Review of The Future of Marriage, by
David Blankenhorn (Encounter Books)
When I came out with a book making the case for same-sex
marriage a few years ago, I expected to spend time selling gay
marriage to straight people and marriage to gay people. The
surprise was how much time I spent selling marriage to straight
people.
By marriage, I mean not just a commitment that two people make
to each other. Marriage is a commitment that the two spouses also
make to their community. They promise to look after each other and
their children so society won't have to; in exchange, society deems
them a family and provides an assortment of privileges,
obligations, and caregiving tools. (Not, mostly, "benefits.")
Marriage does much more than ratify relationships, I would tell
audiences; it fortifies relationships by embedding them in a dense
web of social expectations. That is why marriage, with or without
children, is a win-win deal, strengthening individuals, families,
and communities all at the same time. Gay marriage, I said, would
be the same positive-sum transaction. The example gay couples set
by marrying instead of shacking up might even strengthen marriage
itself.
Audiences received my gay-marriage pitch in predictably varied
ways. What consistently surprised me, however, was how few people
thought of marriage as anything more than a private contract.
Particularly among groups of younger people, the standard view was
that marriage is just an individual lifestyle choice. If chosen,
great. If not chosen, great. I would leave such encounters with a
troubling thought: Perhaps straights were becoming receptive to gay
marriage partly because they had devalued marriage itself.
What's Marriage For?
In his new book, The Future of Marriage, David
Blankenhorn begins where my doubts left off. Blankenhorn is the
founder and president of his own think tank, the Institute for
American Values, and has built his career on the restoration of
fatherhood to the center of American family life. In The Future
of Marriage, he emerges as an articulate, humane, and
fair-minded opponent of same-sex marriage, which he regards as
nothing less than part of an effort to steal children's patrimony.
"It would require us, legally and formally, to withdraw marriage's
greatest promise to the child-the promise that, insofar as society
can make it possible, I will be loved and raised by the mother and
father who made me." He takes jabs at me, among other gay-marriage
advocates, but in my case he plays fair. And Blankenhorn is
ambitious. He wants to lift the gay-marriage debate from its
isolation in the mud-pit of the partisan culture wars and place it
within a larger theory of marriage. He also wants to put an end to
the days when gay-marriage advocates can say that there is no
serious case against gay marriage. In both respects, he
succeeds.
As I read, I made note of points on which he and I agree. I soon
found myself running out of paper. Marriage, we both believe, is a
vital institution, not just equal to competing family arrangements
from society's point of view but preferable; it is an institution
embedded in society, not a mere contract between individuals; it is
social, not just legal, and so cannot be twisted like a pretzel by
court order; it has (almost) everywhere and always been
heterosexual and entwined with procreation, and should be. Gay
marriage, we both believe, is a significant change that entails
risk (though we assess the risks very differently); but gay
marriage, we also believe, is a supporting character in the much
larger drama of shifting social values. We agree that
heterosexuals, not homosexuals, will determine marriage's fate and
have handled matrimony pretty poorly without any gay help. And we
agree that children, on average (please note the qualifier), do
best when raised by their biological mother and father, though he
makes more sweeping claims on that score than I would. That is a
great deal of common ground, which makes it all the more
interesting that we come out in utterly different places and that
gay marriage, in some ways, turns out to be the least of our
disagreements.
For Blankenhorn, "the most important trend affecting marriage in
America" is not same-sex marriage. It is the
"deinstitutionalization" of marriage-that is, "the belief that
marriage is exclusively a private relationship"-of which gay
marriage is merely a prominent offshoot. To his credit, he
understands and forthrightly acknowledges that the individualistic
view of marriage "has deep roots in our society and has been
growing for decades, propagated overwhelmingly by
heterosexuals."
Marriage creates kin. In society's eyes, it distinguishes a
relationship from a family. The trouble, for Blankenhorn, with
declaring any old kind of relationship a family-with turning
marriage into "a pretty label for a private relationship"-is that
marriage evolved and exists for a specific social reason, which is
to bind both parents, especially fathers, to their biological
children. Same-sex marriage, he argues, denies this principle,
because its "deep logic" is that a family is whatever we say it is,
and it changes the meaning of marriage "for everyone" (his
italics). For support, he draws on the writings of left-wing
activists and academics who favor same-sex marriage precisely
because, they hope, it would knock mom-dad-child marriage off its
pedestal. Granting marriage rights to gay couples, who even in
principle cannot unite biological fathers and mothers with their
children, would "require us in both law and culture to deny the
double origin of the child." Once that happens, we "transform
marriage once and for all from a pro-child social institution into
a post-institutional private relationship."
In plainer English, Blankenhorn is saying that marriage is
designed to discriminate in favor of conjugal families and must
continue to do so. Egalitarians may hate that idea, but it isn't
stupid or bigoted. Blankenhorn is correct to think society has a
strong interest in keeping fathers, mothers, and children together;
many of today's problems of crime, poverty, and inequality flow
directly from the breakdown of families. But there Blankenhorn and
I part ways. He says he is all for maintaining the dignity and
equality of gay people, but he believes that changing marriage's
most venerable boundary is the wrong way to do so. I am all for
maintaining the strength of marriage and family, but I think that
telling homosexuals (and their kids) they can't form legal families
is the wrong way to do so.
One Purpose, or Many?
Having written a whole book on the subject, I won't rehearse
here why I think gay marriage is good family policy. Suffice it to
say that, in a society riddled with divorce and fatherlessness,
family policy's essential task is to shore up marriage's status as
a norm. In a world where gay couples look married, act married,
talk married, raise kids together, and are increasingly accepted as
married, the best way to preserve marriage's normative status is to
bring gay couples inside the tent. Failing to do so, over time,
will tar marriage as discriminatory, legitimize co-habitation and
other kinds of non-marriage, and turn every successful gay couple
into a cultural advertisement for the expendability of
matrimony.
Blankenhorn clearly disagrees. Our disagreement over how gay
marriage will affect marriage's normative status, however, is
well-plowed ground. So I'll move along to what Blankenhorn rightly
considers his deeper and more important arguments, which are about
the nature of marriage itself. Near the beginning of his book,
Blankenhorn calls childrearing (by which he means the rearing of
children by their biological parents) "probably the single most
important social need that marriage is designed to meet, but there
are numerous others as well." Two pages later, however, he makes a
more unequivocal statement: "Without children, marriage as an
institution makes little sense." Though he regularly uses
qualifiers, it quickly becomes clear that, in practice, the
unqualified statement is much closer to his view.
Blankenhorn succeeds in showing that binding fathers and mothers
to their biological children is a core purpose of marriage, and
more power to him for that. But the logic of his argument is that
binding fathers and mothers to their biological children is the
only purpose that has any compelling claim on society, and
that allowing marriage to serve any other purpose hurts children by
pushing them to the sidelines. From a purpose to
the purpose is a long leap, and one that leaves the public
far behind. Blankenhorn himself cites a poll showing that 13
percent of Americans say "promot[ing] the happiness and wellbeing
of the married individuals" is the "more important characteristic
of a good marriage," and 10 percent choose "produces children who
are well-adjusted and who will become good citizens," but
three-quarters say: "The two are about equally important." In other
words, the public believes that a good marriage is good for adults
and good for children, and that there is no conflict. And
the public is obviously right. Marriage has more than one essential
public purpose. Providing a healthy and secure environment for the
rearing of children (biological or adoptive) is certainly one of
them (and, of course, many gay couples are raising children), but
at least three others, in my view, compel respect: providing a
transition to stable domestic life for young adults (especially
men), providing a safe harbor for sex, and providing lifelong
caregivers.
Still others can be found in a 2000 document called The
Marriage Movement: A Statement of Principles. In a section
headed "What Is Marriage?" the manifesto declares that "marriage
has at least six important dimensions": it is a legal contract, a
financial partnership, a sacred promise, a sexual union, a personal
bond, and a family-making bond. "In all these ways," the statement
continues, "marriage is a productive institution, not a consumer
good."
That manifesto, as you may have guessed, was drafted, endorsed,
and disseminated by David Blankenhorn, among others. The
Blankenhorn of 2000 was right. Marriage multitasks. It is
undoubtedly linked with procreation, but the reductionist
Blankenhorn of 2007 gets the relationship backward: Marriage binds
children to parents by conditioning procreation on marriage, not by
conditioning marriage on procreation. We regard the marriage of
infertile (say, elderly) couples as cause for celebration, not
condemnation. And, of course, gay couples are just another variety
of infertile couple. Even if their unions do not accomplish all the
public purposes of marriage, three out of four-or five out of
six-ain't chicken feed.
Blankenhorn, oddly, treats the objection that society values and
encourages infertile straight marriages as no objection at all. His
three flippant pages explaining why infertility would bar gay but
not straight couples from matrimony are the only really
embarrassing performance in his book. He says that allowing
infertile straight couples to marry no more shows that marriage
isn't for biological parenting than allowing non-drivers to buy
cars shows that cars aren't for driving. He fails to note that
marriage is more like a mobile home (some people drive them, some
live in them, and some do both), that it is in fact legal for
non-drivers to own cars, and that in any case gay couples are
already out on the roads by the thousands. He says barring
infertile straight couples would be impractical, as if that were
the reason we don't do it. (And, actually, it would be pretty easy;
in fact, a satirical Washington state initiative campaign proposes
to do it.) Then, backing up, he acknowledges that practicality
isn't the issue, only to tumble headlong into a baffling non
sequitur by saying "there is no need!" (his emphasis) for
a ban on infertile straight marriages because fertile couples will
have babies anyway.
In the midst of those pratfalls, he looses this whopper:
"Marriage's main purpose is to make sure that any child born has
two responsible parents, a mother and a father who are committed to
the child and committed to each other. To achieve this goal, it
has never been necessary, and it would never be possible,
for society to require that each and every married couple bear
a child" (italics mine). Well, thanks. I rest my case.
A Choice of Cultures
Fortunately, Blankenhorn has a stronger argument to
make-although in the end it lands him on the horns of another false
dilemma. Setting aside the structure of marriage, he considers the
structure of support for gay marriage. It is no coincidence, he
says, that "people who professionally dislike marriage almost
always favor gay marriage" (his italics). Marriage's opponents
want to de-privilege marriage, replacing it with a "family
diversity" model in which society and law view all family
structures as equal and interchangeable. Such folks favor gay
marriage, he argues, because they understand it as a step along
their downhill path.
Blankenhorn here elides the fact that many egalitarian
anti-marriage activists have expressed ambivalence or outright
hostility toward same-sex marriage, precisely because they fear it
would undercut their liberationist agenda. He also elides the fact
that some of the country's most distinguished and dedicated
marriage advocates support same-sex marriage: Paul Amato, William
Doherty, William Galston, and Theodora Ooms, among others. He does
not explain why a bunch of left-wingers who he and I would probably
agree are wrong about almost everything else should be presumed
right about same-sex marriage.
Still, Blankenhorn is making a deeper point, and one with an
element of truth. He is saying that certain values go together in
coherent bundles. If we could have the status quo plus gay
marriage, he could live with that. But he thinks we will either get
less than gay marriage or much more, because we must choose between
two bundles of values, one that puts children at the center of
marriage and another that gives primacy to adults. To clinch the
point, Blankenhorn draws on two multinational public-opinion
surveys. He considers eight questions about marriage, such as
"Married people are happier," "People who want children should
marry," and "Marriage is an outdated institution." Countries that
recognize gay marriage, he finds, are consistently less likely to
insist on the importance of marriage than are countries that do not
recognize it.
Blankenhorn is saying that only one of these two cultural
bundles can sustain marriage as a child-centered public
institution. But it is the whole bundle, not just gay marriage,
that determines marriage's fate. With exemplary integrity,
Blankenhorn acknowledges as much. "To the degree that it makes any
sense to oppose gay marriage, it makes sense only if one
also opposes with equal clarity and intensity the other main trends
pushing our society toward post-institutional marriage" (his
italics). So the important question isn't only gay marriage, or
even marriage. Just as important is what else is in these
bundles.
Here is one clue. Countries in his data set that recognize
same-sex marriage nationally are relatively few and are
concentrated in Western Europe, plus Canada and South Africa.
Countries that do not recognize same-sex unions, on the other hand,
form a larger and more heterogeneous group, including a few Western
countries, but also, for instance, Bangladesh, China, Egypt,
Indonesia, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Nigeria, Uganda, and Ukraine. It
would certainly be surprising if the latter countries did not take
a more traditional view of marriage-and very much else.
And so they do. Using data from the World Values Survey-the
larger and, as we both agree, more representative of Blankenhorn's
two sources-I looked at how countries with and without same-sex
marriage felt on some matters other than marriage. As Blankenhorn
points out, countries without same-sex marriage do indeed take more
traditional attitudes toward marriage, parenthood, and divorce.
But-prepare to be shocked-what correlates most starkly with the
absence of gay marriage is intolerance of homosexuals. Meanwhile,
people in countries with same-sex marriage are more supportive of
teaching children to be independent and tolerant; they are more
supportive of women's equality in work and politics; and they are
less insistent that women must be mothers to be fulfilled. They are
also more secular and are marginally more supportive of democracy.
As it turns out, they also report higher satisfaction with life and
feel they have more freedom of choice and control over their lives.
If you had to live in a random country chosen from one of these two
lists, which list would you choose? As a homosexual American, I can
tell you my own answer, and not just because of gay marriage.
Blankenhorn has painted himself into a corner, one where the
American public will never join him. If, as he insists, we cannot
sustainably mix and match values and policies-combine adult
individualism with devoted parenthood, for example, or conjoin
same-sex marriage with measures to reduce divorce-then we must
choose whether to move in the direction of the Netherlands or Saudi
Arabia. I have no doubt which way the public would go. And
should.
A Wiser Public
In fact, however, the public will reject the choice Blankenhorn
offers as a false one; and, again, the public will be right. A look
at Blankenhorn's own data shows that the publics of gay-marriage
countries have not rejected marriage; on six out of the eight
questions he uses as indicators, they agree with non-gay-marriage
countries, just by less decisive margins. People in countries
recognizing same-sex unions are more accepting of co-habitation and
single parenthood than Blankenhorn and I would prefer; but their
project is not to reject marriage, except perhaps on Blankenhorn's
reductionist account of it, but to blend and balance it with other
values of liberal individualism.
Blankenhorn may think this project futile. He is right to sound
cautionary notes. But in recent years, as he points out, U.S.
divorce rates have dropped a little and teen-pregnancy rates have
dropped a lot, while "rates of marital happiness have stabilized
and may be increasing." States are experimenting with reforms to
strengthen marriage and reduce unnecessary divorce, and the
proportion of African-American children living in two-parent,
married-couple homes has stabilized or increased. Those modest but
heartening improvements come at precisely the time when gay
Americans in the millions-the ordinary folks, not the
academicians-have discovered and embraced marriage and family after
years of alienation from both.
Blankenhorn and I could argue all day about whether gay marriage
is part of the solution or part of the problem. But I feel I have
learned a couple of things recently. From giving all those
speeches, I have learned that the public takes a more
individualistic view of marriage than either Blankenhorn or I would
prefer. From his new book, I've learned that the public's view of
both marriage and society is nonetheless richer, wiser, and more
humane than David Blankenhorn's-and possibly, for that matter, than
my own. Which gives me hope that, whatever the experts say the real
purpose of marriage is or is not, the public can ultimately get it
right.