Tuesday, July 17, 2012
More on the "I Do" Divide: A short response to Eric Bugyis
Eric Bugyis has a post, here, that, in my view, reflects a misunderstanding of what I wrote, and intended, in my recent post, "Marriage, Class, Opportunities, and Outcomes." He writes:
[I]f one reads past the headline, the picture becomes significantly more complex, and Garnett’s takeaway: “It’s not just that marriage might be ‘confined’ to the fortunate classes; it’s also, it seems, that mobility into those classes (or not) is connected to the decisions that people make — and that people’s parents make — about marriage and childrearing,” becomes less tenable (to the extent that it is not meant to be trivial).
I did, of course, "read the past the headline" and appreciate that the "picture" is "complex", and I am confident that my short reaction is both tenable and nontrivial. Bugyis seems to have assumed quickly that I was offering a "values-oriented" interpretation of the stories described in the piece, perhaps in an exercise of "sanctimonious" or "self-congratulatory affirmation." While I admit to thinking that "values" are implicated in the choices people make about marriage and child-rearing, I think his assumption here is unfair and uncharitable, and, in any event, unfounded.
My point -- which I certainly didn't hold out as the only "takeaway" from DeParle's piece and which I don't think was too hard to get -- was that (we know that) it is a good thing for children to be raised in intact, two-parent families, and therefore (here's the relevance of the "Dan Quayle" reference) it is not a good thing for us to celebrate the kids-without-marriage choices of celebrities and others who are able, by virtue of their economic advantages, to protect themselves and their children from the consequences that often attend, for those who lack such advantages, those choices. (To say this is not to imagine that educational and economic opportunities and situations do not put some people in a better position to make the better -- i.e., better-results-yielding -- choices instead of the worse -- i.e., worse-outcomes-yielding -- ones.) I would not have thought that this was more an empirical claim -- coupled with a critique of the more fortunate sector to which, I admit, I belong -- than a "sanctimonious" or "self-congratulatory" point.
https://mirrorofjustice.blogs.com/mirrorofjustice/2012/07/more-on-the-i-do-divide-a-short-response-to-eric-bugyis.html
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I don't remember anyone thinking "My Three Sons," in which a widower (Fred McMurray) and his father-in-law raise three boys, was subversive. Everyone thought it was heartwarming. I suppose the writers of Murphy Brown didn't have to write the plot they did, but in the context of the show as it was presented, what was she supposed to do? Have an abortion? And does anyone suppose poor women deciding whether or not to have a baby out of wedlock said, "If Murphy Brown can do it, so can I"? Dan Quayle was bashing Holywood, a still-popular pastime among conservatives.
Does anyone think that Katie Holmes ought to stick with Tom Cruise and have her daughter raised in the Church of Scientology rather than do what she has done—escape and put the kid in a Catholic school?
I think that marriage is very important, and I think that the out-of-wedlock childbirth rate is a disaster. But that's a sociological and economic opinion, not a judgment about individual cases. The woman in the Times article made some bad choices, but she also had some bad luck. And if she hadn't listened to her boyfriend and given up the idea of aborting the first child, she might have finished college and been the better-off married mother supervising the struggling single mother. Matthew Boudway makes some good points along these lines in his comment following the Commonweal piece.
Dan Quayle may very well have been right about the importance of marriage, but the Murphy Brown references were just red meat for conservatives who like to blame the country's ills on the liberal media and the entertainment industry. I don't think Murphy Brown contributed one iota to the social problems of poverty and single-parent families, any more than "My Three Sons" was a brief for same-sex partners raising children!