By Colleen Carroll Campbell
Ethics and Public Policy Center
Battles over same-sex marriage typically turn on arguments about gay rights, judicial activism and views on homosexuality. Absent are answers to a more fundamental question: What is the public purpose of marriage?
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Blankenhorn worries that this child-welfare ideal is endangered by a view increasingly prevalent among Americans: that marriage is merely another lifestyle choice, the public recognition of a private relationship with no intrinsic connection to parenthood.
That view is a historical anomaly. For thousands of years, marriage has existed in nearly every society for the purpose of ensuring that a child is raised by his mother and father. Far from simply blessing a private relationship between consenting adults, marriage has aimed to promote stable sexual unions between men and women whose public commitment creates a suitable context for childrearing.
In recent decades, factors ranging from increasing acceptance of sex outside marriage and wider use of contraception to the institution of no-fault divorce laws gradually have changed our view of marriage as a permanent, public bond linked to parenthood. A Pew survey released this week confirmed this trend, finding that most Americans now consider adult happiness, not child rearing, as the primary purpose of marriage, and most do not consider children very important to a successful marriage.
Some see this severance of the link between love, marriage and the baby carriage as social progress. Yet Blankenhorn sees a downside: rising rates of divorce, unmarried cohabitation and births to unwed mothers that have resulted in more children growing up without a married mother and father.
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This radical change would affect all Americans by further eroding our fragile marriage culture. As Blankenhorn and other scholars have noted, international surveys show that people in countries where gay marriage and civil unions are accepted widely tend to be less positive about marriage, more accepting of divorce and less inclined to believe that people who want children should marry.
Marriage survives in a culture as long as a critical mass of the population views it as the socially acceptable context for childbearing and childrearing. When popular support for marriage drops too low and public policy denies the unique value of marriage between a man and a woman as a guarantor of social stability, fewer men and women marry. More children are deprived of the presence of their mothers and fathers. And marriage no longer serves its civic purpose, which always has been more about defending child welfare than validating adult desires. (more)
