The Case for Same-Sex Marriage: From Sexual Liberty to Civilized Commitment. - book reviews

National Review, May 6, 1996 by Elizabeth Fox-Genovese

LIKE Nero, fiddling while Rome burned, Americans have steadfastly denied the reality engulfing us. The siren songs of sexual liberation and individual self-realization, abetted by the transformation of our economy, have lured us to the deadly reefs on which marriage, as known throughout history, is breaking up.

So, without ever admitting that two and two do make four, we contemplate the mounting evidence of divorce, co-habitation, single motherhood, child abuse, and violence perpetrated by children, not to mention children's suicide, alcoholism, and drug abuse. Many have attended to the signs, but they almost unanimously find someone to blame: conservatives charge women with neglecting their responsibilities; feminists charge men with brutality; everyone deplores deadbeat dads. Some preach restoration of family values, others sexual equality and joint-parenting, still others look to a rejuvenation of fatherhood. All these charges avoid the real problem: Marriage as the essential social unit -- the glue that binds men and women to one another and, from infancy, binds children to society -- has disintegrated.

In The Abolition of Marriage, Maggie Gallagher forcefully lays out the essentials. Feistily challenging the complacency of those who promote the "good divorce," she summarizes the massive evidence that, short of pathological brutality, divorce is never good for children and not much better for adults. In replacing the aspiration to marriage with the "divorce ethic," we have acquiesced in a vision of family as nothing but "a package of roles related to the function of caring for and rearing children" -- roles that might appropriately be assigned to professional caretakers.

Miss Gallagher is masterly in dismantling, one by one, the prevailing nostrums about roles, relations, partnerships, and all the rest that have drained marriage of its significance, meaning, and, yes, sanctity. Remarriage after divorce does not solve problems and often exacerbates them. Stepfathers rarely invest as much time and love in children as biological fathers and are much more likely to abuse them. Sexual abuse is overwhelmingly perpetrated by stepfathers and mothers' live-in boyfriends.

Meanwhile, divorced biological fathers rapidly lose their sense of responsibility for children with whom they do not live. Pre-marital cohabitation does not improve marriages' chances for success; it weakens them. Divorced mothers can rarely provide the attention, resources, and opportunities children need, and children of mothers who never married fare even worse. Nothing serves children as well as the presence and commitment of their biological father. Should you doubt the importance of commitment, consider that children of widows do much better than those of divorced or never-married mothers.

The delusion that divorce and single motherhood don't harm children presumably originated in adults' need for comfort and reassurance. No matter how selfishly we behave, we and our children will be okay. With respect to the needs of children, that wisdom amounts to nonsense, and it serves adults no better. Thinking to have liberated ourselves from the bondage of undying promises and their attendant responsibilities, we have condemned ourselves to a wasteland of anomie, loneliness, and despair. We are beginning to acknowledge the burdens that sole responsibility for children imposes on women, especially if they are poor. We have been slow to admit the tremendous cost that men's freedom to leave or never commit to marriage imposes on us all, starting with men themselves. Men who father illegitimate children disproportionately end in jail, addiction, or premature death.

One may, without exaggeration, argue that the entire history of civilization has been a sustained attempt to bind men to women and children -- literally to domesticate their propensity for aggression and sexual irresponsibility. Within the past few decades, that project has unraveled. David Popenoe's fine study, Life without Father, sketches some of the historical background and, especially, provides a searing picture of contemporary failures and their cost. Fatherhood -- good fatherhood -- grounds the well-being of children; its absence painfully cripples them and all of us. Whatever we may like to believe, neither mothers alone nor the village can substitute, and the personal failings of individual men inescapably result in "a major public crisis."

Nothing more clearly underscores the demise of marriage than the case for same-sex marriage, which William Eskridge forcefully argues. Starting from the same premise about men's propensity for sexual adventure as Miss Gallagher and Mr. Popenoe, Mr. Eskridge insists that same-sex marriage would help "civilize" the gay community as well as bring overdue respect. On what grounds, he asks, should gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transsexual Americans be denied the social, psychological, and economic benefits of marriage? Himself a lawyer, Eskridge traces the legal interpretation of marriage through a series of Supreme Court cases, arguing that during the twentieth century the goal of marriage has changed from the promotion of procreation to the promotion of "personal and interpersonal fulfillment." Using the now-discredited anti-miscegenation laws as analogy he further insists that the Constitution guarantees each individual a fundamental right to marry regardless of sexual orientation.