My last post stimulated a conversation that was much more powerful and rich than my original post. Some of the comments deserve further attention. The topic was the advisability of society offering its imprimatur for "gay Marriage."
C. Owen Johnson suggested that since marriage long ago ceased to be primarily about "socio-political-economic activity and became (a) romantic sacrament of mutual attraction", the rationale for excluding any arrangement was no longer valid.
Robert Godwin made several points directed toward marriage as an evolving institution; only with the advent of a modern "sense of self" has romantic marriage become possible. He then brings in the question of child rearing:
...allowing homosexual marriage would be an explicit statement that having two fathers or mothers is equally beneficial to a child as having a father and mother--that a father and mother do not contribute very different things to a child's psychological development--which is hardly worthy of rebuttal.
Unfortunately, there are many people who do challenge the idea that a child does best with a father and a mother. I will not rehash those arguments here since they do not hold much credence, however, they do form an important part of the PC narrative in which single mothers, same sex parenting, and other unconventional forms of child rearing are seen as perfectly equal to, and in many cases, better than, heterosexual parents. Despite the censorship exerted by the PC mindset operating in Universities and the media, some facts are leaking through the iron curtain of denial. USAF_Linguist offers a bit of a sociological historical view of marriage, which emerged as a contract designed to maximize the ability to raise children.
For the past 300-odd years in western society, marriage has been a means for producing and raising children in an economically and emotionally viable setting.
USAF_Linguist ended the comment with a modified "Row" effect (a take-off on James Taranto's observation that supporters of abortion rights are likely to have less children than those who do not believe in abortion, which will result in a shift rightward of the electorate over time):
Marriage is still important to our society's survival, but it means different things to different people. Those who believe it is a contract of love and nothing more will eventually breed themselves to extinction, while those who believe in the sanctity of the unit for creating families will pass along their beliefs to their children.
We can see these two trends playing themselves put in our society. The proponents of greater spending on dependency supportive programs have to insist that there is no meaningful difference between a single parent (usually mother) household and one in which there is a father and a mother. In my series on PC, I pointed out that the radical feminist narrative required destroying the recognition of any differences between the sexes and suggested that men were not only oppressors by their nature, but were actually unnecessary to society. Unfortunately, the most vulnerable in society have been fed this line for much of their lives and have created a vicious circle by way of our liberal social experiment.
William Raspberry, in Poor Women's 'Magical Outlook', describes a five year study of poor women which had troubling results:
What Edin and Kefalas, both Philadelphia sociologists, found in their five-year study of 162 poor black, white and Puerto Rican single mothers is a near total disconnect between marriage and motherhood.
Raspberry quotes a Professor of public policy:
...William Galston, a University of Maryland professor of public policy, once called his "favorite statistic": that finishing high school, reaching age 21 and getting married before having the first child dramatically reduces the odds that the child will experience poverty.
And then quotes him again commenting on the Edin and Kefalas study:
If I were a woman in a community like the one they describe, and the pool of men I was looking at involved dropouts with criminal records and abusive patterns, I wouldn't marry either. But that omits the prior question: Why would I allow such a man to impregnate me?"
In short, it isn't simply the decoupling of marriage from children, he said, but the decoupling of the decision to have a child from the rest of your life.
I have not even talked about the psychological benefits of a child having two parents of opposite gender. I would just suggest here that when a child makes the transition from a two person psychology (the pre-Oedipal mother-child dyad) to a three person world including the loved and feared father, we have traditionally seen that child as ready to begin the long process of becoming a part of the greater community. Children, in almost every society, leave the parents home to enter school at around 5, the very age when the child has securely entered or negotiated, the transition.
Those liberals and leftists who continue to push the idea that all parenting arrangements are equivalent, are condemning a large community of poor children to perpetual impoverishment (both financially and psychologically.) I would submit there is a significant, unacknowledged, racial aspect to this since statistics consistently show minority women are much more likely to be single mothers than women in other ethnic groups. Thus, an additional unintended consequence of the changing view of marriage over the last 30-40 years is a functionally racist relegation of a large cohort of minorities to a permanent second class status by virtue of the devaluation of the male presence in marriage.
[This supports, rather than refutes, that one of the legacies of slavery's attack on the traditional structure of marriage, was to make it more difficult for black men to be successful in marriage. Since they comprised the most vulnerable group in society, Black Americans, more than any other group, would benefit from society doing all it can to support conventional marriage. Sadly, too many poor minorities have been bribed by easy dependency and have been confirmed supporters of the party which continually pushes to "up the ante" of dependency. This is truly voting against one's own self-interest, but it is hard to change such habits when the damage is not recognized.]
While race remains one of the areas of conversation that is dangerous to discuss directly, many are catching on that the all too frequent use of minorities as props for the self aggrandizement of the caring and chattering classes hides (barely) something ugly: "the soft bigotry of low expectations", indeed.
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