Raising Boys Without Men (Part One)

In Raising Boys Without Men, Peggy Drexler praises a group of “maverick moms” – lesbian couples, single mothers by choice, and a variety of single mothers not by choice – for raising the next generation of “exceptional men.” The core of the book is Drexler’s study of 16 boys raised by lesbian couples in San Francisco in the 1990s. She then supplemented this dissertation work with interviews with another 60 single mothers, half who had chosen to raise sons alone, half who had not. The lesbian couples, who make up the bulk of the analysis and examples in the book, are white, educated, white-collar, older women in stable relationships.

Drexler, a long-married mother, approaches the issue with some rather old-fashioned questions. Will boys raised by women only be sissies? Will boys raised by lesbians be gay? Sociology in the fifties and early sixties was concerned that over-mothered boys would not be manly enough. That question was largely laid to rest in the decade or so following. Likewise, research from the seventies and eighties found that children of homosexual parents were no more likely than average to be homosexual themselves, though they were more likely to be liberal in their attitudes toward sexual orientation.

Drexler did find that these boys were normal boys in most respects. They were typical boys in their interests and their play. I was pleased and a little surprised to find that Drexler expected this, as she agrees that much of the gendered activity of children is hardwired, and not simply the result of social convention and socialization.

Indeed, Drexler’s stronger claim is that the sons of lesbian couples are more sensitive to emotions and social relations than average boys are. Far from being morally retarded by growing up in a female-run household, Drexler seems to be saying that this small group of boys is morally superior to the average lad. She also seems to be making the same claim for the sons of the single mothers she studied, though it is hard for me to be certain about this as there are no real quantities reported here.

Drexler sets out to answer a too-easy question: Is it possible for lesbian couples and single women to raise good boys and men? It is practically a sociological truism that it is possible for good individuals to arise from any social circumstance, no matter how risky. The more difficult sociological question is, are lesbian couples and single mothers as likely to produce good boys and men as stable heterosexual couples are? Drexler’s sample is much too small, and much too select, to answer that question. Moreover, other research makes me think that she is mixing apples and oranges. Stable, two-parent couples generally produce better outcomes for kids than single parents do, regardless of any other factors. Calling lesbians couples, single-moms-by-choice, and women who become single mothers by divorce, widowhood, or inadvertent never marrying all “maverick moms” obscures very large differences among those groups.

Peggy Drexler did, I think, demonstrate her main point – sons of lesbian couples grow up to be regular guys. There are other questions, though, that her study raises, but does not fully answer.

Fighting the Culture of Fear is THE Centrist Issue

Extremists try to win the hearts and minds of the majority through fear. The culture of fear is equally a weapon of the left and the right. What they most want you to fear is what will happen if the other side wins.

Barry Glassner published a good book, The Culture of Fear: Why Americans are Afraid of the Wrong Things, in 1999. He details the ways in which many of the things which are high on most Americans’ fear lists – pregnant teen girls and murderous teen boys, rising rates of drug use and violent crime, epidemic new diseases and plane crashes – are actually quite rare, and most of them are getting better. From recent news we might add a fear of pedophiles and serial killers, and, of course, terrorism. Glassner’s point holds true about these fears, as well: they are rare, and they are not getting more frequent.

Michael Moore made a similar point in Bowling for Columbine. In talking about shooting deaths, he used the wonderfully rich comparison of the United States and Canada. Both societies have many guns and a gun-accommodating culture. Yet their gun death rate is a small fraction of ours, even when adjusting for their much smaller population. Moore attributes the difference to a different culture – American culture promotes fear much more than Canadian culture does. Indeed, in the middle of the film, Moore interviews Barry Glassner about the culture of fear, while they are both standing at the street corner in South Central Los Angeles which was the heart of the Rodney King riots. Presumably, two middle-aged white guys – geeky, slow, obviously defenseless white guys, at that -- should have been at risk and felt fear in the heartland of black rage against white society. (In fact, most of the perpetrators of the Rodney King riots were Mexican-Americans, and most of the shop-keeping victims were Asian-Americans – but that did not fit the CNN story line). Yet, sensibly, they were not fearful, and were treated in a civil, even friendly, fashion by everyone they met.

Television is particularly egregious in selling fear. Television is actually, I think, a very bad way to find out what is going on. Television is driven by a need to show pictures. Most important things that happen do not produce interesting pictures. Most real news, in other words, does not make good television. So television shows good pictures – fires, car collisions, plane crashes, bombings, riots, shot and beaten bodies, and, when all else fails, crying victims of the above. These pictures give us the impression that these are the most newsworthy events. Rarely is that so. Since most people get their news from television, this mistaken impression is widespread in society. The cable news stations, if anything, make the problem worse, by repeating a few shocking headlines and pictures, and filling the rest of the time with reporters’ opinions. Local news stations answer the cable challenge with “how your innocuous possessions can kill you” stories. The best television news show, the PBS “Newshour,” is very boring television, indeed – all talking heads, with almost no pictures at all. And the “Daily Show” is a funny parody, but it is frankly fake.

Of course there are real threats in the world. There are terrorists, and tsunamis, and tsetse flies. But for most people most of the time, these are distant threats. Yes, millions die every day, and many of them from preventable causes. But the cause of prevention is also advancing every day, too. The fact that we know about deaths from around the world does not show that there are more deaths around the world, as much as it shows the great improvement in our news-gathering capacity. The fact that the 2004 tsunami was a worldwide cause for compassion shows improvement in the world. Even in the most dangerous places in the world, most people live without being attacked. Many of the bad things that happen in the world – drug addiction, alcoholism, gun-shot wounds, sexually transmitted diseases – mostly happen to people who live risky lives. If you don’t fool around with drugs, booze, guns, and sex, you are very unlikely to suffer any of these bad outcomes.

Sociology is a great help in combating the culture of fear. Sociology, more than any other science, in concerned with distinguishing the normal from the rare. We look at the whole bell curve, to see what is likely to happen to most people, and which things happen only rarely or mostly to those who live in the extreme ends of society. Of course, we should fight bad things, even if they are rare or are only likely to happen to other people.

But we need not succumb to a culture of fear. The facts, I believe, support a culture of cheerfulness.

Choice vs. Faithfulness in Family Life

In the seventies family life was reconstructed to make adults free to choose the family lives they wanted. The promise of “families we choose”was that family life would be happier and more satisfying. No-fault divorce would end unhappy marriages. Easy birth control and abortion on demand would mean there would be no unwanted children. Cohabitation before marriage would end naïve marital choices. Reducing the stigma of divorce, unmarried parenting, cohabitation, abortion, and homosexual relations would widen the spectrum of “family.”

However, as Francis Fukuyama argued convincingly in The Great Disruption, the sixties and seventies disrupted traditional ways of arranging society in the name of freedom, without putting any better social arrangements in their place. Indeed, as things have played out since then, the new social arrangements have produced many new social problems, without solving the old ones. The American Paradox, David Myers argues, is that today Americans feel materially rich, but spiritually poor. Norval Glenn, a leading family sociologist, has shown that while most people are still happy with their marriages, fewer report being very happy compared to forty years ago.

The problem, I think, is that family life is not based on choice, but on faithfulness. The problem with the religion of choice is that it does not let you actually choose anything. Any choice made now forces you to give up other choices in the future. If, on the other hand, you try always to keep your options open, you never get to live any particular kind of life fully.

The conflict shows up most clearly when we are talking about marriage. As Linda Waite and Maggie Gallagher demonstrate in The Case for Marriage, marriage can change lives because of the Power of the Vow. We choose our mates. More importantly, we choose never to choose another, barring death. That is what gives marriage its power. Choosing to live a married life with one particular woman is what makes the extraordinary change in men. Single men live the life of “options.” They have lots of choices, but many fewer accomplishments. Married men are the most productive economic group in society because they have given up the life of many options, and are living the life of their one great choice.

When we say “choice” now, it first calls to mind the choice about abortion. Easy abortion was supposed to end unwanted children. It didn’t. There are many factors which contribute to the problem of unwanted children. Still, a pro-choice attitude toward children, however much it may free women to live as they choose, has the unintended effect of undermining commitment to the children who are born, and to children in general.

As a society, the growth of choice about every aspect of family life – and genetic design of children and cloning are on the horizon, expanding the world of family choice – has, paradoxically, undermined our collective commitment to actual families.

Choice is a virtue in a society. But it is a secondary virtue. Faithfulness is a primary social virtue. When choice serves faithfulness, society is better. When choice displaces faithfulness as a high social virtue, society suffers. And the institution of society that depends most on faithfulness, commitment, reliability, and the Vow, is family life.

Marry Your Baby Daddy – The Book

Earlier I wrote about Marry Your Baby Daddy Day, a contest in which a group of couples who had a child together and the intention to marry someday were given an an-expenses-paid wedding, arranged by novelist Maryann Reid and Rev. Herbert Daughtry. Rev. Daughtry supplied the church and conducted the services. Ms. Reid wrote the novel, Marry Your Baby Daddy, which inspired the contest. Having been intrigued by the concept, I thought it only fair to read the novel, too.

The premise of the novel is that the loving grandmother of the three Anderson sisters has died. Each Anderson woman has a child with a man she sort-of wants to marry. To their surprise, grandma died with money – three million dollars worth. It will all come to them – if they each marry their “baby daddy” within six months. Romantic complications ensue.

Let me say at the outset that “chick lit” is not my genre, and black chick lit is terra incognita. I am not the target demographic. This is fine – in this great country of ours, there is room for every kind of reader and every genre of writing. Someday I will blog about my favorite genre, fast-paced church history. (I’m sure you can’t wait).

The women range in age from late-twenties to mid-thirties, and in class from the corporate lawyer big sister to the successful hairdresser middle child to the file clerk little one. The men include the sweet one who wants to marry, the decent one who doesn’t want the bother, and the handsome tomcat who is by turns sweet and brutal. Oh, and there is a handsome lawyer handling the estate. I am guessing that experienced readers of the genre could fill in the rest. But novelty is not the point of popular genres. My wife reads mysteries every night, not for the puzzle so much as to be drawn into the setting and the nuance of familiar kinds of characters. The evocation of the particularities of New York black culture, especially in the Brooklyn settings, is engaging. The communication among the sisters, who have only one another to rely on, is believable and really the emotional core of the story.

I was struck by a few features, though, that I couldn’t simply attribute to the genre. For one thing, nearly every chapter contains a detailed sex description. In the “Sex and the City” literary world (as opposed, of course, to real life), is this customary? Moreover, there was not a single married father in the story. We infer that grandma has been married to produce her granddaughter’s mother, but he is so long gone his departure is not even described. The sisters’ mother killed herself when the girls were young. There is no mention at all of their father or fathers, nor a suggestion that her mother ever married. I won’t be spoiling the ending to say that some of the baby daddies become married fathers by the end, but only in that order, and only under extraordinary conditions.

The poor teen moms in Promises I Can Keep, which I wrote about earlier, grow up in a world without married fathers. These women, black, white, and Hispanic, are shaped by their poverty as much as their ethnic culture. The fictional women of Marry Your Baby Daddy, on the other hand, are above poverty. Marriage is not an economic decision for them, but an emotional one. Their questions are, am I ready to settle down, and do I want to settle down with this man? Even in the end, one of the new wives does not want to commit on whether her marriage is permanent.

Jane Austen wrote the great classic chick lit about, and for, women seeking to be wives and (then) mothers. (And wonderful moral tales they are, too, which I admire hugely, lest anyone thing I am disrespectful of the great Jane). Bridget Jones, for all her near-parody of Jane Austen, still seeks the same thing. Marry Your Baby Daddy rests on a different premise, or at least a wildly different order of operations. Is this typical? I would welcome your comments.

She Who Gets Custody Files First

Margaret Brinig, a law professor at the University of Iowa, has done several interesting studies of divorce law. I especially commend one co-authored with Douglas Allen with the wonderful title, ”’These Boots are Made for Walking’: Why Most Divorce Filers Are Women.” This work was brought to my attention by a comment on a the recent blog, “Divorce Divides Children.”

Brinig’s interesting finding is that “who gets the children is by far the most important component in deciding who files for divorce, particularly when there is little quarrel about property.” Women are much more likely to file for divorce than men – at a rate of two to one in many states. In states in which the mother is presumed to get sole custody of the couple’s children, she is much more likely to file for divorce. Joint custody rules reduce the likelihood that women will file more often than men.

Even more interestingly, joint custody rules make it less likely that either party will file for divorce in the first place. Brinig suggests that this is due, in part, to the fact that divorcing spouses often use custody filings to hurt their soon-to-be ex. Sole custody is a powerful sledgehammer against an ex. Joint custody is more like staying married.

Elizabeth Marquardt makes clear that joint custody does not make it any easier for kids to avoid being divided by divorce, and may make that feeling worse. But the main point is that it would be better for children – and parents – if there were fewer divorces to begin with.

When divorce is even on the table, all the choices are tragic. Margaret Brinig’s research about the effect of custody rules on filing, though, is a help in assessing joint custody as a tool in reducing divorce.

The “Adults First” Divorce Culture Lives On

Yesterday I posted “Divorce Divides Children” from San Antonio, where I was attending a conference. Later that morning I opened the San Antonio Express-News, and found a story typical of the problem the I have been writing about: the divorce culture that thinks divorce is about the adults’ happiness, without even asking about the children.

“An amicable divorce can benefit everyone,” by Express-News staff writer Jeanie Tavitas-Williams, reported on The Unofficial Guide to Getting a Divorce, by Russell and Susan Wild. The paper reports that “with 22 years of marriage behind them, two children, a decent portfolio, property and all kinds of other personal, financial and emotional entanglements, both acknowledge they had ‘all the ingredients that could have made for a ….’” How would you expect that sentence to end? Good marriage? Effective partnership? Secure home? No, to the Wilds, those are the ingredients of a “nasty divorce."

The Wilds did divorce. Yet the tone of the story is congratulatory. The story continues, “Yet today, fewer than two years after their union was legally dissolved, the Pennsylvania residents are good friends. They live about three blocks away from each other, have dinner together (kids included) most every Tuesday, even have keys to each other's homes.” If they had all that going for them, and still do, why did they divorce? Because, Russell Wild says, they “had exhausted all of their efforts to regain the spark before finally ‘throwing in the towel.’"

My gripe is not with the Wilds. To me, it would seem that two people who are capable of such an amicable divorce, are also capable of an amicable marriage. But I don’t know all the facts from a newspaper story, and won’t judge the Wilds.

My gripe is with the reporter, the newspaper, and the dozens of other stories like this one that you can find any month in newspapers, women’s magazines, men’s magazines, and, especially, “relationship” television and radio shows.

No one asked about the children. The reporter does not tell us what the parents think their divorce did to their children. She did not report on the growing body of expert evidence, such as Elizabeth Marquardt’s or Judith Wallerstein’s work, which details the enduring legacy of divorce on children. She did not, evidently, think to ask the children themselves what they thought of this “amicable” relationship.

With other kinds of stories, reporters have a normal routine: first report what the more powerful parties in a conflict are doing, then investigate the effects on the less powerful. If they were reporting, say, a school strike, they would interview the administration, interview the teachers, and then talk to parents and kids, or at least to some sort of experts about the effect on parents and kids. Our current divorce culture, though, treats divorce as something that adults do. The effects on kids are not a normal part of the story, are not in the reporters’ and editors’ standard calculation of affected parties.

So this is my plea: when anyone reports on a divorce, either a particular divorce or on divorce as an institution, always ask “what about the children?” Ask, and tell.

Divorce Divides Children

Elizabeth Marquardt’s main point in Between Two Worlds: The Inner Lives of Children of Divorce is, as the title suggests, that children of divorce grow up divided because they are never fully at home. She reports with great subtlety about the routine ways in which divorced kids learn to keep secrets from their parents, and even to lie to one parent so as not to betray the other. She makes clear that joint custody is not the happy solution that some divorced parent activists promote, because it keeps the child perpetually uprooted. Divorce takes children from being the center of one nuclear family, to a perpetual guest in two new families,

The core problem of divorce for children is that even in the best divorce, the child can never have a full life with both mother and father. All of Marquardt’s subjects were chosen because they had kept contact with both parents. We know from other research that a quarter to a half of all divorced children lose all contact with their fathers after a few years. The luckier ones who keep ties to both parents are still divided in their lives, loyalties, and longings. The divorced kids who lose a parent altogether are like emotional amputees.

I have known a number of children of divorce, some of whom have gone on, like Marquardt, to be successful in their education, their careers, their civic lives, and, most impressively, in their own marriages and childrearing. Yet, as Marquardt would be the first to acknowledge, the divorce always leaves scars. Divorced kids are more prone to become anxious over difficulties in their marriages. One of the reasons that children of divorce are more likely to divorce themselves, despite their deathly fear of divorce, is because they either marry impulsively, or throw in the towel too soon. It is hard for children of divorce to believe that they really know how to make a successful marriage, even if other people do.

I find that I can usually tell after knowing a student for a little while whether his or her parents are still together.

Divorce is one of many experiences that scar children. Compared to growing up with violence, or drunkenness, or drug addiction, divorce leaves relatively mild scars. But it always does. Marquardt says that she is not trying to condemn divorced parents, like her own mother and father. Rather, she wants everyone to see that “divorce happy talk” is a self-serving lie that parents tell when they want to convince kids that what is good for the parents is also good for the children.

Divorce’s Religious Effects

Elizabeth Marquardt’s Between Two Worlds, which I have reported on in my two previous blogs, rests on a study which ultimately has a religious purpose. The National Survey on the Moral and Spiritual Lives of Children of Divorce, which Marquardt directed with Norval Glenn, was paid for by the Lilly Endowment, as part of their ongoing studies of the social effects of religion. And Marquardt’s findings on religion are among the most interesting and unprecedented in the study.

Children of divorce are less likely to be involved in organized religion. This fact has been reported before. But when children of intact and divorced families were asked how spiritual they considered themselves to be, nearly 3/4ths of each group answered “fairly” or “very” spiritual. Almost all from each group (90% and 86%, respectively) reported attending religious services as a child. The divorced kids, though, were more likely to report that they lost their early church in the divorce. Sometimes when the parents stop going, the divorced kids will start attending religious services by themselves. The children of divorce are, if anything, more serious in their search for meaning, order, and spiritual direction in their lives. Indeed, despite the generally lower church membership of divorced kids compared to kids from intact families, divorced kids are somewhat more likely to report that they are born-again or evangelical Christians, though they were no more likely to have been raised that way.

The study asked what the respondents made of the “prodigal son” story in the Bible. The two groups differed starkly in their responses. The children from intact families were likely to identify with the prodigal being welcomed home by loving parents, based on their own lives or those of siblings or friends. The divorced kids, on the other had, were more likely to identify with the parent, welcoming the prodigal home – only in their case the roles were reversed; their parents were in the role of the prodigal. This response is of a piece with the common effect of divorce in making the children, especially the eldest, adults before their time. Similarly, the intact family kids could respond straightforwardly to the commandment to “honor their father and mother,” especially if they were now married parents themselves. The children of divorce, on the other hand, found this commandment harder to embrace, or even understand.

The most fascinating, and poignant, religious responses of divorced kids come from their attempts to relate to “God the Father.” For many, their own bad experiences with their fathers spoiled the whole biblical vision of God for them. This difficulty, among others, likely contributed to children of divorce being less churched as adults. On the other hand, a subset of the divorced kids found great comfort in religion – God was the father they did not have in their own family life. These kids were more likely to have gotten themselves to church as a way to cope with the divorce. I expect that it is this group that produces the higher-than-expected rates of born-again and evangelical Christians.

One religious message of Between Two Worlds is that children of divorce, even high-functioning adult children of divorce, yearn for God and a supportive religious community. Precisely because they are torn between two worlds in their parents’ homes, they are more in need of a unified and supportive religious home. The superficial secularity of divorced kids hides a religious need and want which is, if anything, even greater than that of children from intact homes.

What’s Wrong with the Good Divorce

In Elizabeth Marquardt’s Between Two Worlds, she reports on a valuable new study which compares children from five different kinds of marriages: happy ones, low-conflict unhappy ones, high-conflict unhappy ones, bad divorces, and good divorces. The key comparison is between kids who were raised in unhappy but low-conflict marriages, versus the children of good divorces.

Marquardt’s point is that even the best divorces leave deep scars in kids. This survey, and the detailed interviews which expanded on it, was designed to go beyond normal divorces studies to look at the quality of divorces, and their effects.

Let’s look at a few statistics:

I always felt like an adult, even when I was a kid:
Low conflict: 39%
Good divorce: 51%

I often missed my father:
Low conflict: 38%
Good divorce: 56%

I felt the need to protect my mother emotionally:
Low conflict: 36%
Good divorce: 44%

I generally felt emotionally safe:
Low conflict: 93%
Good divorce: 82%

I was alone a lot as a child:
Low conflict: 21%
Good divorce: 30%

As Linda Waite and Maggie Gallagher reported in The Case for Marriage, kids often don’t see their family as unhappy, even when the parents do. As the survey shows, they kids in unhappy marriages still overwhelmingly feel emotionally safe themselves. They have much better relations with their parents. They were not left alone as much.

One of the common effects of divorce is that children are “adultified” or “parentified” – forced to be mature and self-sufficient. At the time, this often seems like a good thing, a sign that the child is adjusting well. In truth, this is one of the longest lasting scars. Children of divorce often date the end of their childhood from the moment they heard their parents were divorcing. Being little adults means they lose being kids, which they miss later.

Half the children of good divorces lose their childhoods with the divorce.

A “Good Divorce” is Still a Divorce

Elizabeth Marquardt’s new book, Between Two Worlds: The Inner Lives of Children of Divorce, will be the big news in the dialogue about divorce this year. Marquardt, a researcher with the Institute for American Values, worked with leading family sociologist Norval Glenn to survey hundreds and interview dozens of adult children of divorce. This work is in the spirit of Judith Wallerstein’s foundational work on the long-term effects of divorce on children, and Wallerstein wrote the preface to Marquardt’s book. Just as important as the research, Marquardt is herself the child of a “good divorce.” She has successfully married and has children. And yet, she knows that she herself was scarred by the divorce. This first-person book recounts her own experience, as well as that of her research subjects.

Most children of divorce do not show severe trauma. They have much higher rates of mental and emotional problems – twice or thrice the rate of kids from intact families – but still, most turn out ok. OK, but still marked. Marquardt pursues the question of divorce’s long-term effects past the gross dysfunctions – dropping out, taking drugs, becoming drunks, having marginal jobs, and, especially, divorcing themselves – to find the inner cost to outwardly functional adults.

As I have previously discussed, most divorces come from low-conflict marriages. Marquardt’s main conclusion is that even the best divorce is still worse than an unhappy, low-conflict marriage. Better, that is, for the kids. Adults may think that what is better for them is better for everyone. But it is not. Marquardt writes carefully, so as not to blame divorced parents, especially her own. But the main point remains – even a good divorce is still just a divorce.

Is Saying No to Kids a Failure, or a Necessary Discipline?

The Los Angeles Times had a well-done story yesterday, “The Mommy Shift Begins When the Nanny Shift Ends,” by Anna Gorman. It compares the lives of two married mothers living in different parts of Los Angeles. The difference is that Stacey, an upper-middle class mother of four, hires Margoth, an immigrant from El Salvador with three of her own, to help care for Stacey’s children for most of the day. At six, Margoth can go home to her own kids, and begin her second shift of momming.

Stacey is hugely appreciative of Margoth – Stacey doesn’t like the term “nanny,” and refers to Margoth as a “co-parent.” Margoth is happy with her work, except that it takes her so much from her own children. Stacey does not have a job, but needs the help so she can cope, and so she can have some free time of her own.

This is a good and interesting story. I suspect that one of the reasons that it is a “most emailed” story on the Times’ list is for its implicit critique of inequality. I do not see it that way; Margoth and her husband, also an immigrant, are making it in America by hard work, in the time-tested manner of immigrants. In two generations, their descendents will be hiring help, too. Maybe even in one generation. I don’t think Stacey is selfish for hiring another mom to leave her children to care for Stacey’s, so Stacey can have a life outside the home. Stacey is creating a job, and bucking the trend of too-small families.

What interested me, instead, was this line: “Stacey says she reserves the word ‘no’ for big things. Margoth says she doesn't hesitate to tell her children no.”

Stacey and her husband provide everything for their children. They provide material things, have arranged for Stacey to be home with her children, and, at considerable expense compared to their income, have Margoth to “co-parent” for their kids. For Stacey’s family, being able to provide everything for their kids is one of the greatest measures of their success in life – perhaps the greatest. Stacey’s husband was not interviewed for the article, but I expect he would say that that is what he works so hard and long for. From that perspective, if Stacey ever has to say no to her children, it feels like a failure. Unless the kids actually want to do something dangerous, they should be free from constraint to realize their desires. That is what money is for.

To Margoth, though, children need discipline to learn how to control themselves and avoid temptation. Her children can recite the litany their mother tells them all the time: “Do your homework. Stay out of trouble. Keep away from gangs.” For Margoth, saying no to her children is a gift – the gift of the habit of discipline.

The top and bottom classes differ significantly in how the best parents – like Stacey and Margoth – raise their children. This was the same difference that Adrie Kusserow wrote about in American Individualisms. Part of this difference is due to the different dangers that kids in different classes face. Stacey’s kids are not likely to be tempted by gangs, which is one of the reasons that Margoth says that if she won the lottery, she would move her family to Stacey’s neighborhood. She would lose her network of friends and relatives, but she would also lose the many threats to her kids that poor neighborhoods have.

But different threats is only part of the reason that the classes discipline kids differently. Margoth’s kids need a deep self-discipline and a work ethic like their mother’s to rise in class and status. Stacey’s kids were born already in a comfortable class and status. They have the resources to do just about whatever they want. What Stacey wants for her kids is that they have the internal freedom to take advantage of their external, material freedom.

With each strength, though, comes a complementary weakness. If Margoth’s kids learn to be disciplined, hard-working, and self-sacrificing for their families, they run the risk of being stingy, judgmental, and hard-hearted toward others without the same discipline. If Stacey’s kids learn to be free, risk-taking, and self-asserting, they run the risk of being undisciplined, self-destructive, and arrogant.

Here, though, I think the parallel ends. The bad things that Margoth’s kids might learn from hearing “no” regularly are far outweighed by the good that can come to them and to society from learning discipline and work. The bad things that Stacey’s kids risk from never being told “no,” on the other hand, are very bad indeed, for themselves and for society. Disciplined working class kids build the nation; undisciplined owning class kids tear the nation down.

Just say “no.”

Would Disestablishing Marriage Be Like Disestablishing Religion?

In Marriage: A History, Stephanie Coontz argues (following Nancy Cott) that what we are seeing now is the disestablishment of marriage, on the analogy of the disestablishment of the old state churches. Traditional marriage is not disappearing. Rather, it is losing its long-time monopoly of legitimate forms of close relations. Henceforth, this theory argues, marriage will have to compete with all other forms of close relations in a free market.

I think that disestablishment is good for religion. Lyman Beecher, who had been a minister in the state-supported Congregational Church in Connecticut, fought its disestablishment in 1818. Later, after he experienced the freedom from state control, and the renewed spiritual vigor of the independent church, he changed his mind. In his autobiography, he called disestablishment “the best thing that ever happened to the state of Connecticut. It cut the churches loose from dependence on state support. It threw them wholly on their own resources and on God.” Monopolies get lazy; competition helps them remain vigorous, or go to the wall. The United States has a vibrant religious life, and Europe does not, because we have a genuinely competitive market in religion.

So would a free market in marriage be a good thing? Would traditional marriage – one man, one woman, for life, raising their own children – be stronger if it had to compete with polygamy, gay marriage, polyamory, serial monogamy, casual sex, ritual fellatio in men’s societies as among the Sambia, lesbians with cloned children, temple prostitution, berdache unions, incest, etc., etc., etc? Coontz is right that marriage, for long centuries, was whatever the couple and their families told the world it was. It was only later that the church and the state regularized marriage, creating a public ritual with real spiritual and legal consequences.

No, I don’t think so. Church and State made marriage a public institution in the first place to protect women and children, who were routinely abused and exploited under the cover of the “private” family. Women need less protection now than they once did, but children are as vulnerable as ever, and always will be. And mothers of young children are still vulnerable, and that, I think, is not likely to ever change, either.

When churches were disestablished, it meant that the playing field was leveled between the one monopolistic state church and the many competing sects. It was part of the ideal of the church that society only needed one, but dissident individuals kept creating those pesky sects. Eventually, both church and sect were forced to accommodate and become denominations within the larger currency of religion – to the benefit of both.

The analogy with marriage would be if there were only one family in society. This is not way off the mark. In monarchical societies, the Royal Family is a thing apart, with privileges, responsibilities, property rights, and prerogatives different in kind from all other families. Yet even in the most absolute monarchies, the royal family did not argue that it should be the only family in society. The Bourbons did not exclude the existence of other families, not even among peasants. In totalitarian societies, the Maximum Leader did not have the one and only family. In Plato’s authoritarian fantasy in The Republic the guardian class gives up separate families, but other classes keep theirs. Utopian communities attempt to live as one family, but the only enduring examples had to be celibate communities.

Disestablishing the institution of marriage is not like disestablishing the institutional church. Everyone can create an “established” marriage; there can only be one “established” church. In the United States we disestablished the One Church, but support and accommodate many different kinds of religious institutions. This is because even the most deistical of our Founding Fathers thought that religious institutions were a public good and made better citizens. Marriage as an institution is also a public good. It not only makes better citizens, it is by far the most effective way to make competent human beings.

What we are threatened with today is not the disestablishment of marriage, but the complete privatization of all close relations. The religious analogy would not be disestablishment of the church, but a complete privatization of religious belief, including driving all religious institutions from the public square. Some people want to drive religion from public life altogether, but most Americans have resisted these secularizers, and for good reason. Now, some people want to drive marriage from public life altogether. They should also be resisted, and for much the same reasons.

When It Comes to Abortion, the Husband is Not Just Another Guy

A peculiarity of American abortion law, and of the Roe v. Wade decision on which it rests, is that husbands are not part of a married woman’s abortion decision. Doctors are, but husbands aren’t. This shows who has a more powerful PAC in Washington. Our abortion laws are very unusual in the world even compared with other countries with very liberal abortion laws. Husbands have a stake in practically every legal decision a wife makes, as a wife has a stake in practically every legal decision a husband makes. The law no longer gives one spouse a veto over the decisions of the other (and a good thing, too), but it does normally make provision to protect the interest of husband and wife in their spouse’s decisions -- except when it comes to abortion.

The question of whether a husband deserves to even be notified when his wife is considering an abortion is back in the news because of the most famous judicial opinion, thus far, of Supreme Court nominee Samuel Alito. Judge Alito, who sits on the federal appeals court in Philadelphia, was on the panel that heard Planned Parenthood v. Casey. Pennsylvania law had enacted several limitations on abortion, including a provision that husbands needed to be notified. The panel voted 2 – 1 to strike down this part of the law. Judge Alito, in dissent, defended that part of the law. Ultimately, the Supreme Court upheld the appellate court’s decision, and with it, the basic holding of Roe v. Wade.

Adam Liptak, writing in today’s New York Times, has detected a traditional theory of marriage in this and several other decisions of Judge Alito. Marriage, Judge Alito argues in a number of cases, creates a bright line recognized in the law in dozens of ways. In other cases, for example, he argued that when women are granted asylum in this country to escape persecution and forced abortions, their husbands are included in the asylum protection, but their boyfriends are not.

In Western tradition husband and wife become one flesh. Their relation is unique. They are not just partners, and they are certainly not just parties to a business contract. Husbands and wives are uniquely affected by one another’s actions. This applies in every area of life, especially in a decision that goes to the core of what family life is about, as abortion does. Note that the Pennsylvania law did not give husbands a veto over a wife’s abortion decision. It just required that he be notified. The court struck down that part of the law, but if any state considered something like it, they might include a judicial bypass provision in the case of abuse, as there is for the requirement that the parents of minors be notified when their daughter is considering abortion. I think husband notification is not dead as an issue in the abortion discussion.

I think Judge Alito is right, A husband is not just another guy when it comes to his wife’s decisions.

Smart Men Marry Smart Women

Maureen Dowd’s article, “What’s a Modern Girl to Do?” in the current New York Times Magazine laments the post-feminist return of many educated young women to husband-seeking tactics of yore. She wonders if feminism was a hoax, leaving high-achieving women, like Maureen Dowd, with careers and skills that actually scare off husbands, and preclude children.

Dowd cites some of the sociobiological evidence for enduring differences between men and women, especially in how they normally seek a mate. She does not dispute this evidence, but laments it as a fact, and feels betrayed by the decades of social constructivist chimeras of androgyny.

I think Maureen Dowd is giving up too easily. I think it is true that men and women are different in their hardwiring, different in what they seek in a mate, and how they go about that search. But I also know what sociologists know: the normal tendency of a group is not the doom, or fate, or limit on what each individual in that group can do, or will do. Most men and most women prefer a marriage in which he is a little taller, older, smarter, richer, and higher status than she is. This leaves high-achieving women (not to mention older women) in a difficult position, which they lament in, say, the New York Times. Of course, the same process leaves low-achieving men in an equally difficult position, but their troubles rarely find voice in the Times.

Some men do seek the smartest, highest-achieving women. Some men know that looks fade, but brains endure. A smart man, who plans to earn a professional income, can often figure out that marrying a smart woman is likely to get him smarter kids. And two professional incomes means more money than one, or than one career and “girl money.”

Men who seek smart, high-achieving women are not random mutations in the otherwise benighted field of men. Smart, educated people with knowledge-based jobs are a class, often called the knowledge class. They are in a struggle with the old property-owning and –making class. Marriages in the old owning class are based on him trying to earn and own more in order to support her and the children materially. In exchange, she supports him and the children emotionally. Marriages in the knowledge class, on the other hand, are based on husband and wife supporting one another, and their children, in brighter and deeper achievement. Both classes, at their highest levels, exercise real power in the world. Each class makes a serious bid to be the ruling class. Both can produce excellent marriages.

For examples of each kind of marriage, we can think of George and Laura Bush, as compared to Bill and Hillary Clinton.

I don’t know Maureen Dowd’s history or prospects. I do know, though, that there are whole subcultures of men who do not simply judge women by their appearance, but are attracted to brains and accomplishment in a potential wife. Likewise, I know whole subcultures of women who do not judge men simply as “success objects,” to tie themselves to, tie down, and tie up.

Men and women who seek spouses on the basis of brains, ambition, and achievement will have the last laugh.

Good News: Evangelicals Give the Supreme Court a Catholic Majority

Evangelical Methodist George Bush has nominated Samuel Alito to the Supreme Court. He joins John Roberts, now Chief Justice, who President Bush had nominated earlier this year. Both are Roman Catholics. If Alito is confirmed, the Supreme Court would have a Catholic majority for the first time ever. The evangelical Protestant wing of the Republican party forced the President to drop the evangelical Protestant (and Catholic convert) Harriet Miers, and instead nominate the way Catholic Alito.

How recently would that have been a fighting issue? In 1960, John F. Kennedy’s mild Catholicism was a major campaign issue among conservative Protestants. Last year, John F. Kerry’s mild Catholicism barely made a ripple. He didn’t even take a majority of the Catholic vote – which proves that there is no “Catholic vote.”

Will the Court Catholics vote as a block? Not very likely. Justice Kennedy and Justice Scalia may be of the same communion, but they don’t share much else.

Which proves the point that Robert Wuthnow argued in The Restructuring of American Religion: the crucial divide in American religion today is no longer between Catholics and Protestants, or Christians and non-Christians, but liberal believers versus conservative believers. Alito’s Catholicism will, no doubt, be relevant in his decisions, in an indirect and constitutionally permissible way. The same is true of Justice Kennedy’s Catholicism, though I think it appears more in cases involving poor people. The same could be said for Justice Ginsburg’s very mild Judaism, and Justice O’Connor’s more robust Episcopalianism, to take just a couple of examples.

The center is well served when old divisions are overcome.

The eHarmony Guy Delivers Some of the Goods

Neil Clark Warren, the genial, Mr. Rogers-like face of eHarmony.com, has written several books, including the eHarmony companion, Date … or Soul Mate? Warren, a graduate of Princeton, Princeton Theological Seminary, who then got a Ph. D. in psychology from the University of Chicago, has years of clinical practice in marital therapy. He also draws on his own and others’ research to back up his claims that he can tell you “how to know if someone is worth pursuing in two dates or less.”

The book is light, unfootnoted, and a little repetitive. It could be reduced to a set of lists and slogans, once you get the basic idea. Still, the basic idea is solid, and the practices behind it, which Warren tells us they employ in eHarmony as well as in his personal clinical practice, are likely to help you find a well-matched mate – and to avoid a bad marriage.

The core of Warren’s advice is that if you are emotionally healthy, have a realistic concept of what you bring to mate selection and what you want in a mate, and are seriously looking for one, you can find the love of your life. If you are not emotionally healthy – if you are too neurotic, if you are an addict, and especially if you have a character disorder which makes you a charming, conscienceless manipulator, you have no business getting married. If are emotionally unhealthy, get help. If you are dating someone like that, run.

For the average person, though, Warren has good news. The core of his argument is that if you really want to find the love of your life, look for people who are similar to you, who bring roughly the same level of personal and marital qualities to the relationship, and who match your particular list of “must-haves” and “can’t stands.” He presents 50 popular contenders for each list, but urges the reader to pick only ten of each. This is a reasonable compromise between being too picky, and not choosing carefully enough. Warren notes that the culture pays the most attention to physical attractiveness, but what proves more worth choosing for in the long run is kindness, chemistry, similarity, and adaptability.

Warren doesn’t really get down to cases in this book on how you can tell all this about another person in two dates. He is probably right, though, that if you are clear on what you want and can’t stand, you will be able to read the clues in another person’s conversation and presentation better than you could explain in words. He reports that most failed marriages were flawed from the start, and very often one or both parties knew it. Having the courage to act on that knowledge, and the firm conviction that a bad marriage is worse than no marriage, could save many couples heartache, and save society the disaster of divorces.

The Most Babies Ever to Unmarried Moms

The Census Bureau announced that a record number of American children – nearly 1.5 million – were born to unmarried women. This represents more than a third of all babies born in the country last year.

Most of those babies were not born to teenagers. Teen moms only accounted for a quarter of the births to unmarried mothers. In fact, the teen birthrate has been declining significantly for some years.

Most of those million and a half babies were born to women in their twenties. Most are done their preparation for adulthood, and have begun it – babies first, husbands maybe. Many of them (the Census Bureau did not report how many) are living with the fathers of their babies. We have good reason to think from other research that many of those cohabiting mothers believe that the baby puts them a giant step closer to marriage. The fathers of their babies, on the other hand, are more likely to think that if she didn’t insist that they get married before the baby was born, the pressure is off to ever get married – or even to stay permanently.

A third of all babies born last year are born without legal ties to their fathers. A large proportion of them – half is probably a safe guess – will not have much of a relation with their fathers in 2025, when they become full adults in the eyes of the law. That is a huge and scary proportion of all the new adults to have come up fatherless.

Here is a worthwhile centrist family goal: by 2010, let’s get the number of out-of-wedlock births down to a mere million. That will serve hundreds of thousands of children better, and serve society as a whole.

Family Values: Rap vs. Country

Today I looked at the top five rap songs versus the top five country songs, according to the Billboard singles charts. I was looking for what they had to say about love, sex, marriage, and children.

The rap songs are:
Soul Survivor, by Young Jeezy Featuring Akon
Gold Digger, by Kanye West Featuring Jamie Foxx
Like You, by Bow Wow Featuring Ciara
Girl Tonite, by Twista Featuring Trey Songz
Play, by David Banner

The country songs are:
Better Life, by Keith Urban
Skin (Sarabeth), by Rascal Flatts
Probably Wouldn't Be This Way, by LeAnn Rimes
Who You'd Be Today, by Kenny Chesney
Redneck Yacht Club, by Craig Morgan

All the rap songs are sung by, and from the perspective of, men, though one is an unbalanced duet.

“Soul Survivor” is about unrepentant armed drug dealers. There is nothing about love, or even sex, in this one, but it portrays a very bleak world.

“Like You” is a straight love song, though the marks of his care for her are not a promise of marriage and children, but letting her drive his Benz and go on shopping sprees. Still, this is the most hopeful of the bunch.

“Girl Tonite” is an extremely vulgar sex song. “Play” is a pornographic sex song, including an invitation to group sex with her friends. He calls himself a pimp and the other women hoes. This one is truly disgusting.

The most interesting rap song is Kanye West’s “Gold Digger,” which Maggie Gallagher wrote about recently. This is a gold mine (so to speak) of relational disaster and ambivalence. The woman he describes is a gold digger, though he says he won’t call her that. She has four children, some by other named stars. She wants him to pay for them, too. He offers as general advice that if a woman has your child you have to pay her child support for 18 years. He has a friend, an NFL star, who paid child support, but the woman spent the money on herself – and after 18 years he discovered that the child is not his, anyway. Yet the singer claims that he loves her anyway.

The key lines are:

“If you ain’t no punk holla We Want Prenup
WE WANT PRENUP! Yeaah
It's something that you need to have
Cause when she leave yo ass she gone leave with half”

Note that he says when she leaves, not if.

He urges another woman to stick with a poor but ambitious young man who will make it one day – but then the punch line is “But when you get on he leave yo ass for a white girl”

This is a tragic view of the relations of men and women, and truly horrid for the children they casually and incidentally produce.

The country songs are, not surprisingly, a different story altogether.

“Better Life,” like “Like You,” is a man promising a woman to stay with her and provide a better life for her – with none of the ambivalence of “Gold Digger.”

“Probably Wouldn’t Be This Way,” and “Who’d You Be Today,” are both about grieving for a dead loved one, the first by a widow, the second by, I think, a father. They are tender and straightforwardly grateful for the loving relationship that they had, before the early death of the other person.

“Redneck Yacht Club” is just a genial, working class hoot. Whereas the rappers brag about how expensive their things are, the country singers emphasize how modest their lives are materially. The good ol’ boys who tie their houseboats together for some low-key summer fun suggest nothing more risqué than “than checking out the girls on the upper deck.”

The most interesting song of this set is Rascal Flatts’ “Skin.” A teenage girl with cancer, supported by mom and dad, worries about the embarrassment of going to the prom bald, and thus disappointing her first love. When he picks her up for the dance, however, he has shaved his head in solidarity with her.

I read both sets of top-selling songs as telling us more about the audience than the performers. The audience for country songs wants a world of married parents taking care of their kids, and encouraging young love, in a life in which material things are secondary. The rap audience, on the other hand, wants to feel the feeling of a bleak world of sex, money, and impermanence in all relationships.

Both audiences, we know from other research, are predominantly white. The country singers, though, are popular because they reflect the lives and aspirations of an audience that is like the singers themselves. The appeal of rap songs about brutal, criminal, misogynist black men to the white boys who buy most rap music is that rap portrays a life they don’t live, but are darkly attracted to. Most of them will get over it, and live a life more like a country song. Still, the rap world, as portrayed in its best-selling songs, is all threat to marriage and family life, and no help.

But it is an effective way to annoy your parents. And that may be the main point.

Parents Support School Vouchers

In the same Survey on Faith and Family in America that I wrote about yesterday, another question was asked that we have not been hearing so much about lately: school vouchers. There was only one question about it on the survey, and the answers have not been reported in any of the press accounts of the survey. I think it shows strongly the appeal of vouchers to parents, and is worth wider discussion.

The survey asked:

Q.52 Please tell me if you agree or disagree with the following statement. Parents should get tax-funded vouchers they can use to help pay for tuition for their children to attend private or religious schools instead of public schools?

This wording should push the answers in an anti-voucher direction – the choice of the words “tax-funded” and “instead” are favored by opponents of vouchers. By contrast, a pro-voucher wording might be “Parents should be able to choose the best school for their children, using their portion of the taxes collected for education,” or something like that.

Therefore, it is doubly interesting that despite wording that should suppress a pro-voucher response, nearly two-thirds of parents support having the choice of vouchers.

Nearly half (49%) of all respondents favor vouchers, and most of them (31% of the total) favor them “strongly.” When we move from all respondents in general, to parents in particular, the proportion favoring vouchers leaps from half to two thirds, with most of them favoring vouchers strongly.

What is even more interesting is that single parents, who generally are more liberal than married parents, take the conservative, pro-voucher view even more strongly than the marrieds do. Whereas 40% of married parents strongly favor vouchers, 45% -- almost half -- of single parents do.

By contrast, barely a fifth of parents strongly oppose vouchers – 21% for married parents, and only 17% for single parents.

I will revisit this question when the full dataset is released, to see how other groupings – by race, class, sex, and religion – feel about vouchers.

Until then, we have this strong finding to ponder: when it comes to schools, parents are strongly pro-choice.

Married Parents Really Are Happier

The new Survey of Faith and Family in America conducted for the PBS show Religion and Ethics NewsWeekly asked a national sample of Americans whether they agreed or disagreed with the statement “Married people are generally happier than unmarried people.” 30% of married parents strongly agreed, while 35% of single parents strongly disagreed. It is not surprising that married people would think married people, as a group, are better off, and unmarried people would not.

The survey itself contains a reality check, though. The respondents were also asked to rate how happy they were themselves. The analysts then compared these self-reports of happiness for the married parents and the single parents. The result:

The married were well over twice as likely to report themselves “completely happy” as the singles, 29% to 11%.

Nearly half of the marrieds (46%), but only a third of the singles (32%), called themselves “very happy.”

Nearly half the singles (44%) chose the next level down, only “fairly happy” to describe themselves.

Only one percent of the marrieds would even call themselves neither happy nor unhappy, and none of them said they were unhappy. By contrast, over ten times that many singles (11%) called themselves less than definitely happy.

While singles don’t want to believe that married people are happier, their own reports of their feelings shows that the marrieds are really happier – and know it.

Promoting Marriage is a Public Good

Over at the Family Scholars Blog, David Blankenhorn comments today on the PBS Religion and Ethics Newsweekly poll on “Faith and Family.” He writes:

“here to me is the most striking statistic — 82 percent of respondents say that government should NOT “start up programs that encourage people to get and stay married.” I’ve supported the Administration’s Healthy Marriage Initiative since the beginning, and I still do, but these numbers (and yes, I know, the wording of the question could be better) strongly suggest that, in the public mind, the basic idea is going nowhere.”

The same survey reports that most people strongly support marriage. The resistance, I think, is to the government supporting marriage. I expect there would be less resistance to other, voluntary, institutions supporting marriage.

Americans think of marriage as a good thing. However, a rising fraction of us have come to think of marriage as a private good. This is a dangerous notion. Marriage is, of course, good for private citizens. But it is also a very important public good. Society as a whole has a stake in the strength of marriages in general, and of each marriage. This means that the state does have an interest in promoting marriage.

I think that more people are adopting the view that marriage is a private good. They are not taking this view because they think any less of marriage. Rather, they are trying to avoid making a moral judgment that there is anything wrong with not valuing marriage. I don’t think the issue is about other kinds of marriage besides the traditional one. It is not the existence of alternatives to marriage which pushes people to moral privatism. It is a desire to avoid conflict with other people about the possibility of their having other judgments.

I think everyone should be willing stand up for what they think is right. Once again, we would all be greatly helped if most people were comfortable talking about the good, and the good enough. I am convinced that most people will privately choose the good, which will benefit society. Some people will have to settle for the good enough, sometimes for reasons beyond their control.

The real battleground is whether people who might get or stay married don’t do so, because people they respect have not had the nerve to say “marriage is better.”

Mainline Church Marriage: The Middle Way

The Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) takes a middle way on marriage, between a secular minimum and a sacramental maximum. The Presbyterian position is representative of most mainline Protestant denominations, and really of Protestant denominations in general. Catholic practice is not that far from this standard, though the Catholic theory of marriage is a little different.

“Marriage – A Theological Statement” was adopted by the church in 1980. A Q and A section makes clear that the church’s view of marriage is high in its aspirations, but reasonable in its actual requirements.

1. Should everyone be married? No. Marriage is good, but so is singleness. Jesus and Paul weren’t married.

2. Is divorce legitimate? Yes, but bad. It is a concession to sin.

3. Is intimacy outside marriage legitimate? Yes, but marriage is best. Intimacy without sex is possible and good. Sex within a merely private commitment is not really marriage.

4. What is the appropriate structure of marriage? This is the headship question. Husbands model what Christ does for church, wives model what Christians do with God. Both husbands and wives are supposed to submit to God and lead by service to others.

5. Is a wedding ceremony necessary for marriage? No, but something like it before the Christian community is.

6. Must a marriage involve the intention to have children? No. God wants humanity to be fruitful and multiply, but this does not mean that every marriage must be.

7. Is monogamy the necessary form of marriage? No, but only barely – if polygamy is the local norm and the mission church accepts that the married partners are trying to live in intimacy, fidelity, and forgiveness. But these will be “strained” by multiple spouses.

8. Must both partners be Christian? No, but we should encourage everyone to Christian commitment, and marriage is a powerful way to do that.

Sometimes Christians, especially conservative Christians, elevate the importance of marriage almost to the point of idolatry. It is important, therefore, to see how modest the actual requirements of Protestant marriage really are.

The Presbyterian marriage statement argues that God made men and women different, but created marriage so that they might unite in love and become one flesh. Yet sin infects even marriages, and sometimes they dissolve, especially due to adultery, desertion, or relations that actually harm the people in the family. This is not good, but the church works together with the divorced to encourage them to give and accept forgiveness and to maintain fidelity in their other relationships. And marriage, though a very good state, is not better than singleness, and will not be continued or repeated in the life to come.

Marriage is, for Protestants, primarily a social institution. The main rules of marriage are made by the state. Being married within the church can sanctify the marriage, calling on the aid of the Christian community and of God to help the couple. But marriage is not a sacrament.

The mainline Protestant standard for marriage is a modest, workable, and centrist approach. Knowing that may take some of the fear out of “Christian family values” for liberals and secularists.

Marriage vs. “Close Relations” Matters to the Church

Today, contemporary family law theorists are bent on hammering this new theory into law, usually using the avenue of constitutional law. What is striking is the breathless speed of these developments in the absence of any real scholarly or public debate. A particular school of thought openly aimed at re-conceptualizing marriage first took root in the academy in the 1980s. By the late 1990s it had come to dominate fashionable academic theorizing on sexual intimacy. That school of thought is successfully urging family law scholars to think in radically new ways about family law. Much of the new thinking centers on ways to transform family law from its historic role as the protector of marriage into something very close to its antagonist.

- Dan Cere, The Future of Family Law


Dan Cere, in his review of the current trends in family law, notes that in the past generation the legal discussion has changed from the traditional concern with marriage, to a wholesale substitution of the concept of “close relations.” Marriage is treated as a subset of close relations, at best. This change reflects the political movement to normalize both cohabitation and same-sex unions. Indeed, the “close relations” movement may go beyond putting other pairings on a par with marriage. The longer-term effect may be to treat marriage just as a private lifestyle choice of some individuals, rather than the basic unit of society’s foundational building block. Nor need the revolution stop there: any sort of “close relation,” involving any number, age, and configuration of people, might come to be treated as just as good as any other, as long as it is important to the participants.

The church, though, has a different standard. In the Biblical understanding, marriage is not simply the close relation of two individuals, but makes them “one flesh.” A married couple is not literally one person. But neither are they simply two separate individuals who have made a voluntary and temporary tie.

In the debate about same-sex unions that I discussed before, Maggie Gallagher pointed out that many of the tangles that Protestants get into over this issue happen because Protestants are prone to a more individualistic analysis of everything. Catholics, on the other hand, are more prone to talk about marriage as making the couple “one flesh” in the first place. Both branches of the church have a stake in how secular family law develops.

The law now treats marriage as a unique status. There is nothing else like it, not even the parent-child bond. Our law coincides with the church’s understanding because they both share an underlying – and very high – view of marriage. This is important to say – the law treats marriage as a unique, and uniquely important, relationship for good secular reasons. It is not simply a holdover from a previously religious era.

This is why we need a status of the “good enough” relationship, which is still not the same as the social ideal. Marriage is not just a close relationship like others. But saying that marriage is unique does not mean that all other close relationships are bad.

The Society Safe for Sectarianism

The genius of the American religious culture is that we have created a society in which a huge variety of religious institutions can live together, without anyone having to believe that they are all equally true.

European religion gave us established churches and dissenting sects, each of which thought it was the one true embodiment of the faith. In America, though, all these One True Churches were thrown together. None could become legally established everywhere, nor could any dominate the whole culture. Europeans invented the original terms of the sociology of religion out of their experience, especially when Ernst Troeltsch turned the Christian words “church” and “sect” into universal concepts. American sociology added another crucial term, based on our experience: denomination. In this culture, each church and each sect was obliged to become just another denomination – none of them culturally dominant, none of them the One True way of the faith. Instead, each was obliged to recognize the other as a legitimate expression of the faith, differing in the way they are named (“de-nominated”).

The idea of the denomination turned the fact of religious diversity in America into the idea and ideal of religious pluralism. Eventually the law caught up with the culture. The most important pillar of that law is in the first amendment to the U.S. Constitution. As with many products of the legislative sausage factory, the first amendment is a curious compromise. It does not say, as James Madison initially proposed, “No State shall violate the equal rights of conscience.” Instead, our first amendment says that “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” The first part, the establishment clause, reads in this peculiar way because the individual states could and did make laws establishing religion – official, tax-supported denominations – for some time after the U.S. Constitution was ratified. The second part, the free exercise clause, actually strengthens Madison’s idea. The free exercise of religion protects actions, as well as conscientious thoughts.

We did not create a society free from religion. We created as society safe for every religious thought, and just about every religious action. We created a society safe for sectarianism.

Kevin Seamus Hasson, head of the Beckett Fund for Religious Liberty, makes a similar point in his fine new book, The Right to Be Wrong. The Beckett Fund defends all kinds of religious practices from governmental restriction. They don’t do this because they are relativists, thinking all religions are equally right, but because they think American religious pluralism protects the right of every denomination -- theirs, yours, and mine – to be wrong.

Hasson, a Notre Dame-trained lawyer, argues that freedom of conscience is a natural right. He believes that it is human nature to seek the truth about why we exist and what we are supposed to do about it. And our free consciences require us to not only seek, but find, to commit to what we believe to be true. Beyond finding, we must also act on what we believe. The American right to be wrong protects our search, and our commitments, and only limits our conscientious actions in extraordinary circumstances that threaten public welfare or the free consciences of others. Our public sphere is to be governed neither by what he calls Pilgrims, who only allow their own faith, or Park Rangers, who don’t allow any.

I agree with Seamus Hasson. I think that human nature does seek to know the meaning of our existence, and that our conscience prods us to act on what we believe to be our vocation and duty. I do part company with him on one point. He allows that Roger Williams, the founder of Rhode Island and the cranky pioneer of religious liberty in America, argued for a God-given right to freedom of conscience, too. Hasson thinks Williams’ solution is inadequate for us today, though, because it only convinces those who believe in God. Yet I don’t see how Hasson’s argument for a human nature-given right to freedom of conscience is any different – it only convinces people who believe in natural rights. I think that Roger Williams and Seamus Hasson are both right, because I think God created the nature, both human and otherwise, from which our conscience comes.

American religious freedom rests on a conviction that allowing everyone freedom of conscience is right. This conviction cannot be proven to be true. But we have good reason to believe that it is true from our religion, our philosophy, and our experience.

Conservative Magic and Liberal Magic

There has been a fuss about posting the Ten Commandments in public schools and other public places.

A recent Kentucky case, McCreary County v. ACLU, went all the way to the Supreme Court, where the pro-posters lost. But in the same decision, about the parallel Texas case of Van Orden v. Perry, the pro-posters (or in that case, carve-in-stoners) won. The upshot was that if you want to post the Ten Commandments in a public building to make a religious statement, you lose; if, on the other hand, you post them as part of a series of legal codes, you win. SO, if you really want the Commandments in the courthouse, you can do it. Likewise, it is easy to post the Ten Commandments in public schools legally. All you have to do is teach about them. In fact, you post just about anything on the walls of schools, if you are willing to do the work of actually including the poster in the curriculum. Again, it is not hard to win, if that is what you really want to do.

I think we have had the fuss, though, because the pro-posters don’t really want to win – they want to lose so they can claim that the Christian majority is being religiously persecuted by secularists. Now, there is some truth to this. In my job I run across plenty of secularists who do want to drive all religion out of the public square. They want to do so not just despite massive public support for displaying the icons of biblical religion. They want to exclude those symbols because the majority supports them, so that the secularists, in turn, can feel persecuted by the backlash. Two can play at “oppression envy.”

But really, I don’t think that posting the Ten Commandments is about displaying the faith of the majority, or acknowledging a fundamental code of American law, or even of helping people be literate about a crucial building block of Western civilization.

Conservatives want to post the Ten Commandments as an act of magic.

I think that some people believe that if the text is physically on the wall of the courthouse or the schoolhouse, the people under its eye, so to speak, will behave better. This gesture is mostly futile. Worse, I think that treating the printed commandments this way violates the second commandment against making “graven images.”

If you want people to behave better, it would be more effective to post pictures of Mr. Rogers, or Mother Teresa, or even Barney. This would not be a great improvement, but the magical thought would be more out in the open.

I think there is a parallel kind of magical thinking for liberals. Conservatives think kids will be better behaved if we put the Ten Commandments in schools. Liberals think kids will be smarter if we put computers in schools. They expend much more effort in getting computers into schools than they do in making sure they that they work, that they have any kind of relevant software, that teachers and students know how to use them, or that the computers have anything to do with the curriculum.

The computer becomes a graven image for thinking, the way the Ten Commandments becomes a graven image for morals. Magic.

The Top Public Intellectuals are Not Moms

The hand that rocks the cradle may rule the world, but it does not lead the list of public intellectuals.

The Prospect/Foreign Policy poll of the world’s leading public thinkers was just released. As the editors note, this is a parlor game, and should not be taken too seriously. The editors listed 100 candidates they had chosen, and offered a “bonus ball” option to readers to write in others. About ten percent of the original list were women, and no women made it to the top ten on the write-in list. The top ten are men:

Noam Chomsky
Umberto Eco
Richard Dawkins
Václav Havel
Christopher Hitchens
Paul Krugman
Jürgen Habermas
Amartya Sen
Jared Diamond
Salman Rushdie

The first women comes in at #11, and begins an interesting trend: very few of them are mothers, and fewer still are married mothers. So who is #11? Naomi Klein, activist journalist and author of No Logo. She is the daughter of two well-known Canadian activists, and married to another. As far as I can tell, though, she does not have children. Her work, which is a critique of globalization, is not about family life, so it is hard to know directly what her attitude is toward marriage and children. At the least we can say that children have not been central to her work.

The other women in the top 50 are:

Camille Paglia (20), a famously single, childless, every-sexual critical feminist;
Ayaan Hirsi Ali (46), a Muslim feminist and Dutch parliamentarian who fled an arranged marriage;
Julia Kristeva (48) and Germaine Greer (49), feminist icons who do not treat motherhood as a primary female role, to say the least;

The one exception to the “subordinate motherhood” rule is Shirin Ebadi (12), the 2003 Nobel Peace Prize winner. Ebadi, a married Iranian lawyer and mother of two grown daughters, is a crusader for the rights of women in post-revolutionary Iran. She has been successful, in part, because she works as a wife and mother, and makes her arguments within the Muslim tradition.

The Prospect poll was of public intellectuals. I imagine that if we could have such a thing as the list of top “domestic intellectuals,” the list would be much richer in married mothers.

"Marry Your Baby Daddy" Day

In September, novelist Maryann Reid and Rev. Herbert Daughtry made the dream of marriage a reality for 10 lucky couples. Hundreds of couples who already had children together and who hoped to marry “someday” responded to a contest. The prize: ten all-expenses-paid weddings, presided over by Rev. Daughtry. This contest was aimed at African-American couples, and most of the couples and wedding-makers were black. The idea, though, is a good one for the whole nation to ponder and pursue.

The single most urgent family problem is to get single moms to marry their baby daddies.
(That’s what I think today, anyway. I am still puzzling on this.)

In the long run we need to create a culture which authoritatively supports marriage and careful childrearing. In the short run, though, we already have couples who have children and plan to marry someday, in the pie-in-the-sky future.

Communities could make this dream of marriage a reality. All they need is the wedding.

Suppose every congregation in town agreed to take part in a “Marry Your Baby Daddy Day” – or “Parents’ Wedding Day,” or “Mommy and Daddy Get Married Day,” or whatever name works best. Each minister would agree to perform the wedding, and members of the congregation would find a way to get the dress, the cake, the rings, the flowers, the pictures, the reception, and so forth, and do it nicely. As with the original Marry Your Baby Daddy Day, there could be a contest – which would itself get many couples to get down to cases about getting married, even if they didn’t win the contest. On that happy day, the front-page news would be that the whole community had worked together to make marriage dreams come true for the couples and, especially, for their children.

Promoting marriage among parents would, I am convinced, pay for itself in happier and healthier grownups, and better cared for kids. Men, who would probably resist the idea the most at first, would benefit the most in the end. Yes, we should build in a marriage preparation course, even for cohabiting couples with kids. Yes, we should screen out likely wife-beaters, and get them some other kind of help. Yes, we would probably need to reach beyond each congregation to find the money. But it would be worth it.

The spin-off benefit of a community Marry Your Baby Daddy Day would be to make clear how much the community as a whole supported marriage for all children’s parents – not just those who think they can afford a wedding.

Amending the Definition of Marriage

In an earlier blog I wrote about Kentucky’s mysterious definition of marriage, which reads:

402.005 Definition of marriage.
As used and recognized in the law of the Commonwealth, "marriage" refers only to the civil status, condition, or relation of one (1) man and one (1) woman united in law for life, for the discharge to each other and the community of the duties legally incumbent upon those whose association is founded on the distinction of sex.

All of this I find clear and sensible, until the last clause: “legally incumbent upon those who association is founded on the distinction of sex.” In a reply to the earlier blog, Nancy Jo Kemper, the executive director of the Kentucky Council of Churches, suggested that this phrase was a delicate 19th century way of saying that the husband was responsible for the wife’s debts, and that the wife could not deny the husband sex. This may be so.

In any case, I propose to amend this definition to make it clearer and, perhaps, more up to date. I propose to strike the puzzling final clause, and rewrite the definition this way:

402.005 Definition of marriage.
As used and recognized in the law of the Commonwealth, "marriage" refers only to the civil status, condition, or relation of one (1) man and one (1) woman united in law for life, for the discharge to each other and the community of the duties of mutual material support, sexual fidelity, and the raising of the children they may produce.

I see three advantages in revising the definition of marriage this way.

First, it makes clear that the duties of marriage are mutual and equally incumbent on husband and wife.

Second, it names three particular duties of marriage which are of greatest benefit to society as a whole. Husbands and wives who support one another materially are much more likely to make a net contribution to the wealth of society, and not be a drain on the surplus produced by others. Couples who are sexually faithful to one another avoid a world of trouble for themselves; moreover, if all sex took place only within faithful marriage, the domestic violence rate would go way down, the murder rate would go way down, and sexually transmitted diseases would disappear from the earth. Parents who raise their own children produce the greatest benefit to society, and to their children – and the more carefully they raise their children, the greater the benefit to everyone.

The third reason to amend the definition of marriage this way is to use the bully pulpit of the state to say clearly what marriage is for as far as the government is concerned. Marriage has become a politicized issue today in large part because we have lost a clear conception of what marriage is for.

Before governmental family policy can help support and shape family life, the state needs to have and promote a clearer idea of what it thinks marriage is for. The process of amending the definition would allow us to have a richer discussion of what marriage is for. Improving the state’s definition of marriage would give substantive guidance to the government and to married people about how the state and the married should relate to one another.

The Heart of Blueness

Our travels on my daughter’s college trip have taken us far from Kentucky, to some of the iconic places of “Blue America” – Swarthmore, PA, Princeton, NJ, Middletown, CT, Williamstown, MA, and, especially, Cambridge, Massachusetts. I was asked by an academic friend in Cambridge, as an emissary from Red America, if I could explain why most Americans voted in a way that seems to Cambridge folk to be just plain irrational.

I think I do understand the difference between the two views of the world – and they begin with a difference over what counts as rational. Cambridge extracts a kind of intelligence from all over the world and concentrates it in one place and in a narrow set of careers. Danville, Kentucky, and the thousands of other Danvilles in the great Flyover Country of America, draws people with a different kind of practical wisdom (as well as the usual kind of brains) and spread them over a broader range of The Good Life. The wisdom of Cambridge is that if individuals get their work done, any kind of family life they choose to make is good enough. The wisdom of Danville is that if most people marry and raise their children with care, many kinds of work life that they might choose are good enough.

I heard Thomas Frank, the author of What’s the Matter With Kansas? speak at a panel of the American Sociological Association this summer. The gist of his book is that Kansas and places like it vote for Republicans and against their economic interests because they believe that the Democratic leaders are an arrogant elite who look down on ordinary, faithful, family-first Americans. Frank's presentation, and the others like it from the panel, drew an approving, “ain’t it awful” response from the gray heads in the audience. Then a young woman rose to ask a question. She said that as a Midwestern liberal she had read Frank's book and joined in lamenting the paranoia of her neighbors. Then she went to Cambridge as a graduate student and discovered that it was all true. Her professors and their peers did routinely denigrate the intelligence of religious people and disparage the morals of those who value marriage and careful childrearing. The panel could offer no reply.

What does this have to do with family life? The great meritocratic experiment of picking who we will educate from the top IQ scores, and then picking who will manage our economy and design our social policies from the top of this intellectual heap, has a serious sociological flaw. The “cognitive elite,” as Charles Murray and Richard Herrnstein called them, are chosen as individuals, educated as individuals, put through the elite job selection sieve as individuals. Is it any wonder, then, that they are likely to put individual achievement ahead of forming rich and stable families? In particular, it is, it seems to me, a deep flaw in our current meritocratic culture that the highest achieving women are more likely to skip marriage and children the higher they go in the power structure.

There is much that is great and amazing about our meritocratic system. It is certainly better than any system in which rulers are chosen simply because their ancestors were rulers. But the weakness of Blue America is that it creams individuals with only one kind of intelligence, while leaving out other, family-oriented kinds of wisdom. Worse, the highly individualistic way in which we construct our meritocracy makes it less likely that they will have families to pass their intelligence and achievements and work ethic on to. This is a double loss for American families and American society.

Why Men Earn More

Warren Farrell’s Why Men Earn More: The Startling Truth Behind the Pay Gap – and What Women Can Do About It is ingeniously packaged as a self-help book for women. Farrell’s main finding is that women make less than men because women trade work that pays less for lives that are more balanced, have more time for children, and last longer. Men – most especially married fathers -- work longer, harder, and in more difficult jobs even though that means they see less of their children and die younger. In fact, Farrell argues, when we really compare apples and apples, women earn at least the same as men, and probably more.

The pay gap could, in principle, disappear if tens of millions of women were willing to take rough jobs which required sacrificing their families. Since this is unlikely to happen short of a draconian command economy, the gap will remain. This gap in group earnings is not a bad thing if individual men and women are free to make other arrangements that serve their families as well.

Farrell offers 25 things that women could do to earn more money. For example, women could chose fields in the hard sciences as much as they did in the arts. Less educated women could earn more if they were as willing to work “in the heat and the sleet” as they are “indoors and neat.” Many women, of course, can and do choose such jobs. But it defies what we know about women and men in general to think that hundreds of millions of working men and women in this country would be equally likely to choose the same way.

The main point underlying all of the differences in work choices that Farrell cites is that parents arrange their lives to serve their kids. Women tend to arrange their work so they can be with their children more. Men tend to arrange their work so they can provide for their children (and wives) more. We know this because childless men and women tend to be nearly equal in their work, midway between the averages for mothers and fathers.

Ultimately, men as a group earn more because married fathers are more productive at work than any other group. Men earn more despite the fact that single, childless men earn less than most women.

Promiscuity is Not Androgynous

I want to start with a private exchange that I had with Annie at Ambivablog (see the link at left). She wrote:

Basically I think women are less-than-half empowered sexually and emotionally, which is a dangerous place to be. They're pretending to be tough and enjoy sex for its own sake "like men" … but it's very brittle and fragile: they are really trying to buy love with it, which is a losing proposition. I think a lot of abortions are casualties in this desperate game. Girls and women need to hold themselves in much higher regard; the sensible "no" can only follow from that naturally.

I agree with this entirely. Men and women as a group are not the same now in their desire for uncommitted sex. Some people hope that that is merely a socially constructed difference, and someday free women will be just as promiscuous and conscience-free as men are – though why anyone would think such a state of affairs would make for a better society is beyond me. Myself, I want to see men – even single young men – be caring and responsible about sex.

In any case, I think we have strong sociobiological reasons to think that men and women are quite different in their attitudes toward uncommitted sex. They always have been different, and they always will be.

Usually at this point I need to make the Sociological Concession: what I have just said is true of the group, though some individuals within each group do deviate from the norm. However, fascinating research by Syracuse University anthropologist John Townsend, reported in Steven Rhoads’ Taking Sex Differences Seriously, suggests that even women who are trying to be promiscuous without conscience “just like a man,” find it almost impossible to do. He interviewed a group of women students, both undergraduates and medical students, who were unusually pro-sex. They had lots of sex, with lots of men. They believed in their heads that sex was just a fun physical pleasure from which they should not require or expect emotional commitment. And yet, their hearts would not cooperate. They found that they couldn’t just do it like a man and think nothing of him in the morning. They tried to talk themselves out of having feelings for the men they had sex with, and especially from hoping that he had feelings for them. They were using sex to get love, as the proverb said, despite their strong commitment to an androgynous ideology. They thought they were “pro-sex” (a strange term for the belief that sex doesn’t mean anything), but were still really “pro-love.” And a good thing, too, I say.

The nymphomaniac woman is a male fantasy. Even the happy slut seems to be a male fantasy. I think that connecting sex with love is a deep and hopeful instinct. Rather than trying to stomp it out with an ideology of androgynous promiscuity, we would do better to try to curb male promiscuity by showing how much it hurts women, and children, and, ultimately, men themselves.

Evolution and Creation: A Centrist Proposal

The latest flap over Intelligent Design is another wrinkle in the old struggle of Creation and Evolution, which is itself but a wrinkle in the older struggle of Religion and Science, or (even worse), Faith and Reason.

I think the whole fight is a fraud. There is no conflict between faith and reason, or religion and science, or creation and evolution. Intelligent design is one possibility of the larger metaphysic of how the universe works, which is equally compatible with creation or evolution theories.

Evolution is a theory. The part of the theory which explores how living forms develop over time by adapting to their environments is well supported by the empirical record. The theory of evolution is a scientific theory. As such, it can always be tested, but can never be proven. Scientific theories are in principle always falsifiable by new empirical evidence, and can be displaced by a more comprehensive theory.

Darwin thought that one part of the mechanism of the development of new forms was random mutation. This part of evolutionary theory is much less well established than development through environmental adaptation. Mutations happen, and new forms do appear, but random mutation does not appear to happen on the scale necessary to produce all the evolution that we appear to see. The idea that new forms appear at random, and that their appearance is not part of a design, is not a scientific idea, because it cannot be falsified. It is one theory, but only one. Random mutation is essentially a theological theory.

Natural science starts with a choice of method to only make theories about what can be observed in the material world, preferably from material processes which are or can be repeated. As a methodological convention, materialism has proven a very powerful tool. It means, though, that science simply cannot say anything, one way or the other, about whether material phenomena are the only kind which exist. Science can neither prove nor disprove the claim that materialism is the true metaphysic. Some people think that the universe is only material. That is not a scientific idea, either. Materialism is essentially a theological theory, too.

I have done surveys of Presbyterian ministers, who are among the most educated and reason-oriented of Christians. If you give them a forced choice between Creation and Evolution, naturally most of them will have to choose Creation, or deny God and the Bible. If, though, you give them a middle option – God created the world and has guided evolution – most Presbyterian ministers will choose this option.

We can and should have a debate about how to understand this middle position – theistic evolution, or adaptive creation, or what have you. But we should be clear that there are many middle positions in the creation/evolution discussion.

So why do we keep having this polarized debate? Because ideologues on both sides see the world as polarized, and they have more power in the world if other people can be made to see it as polarized, too.

Refuse the false dichotomy. Choose faith and reason, God and science, creation and evolution.