains a lot about why the decline of marriage in Scandinavia is a decade ahead of the rest of the West.
Are Scandinavians concerned about rising out-of-wedlock births, the decline of marriage, and ever-rising rates of family dissolution? No, and yes. For over 15 years, an American outsider, Rutgers University sociologist David Popenoe, has played Cassandra on these issues. Popenoe's 1988 book, "Disturbing the Nest," is still the definitive treatment of Scandinavian family change and its meaning for the Western world. Popenoe is no toe-the-line conservative. He has praise for the Swedish welfare state, and criticizes American opposition to some child welfare programs. Yet Popenoe has documented the slow motion collapse of the Swedish family, and emphasized the link between Swedish family decline and welfare policy.
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Despite the reluctance of Scandinavian social scientists to study the consequences of family dissolution for children, we do have an excellent study that followed the life experiences of all children born in Stockholm in 1953. (Not coincidentally, the research was conducted by a British scholar, Duncan W.G. Timms.) That study found that regardless of income or social status, parental breakup had negative effects on children's mental health. Boys living with single, separated, or divorced mothers had particularly high rates of impairment in adolescence. An important 2003 study by Gunilla Ringbäck Weitoft, et al. found that children of single parents in Sweden have more than double the rates of mortality, severe morbidity, and injury of children in two parent households. This held true after controlling for a wide range of demographic and socioeconomic circumstances.
THE DECLINE OF MARRIAGE and the rise of unstable cohabitation and out-of-wedlock childbirth are not confined to Scandinavia. The Scandinavian welfare state aggravates these problems. Yet none of the forces weakening marriage there are unique to the region. Contraception, abortion, women in the workforce, spreading secularism, ascendant individualism, and a substantial welfare state are found in every Western country. That is why the Nordic pattern is spreading.
Yet the pattern is spreading unevenly. And scholars agree that cultural tradition plays a central role in determining whether a given country moves toward the Nordic family system. Religion is a key variable. A 2002 study by the Max Planck Institute, for example, concluded that countries with the lowest rates of family dissolution and out-of-wedlock births are "strongly dominated by the Catholic confession." The same study found that in countries with high levels of family dissolution, religion in general, and Catholicism in particular, had little influence.
British demographer Kathleen Kiernan, the acknowledged authority on the spread of cohabitation and out-of-wedlock births across Europe, divides the continent into three zones. The Nordic countries are the leaders in cohabitation and out-of-wedlock births. They are followed by a middle group that includes the Netherlands, Belgium, Great Britain, and Germany. Until recently, France was a member of this middle group, but France's rising out-of-wedlock birthrate has moved it into the Nordic category. North American rates of cohabitation and out-of-wedlock birth put the United States and Canada into this middle group. Most resistant to cohabitation, family dissolution, and out-of-wedlock births are the southern European countries of Spain, Portugal, Italy, and Greece, and, until recently, Switzerland and Ireland. (Ireland's rising out-of-wedlock birthrate has just pushed it into the middle group.)
These three groupings closely track the movement for gay marriage. In the early nineties, gay marriage came to the Nordic countries, where the out-of-wedlock birthrate was already high. Ten years later, out-of-wedlock birth rates have risen significantly in the middle group of nations. Not coincidentally, nearly every country in that middle group has recently either legalized some form of gay marriage, or is seriously considering doing so. Only in the group with low out-of-wedlock birthrates has the gay marriage movement achieved relatively little success.
This suggests that gay marriage is both an effect and a cause of the increasing separation between marriage and parenthood. As rising out-of-wedlock birthrates disassociate heterosexual marriage from parenting, gay marriage becomes conceivable. If marriage is only about a relationship between two people, and is not intrinsically connected to parenthood, why shouldn't same-sex couples be allowed to marry? It follows that once marriage is redefined to accommodate same-sex couples, that change cannot help but lock in and reinforce the very cultural separation between marriage and parenthood that makes gay marriage conceivable to begin with.
We see this process at work in the radical separation of marriage and parenthood that swept across Scandinavia in the nineties. If Scandinavian out-of-wedlock birthrates had not already been high in the late eighties, gay marriage would have been far more difficult to imagine. More than a decade into post-gay marriage Scandinavia, out-of-wedlock birthrates have passed 50 percent, and the effective end of marriage as a protective shield for children has become thinkable. Gay marriage hasn't blocked the separation of marriage and parenthood; it has advanced it.
WE SEE THIS most clearly in Norway. In 1989, a couple of years after Sweden broke ground by offering gay couples the first domestic partnership package in Europe, Denmark legalized de facto gay marriage. This kicked off a debate in Norway (traditionally more conservative than either Sweden or Denmark), which legalized de facto gay marriage in 1993. (Sweden expanded its benefits packages into de facto gay marriage in 1994.) In liberal Denmark, where out-of-wedlock birthrates were already very high, the public favored same-sex marriage. But in Norway, where the out-of-wedlock birthrate was lower--and religion traditionally stronger--gay marriage was imposed, against the public will, by the political elite.
Norway's gay marriage debate, which ran most intensely from 1991 through 1993, was a culture-shifting event. And once enacted, gay marriage had a decidedly unconservative impact on Norway's cultural contests, weakening marriage's defenders, and placing a weapon in the hands of those who sought to replace marriage with cohabitation. Since its adoption, gay marriage has brought division and decline to Norway's Lutheran Church. Meanwhile, Norway's fast-rising out-of-wedlock birthrate has shot past Denmark's. Particularly in Norway--once relatively conservative--gay marriage has undermined marriage's institutional standing for everyone.
Norway's Lutheran state church has been riven by conflict in the decade since the approval of de facto gay marriage, with the ordination of registered partners the most divisive issue. The church's agonies have been intensively covered in the Norwegian media, which have taken every opportunity to paint the church as hidebound and divided. The nineties began with conservative churchmen in control. By the end of the decade, liberals had seized the reins.
While the most public disputes of the nineties were over homosexuality, Norway's Lutheran church was also divided over the question of heterosexual cohabitation. Asked directly, liberal and conservative clerics alike voice a preference for marriage over cohabitation--especially for couples with children. In practice, however, conservative churchmen speak out against the trend toward unmarried cohabitation and childbirth, while liberals acquiesce.
This division over heterosexual cohabitation broke into the open in 2000, at the height of the church's split over gay partnerships, when Prince Haakon, heir to Norway's throne, began to live with his lover, a single mother. From the start of the prince's controversial relationship to its eventual culmination in marriage, the future head of the Norwegian state church received tokens of public support or understanding from the very same bishops who were leading the fight to permit the ordination of homosexual partners.
So rather than strengthening Norwegian marriage against the rise of cohabitation and out-of-wedlock birth, same-sex marriage had the opposite effect. Gay marriage lessened the church's authority by splitting it into warring factions and providing the secular media with occasions to mock and expose divisions. Gay marriage also elevated the church's openly rebellious minority liberal faction to national visibility, allowing Norwegians to feel that their proclivity for unmarried parenthood, if not fully approved by the church, was at least not strongly condemned. If the "conservative case" for gay marriage had been valid, clergy who were supportive of gay marriage would have taken a strong public stand against unmarried heterosexual parenthood. This didn't happen. It was the conservative clergy who criticized the prince, while the liberal supporters of gay marriage tolerated his decisions. The message was not lost on ordinary Norwegians, who continued their flight to unmarried parenthood.
Gay marriage is both an effect and a reinforcing cause of the separation of marriage and parenthood. In states like Sweden and Denmark, where out-of-wedlock birthrates were already very high, and the public favored gay marriage, gay unions were an effect of earlier changes. Once in place, gay marriage symbolically ratified the separation of marriage and parenthood. And once established, gay marriage became one of several factors contributing to further increases in cohabitation and out-of-wedlock birthrates, as well as to early divorce. But in Norway, where out-of-wedlock birthrates were lower, religion stronger, and the public opposed same-sex unions, gay marriage had an even greater role in precipitating marital decline.
SWEDEN'S POSITION as the world leader in family decline is associated with a weak clergy, and the prominence of secular and left-leaning social scientists. In the post-gay marriage nineties, as Norway's once relatively low out-of-wedlock birthrate was climbing to unprecedented heights, and as the gay marriage controversy weakened and split the once respected Lutheran state church, secular social scientists took center stage.
Kari Moxnes, a feminist sociologist specializing in divorce, is one of the most prominent of Norway's newly emerging group of public social scientists. As a scholar who sees both marriage and at-home motherhood as inherently oppressive to women, Moxnes is a proponent of nonmarital cohabitation and parenthood. In 1993, as the Norwegian legislature was debating gay marriage, Moxnes published an article, "Det tomme ekteskap" ("Empty Marriage"), in the influential liberal paper Dagbladet. She argued that Norwegian gay marriage was a sign of marriage's growing emptiness, not its strength. Although Moxnes spoke in favor of gay marriage, she treated its creation as a (welcome) death knell for marriage itself. Moxnes identified homosexuals--with their experience in forging relationships unencumbered by children--as social pioneers in the separation of marriage from parenthood. In recognizing homosexual relationships, Moxnes said, society was ratifying the division of marriage from parenthood that had spurred the rise of out-of-wedlock births to begin with.
A frequent public presence, Moxnes enjoyed her big moment in 1999, when she was embroiled in a dispute with Valgerd Svarstad Haugland, minister of children and family affairs in Norway's Christian Democrat government. Moxnes had criticized Christian marriage classes for teaching children the importance of wedding vows. This brought a sharp public rebuke from Haugland. Responding to Haugland's criticisms, Moxnes invoked homosexual families as proof that "relationships" were now more important than institutional marriage.
This is not what proponents of the conservative case for gay marriage had in mind. In Norway, gay marriage has given ammunition to those who wish to put an end to marriage. And the steady rise of Norway's out-of-wedlock birthrate during the nineties proves that the opponents of marriage are succeeding. Nor is Kari Moxnes an isolated case.
Months before Moxnes clashed with Haugland, social historian Kari Melby had a very public quarrel with a leader of the Christian Democratic party over the conduct of Norway's energy minister, Marit Arnstad. Arnstad had gotten pregnant in office and had declined to name the father. Melby defended Arnstad, and publicly challenged the claim that children do best with both a mother and a father. In making her case, Melby praised gay parenting, along with voluntary single motherhood, as equally worthy alternatives to the traditional family. So instead of noting that an expectant mother might want to follow the example of marriage that even gays were now setting, Melby invoked homosexual families as proof that a child can do as well with one parent as two.
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The Scandinavian experience rebuts the so-called conservative case for gay marriage in more than one way. Noteworthy, too, is the lack of a movement toward marriage and monogamy among gays. Take-up rates on gay marriage are exceedingly small. Yale's William Eskridge acknowledged this when he reported in 2000 that 2,372 couples had registered after nine years of the Danish law, 674 after four years of the Norwegian law, and 749 after four years of the Swedish law.
[ IOW hardly any gays really want to marry anyway. ]
Danish social theorist Henning Bech and Norwegian sociologist Rune Halvorsen offer excellent accounts of the gay marriage debates in Denmark and Norway. Despite the regnant social liberalism in these countries, proposals to recognize gay unions generated tremendous controversy, and have reshaped the meaning of marriage in the years since. Both Bech and Halvorsen stress that the conservative case for gay marriage, while put forward by a few, was rejected by many in the gay community. Bech, perhaps Scandinavia's most prominent gay thinker, dismisses as an "implausible" claim the idea that gay marriage promotes monogamy. He treats the "conservative case" as something that served chiefly tactical purposes during a difficult political debate. According to Halvorsen, many of Norway's gays imposed self-censorship during the marriage debate, so as to hide their opposition to marriage itself. The goal of the gay marriage movements in both Norway and Denmark, say Halvorsen and Bech, was not marriage but social approval for homosexuality. Halvorsen suggests that the low numbers of registered gay couples may be understood as a collective protest against the expectations (presumably, monogamy) embodied in marriage.
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The American mix of family traditionalism and family instability is unusual. In comparison to Europe, Americans are more religious and more likely to turn to the family than the state for a wide array of needs--from child care, to financial support, to care for the elderly. Yet America's individualism cuts two ways. Our cultural libertarianism protects the family as a bulwark against the state, yet it also breaks individuals loose from the family. The danger we face is a combination of America's divorce rate with unstable, Scandinavian-style out-of-wedlock parenthood. With a growing tendency for cohabiting couples to have children outside of marriage, America is headed in that direction.
Young Americans are more likely to favor gay marriage than their elders. That oft-noted fact is directly related to another. Less than half of America's twentysomethings consider it wrong to bear children outside marriage. There is a growing tendency for even middle class cohabiting couples to have children without marrying.
Nonetheless, although cohabiting parenthood is growing in America, levels here are still far short of those in Europe. America's situation is not unlike Norway's in the early nineties, with religiosity relatively strong, the out-of-wedlock birthrate still relatively low (yet rising), and the public opposed to gay marriage. If, as in Norway, gay marriage were imposed here by a socially liberal cultural elite, it would likely speed us on the way toward the classic Nordic pattern of less frequent marriage, more frequent out-of-wedlock birth, and skyrocketing family dissolution.
In the American context, this would be a disaster. Beyond raising rates of middle class family dissolution, a further separation of marriage from parenthood would reverse the healthy turn away from single-parenting that we have begun to see since welfare reform. And cross-class family decline would bring intense pressure for a new expansion of the American welfare state.
All this is happening in Britain. With the Nordic pattern's spread across Europe, Britain's out-of-wedlock birthrate has risen to 40 percent. Most of that increase is among cohabiting couples. Yet a significant number of out-of-wedlock births in Britain are to lone teenage mothers. This a function of Britain's class divisions. Remember that although the Scandinavian welfare state encourages family dissolution in the long term, in the short term, Scandinavian parents giving birth out of wedlock tend to stay together. But given the presence of a substantial underclass in Britain, the spread of Nordic cohabitation there has sent lone teen parenting rates way up. As Britain's rates of single parenting and family dissolution have grown, so has pressure to expand the welfare state to compensate for economic help that families can no longer provide. But of course, an expansion of the welfare state would only lock the weakening of Britain's family system into place.
If America is to avoid being forced into a similar choice, we'll have to resist the separation of marriage from parenthood. Yet even now we are being pushed in the Scandinavian direction. Stimulated by rising rates of unmarried parenthood, the influential American Law Institute (ALI) has proposed a series of legal reforms ("Principles of Family Dissolution") designed to equalize marriage and cohabitation. Adoption of the ALI principles would be a giant step toward the Scandinavian system.
AMERICANS take it for granted that, despite its recent troubles, marriage will always exist. This is a mistake. Marriage is disappearing in Scandinavia, and the forces undermining it there are active throughout the West.
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The Scandinavian example also proves that gay marriage is not interracial marriage in a new guise. The miscegenation analogy was never convincing. There are plenty of reasons to think that, in contrast to race, sexual orientation will have profound effects on marriage. But with Scandinavia, we are well beyond the realm of even educated speculation. The post-gay marriage changes in the Scandinavian family are significant. This is not like the fantasy about interracial birth defects. There is a serious scholarly debate about the spread of the Nordic family pattern. Since gay marriage is a part of that pattern, it needs to be part of that debate.
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weeklystandard.com
Eventually liberals will admit gay marriage weakens the institution. When thats admitted, it will come as 'so what, marriage was patriarchal and oppressive anyway. |
