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Politics : Politics for Pros- moderated -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Ilaine who wrote (52801)	7/4/2004 7:30:05 PM
From: Lane3	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 793603

I'm going to give this one more try and then give up if it doesn't get through. If you live together "as married," when you die, if you die childless... I understand what the law is. Yes, we have set up a system of laws around marriage to provide support and bennies to the married. I'm not talking about that. It is my contention that we are supporting marriage as a mistaken proxy for something else, that it is not marriage, in and of itself, that is the key to what we want to support in society. We want to support stable family relationships but don't do so directly. Instead we support marriage, which is only a proxy and, I submit, not a very apt one anymore, for what we really want to support. Say you ran a company and you thought that your sales force had too hard an edge and was turning off customers so you wanted to hire people with a softer style. Rather than going through the process of interviewing and testing people to identify nurturing types, you made it a company policy to hire women figuring women are nurturing. There is some basis for that but there are lots of hard-driving women and lots of nurturing men so your proxy policy will have a lot of misses. When your workforce doesn't turn out the way you hoped, you are oblivious to the fact that what went wrong was your use of an inapt proxy. Yet you cling to your policy of hiring women rather than examine it and see why you're off. My point is that marriage is an inapt proxy for what we want to foster in society. It is no longer an apt proxy for whatever it is that bland's parents bring to society. Calling that a testament to marriage is off base. It's a testament to whatever that something is for which marriage is a proxy. Family commitment, I suppose, something like that. We have plenty of people with that "something" who aren't married. We have plenty of people without that "something" who are married. By supporting marriage we support some that we should but not all while we support some that we shouldn't. It would be better if we identified and made the "something" the focus of our attention rather than the mistaken proxy. When I say that marriage is broken I'm saying that there is too little correlation these days between the "something" and the marriage certificate. Having the certificate is not at all the same as having the "something." Remember the Hawthorne Studies you learned about in school? They thought that the productivity of their subjects inproved because they provided better lighting so they set out to improve lighting company-wide. As it turned out, the lighting was not the key at all. I submit that, likewise, marriage is not the key.