Mark Oppenheimer on gays and divorce stigma

Mark Oppenheimer suggests that when you meet a social conservative willing to blast the late President Ronald Reagan vocally for his role in de-stigmatizing divorce, you will have met a truly consistent so-con, worthy of defending the state of family values circa 1950. But you hardly ever meet such a person:

Maybe same-sex marriage is, as they like to say, “the last straw” in this sexual revolution. But rights for the most marginalized people will always be the last straw in social revolutions. The marginal people will always get everything last. If you’re honest and ethical, you have to go after the elites who started the revolution, not the marginalized who later said, “Me too! Please, me too!” And you can’t just pay it lip service, like, “Oh, straight people are culpable, too, since they began divorcing at higher rates in the 1970s…”—you have to actually try to shame straight divorcés more than you are trying to shame gay people for wanting to marry, because the straights started it. If you aren’t horrified by Rush Limbaugh being married four times—if you didn’t see Ronald Reagan as a less fit leader because of his divorce—then you simply have to shut the hell up about gay people marrying. You can’t ethically go after the marginalized people who try to eat the fruits of a revolution. You have to go after the revolutionaries. …

If it were the goal of the traditionalists at First Things and National Review and The American Conservative to help us re-think the Reagan presidency on the grounds that he helped normalize divorce, and thus helped usher in all that is terrible about libertine USA ca. 2013, they could.

22 Comments for “Mark Oppenheimer on gays and divorce stigma”

  1. posted by Tom Scharbach on

    Mark’s commentary is thoughtful and thought-provoking, but the ways in which the so-called “sexual revolution” affected marriage is not the whole story.

    I am old enough to remember the days when marriage was the expected norm (as in “If you want to live together, get married. If you have children, stay married.” and so on).

    In those days, living together outside of marriage, for the cultural outsiders who engaged in it, was kept quiet, and whispered about by adults when children were out of the room. Divorce was seen as a tragedy. Nelson Rockefellar’s divorce and remarriage was a serious impediment to his presidential aspirations. If you are old enough, you will remember.

    That has changed, of course, but the role that gays and lesbians played in that change was marginal until the 1990’s, by which time the decline of marriage as a cultural norm was well under way. We were just another variant of cultural outsiders who were whispered about in euphemisms — “bachelor farmers”, women living “like sisters” and so on — if we knew them, or warned against as “perverts” if we didn’t. That, too, has changed, of course.

    But that isn’t the whole story. I think that there is another factor that needs to be considered, and acknowledged, but social conservatives — the role which social conservatives played in destroying marriage as the “gold standard” during the battles over marriage equality.

    Jon Rauch laid out the role played by social conservatives in denigrating the “gold standard” in his brilliant 2004 book “Gay Marriage: Why It Is Good for Gays, Good for Straights, and Good for America“, arguing (my words) that you cannot both argue that marriage must be preserved as the cultural norm demanded of people living together and raising children and, at the same time, argue that marriage is not essential for, and must be denied to, large numbers of people living together and raising children.

    Oddly, the role played by gays and lesbians in furthering the decline of marriage as the “gold standard”, if we played such a role at all, has been to seek marriage, to try to uphold marriage as the expected cultural norm, and to be included in that cultural norm, only to become the the spark that ignited social conservatives to loudly and vigorously deny that marriage must be upheld as the cultural norm, the “gold standard”.

    I don’t know that marriage equality will reverse the decline of marriage as “gold standard”. It probably won’t because the social conservative message that marriage is not essential for living together or raising children has been too loudly proclaimed for too long for a small minority of the population, like we are, to have much effect.

    But at least we are on the right side of the issue, trying to uphold marriage.

  2. posted by Houndentenor on

    I can’t tell you how many times relatives and acquaintances bit my head off in the 2012 primaries for mentioning that Newt Gingrich was on wife #3 (and in each case was sleeping with the new wife before divorcing the old one). Reagan at least had an amicable divorce from Jane Wyman. These things happen. Of course Nancy was at least four months pregnant when they got married. I really don’t know why the so-cons can’t find someone who walks the walk to be their standard bearer. I do have a great deal of respect for people who live by a certain set of standards and lead by example. I think that most social conservatives do most of the things they preach against and think somehow that making them more shameful or illegal that will stop them from doing them as much. The louder they scream, the more I think that.

    • posted by Tom Scharbach on

      Reagan at least had an amicable divorce from Jane Wyman …

      Hollywood celebrities were exempted from being held to national marriage norm in many ways, even back into the 1950’s. I’m not sure why that was, but the fact that Reagan emerged out of Hollywood probably reduced any stigma that might otherwise attached to his divorce and remarriage. And, of course, by 1980, divorce and remarriage was very common among the conservative base, including social conservatives.

    • posted by Jorge on

      I really don’t know why the so-cons can’t find someone who walks the walk to be their standard bearer.

      (Uhhhh, Mike Huckabee and Rick Santorum? Maybe even Pat Buchanan.)

      Because those kind of people fight fair, and people who fight fair LOSE. Lose, lose, lose, lose, lose.

      • posted by Houndentenor on

        Maybe because no one in their right mind could consider either Huckabee or Santorum a serious presidential candidate. My favorite last time was Romney. His father was a polygamist but he considered one man one woman to be “traditional marriage”. that’s effing hilarious!

        • posted by AG on

          I’m afraid you got the presidential candidates wrong. Obama’s father was a polygamist — he was already married married in Kenya before he come to the U.S. to study. Obama’s grandfather had four fives. Our president is the first non-polygamist in his family. Romney’s father was not a polygamist, neither was his grandfather. Only his great-grandfather was a polygamist. Facts, how do they work?

          • posted by Tom Scharbach on

            You make an important point, AG. If polygamy is legal, what’s to stop two men or two women from marrying? Or women from marrying turtles?

          • posted by AG on

            Too bad the edit button is nowhere to be found.

  3. posted by Clayton on

    “I really don’t know why the so-cons can’t find someone who walks the walk to be their standard bearer. ”

    Mitt Romney, Michelle Bachmann, Rick Perry and Rick Santorum all walked the walk. The problem was that they all had other issues. Bobby Jindal walks the walk, but his current approval rating in his home state is around 38%, which is going to make it hard for him to sell himself as a viable candidate in a nationwide election. Chris Christie and Marco Rubio walk the walk (to the best of my knowledge), but the right wing of the party doesn’t like Christie. So is Rubio the man that so-cons can support while uniting the Republican party? We’ll see.

    • posted by Houndentenor on

      Bachmann is married to the world’s most obvious closet case. Who can take her seriously?

  4. posted by Mary on

    I take a personal interest in this particular topic since I’m a socon who has complained for years about the refusal of my fellow socons to take moral decline seriously in “the silent majority.” I hate to admit it, but Mr. Oppenheimer and Mr. Olson have a very valid point – and one that should have been raised by liberals years ago. It always surprised me how quick socons were to forgive Reagan for being the first divorced president and for having legalized abortion laws when governor of California. But of course he got a pass as he wasn’t part of “the liberal elite” or the post-war baby boom generation – the two groups that socons love to blame for all of America’s problems.

    Part of our difficulty in social conservativism is that ours is a philosophy that takes a dim view of human nature and emphasizes limits to what is possible. This goes against the grain of American thinking – according to which people are capable of achieving even more than they can dream of. Conservatives are terrified to confront the American people on this topic. So the official line is that most Americans are conservative, but “the elites” prevent their will from prevailing in national policy. Unless they work at think tanks,you usually find conservatives refraining from getting into the nitty gritty of social policy and defending their political positions with abstract cliches about “the values that made America great” and America’s “Christian heritage.” This unfortunately gives the impression that conservatism is simple-minded and has no answers to many of the questions posed it it. It DOES, of course. But socons are just too damn afraid to scare off voters. Reagan’s sunshine and optimism doesn’t work on all issues.

    Although I’ve recently switched my position to support SSM (actually, given up rather than switched – my original arguments against it still strike me as valid, I ‘m more concerned now with preventing the country from becoming further divided) I have to say that the survival of marriage as an institution rests far more on what heterosexuals do than what homosexuals do. So to turn the question around, do liberals and libertarians who support SSM now want to work on the problem of the heterosexual divorce rate? Consistency should work both ways.

    • posted by Houndentenor on

      I’d love to hear your “valid arguments” for opposing same sex marriage since so far I haven’t heard a single valid argument against allowing gay people to marry, but I don’t really want to get into that fight wing someone who isn’t opposing legal recognition of gay marriages. So long as you aren’t interfering with my legal rights, the reason for your non-interference is irrelevant.

      As for dealing with the divorce rate, it’s more a conservative problem than a liberal one. The highest divorce rates are in the most conservative parts of the country. I think this is due to people marrying too early. There are also great stresses on couples in financial distress, which has led to divorce being far more common among the poor than among the affluent. (I realize the public perception is the other way around but that cliche hasn’t been true for decades.)

      So what to do about the divorce rate? I’d like to divide divorces into three categories. 1) Couples that never should have married in the first place (incompatible, too young, etc.) Premarital counseling could discourage such couples from ever marrying. We’ve all known too many couples whose divorce announcement was a relief to friends and relatives who had long grown weary of hearing them snipe at each other in public. Some people are just toxic together (even if they are fine on their own) and just shouldn’t be married. 2) Couples whose marriages could be repaired with counseling. There are a lot of these. Meryl Streep and Tommy Lee Jones starred in a very good film last year called Hope Springs about one such couple. They almost don’t make it. I’m not sure if such counseling could/should be made mandatory, but it should at least be strongly encouraged. At the very least exiting a relationship after defusing any anger and resentment will be more healthy. 3) Couples whose marriage has irreparable damage. This includes marriages characterized by spousal abuse, abandonment, and other fractures that can’t and probably shouldn’t be mended. (My mom does some volunteer work for a battered women’s and children’s shelter. Most go back to their husbands after their first time at the shelter. Almost all are back at the shelter within a few months.) People need a legal out for truly malignant (and worse, dangerous) situations.

      None of that comes with a legal remedy. Making divorce harder will make things worse for people who desperately need to get out of a marriage that is harming them. If you have other solutions, I’m happy to hear them. People need to be free to exit a marriage if they need to. Whether or not divorce is good or bad depends on the situation and I’m loathe to prohibit something that is often necessary.

  5. posted by Tom Scharbach on

    So to turn the question around, do liberals and libertarians who support SSM now want to work on the problem of the heterosexual divorce rate?

    My guess is that it would depend on what counts as “working on” the problem.

    I know very few people who favor what seems to be the most common “solution” proposed by social conservative groups like Wisconsin Family Action, which is to severely restrict the ability of a couple to divorce. Almost everyone I know believes that, at bottom, the decision to divorce or not should be the couple’s decision, not the government’s.

    I know a lot of people who encourage couples to marry and stay married, and who do all that they can reasonably do to support couples in marriage.

    • posted by Houndentenor on

      Some facts: divorce is higher in the conservative states than in the liberal ones. Divorce rates are lowest among the least religious and highest among fundamentalist Christians. Asking liberals to help social conservatives solve what appears to be a problem more for socons than for liberals is a little odd. Everyone should work on their own marriage and encourage friends having problems in their relationships to seek appropriate counseling. At the very least stop blaming the problems with heterosexual marriage on gay people. I can only speak for myself, but I never broke up anyone’s marriage.

  6. posted by Lori Heine on

    The “argument” against same-sex unions is basically that straight people want to be able to go on using the tax code to loot single people, gay and straight. This has less to do with upholding the traditional view of marriage than with holding up a legal fiction to justify theft.

    If they want to base their morality on the Bible, straight Christians ought to begin by understanding “Thou shalt not steal.” Until they’ve even managed to master a knowledge of that, I have no reason to believe their holier-than-thou image is anything more than a facade.

    • posted by Jorge on

      It’s only reasonable that those who are being productive and good in society should receive favorable treatment. It is difficult to find a more obvious social expression of industriousness and honor than marriage.

      • posted by Lori Heine on

        Whatever happened to the concept that virtue is its own reward? Why it is the government’s business to decide who gets to keep their money and who doesn’t? Who died and made Those Who Know Better God?

        I suppose private property is yet another of those “special rights” to which gays are not entitled.

    • posted by Tom Scharbach on

      Special treatment of marriage permeates our laws at both federal and state levels.

      Almost all of the laws granting special treatment to married couples were enacted to further the purpose of supporting marriage in the social and economic conditions of the time.

      Times have changed. My guess is that about half of those laws are now either unnecessary or improperly targeted, often working at odds with their original purpose.

      We might be able to develop a confluence of interest between liberals, libertarians and social conservatives in examining the special treatment laws, one by one, in light of (a) the original purpose of the law, and (b) the current need for and/or effectiveness of each .

      Along the way, we could look for other ways to shape our laws to support marriage and married couples given current conditions.

      I believe that marriage is worth supporting. But we need to do it smart. Hanging on to old laws that no longer work, while ignoring opportunities to create new laws that will work, is just stupid.

      • posted by Lori Heine on

        If libertarians and liberals are to be able to work with social conservatives, the Tea Party is going to have to stop doing things like inviting pastors who call for the death penalty for gays to come and speak for them.

        Granted, they had him speak on “illegal immigration” — another of the Arizona TP’s big issues — but with hundreds of people crossing the border every day, it’s hard to see why they couldn’t have found another “authority” to speak for them.

        Either they’re for a smaller and more efficient government — one that uses our money more responsibly and extracts it from us more fairly — or they’re not. They need to make up their minds.

  7. posted by Throbert McGee on

    Oddly, the role played by gays and lesbians in furthering the decline of marriage as the “gold standard”

    It seems to me that upholding one-man, one-woman marriage as a “gold standard” while simultaneously recognizing same-sex marriage as a “silver standard” would be a viable option, though it’s one that neither the Biblo-cons nor teh gheys have shown any interest in pursuing, for different reasons.

    (Religious conservatives don’t want to make the slightest concession that homosexuality is normal for maybe 1 in 30 people; gays don’t want to concede that their relationships and heterosexual marriages might possibly be of unequal value to society as a whole.)

  8. posted by Joel on

    Mark’s opinion is considerate but every one of us may have the same thoughts or different. Let’s just respect the decision of others.

  9. posted by Adrienne Critcher on

    To be consistent, those so-cons who oppose same-sex marriage should also follow Matt. 19:9 and oppose, and stigmatize, those who divorce and remarry (it’s adultery) except in the case of an unfaithful spouse. Now I don’t care what the Bible says about these things (for a variety of reasons), but for those who claim to, they should demand that divorced people remain celibate for the rest of their lives! I don’t see Mike Huckabee or Rick Santorum demonizing those in their party who are considered by Matt. 19:9 to be living in a perpetual state of adultery. When will the Huckabees lead drives for constitutional amendments banning remarriage after divorce? That is what a consistent policy on “traditional marriage” would look like.

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