…Even a flawed marriage was likely to be a stable one. Over time, the spouses would grow into their responsibilities.
That is what “families form adults” means. Many teenagers and young adults formed families before they reached maturity and then came to maturity precisely by shouldering family responsibilities. Immature choices and what were once euphemistically called “accidents” were a fact of life, but the unity of sex, marriage, and procreation, combined with the pressure not to divorce, turned childish errors into adult vocations.
. . .
The new paradigm prizes responsible childbearing and child-rearing far above the traditional linkage of sex, marriage, and procreation. Instead of emphasizing abstinence until marriage, it enjoins: Don’t form a family until after you have finished your education and are equipped for responsibility. In other words, adults form families. Family life marks the end of the transition to adulthood, not the beginning.
. . .
In 2008, when news emerged that the 17-year-old daughter of the Republican vice presidential nominee was pregnant, traditionalists were reassured rather than outraged, because Bristol Palin followed the time-honored rules by announcing she would marry the father. They were kids, to be sure, but they would form a family and grow up together, as so many before them had done. Blue America, by contrast, was censorious. Bristol had committed the unforgivable sin of starting a family too young. If red and blue America seemed to be talking past one another about family values, it’s because they were.
without attribution, so I had to follow the link. Was surprised to see who the author was. It seems at times like a Phyllis Schlafly column.
I’d been puzzled as to why conservatives weren’t all up in arms about Bristol Palin’s pregnancy or Sarah Palin’s response to it.
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p>Asking around, most liberals I knew simply attributed that to tribalism: If a daughter of a conservative “got into trouble”, that was okay; a daughter of a liberal doing the same thing would be called a whore.
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p>However, the explanation of tribalism never seemed fully convincing to me.
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p>This article gives a much better explanation. Red America understands marriage the way we all did when Eisenhower was President when people married very young, divorce was scorned, single wage families more common, and contraception scarcer. In modern America, we expect adults to form families, that is, people who have started careers, have explored their emotions and their sexuality, and have entered marriage understanding fully what it entails.
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p>That’s why blue folk manifestly did not think that Bristol Palin was a whore. We thought she was irresponsible.
… paternalism that is popular among social conservatives to be fraught with some particular risks in the modern world. Consider that as distance between the age of people when we tend to think of them as ‘adult enough’ to marry responsibly and the age at which we can become sexually procreative keeps stretching – maximizing the potential window for ‘getting into trouble’. I don’t think it’s a stretch to think that most parents would like their daughters to finish college before motherhood and although they seem to have a harder time achieving that goal, I’ll bet social conservatives don’t differ very much on that point. What familial paternalism does do, however, is teach youth much more about dos and don’ts than practical whys. Dos and don’ts are great for ‘pre-deciding’ the correct course of action where as ‘whys’ are great for nurturing decision-making skills. This is why I think the youth of the social conservatives suffer more risk.
Thinking about this more, it even helps explain why social conservatives are so up at arms about marriage equality. Again, they used to inveigh heartily against the promiscuity of teh gay. So you’d think they might have embraced something that cut down on promiscuity. But no!
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p>Instead, the “marriage forms adults” kind of marriage requires that marriage be highly structured — like a school. If all the expectations are clear, if all the roles clearly delineated, then not-so-mature people have a chance of navigating it. This is undermined, certainly, by ethnic and cultural diversity because that messes up expectations.
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p>Gay marriages undermine it further because marriages of gay people are completely invented. There is no cultural tradition. There’s no rule book. They require adult participation. What they tell people is that, in fact, marriage really is for adults. You too can and should invent your own marriage. Be creative. Forget adherence to a list of do’s and don’ts.
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p>Progressive heterosexuals have known this all along. Married gay people are physical embodiments of a change in the institution.
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p>That’s probably why social conservative say marriage equality undermines marriage. It does. It undermines the idea that marriage is a completely predictable endeavor on which immature people can safely embark on their way to maturity.
Now I’ll spend days rethinking things. Thanks!
… put it more succinctly. For the social conservatives, marriage is prescriptive (paternalistically so), and so deviation from the ‘recipie’ for their prescription violates the very concept, even if it violates secular notions of free association and personal liberty.
Also – the idea that the only broken homes come from divorce is silly. How many kids now have multiple parents, none EVER married to one another, with the only acknowledgement of parenthood a support order?
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p>I admit I favor the ‘marriage forms adults’ form, although I don’t think procreation is the most importatn part. It’s the idea of making a promist to one another, and to God, that you will have somebody’s back through good and bad times. That personal fulfillment is desirable, but cooperation and compromise are qualities of adulthood, and responsibility to another person is fulfilling in a way a series of temporary connections is not. Committed parents can teach this to children, while a series of adult figures may not have the same credibility.
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p>A parable: Years ago, my 12 year old decided he had to have a dog. We went to the shelter and chose a dumb but loving Shepherd-Lab mix, about 3 years old. His bio was that his former owner’s parents had gotten the puppy when the boy was about my son’s age but when the novelty wore off, the boy refused to walk him and when he got his driver’s license he ignored the dog completely. So those parents brought the dog to the shelter to be euthanized.
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p>Now that the boy has fully explored his personhood and preferences, what number wife do you suppose that boy is on now, if he bothered to marry at all?
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p>(The dog died at age 15, lying under our Christmas tree, and is buried in our yard.)
Isn’t the decision to not get married as ‘adult’ as the decision to get married?
… if breaking up a non-marriage relationship was the same as breaking up a marriage. But they aren’t, unless you believe that marriage actually adds very little or no value to a relationship or society.
I guess I haven’t explained myself that well. If you want to assert that the low divorce rate is a ‘fake’ number because there are so many couples who do ‘break up’ when not married (analogous to divorce), then what you’re saying is that married couples and non-married couples are essentially equal and that their ‘break-ups’ have equal weight and thus that the one distinction between them, marriage, doesn’t actually matter that much. I do think marriage matters and thus I don’t think divorce and non-marital breakup are ‘equal’. Thus I don’t think the rates of ‘non-marital breakup’ have any bearing on the measure of divorce rate. If more people in MA don’t get married, that just says that they understand the commitment better and take it less lightly than elsewhere. An individual’s choice for waiting or delaying getting married doesn’t devalue the institution anymore than waiting for or abstaining from parenthood devalues that institution.
He grew up and married, and raised a large family, and brained them all with an axe one night, and got wealthy by all manner of cheating and rascality; and now he is the infernalist wickedest scoundrel in his native village, and is universally respected, and belongs to the Legislature.
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p>I’m sorry, what was your point?
…because they experience it more, whereas liberal areas don’t see it as much of a problem.
“experience” with “perception.” Unless you think culture has deteriorated more in Conservative areas than in liberal areas, in which case, you ought to help us understand how that is.
I was refering to exactly what the diary was talking about with regards to stable marriages. What I was trying to say is that conservative areas rail against the breakdown of marriage because they see more of it, whereas liberal areas don’t see as much of this and therefore don’t see the need to turn it into a crisis. Sorry if I weren’t clear.