Rumors of the death of marriage are greatly exaggerated.
I didn't mean to suggest the death of marriage as in people stopping getting married. More likely they will marry more often and that it will mean less.
What I'm trying to say when I talk about marriage being broken is that marriage means different things. Different people enter into it for different reasons. And there are many different facets of marriage that affect all couples. The notion that marriage is all about raising children is one that is held by some but not all. Children are raised inside and outside of marriage without much legal difference so legal marriage is close to irrelevant to that process. To the extent that the marriage vows or the marriage laws or the marriage sacrament keep couples together, they may contribute to the rearing of children. Studies indicate that enduring couples do better than other arrangements. Other than that, marriage is inherently irrelevant, best I can tell.
So when I talk about marriage being broken, that's what I mean--it's disassociated with the rearing of children. Supporting marriage as we know it is not the key to improving the lousy job we do of rearing children. The key is somewhere else and focusing on marriage is not apt unless we change marriage to correlate more with the objective of rearing children.
Right now, legally speaking, the decision to get married can be and often is much like the decision of whether to rent or own or to file jointly or separately. It's about which status is the most advantageous. It's not necessarily about joining together and making a commitment to bear and raise children. If we think that the latter arrangement is crucial to the success of our society, there's no easy way the state can move us in that direction. The state cannot be a family standard setter or a family counselor.
Well, there is a potential way, which is to offer covenant marriages. Right now that's being done in some states as an alternative. If states offer covenant marriages as an alternative, they are effectively downgrading their regular marriages to something more akin to a domestic partnership or civil union or whatever we call it. States can offer these tiered arrangements and let people choose. That's a possibility. I read recently an article from an Arizona paper that said that covenant marriages were rarely chosen. Not sure what that tells us. If a state were to offer an array, though, then we would see what people chose. Anyway, that would be a way the state could encourage the kind of marriage commitment that is alleged to correlate with successful child rearing.
Another way to tier marriages would be for religious institutions to offer marriages and the states to offer civil unions. That way the institutions could stress the childrearing meaning of marriage. They could choose not to marry people who didn't meet their standards, presumably a covenant-like standard. People who got married in a church would also get a civil union for the legal side of it. Other people would just do the civil union. Perhaps this way those who were getting married just so they could inherit or get citizenship would go for the union and skip the kids. Social pressure could direct the child bearers into the marriage track where they would get guidance and support.
Those are my thoughts on "fixing" marriage, fixing being defined as stressing child rearing. Seems to me that either we need to fix marriage so that kids can be emphasized or the folks who equate marriage with "for the kids" should give it up. I don't see how the marginal difference of allowing gays to marry is more than a drop in the already pretty full bucket of marriage distractions. I don't see that what we have currently is worth protecting from the intrusion of gays. If we fix it, that's another matter. Perhaps letting gays in will be a useful trigger for forcing the fix. If they can't keep gays out, maybe those for-the-kids folks will come up with a supra-marriage alternative. I'd like to see some creative thinking about that rather than the simple begrudging of access to gays. |
