Question-begging by the LA Times
George Skelton of the LA Times opines that “the notion that baby-making is the principal purpose of marriage in 21st century America is plain absurd. Let’s just say that upfront.” Well that’s nice. How does he say that with such confidence?
we all know happily married, childless couples who benefit society without ever propagating. Some can’t produce children. Some choose not to. Some adopt. Some bring cats or dogs into the family. Whatever works. It’s really nobody’s business — least of all the government’s.
They get married for many reasons: companionship, physical attraction, financial protection, to make a commitment. . . . Many even get married, and stay married, because of love.
Just a couple of problems with this:
1. He is confusing the reasons that motivate individuals to choose to get married with the reasons that society needs the institution of marriage in the first place.
2. Not all marriages have children, true enough. But every child has parents. The social purpose of marriage is to attach mothers and fathers to their children and to one another. Which children don’t deserve a mother and a father? By what right do we say that children ordinarily are entitled to have their biological parents be their legal parents be their social parents be their care-giving parents, but that some children are not entitled to that?
3. Child-bearing is logically central to marriage in this sense: in the absence of child-bearing, we wouldn’t need the institution of marriage. Look at it this way. The human species reproduces through sexual reproduction (one male parent, one female parent). Our offspring are dependent for a long time. In the absence of those two biological facts, no human society would have ever come up with the idea of creating a special legal and social status for long-term sexually exclusive partnerships between men and women. As it is however, both those facts are true, and every known society has come up with something like marriage.
Marriage is not simply about health insurance and making people feel good about themselves. Marriage is society’s premier social institution linking the generations to one another.
To go back to our genius from the LA Times: if “the notion that baby-making is the principal purpose of marriage in 21st century America is plain absurd,” does he have another plan for attaching responsibility for children to parents? I mean, a plan that works pretty much automatically, without continual intervention from the state? The things that the family courts are coming up with to deal with the “alternatives to marriage,” are not very encouraging….
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I’ve been in some discussions about marriage, including discussions about California’s recent Proposition 8.
One of the things I like to do is turn the whole issue upside-down, just to see what people come up with. Rather than looking at the rights and privileges that are conferred with marriage, I like to ask people to justify civil marriage itself.
Why should a government regulate marriage at all? Why give rewards to people who like each other a lot, but not to people who like each other somewhat less (say, not enough to swear to stay together “forever”)?
Child care? Rather than bind two people together into a unit, why not have the parents sign a contract to care for their offspring? Or for that matter, the one parent who’s most interested in the welfare of the offspring, and contract with whatever other people may be needed, as needed?
Inheritance? Contract for that too, or abide by the terms of the default child-bearing contract.
Shared property? Instead of a “pre-nup”, why not a “shared residence” contract, spelling out what’s shared, what’s not, and what happens in case of X, Y, and Z?
What does marriage, especially civil marriage, do that can’t be done by other mechanisms in society?
Karl, if it weren’t for children, you would be right. But there is much more to raising children than can reasonably be handled by contracts. Children cannot contract for themselves, so they can’t be contracting parties. And, children are not objects to which other people have rights. Children are persons, with rights of their own, albeit, rights they are in no position to defend on their own. This is why family law is not simply a special case of property and contracts. and that is why I think it would be a mistake to recreate family law as a special case of property and contracts, as many of the family law radicals seem to want to do.
Even if you could make contracts for every aspect of child-rearing, there would still be a problem: who “owns” the rights to make contracts on the child’s behalf in the first place? Does the mother “privately” own the child, and have exclusive rights to make arrangements for the child? What rights do fathers have? Who even counts as a father? Does the mother get to pick the richest guy she has ever had sex with, and force him into a parenting “contract?”
Now you might say that any time a man has sex with a woman, he is tacitly consenting to assume paternal responsibility for chidlren she bears. If you take that position, you have gone a long way toward saying that sexual activity, child-bearing and some-kind- of- permanent-relationship/responsibility-let’s-call-it-marriage, should be organically linked with each other.
Welcome to the club. that’s my position.