*Cross-posted from AlterNet.
President Obama’s strong support for same-sex marriage is strong support for the institution of marriage itself. It's a vital step toward a revitalized institution better equipped to address the needs of today’s families.
Those who think and talk like Rush Limbaugh – who called the president’s statement a “war on traditional marriage” -- have championed the policies underlying the real war. Research on contemporary marriage such as Brad Wilcox's "When Marriage Disappears" shows that the ability to sustain a long-term, two-parent relationship (with any sex) is increasingly a function of class. Our research in Red Families v. Blue Families reveals that it is also the product of a conservative economic program that has wreaked havoc on the family lives of struggling Americans.
We have been consistently stunned, though alas not shocked, by the anguished tones used by those who oppose same-sex marriage and who manage to argue with a straight face (pun intended) that declining marriage rates must somehow be linked to public recognition of same-sex couples. It is time to identify the real reasons for the transformation of marriage – and gay marriage has nothing to do with those changes.
Marriage results from the union of two partners convinced that they are better off together than apart. In times when only men had access to a "family wage" and child care was (and still is) expensive or non-existent, the traditional match involved a trade of men's higher income for women's domestic services.
What does marriage rest on today? For many, it rests on a commitment of two people to share their lives, to create a permanent union that provides support for children, and to manage the tradeoffs between careers, finances and services necessary to manage a family. This is an ideal held by both heterosexual and same-sex couples who are more financially secure. But it no longer fits large numbers of working-class couples who conceive children together. That's because the foundation for their relationships has been destroyed by the very people who accuse President Obama of a war on marriage.
Let's consider how they have systematically undermined marriage.
1. Attacks on Jobs and Wages. The "traditional” marriage that conservatives are so fond of talking about rested on the ability of a man -- any man -- to earn a "family wage" in a stable job. Those assaulting unions, like Scott Walker in Wisconsin, have undermined both the family wage and job stability. Job stability has declined in the United States since the 1970s. Dartmouth sociologist Matissa Hollister explained last year that the strongest evidence for this "is decline in long-term tenure among men employed in the private sector."
2. Attacks on Work/Family Balance. In the absence of male job security, two incomes have been increasingly important to family life. Yet, managing two incomes also involves managing the down-time between jobs. Those characterizing themselves as "conservatives" have led the assault on unemployment benefits, education and work/family balance necessary to flexible family roles. While 178 other countries have paid parental leave, only a few states – all blue – guarantee paid leave in the United States. A few blue states -- California, New Jersey, New York, Rhode Island, Hawaii – as well as Puerto Rico -- offer temporary disability insurance programs, an option through which a biological mother can “draw on public insurance for pregnancy and childbirth.” In other states, families are on their own. Paul Amato’s 2009 book Alone Together demonstrates that tensions working-class men have experienced due to loss of employment and working-class women’s lack of job flexibility is a major factor in the class-based increases in divorce.
3. Attacks on Women. As Amato’s work documents, managing a world in which many women outearn men requires more flexible gender roles. Yet conservatives have led the fight against women and women's autonomy. They link same-sex marriage to the remaking of the institution in the gender neutral terms they oppose.
4. Attacks on Reproductive Freedom. The war on women, which focuses on reproductive autonomy, has contributed more to elimination of the stigma against non-marital births than the counter-culture of the 1960s. How? Eliminate the male premium that supported the shotgun marriage and oppose abortion as murder and what's left are single mothers struggling to make it on their own. If you happened to see the blog discussions of Bristol Palin’s non-marital birth, you may have noticed that neither conservative nor liberal women thought there was much point to Bristol marrying Levi, the birth father. And yet conservatives were more enthusiastic than liberals in congratulating the Palins for their support of Bristol’s decision to keep the child. Fine, perhaps, for a young women with financial resources, but what about those who don't have wealthy parents?
5. Attacks on the Marriageabity of Men. Studies of marriage and gender relationships show that norms change quickly with gender ratios: marriage rates in most societies go up when men outnumber women and go down when women outnumber men in the marriage pool. (See Guttentag and Secord's book Too Many Women: The Sex Ratio Question.) That's because when the number of men that women find attractive as potential mates goes down, those men find they can play the field. The women in their lives come to distrust men more generally and invest less in relationships.
A dramatic new study illustrates the effect by looking at the undergraduate dating behavior of young women on college campuses. The study finds that the more the men outnumber the women on a given campus, the more likely the women are to be in committed, monogamous relationships. Older studies show that high rates of incarceration and the decimation of blue-collar jobs in low-income communities skews gender ratios and depress marriage rates. (See William J. Wilson's book, The Truly Disadvantaged.) And, as Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett further detail in their book The Spirit Level, higher rates of income inequality (which are directly related to conservative economic policies) increase the rates of alcoholism, depression and criminality and do so even more for men than women. All of these factors tend to remove a large number of low-income men from the marriage market.
At the height of what economists have called the"Great Compression" of the '50s and '60s -- a time of increasing security for ordinary Americans produced by progressive policies of very high marginal tax rates and a reduction in income inequality -- marriage rates soared. On the flip side, what Timothy Noah has described as the "Great Divergence"-- a period starting in the 1970s characterized by ever higher rates of income inequality valorized by the right -- has weakened the institution of marriage for many.
Who, then, is waging the real war?
Bill Schneider: Unity Has Failed
My husband and I have been married for 35 years in a healthy, loving marriage.
Our friends, who are gay and have been in a committed relationship for 10 years, just phoned us and told us that they were finally married. We were very happy for them. I'm wondering how this harms our marriage?
My brother-in-law, who is against marriage equality just came over for dinner and I asked him why he opposes it. His response was that when he was a young man he got an unwelcome sexual advance from a man. My response was 'oh, now you know how a woman feels'.
I just can't understand this.
Those folks usually cry about how gays are immoral because they go around having sex with everything that moves, as long as it's same-sex sex. Wouldn't allowing them to marry encourage them to stop all the indiscriminate carousing? I wonder how these anti-gay folks process that conflict.
One of these people is now a pharmacist and to get there, it was FREE for her. There's more fraud that goes on than people know. And these people vote for the "free" ride.
They didn't want to pay--nothing more, nothing less.
http://mallaryallen.com/2012/05/05/growing-up-uu-survey-preliminary-results/
This certainly doesn't bear out the dire predictions coming from NOM about the effects of same sex marriage on traditional family structure.
2.. Lack of good paying jobs, out-sourcing jobs, high unemployment.
3. Society's more tolerant acceptance of unmarried couples
4. Contraception also is major factor as children/marriage are postponed for financial reasons as the two income family becomes necessary to maintain a desired living standard.
2 -- same thing and add that "progressive" led regressive in fact income taxes on middle and lower income people tax bracket creep and the FED caused inflation are to blame for the rise of the two income household.
3 -- conservatives are guilty of that (so are progressives).
4 -- conservatives are guilty of that
5-- not the fault of anyone, a social issue
The relative affluence and standard of living in countries where the middle class pays higher taxes than is true for America (Canada, northern European/Scandinavian countries) is higher than it is for the United States, so the idea that somehow the tax rates on the middle class are exorbitant is demonstrably false: there are other factors at work.
Now, consumer credit: *there's* a factor! When I was a lad, credit cards were virtually a novelty and people did not carry the kind of debt that they do today. We did things like saving to buy what we wanted... sometimes resorting to lay-aways. People pay relatively large amounts of their income on nothing but interest.
I don't give a flip what taxes people pay in other nations, that is their problem not mine. Progressives especially FDR stacked the deck in the 1930s and in WWII to enact income taxes in a practical manner such that average Americans had to pay a payroll withheld income tax. That is a progressive agenda item.
There is no longer any need for people to be stuck in long term relationships. Both parties can work and support themselves.
"Traditional marriage" is an institution that is based on morality, not practicality. It makes no sense. It is not something to strive for.
Historically marriage was about dealing with property and power.
Now there are other reasons, such as the mentioned family insurance coverage and what not, but the economic reasons for marriage have changed dramatically.
Thirty years ago, ONE full-time job was enough to support a family living in a three-bedroom house (with a mortgage) in a medium neighborhood, with two cars. Now, it's not even close. The median household income was up slightly, from 1980 to 2000, mostly because far more families put another person to work. Since 2000, median household income has been falling, steadily.
There is also a factor of decreasing household size. There is less need to live with someone. Now people are caring for themselves.
And you forget that people have more now. Things are cheaper and more plentiful. Technology is amazing like that.
Los Angeles Times in 1993.
'The House That Mame Built' Gone : Fires: Malibu home of writer Jerome Lawrence is destroyed.
Friends called it "The House that Mame Built." The man who built it preferred "Walden West."
On a slope above Las Flores Canyon, Jerome Lawrence watches firemen dousing "hot spots."
Gone is the circular staircase modeled on the steps climbed by Angela Lansbury in the musical "Mame."
The Steinway against which Judy Garland once leaned while crooning at a Lawrence party, is vaporized.
We rebuilt the house as a retreat for writers and artists but that never came to pass and a few months after Jerry's death, realtors were selling our dream to highest bidder.
NO legal protection, everything that we worked and suffered for together ended up benefiting his blood family.
Fifteen years of Love and Life meant NOTHING under the LAW.
His family took everything. They got the money and all that stuff.
However,I got the man and I held him in my arms as he took his last breath. He died in our bed, in our home as the sun set. Priceless.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QV5rYtZrKMY
My sister's partner is very ill, and I see the same thing happening to her if her partner dies.
I wish you well and hope your good memories can help sustain you.
What fascinates me about the conservative rhetoric is the assumption that marriage is immutable - that it is an institution that does not change. And yet to take only a slice of Christian European history to see how changeable it is.
There's a very quick summation of how marriage has changed courtesy of the BBC here http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-17351133
My idea of equality is not to grant marriage rights to gays, but to take it away from straights as well. If you want to live with someone under the same roof, go ahead. If you want to go to a church and make it religious, be my guest. If you want to live your money to someone you love, write a will. But don't expect any special compensation or any special rights or any legal representation just because you regularity have sec with someone, that's ridiculous.
Neither liberals nor conservatives are waging a war against marriage, but it's still an ancient corrupt institution, so someone must.
by the bye, you mean polygyny and polyandry. Polygamy is derived from Greek; it just means that one is married many times. It does not indicate the makeup of the group.
The primary purpose of marriage in a society is not to protect and secure the intimateicy and “business” relationship between two people; it is to protect the procreative relationship of opposite-sex couples and the families they produce.
The continuation of human society requires a fertility rate of at least 2.11 children per family; anything less and that society will eventually die off. The continuation of mankind is made possible by heterosexual procreation and the values and traditions that are passed down within the traditional family.
Marriage between a man and a woman and the families these unions produce is the framework for all of human society. Anything that undermines this traditional framework is a danger to the continuation of society and must not be allowed; society owes its continued survival to the family, founded on marriage.
There are many causes for divorce but society should not contribute to this by degrading traditional marriage to an anything goes "us" vs. "them" mentality.
This regressive nonsense is pushed by vicious theocrats Rick Warren and the late Jerry Falwell, vicious misogynist and hypocrite Phyllis Schlafly, leading MRA and misogynist Stephen Baskerville, and other venal anti-woman propagandists. Many of the supporters are LDS, so be informed that POTUS candidate LDS Bishop Willard WILL attempt to codify this vile attack on American women and their civil, human and Constitutional rights.
Read it, learn it, educate yourself on these people and their causes and associations, and tell your friends, especially those who still might be considering voting for the GOTP this November.
http://familymanifesto.net/default.asp
Frightening.
To reduce marriage to just a class warfare kind of “us” vs “them” and “Conservative” vs. “Liberal” mentality is not only wrong it’s dangerous.
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He did no such thing. He highlighted the true causes of declining marriage rates. You carry on at great length as to why marriage is important.
That doesn't change the fact that the trends he listed are tearing marriages apart and public policy has been exacerbating those trends.
That one party is responsible for the family destroying policies predominantly is coincidence.
At no point in his entire post did he say marriage wasn't important. Liberals love family. We are the ones that actually keep families together for the most part because we love it enough to do it right instead of just marrying the first person we sleep with when we are to young to even know who we are yet and then just figuring it'll work out somehow.
If you care about family, you'll look at the things blue families do that lead to happy, healthy, successful families.
War on Women? It's doesn't exist because we don't believe in it. Fine, so what if there's a War On Women? It's all their own fault for being so uppity; if they'd stayed in the kitchen, there'd be no War On Women.
This is pretty much the gist of the arguments of the GOP when confronted with questions on the War On Women.
I'm feeling the urge to be uppity.
Oh, if only someone had taught me to make shortening biscuits before it was too late!!