The REAL threat to marriage

While NOM and others fulminate against LGBT couples marrying, they might do better to look at the horrific effects that the recession has on marriage (not to mention conservative policies that disadvantage the poor and jobless).

From the Atlantic, last year but still current:

[J]oblessness corrodes marriages, and makes divorce much more likely down the road. According to W. Bradford Wilcox, the director of the National Marriage Project at the University of Virginia, the gender imbalance of the job losses in this recession is particularly noteworthy, and—when combined with the depth and duration of the jobs crisis—poses “a profound challenge to marriage,” especially in lower-income communities. It may sound harsh, but in general, he says, “if men can’t make a contribution financially, they don’t have much to offer.” Two-thirds of all divorces are legally initiated by women. Wilcox believes that over the next few years, we may see a long wave of divorces, washing no small number of discarded and dispirited men back into single adulthood.

Among couples without college degrees, says Edin, marriage has become an “increasingly fragile” institution. In many low-income communities, she fears it is being supplanted as a social norm by single motherhood and revolving-door relationships. As a rule, fewer people marry during a recession, and this one has been no exception. But “the timing of this recession coincides with a pretty significant cultural change,” Edin says: a fast-rising material threshold for marrying, but not for having children, in less affluent communities.

Edin explains that poor and working-class couples, after seeing the ravages of divorce on their parents or within their communities, have become more hesitant to marry; they believe deeply in marriage’s sanctity, and try to guard against the possibility that theirs will end in divorce. Studies have shown that even small changes in income have significant effects on marriage rates among the poor and the lower-middle class. “It’s simply not respectable to get married if you don’t have a job—some way of illustrating to your neighbors that you have at least some grasp on some piece of the American pie,” Edin says. Increasingly, people in these communities see marriage not as a way to build savings and stability, but as “a symbol that you’ve arrived.”

Childbearing is the opposite story. The stigma against out-of-wedlock children has by now largely dissolved in working-class communities—more than half of all new mothers without a college degree are unmarried. For both men and women in these communities, children are commonly seen as a highly desirable, relatively low-cost way to achieve meaning and bolster identity—especially when other opportunities are closed off. Christina Gibson-Davis, a public-policy professor at Duke University, recently found that among adults with no college degree, changes in income have no bearing at all on rates of childbirth.

“We already have low marriage rates in low-income communities,” Edin told me, “including white communities. And where it’s really hitting now is in working-class urban and rural communities, where you’re just seeing astonishing growth in the rates of nonmarital childbearing. And that would all be fine and good, except these parents don’t stay together. This may be one of the most devastating impacts of the recession.”

What was that about "every child deserves a mother and a father"?

Red state, blue state, and same sex marriage

There's a new book out called Red Families v. Blue Families: Legal Polarization and the Creation of Culture. How is it that states with the most liberal viewpoints (same sex marriage, major Obama supporters) do better in "family values" (low divorce rates, low rates of teen childbirth) than states with more "traditional" views?

The book argues that traditional family life was built on early marriages, and the ability of low-skilled men to get jobs with little education. Children, sex, and marriage were all tangled up together, divorce was hard to get, and thus people married young. But the global economy changed the game, by demanding high levels of skill and education, and the sexual revolution decoupled sex from children. Women entered the workforce and could postpone child bearing; liberalization of divorce laws made it easier to break up a marriage and gave women options and independence. Thus people take their time, marry later, and have fewer children, if at all. In this paradigm, The Red Families think Bristol Palin getting pregnant too soon is okay if she marries the boy; The Blue Families are horrified that she's having a child before finishing her education.

Jonathan Rauch has written about this several times and points out

In the Blue and Red paradigms, same-sex marriage has entirely different meanings.

In Blue World, same-sex marriage is wholly consonant with the ethic of responsibility and autonomy as the pillars of family formation. In this world:

• Mature adults form families to express and nurture commitment to each other and their children, and to share human capital which both partners have already amassed.
• Sex comes before marriage, and marriage comes before children, and indeed children need never come at all

....In fact, in Blue World, marriage is incomplete if it excludes gay couples! Excluding them sends all the wrong signals about family and responsibility. It would make a hypocritical nonsense of what it is that marriage is supposed to be all about.

In Red World, things look very different. The Red project is to maintain the linkage between sex, marriage, and procreation. In Red World, de-linkage has wrought all kinds of social problems.

Same-sex marriage, in this view, is in some sense the ultimate symbolic assault on what is left of the unity of sex, marriage, and procreation.....After gay marriage, in the Red view of things, how can sex, marriage, and procreation ever be put back together again?

In this regard, he suggests that the opponents are fighting for a world view and a society that is long gone.

I believe that, slowly but surely, family values are renormalizing and will continue to renormalize around later family formation and an ethic which stresses responsible childbearing over abstinence from sex—if only because economic and cultural forces are pulling so hard in that direction. ...I don’t think excluding gay couples from marriage will do anything to strengthen or restore the old sex/marriage/procreation unity, and I think trying to hold homosexual couples to the old norm while heterosexuals live by the new one will be counterproductive as well as unfair.
....

I think it's very interesting to suggest that the opposition to marriage equality is based in this resistance to changing norms. It's convenient to blame the gays since this seems a change that is So Big, but in reality, the changes have already taken place, and this is quite incremental. It describes a polarization in worldview that is really profound.

And that leads into a broader question of how we can bring along people for whom advanced degrees and educational opportunities are not available solutions. How do we rescue the kids in mill towns and rural America and poor working families to benefit from these changes? Something I blogged about elsewhere.