How are social conservatives responding to their recent loss regarding DOMA? A recent Christian Science Monitor article gives a mixture of denial and inadvertent truth telling. From Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council, we get:
As the American people are given time to experience the actual consequences of redefining marriage, the public debate and opposition to the redefinition of natural marriage will undoubtedly intensify.
Apparently the “Research” Council hasn’t noticed that this hasn’t happened anywhere ever. Someone, please, get these guys tickets to Belgium and Norway. They clearly need a vacation.
Failed presidential candidate Gary Bauer from his perch at American Values is worried that Republicans are about to abandon social conservatives. He has some news for the no-taxes, libertarian wing of the party:
The idea that the Republican economic agenda is popular and is held back by the Republican social agenda is, like everything else in Washington, D.C., exactly upside down.
I like this argument. I hope Mr Bauer persists in making it.
The National Organization for [sic] Marriage has taken to fretting that their religious right to treat gay people as icky will be trampled upon by the recent Supreme Court decision:
Our opponents blithely claim that religious liberty and same-sex ‘marriage’ can peacefully coexist, but experience shows that is not the case. Anybody who doesn’t abandon their faith principles and fully cooperate with the new gay marriage regime is likely to face consequences. Unless we fight back, it will only get worse.
Unable to look at polls, NOM, by the way, is confident that the majority is on their side. They write: “This means winning or losing marriage is still up to us, The People.” Nonetheless, this particular line, that marriage equality will infringe on religious liberty, has been polled the strongest in opposing marriage for all.
The Family Research Council has been emphasizing natural law as of late. Given their hostility to the theory of evolution, this is amusing. (Tony Perkins wrote back in February: “The education system is already force-feeding kids everything from sex education to evolution.”) So perhaps they have read nothing about bonobos.
Bonobos are just as closely related to humans as chimpanzees. They’re our closest primate relatives. Bonobos, it turns out, have a great deal of sex — most of it, lesbian sex: 60% of all bonobo sexual activity occurs between females. And there is a fair bit of sex between males and between males and females. So much for FRC’s rather odd statement:
Family Research Council believes that homosexual conduct is harmful to the persons who engage in it and to society at large, and can never be affirmed. It is by definition unnatural, and as such is associated with negative physical and psychological health effects. While the origins of same-sex attractions may be complex, there is no convincing evidence that a homosexual identity is ever something genetic or inborn.
I guess when you’re in the Family Research Council, you don’t need to do much research. For clearly, there is nothing unnatural about bonobo sex: bonobos as a rule don’t tend to know many liberals.
Putting all this aside, there are indeed some disturbing trends in marriage that have little if anything to do with marriage equality:
- The average age for childbearing is now younger than the average age for marriage. By age 25, 44% of women have had a baby, while only 38% have married.
- Consequently, 48% of all first births are to unmarried women.
- Most unwed mothers are not teens.
This is explained somewhat by the cornerstone to capstone change with respect to marriage:
[Y]oung adults have increasingly come to see marriage as a ‘capstone’ rather than a ‘cornerstone’—that is, something they do after they have all their other ducks in a row, rather than a foundation for launching into adulthood and parenthood…Ninety-one percent of young adults believe that they must be completely financially independent to be ready for marriage, and over 90 percent of them believe they should finish their education before taking the big step. Fifty-one percent also believe that their career should be underway first. In fact, almost half say that it is ‘very important’ to work full-time for a year or two prior to getting married.
Getting one’s life together to the point that one can have a “capstone” marriage is particularly easier for those who are more affluent. So an effect of this change is that marriage has become more solid among the more comfortable, and both less common and less stable among the more economically precarious.
These are real concerns, but, as Blankenhorn realized, they are not addressed by attacking equal rights.
I’m having trouble with 44% having a baby before 25 and 38% marrying before 25 leading to 48% of the first births being out of wedlock. Can someone help me with that math or do those stats not connect?
I do think of marriage as close to capstone, which goes a good way towards explaining why I haven’t pursued it, but why would people not think that bearing children is even more of a capstone? Seems to me in order to support a child it’s even more important to have other things stable, including a marriage.
Incomes steadily rose in the U.S. economy from World War II until sometime around 1980. During this extended period of expansion, a young adult could count himself or herself as stable years earlier than a young adult in 2013.
Particularly if you married within your social class and ethnic group, you have found a lot more clarity on how your marriage was supposed to function. (This was not necessarily a good thing, by the way.) That stability of role and expectation provided simplification; it meant you were ready earlier. Or at least, you thought of yourself as ready earlier. Even with respect to child rearing.
*
Yeah the stats I quoted do violate some of the rules of arithmetic. Maybe I should check the source Ezra Klein was quoting.
The point I was trying to make is that marriage contributes at least in most cases to the stability factored into raising a child, thus generally marriage then children would be the prefered sequence.
As of age 25, 44% have had a baby out of wedlock. That percentage will be larger at age 26 because in another year, some proportion of women will have babies in and out of wedlock thereby bumping the number. up. That’s why if we take by age out of consideration we get a larger number than the 44% at age 25 with which we started, namely 48%.
A woman has a child, or children, before she marries. She then, after having the children before turning 25, marries. Just because marriage and children both come before 25 doesn’t mean marriage came before children.
In addition to my earlier point (that someone might have a child, then marry, before turning 25), there are the women who neither have a child nor marry until after turning 25. Many of their children may be born out of marriage.
The word “consequently” in the post should be “Partly consequently.”
The word “consequently” was an error. Quite misleading. Apologies.
The GOP has never had popular economics, not since the Coolidge administration. This is why it is even more important for the Democratic Party to move left on economics. The GOO can either adopt social moderation with its heavy brand of fiscal conservatism as Frum might suggest, or double down on social conservatism while embracing Hispanics and economics that favor working families as Douthat and Gerson suggest. Who’s there is a vast disconnect between base and elite in both parties it’s become a chasm on the right. Socially liberal Randians like Koch battling theocons like Bauer. Mutual hawkishness on defense is no longer enough to hold the stool together. Fusion is dead.
That said, with social issues neutralized now is the time to go after downscale voters reconsidering the GOP and rebuild the New Deal coalition on class rather than culture faults. If we can recover that populism we will have an enduring majority for decades, if we squander this next decade we will allow the GOP to comeback. The DLC was a necessary counterweight to an old guard liberal establishment that was captive to its base and no longer winning elections. The GOP is where we were after Dukakis lost, but we should not squander as they did a historic opportunity by staying timid. Time to retake the populist mantle while we still can.
I wouldn’t call social issues neutralized. We’re, frankly, on the losing end of state-level anti-choice legislation. It’s true that the rights for gays are trending upward, but they’ve got plenty of room to make up across the country. Women are still paid less than men, and darker skinned men spend a whole lot more time in jail than whites, controlling for all sorts of different socio-economic variables.
There’s plenty of not-yet-neutralized social issues, seems to me.
If one believes marriage is “about” personal fulfillment and unending romance, than no matter whether marriage is between different genders or the same gender it will be fundamentally unstable. Human emotions come and go; more changeable than than New England’s weather.
And one the wedding-industrial complex tries to impose on the rest of us. I am in the early stages of planning my own wedding and marriage and can only say ours is a relationship that has survived ups and downs precisely because our underlying friendship is so much stronger and sturdy than the more fleeting kind. The Atlantic has written at length on how same sex marriages, particularly those between women, are proven to be more stable precisely because partners have waited longer, have a more realistic level of expectations, and responsibilities are equally divided. Perhaps this ‘radical social experiment’ as the Scalia’s of the world contend will actually reinforce and help revive that traditional more platonic and enduring form of marriage, even in a small way.