Sexuality and American Culture

An interesting article on the state of marriage these days.

The Marrying Kind

Although Connecticut, Massachusetts, Iowa, and Vermont are now permitting same-sex marriage, few gay activists are sitting back to count their blessings. A majority of states still define marriage as a union between a man and a woman. But with the general attitude (especially among younger people) toward marriage inching gradually toward a philosophy of “live and let live,” it’s not too far-fetched to imagine that within a decade or so all but the most diehard conservative states will permit same-sex marriage.

It’s deeply ironic, then, that even while gay couples are struggling for the rights, privileges, and responsibilities of marriage, straight couples are avoiding it like the plague. The proportion of American households consisting of straight married couples — with or without children — has been in the minority since 2005. As for households with children, only 1 in 4 households is a married household with children (compared to 1960, when the figure was closer to 1 in 2).

Defenders of traditional marriage argue that because of history, tradition, religion, and nature itself, marriage is “a union between a man and a woman.” When I was in college, feminists went about trashing marriage as oppressive to women. Perhaps. But I thought then, and I think now, that this hardly constitutes the sum of the matter. Over the ages, and all over the world, men and women have always danced a very complicated, unfathomable dance.

More to the point, marriage has always worked as an extremely tidy solution to the problem of men — i.e., how to make it so that men stay around after the babies are born. Marriage very neatly solves this problem because it makes it so that everyone knows (well … um, sometimes everyone simply looks the other way) who’s the father — and therefore who’s responsible for paying to raise the offspring.

But now that nearly 40 percent of the babies born in the United States are born to unwed mothers (40 percent — whoa!), the time has come for reasonable — or at least practical — people to stop clinging to ideas about marriage that have slid into muddy anachronisms. Traditional marriage is collapsing of its own accord, and to link the phenomenon with the paltry number of same-sex marriages now taking place in a couple of states is absurd. Like strange molecules floating around in space, contemporary families take form, break apart and reconstitute themselves in a variety of ways — only one of which entails marriage.

In terms of poverty, unwed teen mothers are a terrible problem — for the mothers and the children both. But the social stigma of having children without a husband (although the father may actually remain on the scene) — for all racial groups, and all ages, and even for a lot of religious people — has disappeared. The good old-fashioned days (days that are at least partly a product of our wistful imaginations), where fathers always married the mothers of their children before they were born, are over.

When next you see a father with his kid, consider this. That father very well may be gay, living in a committed and very legal marriage. The times they are a changin’.

Posted at 05:29:03 PM on April 22, 2009 | All postings by Laurie Fendrich
 

Thanks for posting that.

It is most certainly worth watching the original NOM ad as well as the Colbert response.  After getting over the fact that an organization like NOM actually exists, I was hit hard by their ad, which felt even more like an SNL skit than Colbert's appropriate (and appropriately ridiculous) response.

Here are the links to the videos:

www.youtube.com/watch

www.youtube.com/watch