Boston Marriage Redux.


Cobb offers a compromise on the "gay marriage" issue as follows:

Therefore the state should not *recognize* 'Marriage' any more than it recognizes 'Extreme Unction'. The state buries unidentified bodies in the ground but that does not make it a Funeral. The state recognizes civil unions but that doesn't make them Marriages.

I'd like to subscribe to this position, but I can't. Here's why.

As I explain to my "pregnancy discrimination" clients, pregnancy discrimination really isn't about "discrimination." In pregnancy discimination cases we're not really asking employers to treat their pregnant employments equally. We are actually asking that pregnant folks - women, we call them - be given preferential treatment over folks with ulcers. You can fire the latter after three months given all kinds of side-constraints dealing with hours worked and number of employees, but the former have to get rehired in the same position after four (or seven) months.

This is justified, I explain (or, as we say in Fresno, "It's all good"), because we kind of want there to be folks in the future to pay taxes, provide labor and defend the borders. To get those people - children, we call them - we kind of have to encourage, or at least de-incentivize, folks - i.e., "women" - to get pregnant - or, as we say in Fresno, the "baby-making way."

Even so, making babies, and raising children, will be either exclusively a heterosexual project (in the former situation) or largely a heterosexual project (in the latter.) To that extent, social policy should encourage the institution that is most likely to lead to the creation of healthy, productive future citizens - and that in our middle class bourgeousie culture is long-term monogamous marriage. Social policy should encourage such an institution for exactly the same reason that scocial policy currently favors the "disability" of pregnancy over the disability of gout - to wit, because a healthy, productive society requires healthy, productive replacement economic units, which we call "children."

Now, when I take off my Catholic/Aristotelian hat, I have zero opposition to the existential concept of same sex marriage. More power to them, I sez. I hope they will all be as succesful as I was. More money to the divorce lawyers and God bless them all, sez me.

But as a conservative who has noticed the altogether dreadful consequence of minor adjustments in social policy, I have to be skeptical. Back in the seventies, no fault divorce was intended as a minor adjustment to the institution of divorce. What could it hurt? Divorce might climb a few percentage points, but, really, the horrible charade of connived divorces, where "incompatibility" was founded on purely fictitious excuses, would be ended. It would all end in utopia as those few, sad couples who wanted to divorce would maximize their joint and several utility

Ten years later when the divorce rate climbed to 50%, the genie was out of the bottle. Now, when the first generation of the divorce culture is now beginning to have its own children, one has to wonder which was worse, the tremendous exposure of children to poverty and violence, or the denial of growth opportunities to the parents who had them? (And, incidentally, like the famous mock NY Times headline "World to end tomorrow; women and minorities hit hardest," the fact is that the breakdown of the family hurt the most vulnerable populations. For example, the drop- out rate at Fresno High School, which in the 1950s was the premier Fresno high school and graduated Baseball greats Tom Seaver and Dick Ellsworth, presently is around 40%. These students simply disappear and never get a High School degree. Not coincidentally, I was told by a teacher at Fresno High that her long term marriage of thirty years was unfathomable to her students who were usually working on their third or fourth stepfather.)

But it's all good. Gay marriage is a marginal issue. How many gays really want to marry? It couldn't possibly further erode an institution that desperately needs to be slapped awake and sent off to Betty Ford. But then I have to reflect on a culture that celebrates Madonnna and in which the homosexual ethos has a tremendous influence in popular culture and politics. I have to reflect on the fact that that influential social group has essentially no structural investment in fidelity in the traditional sense of warding off bastardy or ensuring the relationship of father and child, which is so very important to marital fidelity and, concomittantly, to marital stability.

See you in about twenty years.