The only time Americans seem to get exercised about the future of marriage is when proposals for gay weddings and civil unions are in the headlines.
So we can probably expect plenty of hand-wringing about the future of marriage in a few weeks when state lawmakers take a look at Sen. Pat Steadman’s upcoming bill (it’s still being drafted) that would recognize civil unions for gays. Hand-wringing much like the following:
“We could not support a law that undermines marriage, and that’s exactly what civil unions do,” said Jenny Tyree of Citizen Link, which is affiliated with Focus on the Family.
“This is a steppingstone to one thing only,” she added, “and that’s redefining marriage . . . .”
Actually, Americans have been pretty successful at undermining and redefining marriage for years without any help from civil unions. It’s almost quaint to worry about possible corrosive effects of civil unions in a nation in which the percentage of children born to single mothers sets a record almost every year — from 37 percent five years ago, for example, to more than 40 percent today — and a quarter of all kids live in single-parent homes.
The figures for blacks and Latinos are even higher, with more than 70 percent of black babies born to single moms.
The yearly creep of these figures passes almost unnoticed in the media and in public debate despite their ominous implications for multigenerational poverty and educational attainment — not to mention stubborn economic disparities between ethnic groups.
Kay S. Hymowitz, author of “Marriage and Caste in America,” put the trends in perspective a few years ago. “While Americans have been squabbling about gay marriage,” she wrote, “they have managed to miss the real marriage-and-social-justice issue, one that affects far more people and threatens to undermine the American project. We are now a nation of separate and unequal families not only living separate and unequal lives but, more worrisome, destined for separate and unequal futures” — in part because of the huge marriage gap between the college educated and those with only a high-school diploma.
Time magazine, in a recent article, summed up the data this way: “[T]he richer and more educated you are, the more likely you are to marry, or to be married . . . .”
Time seemed mildly concerned by this development, but offered a breezy exploration of the question, “Who needs marriage?” including the eye-popping finding from a Pew Research Center survey that 40 percent of Americans “think marriage is obsolete.”
For those adults, maybe it is. But so far no one has invented a substitute for marriage that is equally effective at socializing and educating children and preparing them for happy and productive lives. For kids, marriage is far from obsolete, whatever lies adults may tell themselves to justify putting their own interests first.
Civil unions for gays don’t materially threaten the institution of marriage; a culture of narcissism and self-delusion does.
If I have one concern about Steadman’s bill, it’s his intention, as he told me Tuesday, to extend a civil union option to heterosexuals, too. In France, where that option is available to all, couples “are increasingly shunning traditional marriages and opting instead for civil unions, to the point that there are now two civil unions for every three marriages,” The New York Times reported the other day.
France’s experience seems to be unique in Europe, admittedly, but there’s no point in risking its replication here.
E-mail Vincent Carroll at vcarroll@denverpost.com.
