Treat Us Like Lesbians!

I had wondered what happened to the Burden sisters, the elderly English couple who had devoted their lives to taking care of family members and then each other. They loved each other, lived in financial interdependence in the same house. But they were not having sex and were not eligible for marriage or a recognized Civil Partnership under English law. As a result the survivor faced heavy inheritance taxes on the death of her sister that would result in the loss of her home. Had they been a lesbian couple in a civil partnership, they would receive the same relief from the full force of the inheritance (death) tax as a married couple.

The case, which they lost on their final appeal to the European Court of Human Rights, is sad and appalling. It is manifestly a grave injustice.

It also raises interesting questions about legal recognition of same-sex partnerships as marriage or marriage-equivalents. Marriage has been recognized in all, or nearly all societies as socially approved sexual intercourse between a man and a woman such that any children resulting from that union would belong legally, morally, socially, and emotionally to the two parents who made them. Marriage, the main topic of the earliest legal codes long before churches became involved, was a legal development with the aim of creating fatherhood as a legal and social role for the protection of the man's children and their mother.

Marriage was fundamentally about sex--specifically a kind of sexual act that is in principle capable of generating children. Marriage was consummated by that act and could be annulled, both in canon and civil law, where one of the parties had refused or proved physically incapable of performing the act in question.

Christianity insisted that a valid marriage must be willingly entered into on both sides, and recognized the "unitive" as well as the "procreative" aspects of the marital act. Marriage did not depend for its validity on the couple's capacity or willingness to produce children, i.e., on their fertility. But the institution of marriage was everywhere defined in terms of the coupling, the one-flesh union of a man and a woman, the kind of sexual act, that is, that is in principle (per se if not per accidens) apt for generation.

When marriage is redefined as being about the feelings--the love and commitment--of two people, rather than about the kind of sex that produces children and about the needs of the children who result from it, its whole rationale seems to fall apart.

Why is the state interested in the feelings or the sexual practices of two people where such practices are by their very nature incapable of producing children?

If marriage is defined by the feelings--the love and commitment of the two people involved--who decides the quality of those feelings? Traditionally, a marriage is valid if entered into voluntarily by both man and woman and consummated by sexual intercourse. Of course the state does not supervise the marital act to assure the validity of the marriage, but normally assumes it where the couple cohabit. The point is that the marriage is not defined or validated by the purity of the couple's feelings for each other. Many marriages involve mixed feelings and impure motives--Charles and Diana come to mind, as well as marriages in which wealth, status, or beauty play a prominent role--but none of that invalidates the marriage.

Often, we hear the argument from advocates of same-sex marriage (SSM) to the effect that being too old for fertility or childbearing upon marriage does not invalidate the marriage. No, because the marriage is not defined by the fertility of the couple but by their commitment to a sexual relationship in which the defining marital act is of the kind that in principle is capable of producing children. SSM, in contrast, rests upon a sexual relationship that is by its very nature incapable of being generative, regardless of the circumstances of a particular couple.

But if the place of potentially generative sex is taken by feelings, what about "marriages" in which the feelings are mixed and motives less than pure? What or who determines the validity of the marriage?

Is sex still essential to the definition of marriage? If so, what kind of sexual act must be performed by the couple before the marriage can be said to have been consummated and be valid in law?

If it is not essential to marriage and the legal and social benefits thereof, why should couples who are not in a sexual relationship be excluded?

In this regard, Hawaii's reciprocal beneficiaries law seems much fairer and more sensible than same-sex marriage or its equivalents. Here, any couple may register as reciprocal beneficiaries so long as both are adults and are barred legally from marriage. They must only be over 18 and prohibited by law from marrying--such as brother and sister, uncle and niece, aunt and nephew, widowed mother and her unmarried son, and two persons of the same sex. The Burden sisters would be eligible to register under it here.

In either case, it is not clear what the logic is for restricting marriage or its equivalent to two persons if marriage is now about feelings and commitment and not sex and the children that result from it. Why should a polyamorous group committed to sex in a long-term relationship be excluded from marriage, regardless of the members' sex or number?

It seems very clear that same-sex marriage, though it may directly affect very small numbers, fundamentally changes the nature of marriage as a social institution, in particular as the institution through which children are the responsibility of the two parents who made them and through which one generation sacrifices for the next. Instead of being about children's needs and rights, it is redefined as about the desires and freedoms of adults. Marriage has been our most pro-child institution, the most important protective factor in offsetting the risks faced by poor families and communities. Its collapse and hence the collapse of fatherhood as a social role, in poor, and especially Black, communities has been devastating. (See Kay Hymowitz and also James T. Patterson)

I have often heard advocates of SSM ask how their marriage would affect mine, but like jesting Pilate, they do not wait for an answer.


If like me, you wondered what happened to the sad case of the Burden sisters, here is the answer:


April 30, 2008
Sisters Joyce and Sybil Burden lose legal appeal over death duties
Frances Gibb, Legal Editor

Two elderly sisters fighting for the same rights as married and gay couples have lost a final legal appeal for equal treatment.

In a 15-2 vote, the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg ruled that Joyce and Sybil Burden, who have lived together all their lives, do not face unfair discrimination under Britain’s inheritance tax rules.

Joyce, 90, and Sybil, 82, have been fighting for 32 years to avoid crippling inheritance tax on their £900,000 home in Marlborough, Wiltshire, when one of them dies.

They claimed that tax laws breached their human rights by exempting married and gay couples from paying inheritance tax, but not cohabiting siblings.

But the Grand Chamber of the European Court of Human Rights upheld an earlier human rights ruling yesterday that national governments were entitled to some discretion when deciding taxation arrangements.

The decision means that when one of the sisters dies the other will have to sell their four-bedroom property to pay the 40 per cent inheritance tax on its value above £300,000. If they had won their case, inheritance tax law would have had to change, to place cohabiting couples on an equal footing with married couples and “civil partnerships” in being exempt from inheritance tax.

The sisters have written to the chancellor of the day before every Budget since 1976, pleading for recognition under the tax rules as a cohabiting couple.

When the Civil Partnership Act of 2004 first recognised gay and lesbian couples for inheritance tax purposes, the sisters turned to the European Court of Human Rights, claiming that the Act violated articles of the European Convention on Human Rights outlawing discrimination and guaranteeing the “protection of property”.

In 2006 the Burdens lost the case by a 4-3 majority of the panel of seven human rights judges, although three members of the court described their inheritance tax plight as “awful” and “particularly striking”.

But the appeal hearing, before a larger 17-member panel of human rights judges, produced a more decisive 15-2 majority against the sisters yesterday. The ruling marks the end of the sisters’ legal fight, but they vowed to continue lobbying Parliament on the issue after their “bitter disappointment”.

They said in a statement issued by their lawyers: “We are still struggling to understand why two single sisters in their old age, whose only crime was to choose to stay single and look after their parents and two aunts to the end, should find themselves in such a position in the UK in the 21st century. We certainly do not regret our decision to look after our family for a single moment; we were glad to repay them for the happy, good, Christian upbringing they gave us.”
“But we have been fighting for 32 years just to gain the same rights, as regards inheritance tax, as married couples and couples in civil partnerships.”

After losing the first case in 2006, Joyce Burden commented: “If we were lesbians we would have all the rights in the world. But we are sisters, and it seems we have no rights at all.”

Retrieved September 17, 2010 from http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/article3837715.ece

Thyer on Social Justice

Bruce Thyer is Professor and former Dean of the College of Social Work at Florida State University, and also founding and continuing editor of the journal Research on Social Work Practice. It is not surprising then that a leader in social work education would write an article on one of social work’s “core values,” social justice.

What is surprising is that a social work leader of such distinction would subtitle his article, “A Conservative Perspective.” See Thyer, B.A. (2010), Social justice: A conservative perspective, Journal of Comparative Social Welfare, 26(2-3), pp.261-274.

The liberal consensus
Conservatives, at least professing ones, are rare in social work and especially in the profession’s higher reaches—a feature, along with secularism, that distinguishes them from their clients and much of the general public. Thyer makes the case that social work professes in its own standards an openness to diversity and opposition to discrimination on the basis of political perspectives. Yet he cites recent cases where students were allegedly required to advocate for liberal causes they opposed, as well as the National Association of Scholars (2007) study, the title of which speaks for itself: The scandal of social work education. He also quotes another social work educator, Fred Newdom (2003), as making the following pronouncement: “If you accept that social workers have an obligation to advance social justice and that political engagement is a means to accomplish that end, then you have to accept that we reject conservative political thought and conservative politicians” (p.3).

No wonder social work education is a scandal! It is a profession licensed in one form or another by most states and mostly funded via taxpayer money, and yet in this view excludes a large part of the political spectrum from membership. Fortunately, Newdom’s exclusionist line is not the official position of NASW or CSWE, as Thyer documents.

But Thyer argues for more than reluctant toleration of conservative social workers and their positions. His argument is that a conservative perspective offers promise of a more socially just practice than the dominant liberal orientation.

The article is a welcome addition to the social work literature, in particular to the assigned readings for my foundation social policy class. It is the only such reading I have found in recent times that argues a conservative perspective in social work and social welfare. Even relatively factual textbooks in social welfare policy have a strong liberal bias. For example, DiNitto’s Social welfare: Politics and public policy—as good a social work policy text as I have found—takes for granted a liberal perspective on controverted issues of the day.

For example she uses terms like “gay rights” that assume the point at issue, whether “sexual orientation” confers rights, especially the right to marriage. Hitherto no-one has been either included or excluded from marriage on the basis of their sexual preferences or desires. Marriage always has been understood as socially approved sexual intercourse between a man and a woman such that any children resulting from such sexual activity are legally, socially, and emotionally tied to the two parents who made them—and nothing to do with whatever sexual desires or proclivities the partners may harbor. So a fundamental redefinition of our most pro-child institution is presented as a matter of diversity and (adult) gay rights.

Similarly, in discussing the deep divide over abortion in the country, DiNitto calls the two positions anti-abortion and pro-choice. She could have called them, as they call themselves, pro-life and pro-choice, or more accurately, pro-abortion and pro-life. After all someone who supports an adult’s choice to own slaves (on the grounds that the owner thinks they are not full human beings) is not pro-choice, but pro-slavery.

So Thyer’s article is a welcome challenge to the mindless consensus, the group- think, which prevails in social work. For an instructor, it provides that valuable stimulus to disagreement that requires students to examine and articulate their assumptions and easy dismissals of minority perspectives in social work.

The two faces of liberalism
At the same time, for a policy teacher, it poses the pedagogical problem of the two faces of liberalism. Thyer’s perspective, though conservative by current understandings, is a good expression of the liberal political philosophy on which the republic was founded. It is the liberalism of liberty, natural rights, and the rule of law that stood opposed to tyrannical sovereigns, noble privilege, and arbitrary power. The rights espoused by the Constitution, as Thyer says, are all negative rights, rights to be free and secure in one’s person and property vis a vis the state. It is the liberalism of laissez faire, of the belief that that government governs best which governs least.

The liberalism of the American founders was aimed at limiting state power by separating the powers, branches, and levels of government, and separating church and state so that all were free to worship publicly without state interference or favoritism toward one particular denomination. But it was not a relativistic or subjective liberalism in which the individual is atomized or morality a matter of opinion. The rights embraced by the new state were rooted in an understanding of Natural Law, of Nature and Nature’s God. It rested in the conviction that there is a truth, that human beings can know it, and that their well-being lies in finding and living in accord with it.

The founders also recognized that the kind of democratic republic they were establishing required citizens able and willing to deliberate together about the common good—it required the civic virtues. It was, then, a very different liberalism from that of two and a quarter centuries later, one which saw the establishment of a secular liberalism or liberal secularism. The new liberalism increasingly pushed God and religion out of the public square, substituted vacuous values talk for the virtues, and tended to relativism and principled indifferentism in matters of faith and morals.

This modernist, secular liberalism inverts much of the liberal perspective on which the republic was founded. It looks not to the voluntary association that Tocqueville noted as such a distinctive feature of American democracy, nor to Burke’s “little platoons” or Berger and Neuhaus’s “mediating structures”—the rich civic society that mediated between state and individual. On the contrary, it increased state power and intrusiveness in just those areas of life, protecting the individual from family, neighborhood, church, and community. The rights espoused by modern liberalism are not guarantees against state interference, but claims on the state for resources funded by others, the taxpayer or Forgotten Man as William Graham Sumner called this donor of coerced charity. It is a liberalism of ever-expanding state control, of the collectivist authoritarian impulse that criminalizes perspectives other than the politically correct secular-liberal orthodoxy. (See Robert P. George's Clash Of Orthodoxies: Law Religion & Morality In Crisis .)

Thyer’s conservatism is not that of the ancien regime, of an organic, hierarchical, traditional society, either European or “indigenous.” It is closer to the economic individualism that fought those old orders from the 17th to 19th centuries, to the political philosophy of liberalism that finds expression in the U.S. Constitution.

But that liberalism understood natural rights as rooted in a Natural Law established by God but discoverable by human beings whom God had endowed with the reason needed to discover their real nature and their common good. Because rooted in Natural Law, these rights are prior to political entities and justify the alteration or abolition of such regimes if necessary to secure those rights. Absent such grounding in the real nature of human beings in relation to their Creator, however, such rights are built on sand.

As Pope Benedict just said in his magnificent address at Westminster Hall in London, “If the moral principles underpinning the democratic process are themselves determined by nothing more solid than social consensus, then the fragility of the process becomes all too evident – herein lies the real challenge for democracy.” Absent such grounding, we may add, the core social work value of respect for the dignity and worth of the individual human being—a concept rooted in the Judeo-Christian tradition of humans as created in the image and likeness of God—evaporates. It is relativized to exclude the most vulnerable among us—those of us in the womb, severely disabled, in severe pain or depression, or comatose.

The shift in the nature of liberalism—a liberalism that is the shared heritage of both “liberals” and “conservatives” in the U.S.—poses particular challenges for the teaching of social welfare history and policy development. How did social welfare ideology and legal theory adapt liberalism to accommodate the expanding role of the state as provider and funder of social work and social services? The best account I have read is James Leiby’s (1985) “The moral foundations of social welfare and social work: A historical view” – in Social Work, 30(4), pp.323-330. Leiby describes the progression from the religious duty of charity as a matter of personal and social responsibility to the role of natural rights rooted in the Natural Law, the police power that provided the legal basis for an expansion of state power, and ultimately to the notion of an individual “right” as a claim that a “needy person could make and enforce on a public agency and official. Enter the ‘welfare state’” (p.326).

An important part of the story, sometimes minimized, is the role of liberal thinking in opposing help for the needy, not only because it is ineffective—that was the criticism to which the Charity Organization Societies sought to respond and it is a major part of Thyer’s critique of modern social work and social welfare. But other critics, who also sought to marshal science for the improvement of the human condition and who also condemned charity, public and private, as unscientific, were the liberal eugenicists like Margaret Sanger. Her complaint in the chapter of The pivot of civilization on “The cruelty of charity” was not that charity was ineffective, but the reverse. Following in the footsteps of Herbert Spencer, she appealed to the “science” of Social Darwinism to argue that charity was enabling the unfit, the weeds of society, to survive instead of to die off.

There is here a remarkable similarity to the economic liberalism of Scrooge in the early pages of Dickens’s A Christmas carol, where Scrooge fends off two gentlemen who appeal to him for a charitable donation at Christmas time. Like modern liberals, he prefers leaving the needy to the tender mercies of the state’s provision, which he supports through his taxes, to dipping directly into his own pocket. (See Brooks, Who really cares?)

In social work discourse, social justice often means the welfare state, as it does for modern liberal political theorist Brian Barry. The great virtue of Thyer’s intervention is that he challenges an all too smugly and consensually “liberal” profession to think again.

Well said! The Case for Marriage - NR editorial

SEPTEMBER 7, 2010 4:00 A.M.

The Case for Marriage
From the Sep. 20, 2010, issue of NR.

If it is true, as we are constantly told, that American law will soon redefine marriage to accommodate same-sex partnerships, the proximate cause for this development will not be that public opinion favors it, although it appears to be moving in that direction. It will be that the most influential Americans, particularly those in law and the media, have been coming increasingly to regard opposition to same-sex marriage as irrational at best and bigoted at worst. They therefore dismiss expressions of that opposition, even when voiced by a majority in a progressive state, as illegitimate. Judges who believe that same-sex marriage is obviously just and right can easily find ways to read their views into constitutions, to the applause of the like-minded.

The emerging elite consensus in favor of same-sex marriage has an element of self-delusion about it. It denies that same-sex marriage would work a radical change in American law or society, insisting to the contrary that within a few years of its triumph everyone will wonder what all the fuss was about. But its simultaneous insistence that opponents are the moral equivalent of the white supremacists of yesteryear belies these bland assurances. Our tolerance for racism is quite limited: The government, while it generally respects the relevant constitutional limits, is active in the cause of marginalizing racists and eradicating racist beliefs and behaviors. Moreover, social sanctions against racism, both overt and implied, are robust. If our society is truly to regard opposition to same-sex marriage as equivalent to racism, it will have to undergo change both dramatic and extensive. Churches that object, for example, will have to be put in the same cultural position as Bob Jones University was in the days when it banned interracial dating, until they too join the consensus.

If proponents of same-sex marriage thought through these implications, their confidence might evaporate, for it seems highly unlikely that this project will succeed at all, and impossible that it will do so without decades of arduous and divisive social “reform.” That is no reason to shrink from the task, if it is truly a just one. But we should first consider whether the historic and cross-cultural understanding of marriage as the union of a man and a woman really has so little to be said for it.

We think that there is quite a bit to be said for it: that it is true, vitally true. But it is a truth so long accepted that it is no longer well understood. Both the fact that we are debating same-sex marriage and the way that debate has progressed suggest that many of us have lost sight of why marriage exists in the first place as a social institution and a matter of public policy. One prominent supporter of same-sex marriage says that the purpose of marriage is to express and safeguard an emotional union of adults; another says that its purpose is to make it more likely that people will have others to give them care in sickness and old age.

So at the risk of awkwardness, we must talk about the facts of life. It is true that marriage is, in part, an emotional union, and it is also true that spouses often take care of each other and thereby reduce the caregiving burden on other people. But neither of these truths is the fundamental reason for marriage. The reason marriage exists is that the sexual intercourse of men and women regularly produces children. If it did not produce children, neither society nor the government would have much reason, let alone a valid reason, to regulate people’s emotional unions. (The government does not regulate non-marital friendships, no matter how intense they are.) If mutual caregiving were the purpose of marriage, there would be no reason to exclude adult incestuous unions from marriage. What the institution and policy of marriage aims to regulate is sex, not love or commitment. These days, marriage regulates sex (to the extent it does regulate it) in a wholly non-coercive manner, sex outside of marriage no longer being a crime.

Marriage exists, in other words, to solve a problem that arises from sex between men and women but not from sex between partners of the same gender: what to do about its generativity. It has always been the union of a man and a woman (even in polygamous marriages in which a spouse has a marriage with each of two or more persons of the opposite sex) for the same reason that there are two sexes: It takes one of each type in our species to perform the act that produces children. That does not mean that marriage is worthwhile only insofar as it yields children. (The law has never taken that view.) But the institution is oriented toward child-rearing. (The law has taken exactly that view.) What a healthy marriage culture does is encourage adults to arrange their lives so that as many children as possible are raised and nurtured by their biological parents in a common household.

That is also what a sound law of marriage does. Although it is still a radical position without much purchase in public opinion, one increasingly hears the opinion that government should get out of the marriage business: Let individuals make whatever contracts they want, and receive the blessing of whatever church agrees to give it, but confine the government’s role to enforcing contracts. This policy is not so much unwise as it is impossible. The government cannot simply declare itself uninterested in the welfare of children. Nor can it leave it to prearranged contract to determine who will have responsibility for raising children. (It’s not as though people can be expected to work out potential custody arrangements every time they have sex; and any such contracts would look disturbingly like provisions for ownership of a commodity.)

When a marriage involving children breaks down, or a marriage culture weakens, government has to get more involved, not less. Courts may well end up deciding on which days of the month each parent will see a child. We have already gone some distance in separating marriage and state, in a sense: The law no longer ties rights and responsibilities over children to marriage, does little to support a marriage culture, and in some ways subsidizes non-marriage. In consequence government must involve itself more directly in caring for children than it did under the old marriage regime — with worse results.

Thoughtful proponents of same-sex marriage raise three objections to this conception of marriage. The first is that law and society have always let infertile couples marry; why not treat same-sex couples the same way? The question can be tackled philosophically or practically. The philosophical answer boils down to the observation that it is mating that gives marriage its orientation toward children. An infertile couple can mate even if it cannot procreate. Two men or two women literally cannot mate. To put it another way: A child fulfills the marital relationship by revealing what it is, a complete union, including a biological union. A man and a woman who unite biologically may or may not have children depending on factors beyond their control; a same-sex couple cannot thus unite.

The practical problems with using fertility as a criterion for marriage should be obvious. Some couples that believe themselves to be infertile (or even intend not to have children) end up having children. Government could not filter out those marriage applicants who are certain not to be able to have children without extreme intrusiveness. Note that we do not generally expect the eligibility criteria and purposes of marriage to exhibit a rigorous fitness in other respects. This is true about those aspects of marriage about which proponents and opponents of same-sex marriage alike agree. Nobody believes that people should have to persuade the government that they really are capable of a deep emotional union or that they are likely to stick around to take care of an ill partner before getting legally married, because that would be absurd. Nobody would try to devise a test to bar couples with no intention of practicing sexual exclusivity from getting married. It does not follow that marriage is therefore pointless or has nothing to do with monogamy, emotional union, or caregiving. (Those are indeed goods that marriage advances; but if sex did not make children, they would not be a reason to have the institution of marriage.)

The second objection proponents of same-sex marriage raise is that the idea that marriage is importantly linked to procreation is outdated. In our law and culture, the ties between sex, marriage, and child-rearing have been getting weaker thanks to contraception, divorce and remarriage, artificial reproduction, and the rise of single motherhood. Yet those ties still exist. Pregnancy still prompts some couples to get married. People are more likely to ask nosy questions about whether and when children are coming to couples that have gotten married. And we have not at all outgrown the need to channel adult sexual behavior in ways conducive to the well-being of children: The rising percentage of children who are not being raised by their parents, and the negative outcomes associated with this trend, suggest that this need is as urgent as ever. Our culture already lays too much stress on marriage as an emotional union of adults and too little on it as the right environment for children. Same-sex marriage would not only sever the tie between marriage and procreation; it would, at least in our present cultural circumstances, place the law behind the proposition that believing that tie should exist is bigoted.

The third objection is that it is unfair to same-sex couples to tie marriage to procreation, as the traditional conception of marriage does. Harm, if any, to the feelings of same-sex couples is unintentional: Marriage, and its tie to procreation, did not arise as a way of slighting them. (In the tradition we are defending, the conviction that marriage is the union of a man and a woman is logically prior to any judgment about the morality of homosexual relationships.)

And does marriage really need to be redefined? The legal “benefits” of marriage — such as the right to pay extra taxes, and to go through a legal process to sever the relationship? — are overstated. Almost all the benefits that the law still grants could easily be extended to unmarried couples, including same-sex couples, without redefining marriage. The campaign for same-sex marriage is primarily motivated by one specific benefit: the symbolic statement by the government that committed same-sex relationships are equivalent to marriages. But with respect to the purposes of marriages, they’re not equivalent; and so this psychic benefit cannot be granted without telling a lie about what marriage is and why a society and legal system should recognize and support it.

Same-sex marriage is often likened to interracial marriage, which the law once proscribed. But the reason governments refused to recognize (and evencriminalized) interracial marriages was not that they did not believe that such marriages were possible; it is that they wanted to discourage them from happening, in the interests of white supremacy. Sexual complementarity is a legitimate condition of marriage because of the institution’s orientation toward children; racial homogeneity has nothing to do with that orientation. Laws against interracial marriage thus violated the right to form an actual marriage in a way that laws defining marriage as the union of a man and a woman do not violate it. The argument about what the equal rights of all citizens entail for marriage laws turns, in other words, on what marriage is. If marriage just is by its nature oriented toward procreation, the refusal to redefine it to accommodate same-sex partners unjustly discriminates against them no more than the military does against the flat-footed.

Same-sex marriage would introduce a new, less justifiable distinction into the law. This new version of marriage would exclude pairs of people who qualify for it in every way except for their lack of a sexual relationship. Elderly brothers who take care of each other; two friends who share a house and bills and even help raise a child after one loses a spouse: Why shouldn’t their relationships, too, be recognized by the government? The traditional conception of marriage holds that however valuable those relationships may be, the fact that they are not oriented toward procreation makes them non-marital. (Note that this is true even if those relationships involve caring for children: We do not treat a grandmother and widowed daughter raising a child together as married because their relationship is not part of an institution oriented toward procreation.) On what possible basis can the revisionists’ conception of marriage justify discriminating against couples simply because they do not have sex?

How, for that matter, can it justify discriminating against groups of more than two involved in overlapping sexual relationships? The argument that same-sex marriage cannot be justified without also, in principle, justifying polygamy and polyamory infuriates many advocates of the former. There is, however, no good answer to the charge; and the arguments and especially the rhetoric of same-sex marriage proponents clearly apply with equal force to polygamy and polyamory. How does it affect your marriage if two women decide to wed? goes the question from same-sex marriage advocates; you don’t have to enter a same-sex union yourself. They might just as accurately be told that they would still be free to have two-person marriages if other people wed in groups.

We cannot say with any confidence that legal recognition of same-sex marriage would cause infidelity or illegitimacy to increase; we can say that it would make the countervailing norms, and the public policy of marriage itself, incoherent. The symbolic message of inclusion for same-sex couples — in an institution that makes no sense for them — would be coupled with another message: that marriage is about the desires of adults rather than the interests of children.

It may be that the conventional wisdom is correct, and legal recognition of same-sex marriage really is our inevitable future. Perhaps it will even become an unquestioned policy and all who resisted it will be universally seen as bigots. We doubt it, but cannot exclude the possibility. If our understanding of marriage changes in this way, so much the worse for the future.

Retrieved September 9, 2010 from http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/print/245649

The Bigotry of the UK's Channel 4

There is nothing surprising about the fact that Peter Tatchell, a gay rights activist and sometime advocate of man-boy sex* hates the Church and the leader of the world's 1.2 billion Catholics. What is or ought to be extraordinary, as Thompson says, is his complete lack of integrity and Channel 4’s complete failure to use its research capacity to correct any of Tatchell’s lies and distortions—ones that anyone with a nodding acquaintance with the Church and its doctrines would know to be false.

What is also striking is the blatant bias in Channel 4's religion coverage, pandering sycophancy toward Islam and Islamists, while promoting the worst kind of anti-Christian, and specifically anti-Catholic bigotry and hate.

*Prof Gilbert Herdt points to the Sambia tribe of Papua New Guinea, where all young boys have sex with older warriors as part of their initiation into manhood. Far from being harmed, Prof Herdt says the boys grow up to be happy, well-adjusted husbands and fathers.

The positive nature of some child-adult sexual relationships is not confined to non-Western cultures. Several of my friends – gay and straight, male and female – had sex with adults from the ages of nine to 13. None feel they were abused. All say it was their conscious choice and gave them great joy.

Tatchell, before the clergy abuse scandal, in a 1997 letter to the Guardian. He still favors lowering the age of consent in Britain from 16 to 14.
###



Peter Tatchell's Channel 4 hatchet job on the Pope is so crude that it misses its target

By Damian Thompson Last updated: September 8th, 2010

Peter Tatchell’s Channel 4 documentary about Pope Benedict XVI, The Trouble with The Pope, scheduled to be broadcast next Monday, begins with an incredibly dirty trick.

Within seconds of introducing Benedict as the leader of the Catholic Church, the film switches into the testimony of a woman describing a sexual assault by a British priest decades ago, before Ratzinger was even a bishop. “He was slobbering all over me … I felt something inside me.” It’s a vile juxtaposition whose subliminal message verges on incitement to religious hatred.

Another cheap trick: right at the start, the voice of a young German man is heard asking, “Do I want to be part of a Church in which people deny the Holocaust?” As it happens, I think revoking the excommunication of Richard Williamson was an act of shockingly stupid naivety. But to imply subtly that this suspended bishop’s views on the Holocaust are acceptable to Pope Benedict is a smear tactic, plain and simple. (There is a major world religion in which Holocaust denial is extremely popular, but don’t expect a TV documentary on that any time soon.)

I know that Tatchell profoundly disagrees with Catholic teaching. Fair enough. But I also thought he had enough integrity not to misrepresent key concepts such as papal infallibility, which he implies means that no decision of the Pope can be questioned – a schoolboy error. Tatchell also claims that the Pope’s previous role as Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith gave him control over Church doctrines. That last statement is so ignorant that I could hardly believe I was hearing it. Did Channel 4 not employ any researchers for this project?

Throughout the film, Tatchell twists the truth again and again. “To this day, Richard Williamson remains a member of the Catholic Church approved by the Pope,” he says. I’m sorry, but a bishop who is barred from exercising his episcopal orders is not approved by the Pope. If a crazed Marxist bishop were similarly suspended, he would be presented by Channel 4 as a persecuted martyr, not “approved”.

“The Pope has done enormous damage to his moral authority,” says Tatchell. I think the Williamson blunder did do damage, yes – but Tatchell’s own slender claims to moral authority (and he has campaigned bravely for his causes) are also damaged by a film that doggedly misleads its audience.

The teachings of the Catholic Church on sexual morality are NOT innovations of Joseph Ratzinger. He inherited them, he is faithful to them, and even if he wished to permit artificial birth control, abortion or extra-marital sexual acts he could not do so. Tatchell finds Catholic doctrines in these areas to be “incomprehensible”. But there is no evidence that he has made any attempt to understand them – or, for that matter, the subtle and complex theology of Ratzinger. (Tatchell sniffily describes the Pope’s thinking as “black and white,” which suggests to me that he hasn’t read a single book by the man he is supposed to be profiling.)

Instead, Tatchell mostly interviews people who share his views, or represent those of a liberal lobby within the Catholic Church. One of the few exceptions is a woman called Fiona O’Reilly from the mainstream group Catholic Voices, who – alone among Tatchell’s interviewees – is not allowed to finish her sentences without being interrupted.

And clerical sex abuse? The charge that Benedict XVI covered up the crimes of paedophile priests falls apart under close examination. Journalists have tried very hard to implicate this Pope in conspiracies to silence victims; they have failed to do so, though we do now know that Pope John Paul II was not nearly attentive enough to the scandal. But that doesn’t fit Tatchell’s script, so after a perfunctory attempt to suggest that Benedict “has form” in this area we move swiftly on.

It is inconceivable that Channel 4 would have sanctioned such a poorly researched hatchet job on, for example, a Muslim leader. Still, I can’t say that The Trouble with The Pope left me feeling any more anxious about the Pope’s visit than I already am. A more nuanced, imaginative and accurate programme could have done real damage. You missed a trick there, Peter.

Retrieved September 9, 2010 from http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/damianthompson/100052875/peter-tatchells-channel-4-hatchet-job-on-the-pope-is-so-crude-that-it-misses-its-target/#disqus_thread

All in the Family

See the roundup of recent academic studies on marriage and the family at the National Affairs blog:

http://www.nationalaffairs.com/blog/detail/findings-a-daily-roundup/all-in-the-family

The Generation That Can't Move On Up: Marriage, Religion, & Blue Collar Blues

This article by Andrew Cherlin, author of The Marriage Go Round and Bradford Wilcox, author of Soft Patriarchs, New Men and a recent article on "The Evolution of Divorce" in the first issue of National Affairs, Fall 2009, available at http://www.nationalaffairs.com/publications/detail/the-evolution-of-divorce, offers a counterpoint to the "very appalling book" by Cahn & Carbone reviewed in the previous post.

Wall Street Journal September 2, 2010

The Generation That Can't Move On Up

By ANDREW J. CHERLIN and W. BRADFORD WILCOX

Most people assume that working-class members of the baby-boomer generation have been hurt the most by the outsourcing and automation in which millions of factory jobs moved overseas or disappeared into computer chips, a shift recently compounded by recession. But actually it may be their children's generation.

Not only are many members of the younger working class unprepared for the contemporary job market. New research we have done shows their striking inability to fit the middle-class ideal in family and religious life. It's a worrisome development for their lifestyle and our culture.

These are the people we used to call "blue collar," although you can no longer tell a person's social class by the color of his shirt. If we can speak of a working class at all, education is now the best way to define them.

Think of people with high school degrees but not four-year college degrees. They make up slightly more than half of all Americans between the ages of 25 and 44; old enough to have completed their schooling but young enough to be still having children, and 79% of them are white. Because they don't have the educational credentials to get most middle-class professional and managerial jobs, their earnings have sunk toward the wages of the working poor.

The grim employment picture is familiar, but what's less widely known is that they are losing not only jobs but also their connections to basic social institutions such as marriage and religion. They're becoming socially disengaged, floating away from the college-educated middle class.

Consider the settings in which they have children. According to surveys by the National Center for Health Statistics, much of the recent rise in childbearing outside of marriage reflects a rise in births to cohabiting couples rather than to women living alone. The percentage of working-class women of all races who were cohabiting when they gave birth rose from 10% in the early 1990s to 27% in the mid-2000s—the largest increase of any educational group.

These working-class couples still value marriage highly. But they don't think they have what it takes to make a marriage work. Across all social classes, in fact, Americans now believe that a couple isn't ready to marry until they can count on a steady income. That's an increasingly high bar for the younger working class. As a result, cohabitation is emerging as the relationship of choice for young adults who have some earnings but not enough steady work to reach the marriage bar.

The problem is that cohabiting relationships don't go the distance. In fact, children who are born to cohabiting parents are more than twice as likely as children born to married parents to see their parents break up by age five. These break-ups are especially troubling because they are often followed by a relationship-go-round, where children are exposed to a bewildering array of parents' partners and stepparents entering and exiting their home in succession.

Church-going habits are changing, too. Traditionally, working-class couples who are married and have steady incomes have attended church, in part, to get reinforcement for the "respectable" lives they lead. But now, when a transformed economy makes marriage and steady work more difficult to attain, those who in better times might have married and attended church appear to be reluctant to show up. Thus, working-class men and women aren't going to religious services as often as they used to.

The drop-off in attendance has been greatest among whites, according to the General Social Survey, conducted biennially by the National Opinion Research Center. In the 1970s, 35% of working-class whites aged 25-45 attended religious services nearly every week, the same percentage as college-educated whites in that age group. Today, the college-educated are the only group who attend services almost as frequently as they did in the 1970s.

Some observers might say that there's nothing alarming about the working class's retreat from marriage and organized religion. It's true that not everyone wishes to marry or to worship, and that family and religious diversity can be valuable.

But the working class is not a cultural vanguard confidently leading the way toward a postmodern lifestyle. Rather, it is a group making constrained choices. For the most part, these are people who would like to marry before having kids but who don't think they are economically ready.

In contrast, college-educated Americans—the winners in our globalized economy—are now living more traditional family and religious lives than their working-class peers. More than 90% of college-educated women are married when they give birth.

What happens, then, when the job-market conditions that once allowed most high-school-educated Americans to connect to the rest of society through hard work, marriage and religious participation no longer exist? Will working-class young adults begin to devalue marriage and religion, or will they fiercely hold onto these ideals because their values are all that they have left?

Will their social disengagement leave them vulnerable to political appeals based on anger and fear? Will their multiple cohabiting unions and marriages prevent their children from developing a sense of attachment to others?

These are the kinds of questions that our nation will confront unless we can narrow the economic and social gap between a middle class that is managing to hold its own in our postindustrial economy and a working class that is falling further and further behind.

Mr. Cherlin is a professor of sociology and public policy at Johns Hopkins University. Mr. Wilcox is director of the National Marriage Project at the University of Virginia.

Retrieved September 4, 2010 from http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703618504575459994284873112.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_LEFTTopOpinion#printMode

This very appalling book

Jennifer Roback Morse | Wednesday, 1 September 2010

Red Families v. Blue Families
Two academics stoke the culture wars by claiming that blue states have the correct recipe for making families.

Red Families v. Blue Families: Legal Polarization and the Creation of Culture | By Naomi Cahn and June Carbone | Oxford University Press, USA (2010) | Hardcover: 304 pages | $29.95
ISBN: 0195372174

This widely-discussed book seems to be about the differences between red states and blue states, between socially conservative and socially liberal America. In fact, it is about the differences between college educated women and everyone else. You could say this book is the “soft power” version of class warfare. The rich are deliberately making war on the poor, not to expropriate their material resources, but to establish social hegemony. They want complete social approval and legal support for a lifestyle from which they benefit and which harms others.

I was supposed to have written this review long ago. The time-consuming nature of unpacking the illogic and obfuscation in this supposedly scientific tract is not the only reasons for the delay. This book made me so angry I could barely read it.

The essence of the Cahn and Carbone’s version of class difference, which they wrongly attribute to “red states” and “blue states”, is delayed age at first marriage. Later marriage allows women to complete their education and enter into high-income, high-status jobs before beginning families. These high status women are likely to get married and stay married, which further enhances the family’s financial wealth and their children’s life-chances.

Cahn and Carbone, both academics specializing in aspects of family law, leave no doubt that they approve of this “blue state script”. If their only point were to encourage later marriage and childbearing, their book would be unobjectionable. They could join the legions of abstinence educators, religious leaders, school teachers and parents who have been trying to convey that message to the young.

What is objectionable is that their data leaves no doubt that it is not “maturity” or greater self-command that makes the later marriages of the well-educated possible. The elites rely on contraception, backed up by the unapologetic use of abortion, to establish their high-status late-marriage life-styles.

Cahn and Carbone plainly disapprove of “red state” advocates of traditional morality, who are more concerned with marriage than age per se as the prerequisite for childbearing. “Rather than ground family morality in investment in higher education and disciplined childbearing, these advocates continue to celebrate the unity of sex, marriage and reproduction. The reward in this system, particularly for those who may never reach the enhanced status that comes with dual college-educated earners, is family life itself.”

As a highly educated woman who nonetheless “celebrates the unity of sex, marriage and reproduction” I found passages like these hard to read. Carbone and Cahn are implicitly accusing us of opposing “higher education” and “disciplined childbearing”. In fact, there is nothing “disciplined” about the child-bearing of the upper classes. They are simply willing to use abortion to kill off the babies that arrive too early for the script. Contraception, not discipline, allows them to be sexually active and still postpone marriage.

And we do not oppose higher education, as they seem to imply. We simply recognize what Cahn and Carbone themselves recognize in the above quotation: not everyone has the aptitude or inclination to go to graduate school, and absolutely no public policy will change this basic fact. They know that the sexual revolution isn’t working for the lower socio-economic classes, yet their book drips with condescension and contempt for those who resist its continual march through society.

Cahn and Carbone direct their fire at advocates of abstinence education and parental notification for abortion. They do not seem to realize that the early sexualization of the young and the decline in parental authority are a large part of the problem. The combination of Supreme Court decisions and federal promotion of contraception education amounts to a complete government take-over of sexual culture. Against this and the social disorganization of the lower classes, abstinence education and parental notification are, admittedly, impotent weapons. Advocates of an organic holistic view of sex, marriage and reproduction have few weapons remaining in their armory. The federal government picked a fight with the traditional sexual culture and forced us to bring knives to their gunfight.

But Cahn and Carbone turn a blind eye to all this, maintaining that abstinence education and parental notification for abortion are to blame for the problems of the underclass. If only they had more contraception and more abortions, these unfortunate people would postpone marriage, go to law school and be just like “us”.

Let me add a few facts that they overlook. First, over half of women who come for an abortion say that they were using contraception during the month they conceived. Second, nearly half of all women who come for an abortion report that they have already had at least one previous abortion. Since they have obviously been to an abortion clinic before, someone could have told them anything they needed to know about contraception.

The most logical conclusion to draw from these facts is that we have probably gone as far as we can go down the road of handing out birth control. We are trying to use a technological solution to what is plainly a moral problem. Cahn and Carbone are simply illogical to suggest that “changing the subject” from abortion to contraception has even a remote chance of being helpful.
But really, the most appalling thing about this very appalling book is the insularity of the authors. Cahn and Carbone simply have no clue what the actual lives of real people look like. I kept asking myself, “Have they ever met an HVAC repairman? Do they know any home-schooling mothers of eight or nine? Have they ever encountered a grandmother with full-time childcare responsibilities, because her daughter is preoccupied with her newest boyfriend? Do they have any idea that women have babies for all kinds of reasons that contraception and government policy will never touch?”

I am writing this in the Tulsa Oklahoma Airport, after helping my son set up his first apartment to go to welding school, in this reddest of red states. During my trip, I had a chat with the cashier at Wal-Mart who told me her boyfriend makes good money as a welder. “But he travels from job to job. It is hard on our relationship. We live together. I don’t have to pay for nothing, he pays all the bills. But he don’t have nothing either. He spends all the money on fancy TV’s and stuff.” I said to her, “You all need to get married. You can help him manage his money and save some of it. You’d both be way ahead.” I’m thinking about the statistics: married men earn more, save more, and spend more on others and less on themselves. She said, with a grim look on her face, “I’m working on it.” The implication was clear: she had been trying to get him to commit to marriage for some time.

While I was taking a walk, I met a man who was resting from a bike ride. He had one shoe off and was massaging his foot. Turns out, he had a nerve injury and couldn’t put any weight on his foot. He rides the bike every day along the Arkansas River for exercise. I struck up a conversation with him about this devastating injury and his recovery process. I asked him if he lived with anybody. I’m thinking about the statistics: people who live alone (married or not) have a longer recovery process from illnesses and injuries. “No, this happened two months after I got divorced. It was a forced divorce. I didn’t want it. I put up with everything she dished out, because of the kids. But she found herself a rich old guy.” I’m thinking about more statistics: the vast majority of divorces take place against the wishes of one party, are initiated by women and do not involve any form of domestic violence.

This is the world that the elites have created for the lower classes: a world of loneliness, mutual suspicion and uncertainty. Contraception wouldn’t have helped either of these people. In fact, without contraception, the Wal-Mart checker would almost certainly not be living with the boyfriend who spends everything he earns and won’t commit.

Cahn and Carbone refuse to acknowledge that their preferred policies and lifestyles have greatly diminished the possibilities for a high quality family life for working class people. They have nothing to offer them, and they know it. But educated women still get to have the Leave it to Beaver lifestyle they denigrate in their classrooms and that they have done so much to destroy in the rest of the culture. They just get started at age 35 instead of age 18.

The college educated, who postpone childrearing until the parents achieve a measure of financial self-sufficiency and emotional maturity, have become more likely to marry and less likely to divorce than the rest of the population, with two-parent families that remain intact, replicating the statistics that existed before no-fault divorce, the pill and legalized abortion.

When I encountered this paragraph, I wrote in the margin, “Have these people no shame?” How dare Cahn and Carbone criticize the beleaguered and increasingly marginalized social conservatives who strive to bring back some semblance of structure to the lives of ordinary people? How dare the life-style left wine and dine these authors, and, with a straight face, claim to be “progressives” who care about the fate of the less fortunate?

After reading the entire book, that is still my question. Have they no shame?

Jennifer Roback Morse, Ph.D. is the Founding President of the Ruth Institute, a project of the National Organization for Marriage.

Retrieved September 3, 2010 from http://www.mercatornet.com/articles/view/red_families_v._blue_families/