New York Times columnists Thomas B. Edsall and Ross Douthat believe that (some) liberals have already conceded that conservatives were right: We should value marriage over all other life paths and family forms.
In the past couple of weeks, two op-ed columns in the New York Times wrestled with the question of whether liberals are out to destroy marriage, family, and society. On November 27, 2019, Thomas B. Edsall wrote a lengthy piece under the title, “Liberals do not want to destroy the family.” The next week, Ross Douthat asked, “Are liberals against marriage?” They were goaded into it.
Bill Barr Demonized Liberals; Edsall and Douthat Think (Some) Liberals Have Already Been Converted into Marriage Promoters
Attorney General William Barr played an outsize role in setting off this latest round of scrutinizing the liberal position on marriage when he unabashedly blamed progressives for “the wreckage of the family” in a speech at the University of Notre Dame. (I discussed that in my previous post.) Edsall and Douthat took a different approach. Rather than excoriating liberals, they declared that liberals (or at least some of them) have already conceded that conservatives were right in important ways about the value of marriage.
Here’s Edsall’s take:
“…many, if not most, liberals are as deeply disturbed by familiar dysfunction as conservatives…scholars on the left now acknowledge that the sexual revolution and the personal autonomy movement had significant costs as well as notable gains.
“Those negative consequences include the explosion of divorce, paternal absence and the growing legions of children raised in single parent households.”
Douthat believes there have been several different eras of liberal attitudes toward marriage. It is his impression, he said, that the past decade has been marked by a “new liberal hostility to marriage-as-normative-institution”:
“…the emerging phase of liberalism is less inclined to concede anything to conservatives on the cultural front.”
He liked the previous era better:
“…from the “Dan Quayle was right” arguments of the early 1990s onward, [liberals] conceded that marriage is probably generally better for kids and maybe especially boys, that monogamy is often preferable to promiscuity and divorce is often undesirable, that welfare policy shouldn’t discourage wedlock and should maybe even encourage it, and that the decline of marriage at least contributed to the post-1960s struggles of the working class.”
Douthat thinks his preferred era of liberalism had its blind spots but:
“this liberal worldview was and is essentially pro-marriage, in the sense of believing that it’s good for society to have a single normative destination to which most couples arrive, a single normative institution in which most children will be raised — and in the sense of favoring a mild cultural and political pressure in its favor, encompassing forces and ideas (religion, gender difference) that are not necessarily progressive.”
It is not new, this claim that liberals have already conceded that conservative were right in promoting marriage. My very first blog post for Unmarried Equality, in 2015, was about the Marriage Opportunity Council and its claim to be uniting conservatives and liberals in a common quest to improve Americans’ opportunities to marry.
At the heart of all common-cause arguments is a belief in the value of marriage for adults and society, and especially for children. Their favorite demons include divorce and single-parent families.
Demonizing Single Parents and their Children
Efforts to value and promote one particular type of family and derogate others are longstanding, systematic, and generously funded. The very important report from the Family Story think tank, published earlier this year, provided compelling documentation of that marriage fundamentalist agenda. According to “The Case Against Marriage Fundamentalism: Embracing Family Justice for All,” at the core of marriage fundamentalism is “the idea that a family composed of a man and a woman in their first marriage is “the best” or “ideal” type of family, especially for children.”
The Family Story report reviews findings suggesting that any advantages of the two-parent married family over single-parent families are small and inconsistent. In my own work, I emphasize methodological considerations and selective reporting.
Methodologically, for example, many studies compare the children of single parents and married parents at one point in time – often, after the parents of the former children have divorced. Some find that the children of single parents are doing less well. But look at those children before their parents divorced – as more sophisticated research does – and other, important dynamics become evident. Those children were already having problems long before their parents divorced. What was difficult for them was living for years in an emotionally-cold or conflict-ridden household, which was a two-parent married household until the time of the divorce.
The issue of selective reporting is self-evident. Studies documenting the special strengths of children raised by single parents, including ways in which they do better than the children of married parents, are mostly ignored by the marriage fundamentalists.
The matter of the supposed superiority of married-parent families over single-parent families is likely to be a contested one for a long time to come. In the meantime, practical questions loom large. Single-parent families are now commonplace. We need to do better than chastising them and stigmatizing them, and punishing and incentivizing the parents to get married and stay married.
There are, of course, single-parent families — and married ones — in all social classes. Punitive measures tend to focus on the poorest among them. The latest idea of letting even more people go hungry by cutting off their food stamps seems particularly egregious and cruel. Policies that support the dignity and well-being of all people – adults and children, married and unmarried – are far preferable. The Family Story report and subsequent articles about it outlined some of those possibilities.
Letting Liberals Speak for Themselves: A Round-Up of Some Responses
Edsall and Douthat both seem to want liberals to join conservatives in proclaiming the superiority of married people and their families over everyone else, and advocating for even more special rights and privileges for them. When Douthat whined that liberals don’t want to concede anything to conservatives, I think he was trying to bait them into saying, “Oh, no, Ross, we’re being good. We are compromisers. Of course, the conservatives were right. Of course “it’s good for society to have a single normative destination to which most couples arrive, a single normative institution in which most children will be raised.””
What did they actually say? On Twitter and elsewhere, a number of particularly insightful responses were posted.
Nicole Rodgers, Founder and Executive Director of Family Story, was not buying Douthat’s plea for compromise. She noted that her organization’s report on marriage fundamentalism had already shown “how centrists and liberals have helped conservatives promote the supremacy of the married family to the detriment of historically marginalized people & progressive family goals.”
She added that:
“…in much of Europe, where there is even less marriage, and higher nonmarital birthrates, there are also more stable co-habiting (but unmarried) couples and far less child poverty. This is the result of POLICY decisions. It could be true here, too.”
She also reminded us that:
“…when states adopted no-fault divorce they experienced significant decreases in wives’ suicide rates and in domestic violence. Just by letting people OUT! Making marriage more compulsory will never be good for women.”
“Dismantling marriage and family privilege is the next step for a just society,” Rodgers concluded. “Please progressives, don’t take the bait on this. Re: marriage, there’s nothing to compromise on.”
Bethany Letiecq, whose important work on family privilege was the topic of a previous post here, said:
“I am certain that @DouthatNYT fails to understand and likely has never considered the magnitude of inequality that is perpetuated by marriage fundamentalism and the myriad laws favoring two-parent marrieds over all others. He speaks at us as if we are not living this oppression.”
I wish all people who think about, write about, and research these issues would keep in mind what Julie K. Kohler, who serves on the advisory boards of many progressive organizations, pointed out about the favored family form:
“…they think that the special status is merited because it is a superior family arrangement. It is classic circular reasoning – you use the “better outcomes” that structural privilege provides as justification for the structural privilege.”
At the Center for Economic and Policy Research, Shawn Fremstad, one of the authors of the marriage fundamentalism report, discussed the issues in some detail. He explained that Edsall’s claim that “liberals are as deeply disturbed by family dysfunction as conservatives” isn’t all that meaningful because liberals and conservatives are worried about different things:
“Social conservatives are particularly disturbed by cohabitation, divorce, same-sex relationships, children being raised by unmarried parents, and women who have children without a male spouse or partner…
“The family dysfunctions [liberals] are most deeply disturbed by include violence, ill-treatment, and various forms of inequality within the family, as well as unfair public and private discrimination against certain types of families based on their structure.”
Fremstad concluded:
“Progressives rightly embrace family diversity and egalitarian, solidaristic relationships. They shouldn’t feel like they need to echo social conservatives to be viewed as taking family seriously. This doesn’t mean that there can’t be overlapping consensus among liberals and conservatives on a long list of specific family policies, like paid family leave, child allowances, a higher minimum wage, promoting men’s involvement in paid and unpaid care work, reducing excessive work hours, and dialing back immigration and criminal justice policies that forcibly separate family members who want to be together. These policies may or may not increase marriage, but they’re worth doing because they’re good for working-class adults, children, and all of our families.”
We can argue about the implications of the tremendous changes in the demographic face of the nation, but we can’t argue about the facts. Growing diversity of family forms is a fact, and has been since 1960, as University of Maryland sociologist Philip R. Cohen has documented. Growing diversity of life paths, including staying single, including not having kids, is another fact. To me, this is all good. “A single normative destination” of marriage and nuclear family is not something to aspire to, it is something to dread. People who do not want to marry and do not want to raise kids are not benefiting their would-be spouses, their would-be children, or society when they are browbeaten into a life that doesn’t suit them. And contrary to all the stereotype-driven fears that single people will contribute to the purported epidemics of isolation and selfishness, research shows just the opposite. Adults thrive when they get to live their best lives, in all their many permutations; children and societies do, too.
[Notes: (1) The opinions expressed here do not represent the official positions of Unmarried Equality. (2) I’ll post all these blog posts at the UE Facebook page; please join our discussions there. (3) For links to previous columns, click here.]
About Bella DePaulo
