modern America
Charles Rice
Right or Wrong?
Is the "traditional" family, based on the marriage of a man and a woman, on the way out? Maybe so. Consider two signs.
First, cohabitation without benefit of marriage is rapidly becoming the statistical norm. As former Education Secretary William Bennett's Index of Cultural Indicators 2001 records, the number of heterosexual cohabiting couples increased from 439,000 in 1960 to 4.24 million in 1998. The number of cohabiting households almost doubled in the 1990s. In 1965, 10 percent of married couples lived together before marriage; in 1998 it was more than 50 percent.
Cohabitation, incidentally, increases despite evidence, summarized in the Index, that it does not work too well: "Only about 1/6 of cohabiting couples endure for three years, and only 1/10 last 10 years or more. ... Couples who cohabit before marriage are almost twice as likely to divorce as those who do not. Cohabiting couples report more disagreements, more frequent fights and lower levels of happiness than married couples." The rise in cohabitation may indicate that marriage is becoming irrelevant or an afterthought.
The second sign is that seven states, numerous local governments, federal agencies and private employers have extended to unmarried couples — homosexual as well as heterosexual — pension, health and other benefits comparable to those extended to married couples. No American jurisdiction has followed the Dutch example of formally recognizing such "domestic partnerships" as marriages. The federal Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) affirms the right of each state to deny recognition to a same-sex marriage recognized by any other state. DOMA will be challenged in the courts as unconstitutional.
Should the law exclusively favor the traditional marriage and family? The logic of the individualist contraceptive ethic would say no. In the natural order of things, one reason why sex is reserved for marriage and why marriage is between a man and a woman is because sex has an intrinsic relation to babies. But if it is up to the discretion of man (of both sexes) whether sex will have any relation to procreation, why should sex be reserved for marriage? And why should the law exclusively define "marriage" as male-female?
Last July the Pontifical Council for the Family issued a document, "Family, Marriage and De Facto Unions," offering reasons why marriage is a "natural" institution prior to the state and why the family must be favored by the law.
The Council framed the issue as one of "justice, which means treating equals equally, and what is different differently." It would be unjust `if de facto unions were given a juridical treatment similar ... to the family based on marriage [because] society would take on obligations towards the partners in a de facto union [but] they in turn would not take on the ... obligations to society that are proper to marriage."
Marriage, in the words of John Paul II, is entitled to a "juridical status that recognizes the rights and duties of the spouses to one another and to their children. ... Families play an essential role in society, whose permanence they guarantee. The family fosters the socialization of the young and helps curb ... violence by transmitting values and ... brotherhood and solidarity."
The traditional family, based on marriage, has been privileged by the law because it is the seedbed for future generations. The partners in a heterosexual de facto union make no comparable binding and public commitments to themselves, their children or society. "Even more serious," in the Council's view, is "the grave error of recognizing or even making homosexual relations equivalent to marriage."
The Council quoted John Paul II on the point: "The demand to grant marital status‚ to unions between persons of the same sex ... is opposed ... by the ... impossibility of making the partnership fruitful ... according to the plan inscribed by God in the very structure of the human being. Another obstacle is the absence of ... that ... complementarity between male and female willed by the Creator. ... Lastly, de facto unions between homosexuals are a deplorable distortion of what should be a communion of love and life between a man and a woman in a reciprocal gift open to life. ... The bond between two men or two women cannot constitute a real family and much less can the right be attributed to that union to adopt children without a family."
The Council criticized "the indifference‚ of public administrations toward the profound difference ... between conjugal love, which comes from ... marriage, and homosexual relationships [as] a kind of apathy with regard to the life or death of society, an indifference about its future projection or its degradation."
This is true. A society in which it makes no difference whether boys marry girls or other boys is on a dead-end road to extinction. Society and the state cannot be neutral on the definition of marriage and on the moral question of whether the family based on marriage should be exclusively promoted by the law. The evidence is abundant that our "Cultural Indicators" are moving in the wrong direction. We ought to think seriously about that.
Professor Rice is on the Law School faculty. His column appears every other Tuesday.
The views expressed in this article are those of the author and not necessarily those of The Observer.
All Viewpoint Stories for Wednesday, April 4, 2001
