Demosophia

Is Rauch Worth Fisking? (Update)

Andrew Sullivan posts a link to Jonathan Rauch's article: Power of Two. I'm not sure it's even worth taking the article apart, piece by piece. Suffice to say that the argument that heteros have done a deuce of a job holding the institution of marriage together during the Great Disruption is a deuce of an argument for taking the risk of screwing things up even more. If it's a disaster twenty years on, how do we get back?

And although Rauch loudly and repeatedly asks how we know that it would do such a thing (which, of course, we don't, with any certaintly) he offers only the standard "conservative" argument that expanding SSM would legitimate OSM. Yes, it might. But in the few places where it has been tried there doesn't appear to be any slowing down of the family dissolution trend (in Scandinavia and Holland). In fact, the trend seems to be accelerating. More significantly, the constraints imposed by political correctness forbid that we ask what might happen should the primary motivation for gay fidelity be swept away, and we arrive at that happy day when AIDS is no longer a threat.

Yes, letting same-sex couples wed would in some sense redefine marriage. Until a decade ago, no Western society had ever embraced or, for the most part, even imagined same-sex marriage. But until recently, no Western society had ever understood, to the extent most Americans do today, that a small and more or less constant share of the population is homosexual by nature.

Same sex marriage has never come up as a viable issue in any society before now. Is it that we're uniquely enlightened, as Rauch contends? What about those societies in which homesexual relationships were the rule, rather than the exception? Would Socrates have considered marrying Alcibiades, even for a moment? Even the Greeks, who were about as tolerant as any society in history of homosexuality knew that marriage had a distinct and vital purpose. Is it possible that what's different today isn't our recognition that homosexuality is "natural," but that AIDS has altered the nature of homosexual relationhips to such an extent that they are now taking marriage seriously? Well, at least seriously enough to demand it as a civil right.

I will address one brief paragraph, that seems to beg some sort of comment, though:

And children? According to the 2000 census, 27 percent of households headed by same-sex couples contain children. How could any pro-family conservative claim that those children are better off with unmarried parents?

This seemed like one of those statistics that could be the result of a flawed method, like ecological inference. However, after checking into this it appears that there is, in fact, a tabulation that could provide the statistic Rauch uses. In the special tablulation conducted for the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) there is a variable that tabulates the householders with partners of the same sex. In fact it even breaks these out by whether the partners are male or female. Rauch must have looked at the tabulation done for the "HC Universe," (households with a given characteristic that have children) which would give the number of householders with same sex partners with children in the household. He would then divide that number by the tabulation done for the "TT Universe" (total population) which would give the total number of householders with same sex partners (with and without children). By performing this division he would have arrived at the proportion of same-sex-partnered households with children present. I didn't do this, because I took Rauch at his word, and I was interested in something else anyway.

I thought that rather than duplicate Rauch's percentage it might be more interesting to look at the "CH Universe" (children who live in a household with given characteristics) which would give us the number of children who live in such households, compared to all the children in the population. It turns out that approximately 1/2 of 1 percent of all children in the US live in households "headed by same sex partners."

While this actually involves a substancial number of children (about 500,000) we don't know how many of these same-sex-pairs who head the households they live in would marry if they could, nor how committed they are at present. But assuming that some significant percentage would be candidates for marriage the issue this raises is whether we'd be willing to risk the dissolution of the families of 99.5% of the children in the US for the sake of the other 0.5%, just because we feel generous about SSM.

We ought to at least get some idea of the risk of such a policy before implementing it, shouldn't we?

And finally, the bottom line is that we just don't know what the impact of establishing SSM would be, and although it could be salutary, it could also be disastrous. Consider what the US would look like if it had the level of family dissolution of some Scandinavian countries, where around 80% of children are born and are mostly raised out of wedlock. The US, unlike Sweden, Iceland and Norway, is a heterogenous society. Would the US be a nice place to live with that sort of family dissolution, and the attendant problems created for the next generation, both in terms of diminished performance and anti-social behavior? Would we even be able to defend ourselves from threats like Al Qaeda, and future Al Qaedas?

And please tell me how the damage could ever be undone?

Posted by Demosophist at March 6, 2004 11:28 PM | TrackBack