Monday, June 13, 2011
The Family's End?
Scott Yenor has posted "The Family's End" at Public Discourse, tracing the various intellectual threads in the family's demise. An excerpt:
These profound intellectual trends have affected how men and women view themselves and view children and childbearing. The logic of contract has culminated in a triumph of autonomy. The movement to conquer nature promotes greater gender equality as an exercise in autonomy. Institutions buckle things together, suggesting that they have a necessary or salutary relation to one another, and both these trends reflect the modern penchant for separating what institutions once united. Marriage and family life had, among other things, buckled love and marriage, marriage and parenthood, parenthood and sex, marriage and sex, and sex and procreation together. Every modern defender of some family form ends up defending, in one way or another, various connections among these goods; the more radical the critics of the family are, the more buckles they seek to loosen.
Today we face the possibility of the family’s end, in part because of the attractive promise to free us from the buckles that nature seems to place on our freedom. The erosion of these buckles explains, in no small part, the amazing decline in birth rates seen across the Western world. Encapsulating all of these separations in one fell swoop is the move for public recognition for same-sex marriage, as it is the victory of the adult-centered marriage contract to secure whatever goods the adults choose, and is the final detachment of marriage and family life from nature.
I agree that we should be troubled by many aspects of the move from status to contract in family law, and I have argued as much in print (see chapter 9). For a similar argument, you should also check out Mitt Regan's wonderful Alone Together. Though I agree with much of what Yenor writes, the difficulty is trying to explain why and how the marriage and procreation buckle matters. Same-sex marriage keeps the love and marriage, marriage and parenthood, marriage and sex, and parenthood and sex buckles together. Unless it can be shown that same-sex marriages detrimentally impact the quality of the caregiving function, it's hard to make a convincing argument that the loss of the marriage-procreation buckle, standing alone, should determine the public definition of marriage. I'm not addressing all arguments against same-sex marriage; I'm just adopting Yenor's framework and speculating that, of all the buckles that the public seems to care about, the marriage-procreation buckle would appear fairly far down on the list.
https://mirrorofjustice.blogs.com/mirrorofjustice/2011/06/the-familys-end.html
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I think Yenor's argument with respect to same-sex marriage is even weaker than you suggest. What is missing from his analysis is an understanding of the content of the buckles linking marriage, sex, and procreation. There are a great many ways marriage and procreation can be linked, some of which are entirely distinct from one another. We might say "Procreation should only occur within marriage," which is one possible link, but which has no bearing on the question of whether any given marriage should involve procreation. We might say "Married couples should open themselves to the possibility of having and/or raising children," which is another possible link, but that really militates against contraception (at least uninterrupted contraception), not against a couple with a natural inability to have children, and certainly not against forms of child-rearing that don't involve biological procreation (like adoption). Unless we conclude that any given marriage is worthwhile only if the parties are capable of naturally procreating, a marriage-procreation link that our society does not accept and seems to me unjustifiable, it's hard to see how same-sex marriage undermines these connections.
Let's have this debate about the contract and the status conception of marriage, and about the roles of autonomy and fidelity in marriage and family life and law. The debate is a fascinating and important one, and speaking as a liberal, I think liberals have a lot to learn from social conservatives on this topic. But same-sex marriage has precious little to do with it. It certainly is very far from the last gateway to familial anarchy. If anything, the eagerness of many same-sex couples to seek the status of marriage over and above both the circumstance of cohabitation and the legal rights of civil unions and domestic partnerships ought to be a reassuring sign of the enduring power and significance of that status, and of the worth of preserving it against a conception of domestic union that is purely legalistic and contractual. And the more tightly social conservatives bind their general family law policy preferences to the specific issue of same-sex marriage, the more likely it is that the declining public credibility of arguments against same-sex marriage will weaken the credibility of the other arguments as well.