The G.O.P. is good at nothing except winning elections and telling lies. I'm talking about the BIG lies, the ones which are the exact opposite of the truth. One of their favorite boogeyman stories is how if the Democrats win, the institution of marriage in its current form will die.
Well, guess what? It's already dying.
From Ken Mondschein's article:
Last week, the Census Bureau announced that married couples are now in the minority of American households. This didn't happen all at once, of course. It's the result of a long-term trend that goes back two generations.
If you were to go to any town in America in 1940, pick a house at random and knock on the door (perhaps you were selling subscriptions to Grit magazine), there'd be a ninety-percent chance you'd find a married couple living there. Thirty years later, despite the new sexual freedom supposedly discovered by the Baby Boomers, the chance was still eight in ten. But then something funny happened: between 1998 and today — a mere eight years — the number of homes containing a married couple fell from six out of seven to one in two. The median age of first marriage has risen to twenty-seven for men and twenty-six for women from its historical low in 1950 of twenty-three and twenty. About one-quarter of Americans, or seventy-five-million people, live alone, and while most Americans do eventually get hitched, today as many couples cohabitate as marry. Singledom — and living in sin — are the new norm.
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While they were dating, our parents and grandparents evaluated each other as potential life partners and helpmates. We, on the other hand, don't know if we will be working the same job, let alone dating the same person, in a year. If the traditional incentive for a long-term relationship — that is, building a shared life together — is a pipe dream, why commit? As NYU sociologist Richard Sennett wrote in his 1998 book The Corrosion of Character, our society's clockwork practice of treating people like oranges — eating the pulp and throwing away the peel, to paraphrase Willy Loman — has led to a general decline in long-term thinking. Much like corporations acquire smaller companies solely to bolster their own stock prices, we've taken to pursuing relationships based on short-term goals. Nor is the lot of the married particularly enviable. Despite the prevalent idea that "sharing your feelings" (as my stepmother puts it) is what makes relationships work, economics are still the number-one cause of divorce.
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The whole marketplace of vice so decried by conservatives — internet personal ads, serial monogamy, sex parties, vibrator boutiques, porno chic — may be an appealing alternative to monogamous monotony, but they're a symptom, not a cause, of the decline of marriage. Where a demand exists in a capitalist economy, people are quick to fill it. If, in the end, we decide to act in "defense of marriage," we are going to need a program of paternity and maternity leave, affordable housing, guaranteed health care and social security. In other words, it seems that in the end, true family values are cognate with the "liberal agenda."
Having spent time in the trenches as a soldier in the marriage wars, I can vouch for how economic issues tend to control relationships.
I myself have argued that there needs to be a shift in the way we even look at marriage. The so-called "traditional marriage" advocates mostly seem hung up on having kids together, and how marriages need to stay together "for the sake of the children."
Pardon my language, but that's bullshit. When couples who don't belong together stay together "for the kids" the kids learn how to be a bitter and resentful adult stuck in a loveless relationship. Sometimes, it's simply better for parents to divorce more or less amicably than stay miserably married.
But I digress. My point is that the conservatives who push the "Traditional Marriage" agenda are also pushing the very anti-progressive, anti-fair trade, anti-non-traditional family agendas that are killing the "traditional family." On top of it all, since the "traditional marriage" forces seem to be interested only in producing more kids, at the expense of womens' rights and the entire concept of marrying for love, maybe the "traditional marrigage" needs to be re-thought anyway. The way things are moving, it's going to change whether we want it to or not.
A brief roll call of people in my Lovely Wife's and my circle of friends:
A couple with two kids together, and he's got a third child by a one-night stand he had in his young and impetuous days.
A couple with one child together, she's got another child by a previous marriage, and he's got two from another previous marriage.
A lesbian couple married in Canada, one of whom has a son from a "traditional marriage" that ended after three years of violent abuse on her ex-husband's part.
A boyfriend-girlfriend arrangement, also abusive. She's got two ex-husbands and a grown-up child of her own, and he's got an ex-wife and a son from that marriage.
In fact, in our circle of friends the only couple I can honestly say meets the definition of a "traditional marriage" is my Lovely Wife and myself. We've even successfully met our requirements to advance the species by having kids.
But then, we're hardly traditional when you get to know us.
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