The Australian Family, July 2003, p. 24
Modern Marriage, Modern Trouble
David Frum is an author and journalist who resides in Washington, D.C. This article is a chapter from Marriage: Just a Piece of Paper? (Anderson, et. al., eds., Eerdmans, 2002).
I think the bare numbers don't even begin to describe how troubled the institution of marriage is. You can't gauge the trouble by looking at any one statistic, the divorce rate or the out-of-wedlock birth rate. You have to put them all together. What you see when you put them all together is that the custom, the convention, of raising children in stable father-mother relationships, which used to be the fate of the overwhelming majority of society's children, is now actually becoming the situation of a minority of society's children.
Most children will spend a piece of their childhood in something other than a marriage. For at least part of the period until they are eighteen, they will be in a stepfamily, they will be in a single-parent household, or they will be brought up by a cohabiting couple. That experience of being born to a father and a mother, growing up with a father and a mother, and reaching adulthood with a father and a mother is an experience that fewer than half of the children born in the year 2000 will have. Not so long ago, 75 percent or more of American children could look forward to reaching the age of adulthood with both the father and the mother. In the past, for those children who didn't, the main reason was because one parent or another died.
So this is a new thing. How did it come about? Marriage in American society reflected two great American principles. One was you're free to make your own choices. This is not like Europe. We don't have arranged marriages. We never have. You make your own choices, but, once made, you must honor your choice. When marriage was a stable institution, it was entirely up to you to go in, but once in it was not so easy to get out. That principle was defended not so much by law as by custom. The American norm was, our laws favor divorce but our customs discourage it.
That norm began to break down in the late 1960s because we began to believe two things about people. We began to have much less respect for the active individual choice, and we also began to be much less insistent that once a choice was made that it had to be honored. So we changed our rules. In contemporary American society, you can often be married without intending to get married. That is, you live with a woman without marriage and have a child by her. The state will come along and say you have some of the obligations but not others of marriage.
At the same time, you can actually undertake a formal marriage, and it's terrifically easy to dissolve. We have quasi-marriages that aren't really marriages. We have cohabitation, where people aren't legally married but are living as if they are. We have couplings in which people are sort of legally married, but are not living as if they are and are creating babies by purchase rather than by conception. We've got a whole jumble of arrangements, but all of them are based on the rejection of the principle of "free choice, but stick by your choice."
Different eras have different ideas about what people are like and what they need. A hundred years ago we believed you should be left alone to make your own decisions because that's freedom but the consequences of your decisions must be borne by you because that way we encourage people to make good decisions. A hundred years ago, people would say, "Look, you make a contract, you make a business deal, even if it turns out badly, you have to stick with it." That's how we encourage people to make better deals.
Now, we don't look at it that way. What we say instead is we are prepared to accept the negative impacts of protecting people from their choices because we can't bear to see those consequences fall on people. We have much less respect for people as free agents. We see human beings as sort of pitiful creatures of their circumstances, of their race, of their background, of their language.
You can see this in area after area of life. A hundred years ago if you wanted to live near a river that flooded because you could buy land more cheaply there, you got the benefit of the cheaper land, but if there was a flood that was very much your problem. Today, we don't look at it that way. Today, we say, "Well, even if you did get a better deal, if there's a flood that's going to be all of our problem" The result is many more people live in places that get floods.
That principle is true in marriage. A hundred years ago if a man and woman lived together outside of marriage and the woman got pregnant and had a baby, the society would say to her, "You have no claim on that man. You didn't marry him. You want him to act like a father? He can if he wants to, but we won't make him for you. Your failure to insist on marriage before making the baby is going to land on your hand. You're going to suffer the consequences of that" We're not prepared to do that today. We're not as robust in that way. So we say, "Okay, well, we will protect you from the consequences" By protecting people from the negative consequences of a bad choice, you encourage the bad choice. The result is that many more babies are born outside of marriage because we allow people who don't get married and have children to have many, even most, of the benefits of marriage. The government will come along and collect some money from the child's father on your behalf.
From the point of view of many women, that's the best of all possible worlds. You get involved with some loser, you have a baby by him, you don't really want him around, but you would like him to contribute to the support of the child. The modern state says, "Fine. We will do that deal" It's no wonder that that has tended to crowd out marriage in the poor sections of society.
We've done two things. One, we have made marriage a much easier institution to get out of. Two, we have transferred many of the benefits of marriage to people who aren't married, thus making marriage relatively less attractive. A marriage is a big step and a lot of people find it frightening. So if you say, "Look, if you cohabit you can get half or two-thirds of the benefits of marriage without any of the scary implications that loom so large to a twenty-one year old," you're going to find you have a lot more cohabitors.
As for gays, you're simply bandying empty compliments. It is not the laws that make gay marriage impossible; it's the nature of things. When you say the law, despite the nature of things, will create a status call it gay marriage, what you're doing is you're taking a kind of cohabitation and equating it with marriage. That tends to undermine marriage.
Gay marriage has a lot of implications for the raising of children that are very, very troubling, and it will spill back into real marriage. For example, one of the things I think that we should be very much determined to do is to protect children from being turned into commodities. This is, I think, the real, the most fundamental, of all issues involved with marriage. It's not just that by overthrowing marriage we have made adult life less pleasant and agreeable and safe and secure, although that's true. What you tend to do when you weaken marriage is to sever child rearing from marriage, and that turns children into commodities. That's what sperm banks are.
When a woman goes to a sperm bank, there are two contracts that have to be signed. One is a contract between the father and the sperm bank, where the father says, "I hereby renounce my child in exchange for a fee." The other is a contract between the mother and the sperm bank, in which she says, "As part of the deed and sale, I hereby release this man from any obligations" Here's what you've done. The father, for money, is being relieved of his fatherly responsibilities, and the mother, also for money, is cutting him out of his fatherly responsibilities. Both are asking the government to enforce those contracts.
You can put every sperm bank in America out of business tomorrow if the government said it was just not going to enforce those contracts. If later on the father wants access to his child, he'll be able to have it like any other father. If later on the mother wants child support from the father, she'll be able to get it. The sperm banks only work so long as the government agrees to enforce a contract for the sale of children. I think that's an outrage.
Now this is where the gay marriage becomes so problematic. If you were to create this status among gays and call it marriage, what you would be signing on to is a vast program of treating children as articles, commodities of sale.
You are missing something. It comes down to the part about sticking by the choice. Traditional marriage said you are free and you're not free. The choice is not that you and your wife can work out any deal you like and every marriage will have a completely unique legal code. The choice was, "Here is this institution. You may enter it or not, and here are its rules. The man must support the wife. The man must contribute to the upkeep of his children. The woman in turn has certain obligations. Now you, man and woman, you are free to make your choice about entering this institution, but once in it you are bound by it." That was the old way.
The new way is to say, whatever you want, whatever you want. You want to come in on terms where the man doesn't have to support the children? Fine. You want to come in on the terms in which some third party is brought in to substitute for the father in some ways and not in others? Fine. It is no longer clear cut. It is, rather, a blurry set of individual arrangements.
The rise of cohabitation is linked to the rise of divorce, because when it's blurry on the way in, it's going to be blurry on the way out. The reason that we used to make the lines so clear is because we believed it was so important to the successful raising of children to have a Bedrock - a reliable, unbudgeable contract arrangement between the man and the woman.
I read recently about a case in Vancouver of two men and two women; they cross-fertilized each other. That is, Man A fertilized Woman C, and Man B fertilized Woman D. Then, while the two men lived together and the two women lived together, they then treated themselves as a four-person family and raised the two children, who were produced with four parents. Well, if you have four parents, you have no parents. It is not true with parents, the more the better. One of the problems with it taking a village to raise a child is if the whole village is raising the kid, the kid doesn't have his own room. That's sort of the implication. Every room is yours; no room is really yours. You have four parents. That is what we are signing up for.
What we are doing by creating this institu tion to be called "gay marriage" is smashing marriage and replacing it with a whole new set of arrangements that apply to everybody, not just homosexuals, everybody, in which marriage is a unique contract between any two or more adults who want to enter into it and set by any rules. It makes marriage impermanent, and it turns children into commodities.
Vermont already made it possible, even before the gay-marriage decision, to have gay adoption. So they are already encouraging the raising of children in non-mother-father households. Adoption is so difficult even under the best of circumstances, and now they're saying we're going to promote not the best of circumstances, but the worst of circumstances. This strikes me as recklessness with children to an almost unimaginable extent.
What is going to happen with the Civil Union Law is it's going to strike a chain of litigation that is going to consume the country over the next twenty years. Ultimately, the Vermont decision is going to go or marriage in the rest of America is going to go. As things are going now, it looks like marriage will lose. It looks like the Vermont decision is going to be the norm, and marriage throughout the United States is going to vanish as a distinct legal status, even though it may remain in the name and people may still have weddings. It's already in the process of vanishing. In Europe it has vanished, and in Canada, it's nearly gone.
To say that marriage is alive and well because so many people want to get married reminds me of the Mark Twain joke that "quitting smoking is easy, I've done it hundreds of times" The fact that people get married four and five times, the fact that men want to marry men and women want to marry women, the fact that there's going to be demand for polygamy and brothers marrying sisters - this is not a sign of marriage's health. It's a sign, rather, that we have so lost sight of what marriage is that we are unable to come up with the most minimal definition of the difference between marriage and nonmarriage.
Fewer than half of American children are going to grow up inside of marriage. If you look at the poor half of American society, you will see that marriage is already a minority form. Even leaving aside the question of divorce, whether people get married at all is becoming a minority form. So, no, marriage is not a well institution, it's a very sick institution, and it's even sicker in all the other countries in the West, which I think gives us a glimpse of America's future.
No, there is no middle ground on this question. You're either having marriage as we've understood it as an institution, which people enter of their own free will but are then bound by their choice, or you are having a variety of cohabitations, some of which may begin with or have in the middle a visit to a priest. But the fact that some of these cohabitations are blessed by some kind of church official does not alter the truth that you have a regime of sequential cohabitations, based on the needs of adults, in which we permit children to be bought and sold.
So it's either going to be one way or the other way. I'm afraid, very much afraid, that at the moment the way we are going is toward a society of temporary, serial cohabitations in which children are treated like commodities for purchase and sale.