The decay of marriage

Kay Hymowitz, a marriage and family scholar at the Manhattan Institute, argues in today's National Review Online that gay marriage is not necessarily contributing to the weakening of marriage. Instead, she suggests that marriage is still valued, but the concept of marriage as a safe haven for raising children has been removed from the equation; the focus has been whittled down to an adult relationship, so any adult relationship is fine.

In the Q&A, NRO Editor Kathryn Lopez asks, "To what degree is same-sex marriage contributing to a weakening of marriage? Is it more a symptom of an institution already decaying?"

And Hymowitz responds (emphasis mine):

I think it’s the latter. The unmarriage revolution[*] of the last 40 years had to occur before gay marriage became a logical possibility, because it was only when marriage had nothing or little to do with children that it made any sense. Pro-gay-marriage conservatives know this. Jonathan Rauch has written in response to the sort of argument I make that “the debate is over about detaching marriage from parenthood — indeed was over years ago;” Andrew Sullivan has said much the same thing. Well, there you have it. Marriage-and-children? That’s so yesterday.

Despite this, Rauch has argued that gay marriage will increase the institution’s standing in American society. But as I’ve already pointed out, the problem is not that Americans don’t value marriage. It’s that they view it as an adult love relationship having little to do with children. That’s precisely the underlying premise for gay marriage.

I hadn't thought about the idea that marriage has become "an adult love relationship having little to do with children," but the idea resonates (and Hymowitz backs it up with data showing how badly the destruction of marriage is hurting our children). That's why same-sex marriage advocates can make their argument with such conviction -- because they know that their social predecessors in the feminist movement have made their jobs easier by excluding children from the marriage debate.

* When she refers to the "unmarriage revolution," she's speaking of "the radical decoupling of marriage and children that began in the late 1960’s and became entrenched during the 70’s," and which was led by the feminists movement. The researchers defending the unmarriage revolution argued that kids are tough and can handle anything as long as mom is happy, but "at least that much has changed," Hymowitz said. "As James Q. Wilson has joked, by now the evidence is now so powerful, even sociologists admit that children growing up with single mothers are at greater risk of just about every problem you can think of — poverty, depression, school failure, delinquency, early pregnancy, and so on."

(Hymowitz has a new book called Marriage and Caste in America: Separate and Unequal Families in a Post-Marital Age; the book is a compilation of essays she has written on the state of marriage.)