Not only is cohabitation not good preparation for marriage, it is not a good long-run alternative to marriage. Cohabiting relationships are less stable than marriage, and this instability creates a whole series of problems. Demographers have come up with a new term to describe this situation. They call it “multiple partner fertility.”41

We can get an idea of the magnitude of this problem with one statistic: of all unmarried urban mothers with more than one child, almost 70 percent exhibit multiple partner fertility; that is, they have children by more than one man.42

The children of racial minorities are more likely to be born to unmarried mothers. In 2005, 37 percent of all U.S. children were born to unmarried mothers. This includes 70 percent of African American children, 48 percent of Hispanic children, and 25 percent of non-Hispanic whites.43

Rather than regale the reader with statistics, let me tell the story of a hypothetical young woman named Lucy. Not all of the outcomes that happen to Lucy happen to each and every unmarried mother. Lucy’s story is a composite of the outcomes that are systematically more likely to happen to unmarried women, or to cohabiting women, than to married women. (I have omitted the hazards associated with drugs and alcohol, so as not to cloud the marriage issue.) Telling Lucy’s story illustrates what multiple partner fertility looks like in the lives of ordinary people of modest means.

Lucy has graduated from high school, has a job as a dental assistant, and lives with her boyfriend, Izzy. Lucy becomes pregnant. It isn’t entirely clear whether this is an “accidental” pregnancy. She has been on the Pill, but she missed one or two. (The failure rate for the Pill for low-income, cohabitating women younger than twenty is 48 percent.)44

Lucy is glad to be pregnant. She has always wanted to be a mother. Izzy isn’t so happy. He isn’t ready to be a father. Pregnancy was not part of the deal. He feels cheated. They quarrel frequently, and he sometimes hits her. (Domestic violence is more common in cohabiting couples than in married couples.)45

As her pregnancy proceeds, Lucy becomes less and less interested in sex, and Izzy becomes less and less interested in her. He has sex with a former girlfriend. (Cohabiting couples are more likely to have “secondary sex partners.”)46 He feels entitled, since he isn’t “getting any” from Lucy, and after all, she cheated him by becoming pregnant in the first place. They quarrel some more, and he moves out for a while. By the time baby Anna is born, Izzy has moved back in with Lucy.

Now Lucy isn’t so happy. In fact, she becomes depressed. (The presence of children increases a cohabiting woman’s probability of depression. Children do not affect a married woman’s probability of becoming depressed.)47 Izzy is caught up in the excitement for a while. But the combination of sleep deprivation, a needy infant, and a preoccupied and depressed Lucy are more than Izzy can handle. He moves out for good when Anna is six months old. (Cohabiting relationships are less stable than married relationships.)48 He never offers to contribute support to the care of Anna. (Never-married fathers are much less likely to pay child support than fathers who were once married to the child’s mother.)49 Lucy finds that she can’t handle the demands of her job and the care of her baby by herself. She goes to court to try to get Izzy to pay child support.

The court orders him to pay an amount that is nowhere near enough for Anna’s needs. He does not have a very good job, so Lucy seldom collects even the small amount the court has ordered. (Cohabiting men earn half the income of married men.)50 In the meantime, Izzy does not feel like working at a normal job with a normal payroll, since his wages are garnished for Anna’s care. He works under the table at informal jobs, keeping for himself the little income he makes.

Lucy moves back in with her mother. Everything goes smoothly until Lucy becomes lonely. She becomes involved with Tom, who has a decent job and thinks Lucy is pretty and the baby is cute. Lucy leaves her mom and moves in with Tom.

Lucy becomes pregnant again. Tom becomes less and less tolerant of Anna, who is a toddler by this time, but Tom is very happy when their new baby is a boy. Of course, baby John takes much time and energy from both Anna and Tom. Anna feels neglected, cries a lot, and misbehaves.

Lucy is exhausted. Tom helps her with the new baby, but he is not interested in Anna. Both parents begin to show a preference for little John. (Men spend less time with their partners’ children than with their own biological children. The presence of a stepfather decreases the time a mother spends with her children.)51 Anna’s behavior deteriorates. Lucy and Tom quarrel about Anna’s poor behavior.

One night, Lucy takes baby John and Anna and slips out. She goes back to her mother. Tom is furious. He wants her back, and he wants his son back. Lucy refuses. She gets a court order for child support; he gets a court order for visitation rights. He is trying to be a good father, as he understands it. His visits with his son are anguished. The little boy doesn’t understand what is happening. He wants to go home with his daddy. (Parental divorce increases a boy’s probability of depression, regardless of the quality of parenting. Nothing seems to compensate for the sense of sadness that boys experience at the loss of their fathers from the home.)52

Meanwhile, Lucy finds a new boyfriend, Joe. She, Anna, and Johnny move in with him. You guessed it: she gets pregnant again. The new boyfriend does not like little John, the reminder of Lucy’s past relationship with Tom. One day while Lucy is at work, Joe slaps John. Lucy asks him how Joe got a bruise on his thigh. Joe says he fell. Lucy wants to believe him. The second time she comes home to find a new bruise on Johnny, Joe admits that he slapped him. (Children are more likely to be abused by their mother’s boyfriend than by anyone else.)53 According to one study, children living in a household with an unrelated adult are fifty times more likely to die of inflicted injuries than children living with two biological parents.54

At the same time, Anna’s behavior is deteriorating. She hasn’t seen her own father since infancy. Neither Tom nor Joe has been very interested in Anna. (Children in cohabiting stepparent households are more likely to feel sad and lonely, and have poorer self-control.)55

By this time Anna is in first grade, and she frequently misbehaves in school. Lucy gets a call from the principal, Mr. Knowles. He tells Lucy that he is concerned about Anna. Mr. Knowles thinks Anna needs a father figure, and would benefit from counseling. (Fatherless girls become sexually active earlier than girls who are with their fathers.)56 They also get their periods earlier.57

Lucy gets angry and says there is nothing wrong with her daughter. Her boyfriend Joe is a perfectly fine father figure. In her heart, though, she knows all is not well with Anna. The girl still wets the bed almost every night. Joe complains about the odor, and makes fun of her. Lucy can’t really stand up to him. She doesn’t want to lose him, and she needs his income.

Little Anna is on course for abusing drugs and alcohol, for teen pregnancy, and for a lifetime of multiple partner fertility herself.58 Little Johnny is at a higher risk for violence, delinquency, and drug use.59 If Lucy had married one of those men and stuck with him, her life chances and those of her children would be greatly enhanced. Some of her children might have had the problems associated with stepfamilies, but at least the subsequent children would have the benefit of both parents married to each other. Without marriage, the fathers of Lucy’s children are unlikely to contribute much, if anything, to the care of their children.

One might object that some of these problems are associated with teen pregnancy and poverty. That is partly true. But the deeper truth is that channeling sexual behavior and childbearing through marriage creates wealth rather than dissipates it. Men behave differently when they marry, and especially when they become married fathers.60

One might also object that Lucy’s case of switching from partner to partner is extreme and atypical. But once we jettison permanence and exclusivity as serious social norms, we are on weak ground in trying to say that Lucy shouldn’t have ditched her boyfriends quite so casually. If a husband is an unnecessary accessory to childbearing, why isn’t it okay to have multiple children, each with different fathers? If one divorce without cause is acceptable, why aren’t multiple divorces? In other words, once we’ve discarded Catholic principles, alternative principles are not so obvious.

One might object that women of higher income and education will not face as many and as serious problems as Lucy. Perhaps a more highly educated, wealthier woman could cohabit, raise children, and do just fine.

In some cases, this may prove to be correct. After all, wealthier people have more resources to face all kinds of life challenges than those of lower income. Indeed, every problem of the poor is exacerbated by the failure of marriage.

All references can be found in the book, Women, Sex & the Church: A Case for Catholic Teaching.

Opposition to this traditional view of marriage has increased in recent times. We are told that society should not “privilege” one form of relationship or family over any others. But “privileging” is, by definition, the exact point of the marital institution: the very existence of the institution proclaims that some relationships are more socially significant, more socially productive, and more socially desirable than others. Since the Catholic Church offers one of the richest and most robust teachings about marriage, the Church has faced particularly strong criticism for her teachings.

In the current debate between the traditional view that marriage is Something, and the modern view that marriage is Whatever We Say It Is, the Catholic Church holds firmly to the view that marriage is something in particular.

The Church teaches that marriage is the lifelong, sexually exclusive, sacramental union of one man and one woman, established by the consent of the spouses, characterized by love and a common life, and ordered to the good of the spouses and the procreation and education of children.

In some cases, the Church teaches that the separation of spouses may be legitimate, and even civil divorce can be tolerated. But remarriage (without annulment) is always forbidden. According to Catholic teaching, sexual activity outside of marriage is always wrong. This includes both adultery (sexual relations between a married person and someone other than the spouse) and fornication (sexual relations between unmarried persons). Obviously, then, the Church objects to nonmarital cohabitation, and out-of-wedlock childbearing.

These, it is safe to say, constitute the “hard teachings” of the Catholic Church regarding marriage. Apart from her teaching on contraception, abortion, and possibly the all-male priesthood, no other teaching has caused the Church so much bad publicity and ill-feeling.

Over the past forty years, many women have become convinced that marriage is not in their best interest. Some women believe marriage is unnecessary. Others think that it is or has been harmful to them. The views of women like these, orchestrated, I will argue, by socialist and other secular feminists, have been instrumental to weakening the institution of marriage.

But the weakening of this foundational institution has also harmed women in some distinctive ways. Without a robust culture of marriage, women have been left with the burden of caring for children with far less support from men than would have been conceivable in prior ages.

Married women are happier, healthier, more sexually satisfied, and more financially secure than their unmarried, cohabiting, and divorced counterparts.

Moreover, the alternatives to marriage have been particularly harmful to children, quite apart from the loss of material support from their fathers. Since women on the whole care deeply about the welfare of their children, the negative outcomes to children caused by the decline of marriage must also be counted among the harmful effects on women.

[Excerpted from Dr. Morse's contribution to the book Women, Sex & the Church: A Case for Catholic Teaching.]

The reason for the disconnect is that the ideology surrounding the pill is more significant than the pill itself.

Behind the apparently benign goal of giving people more choices lies a deeper goal: re-creating society. And since this new society is neither appealing nor natural, its advocates are not so eager to call attention to it.

The New Contraceptive World Order holds these tenets: Sex is a sterile recreational activity. “Safe” sex (meaning sex with a condom) has no significant negative consequences. Marriage is not necessary for either sexual activity or childbearing. And unlimited sexual activity is an entitlement for everyone old enough to give meaningful consent.

But there is a serpent in this man-made paradise: All of these tenets are false.

It isn’t true that sex is a sterile activity. Contraception fails — regularly. Even the pill only reduces the probability of pregnancy, but not all the way to zero. Uncommitted sex has plenty of negative consequences that cannot be prevented by contraception. Marriage really is the best place for both sexual activity and childbearing. And, because we have been convinced that unlimited sexual activity is an entitlement, we have sex in relationships that cannot possibly sustain a pregnancy. When the inevitable pregnancies result, we fall back on abortion to continue clinging to our belief in the New Contraceptive World Order.

Thus, the attempt to create this new society cannot succeed.

The New Contraceptive World Order is an artificial creation of the state. It requires continual support and coddling from the state, including ever-increasing efforts to suppress dissent and enforce conformity.

Cheerleaders for this new heaven on earth insist that all doctors be trained in abortions, that all pharmacists prescribe all forms of birth control, that all employers provide contraception and abortion in their health plans. Suppressing the choices of doctors, pharmacists, insurers and employers makes no sense — unless the real goal is to create the new and unnatural society of sterile sex.

Public-interest law firms defending First Amendment rights report that student pro-life groups are subjected to more restrictions on their free-speech rights than virtually any other student groups.

Obviously, restricting free speech in the name of reproductive “freedom” is incoherent. None of this would be necessary if the only purpose of the pill were to give everyone more choices.

This fundamental incoherence is also the underlying cause of the contentiousness of the Supreme Court nomination process. Since this new world cannot sustain itself by the ordinary actions of ordinary people making voluntary decisions, it has to be sustained by the continual applications of force by those in power. This explains why the stakes for seats in the judiciary are so high.

You might think that consistent failures would compel people to reconsider their ideas about sex. But this cannot be left to chance. The propaganda surrounding the pill has been just as revolutionary as the pill itself. Griswold v. Connecticut, allowing married couples to access contraception to reduce the probability of pregnancy, was never enough for the radicals of the sexual revolution.

To bring their dream world into existence, contraception has to be actively promoted. The federal government finances contraception education in public schools. The sexual-revolution radicals become hysterical over the mere mention of abstinence education. Even people who are normally not ideological have become convinced that it is more “realistic” to expect teenagers to use a condom every time than to persuade them to postpone sexual activity in the first place.

As for the great benefits to women supposedly created by contraception, consider this: In the New Contraceptive World Order, women have the freedom to participate in the labor market on the same terms as men with this proviso: We agree to chemically neuter ourselves during our peak reproductive years.

But it never was necessary for women to make the Faustian bargain. The trend toward the increasing participation of women in higher education and the labor force began around the turn of the 20th century — well before the pill, The Feminine Mystique and the National Abortion Rights Action League (NARAL). Women never needed contraception to be free, even according to the crabbed and truncated vision of freedom that claims that acting on impulse is the ultimate expression of human liberty.

The Catholic Church and other advocates of natural society have taken a beating for being hopelessly “out of step” with modern times.

Do not be deceived by this incessant rhetoric.

The New Contraceptive World Order is inhuman, irrational and, ultimately, unsustainable. It is time to insist that our government stop trying to create something that would not make us happy — even if it could be forced into being, which it cannot.

[This article was first published June 28, 2010 by National Catholic Register.com.]

This is the constant refrain of the marriage-redefinition advocates. Drawing a legal distinction, any legal distinction, between same-sex couples and opposite-sex couples is unfair and amounts to ill treatment of the same-sex couples. But does this argument really hold up?

I am reminded of a time in my life when I felt the law was treating me as a second-class citizen.

Back in the late 1980s, my husband and I were confronted with infertility. Powerful feelings of inadequacy and deprivation swept over us, threatening to sweep us away. The world, we felt, had dealt us a raw deal.

It was unfair. Why couldn’t we have a child? We were every bit as worthy as people who conceived naturally and easily. Why were we being cheated?

Going through the process of adoption only intensified the feeling of being less than everyone else. We had to undergo a criminal background check. We had to be “investigated” through a home study. We had to be fingerprinted. Biological parents don’t have to endure these indignities. We felt like second-class citizens.

But then, during one interminable day at the immigration office, it finally occurred to me that all these requirements — so unfair, onerous and offensive — actually weren’t about me at all. We had to jump through all these hoops for the benefit of children, and not just the particular child we would adopt.

We had to go through all these extra steps because it really is a big deal to bring a little boy halfway around the world to give him to someone other than his natural parents.

The legal requirements are in place to protect children who cannot protect themselves. The forms, the fingerprinting, the investigations: These minimal inconveniences really do nothing more than weed out the worst and most obvious of the bad actors among prospective parents. And complying with these rules conveys a tacit but unmistakable message: Giving a child to an unrelated adult is not something to take lightly.

That day in the immigration office, it finally dawned on me that adoption exists to give children the parents they need, not to give adults the children they want. Any benefits to adults are strictly incidental. The basic way children get parents is that they are born to them. Adoption handles the exceptional cases of children whose biological parents cannot take care of them — without undermining the general rule that biology determines parentage.

I resolved to let go of the self-pity as a first act of love for a child I hadn’t even seen yet.

What does this have to do with same-sex “marriage”? The plain fact of the matter is that same-sex couples cannot have children together. Any child born to one of them has another biological parent somewhere outside the couple. Parental rights have to be detached from that person. Parental rights have to be attached to the nonbiological parent within the same-sex couple. These are not insignificant steps. The legal system does not, and should not, automatically compress those steps into one by trying to treat same-sex couples the same way as opposite-sex couples.

Once we think about this from the child’s point of view, we can see that it actually makes more sense to have two different systems: biology for the ordinary case of natural parents and adoption for everyone else. Marriage supports the biological principle in the case of opposite-sex couples. The husband of the mother is presumed to be the father of the child because, more than 90% of the time, he is. But changing the “presumption of paternity” to a “presumption of parenthood” actively undermines the biological principle in the case of same-sex couples.

The “presumption of parenthood” separates the child from his or her natural parent in 100% of the cases of same-sex couples.

So, no, I don’t believe that domestic partnerships make same-sex couples into “second-class citizens.” The differences between marriage and the other legal arrangements are tracking substantial real differences, not mere prejudice.

Likewise, I don’t believe my husband and I are “second-class citizens” because we had to get fingerprinted before adopting our son. I learned to put up with this mild humiliation because I came to see that it serves a greater good: the good of keeping the biological principle intact even while allowing for exceptional situations.

Whatever security same-sex couples may claim for the children they raise can be obtained some other way than same-sex “marriage.” Redefining marriage to be the union of any two persons, instead of the union of a man and a woman, certainly undermines the general principle that biology determines parentage.

We should not allow ourselves to be misled in redefining marriage, “for the sake of the children.”

[This article was originally published at National Catholic Register.com under the title, "Conferral of Parenthood does not a Second Class Parent Make." It is used by permission of the author.]

The claim that the gender of parents doesn’t matter is a crucial argument for same sex marriage advocates. Treating same sex unions like marriage amounts to saying that mothers and fathers are interchangeable. It is a coin toss from a child’s point of view, whether they have two moms, two dads, or one of each. So here is how Judith Stacey and Timothy Biblarz show that “Two Mommies are as Good as Mom and Dad.”

What the Evidence Says

They say that the evidence purportedly showing that children need mothers and fathers doesn’t really prove any such thing. That research conflates five factors that are conceptually distinct: the number of parents, the gender of parents, sexual identity, marital status and “biogenetic relationship to children.” Children with married couple parents have one straight male and one straight female parent who are married to each other and both biologically related to them. To prove that heterosexual marriage is uniquely good for children, and superior to same sex parenting, we really need studies that separate all these factors. So, Stacey and Biblarz gathered 81 studies that compare families in these various dimensions.

But hold it right there: before we enter into this argument, look at what we are being asked to take on faith. The “biogenetic relationship to the child” is a ten dollar phrase meaning that the adults in the couple are actually the parents of the children. We have always taken for granted the idea that kids are entitled to a mom and a dad because a mom and a dad is what it takes to have a “biogenetic” origin, in the first place. By breaking marriage down into its constituent elements, Stacey and Biblarz are asking us to break ourselves and our children, into pieces. The children in my household need not be products of my sexual union with anybody in particular, or even a sexual union at all. The birth parents can be different from the legal parents can be different from the caregiving parents.

And the kids are supposed to be ok with all this.

But put that to one side. Let’s also put to one side the question of whether the interpretative scheme that Stacey and Biblarz construct around the 81 studies they summarize is really the one and only possible interpretation of all that data. It would take another whole article to deconstruct that issue. Instead allow me a few quotes, from “How Does the Gender of Parents Matter?” to illustrate my point that fatherhood itself is at stake in the same sex parenting debate.

• “Two women who choose to parent together provide a ‘double dose of middle-class feminine approach to parenting.’”
• “Women parenting without men scored higher on warmth and quality of interactions with their children than not only fathers, but also mothers who coparent with husbands.”
• “If contemporary mothering and fathering seem to be converging,… research shows that sizable average differences remain that consistently favor women, inside or outside of marriage.”

See what I mean? Men and women are identical, except women are better.

“Gender nonconformity” used to be considered a negative trait, something, which if found, provided an argument against same sex parenting. But listen to Stacey and Biblarz turn “gender flexibility” into a positive trait.

• “Twelve-year-old boys in mother only families (whether lesbian or heterosexual) did not differ from sons raised by a mother and a father on masculinity scales but scored over a standard deviation higher on femininity scales. Thus growing up without a father did not impede masculine development but enabled boys to achieve greater gender flexibility.”
• “If, as we expect, future research replicates the finding that fatherless parenting fosters greater gender flexibility in boys, this represents a potential benefit. Research implies that adults with androgynous gender traits may enjoy social psychological advantages over more gender traditional peers.”

Interchangeable?

The bottom line is not really that mothers and fathers are interchangeable, but that masculinity is a bad thing.

• “Thus, it may not be fatherlessness that expands gender capacities in sons but heterosexual fatherlessness. When gay men, lesbians or heterosexual women parent apart from the influence of heterosexual masculinity, they all seem to do so in comparatively gender-flexible ways that may enable their sons to break free from gender constraints as well.”
• “Parenting by gay men more closely resembles that by mothers than by most married, heterosexual fathers.” Let’s see now. We’ve shown that women are better parents than men. We have shown that gay men parent more like women than like heterosexual men. Therefore, it stands to reason that gay men are better parents than straight men, perhaps even including the child’s own father.

Same sex marriage is being sold to the public as a small change, with “marriage equality” as the only important issue. I believe there is much more at stake in redefining the law and the culture surrounding marriage and parenthood. This article supposedly showing that “kids do fine” with lesbian parents, has proven my point for me. The drive for same sex marriage will marginalize men from the family, and lead to the belief that the only good man is a gay man.

As an older work, Family and Civilization can be a challenging read. But the introduction by Allan Carlson makes the ISI Books edition accessible to the intelligent reader, including many non-academics who have become marriage activists by necessity. The edition would also be good reading for college courses in history or sociology. Carlson helps situate Zimmerman, who opposed the neo-Marxist sociologists of the Chicago School, within the larger stream of twentieth-century family sociology. The Chicago School argued that the American family was losing its functions, with fathers and later mothers leaving the home for outside employment. But while mainstream American sociology applauded this trend, giving it the greatest of modern accolades—“historical inevitability”—Zimmerman denied that there was anything permanent or inevitable about the “shucking off or negation of familistic bonds.” He argued: “The disintegration of the family into contractual and non-institutional forms is so devastating to high cultural society that these atypical forms can last only a short while and will in time have to be corrected. The family reappears by counterrevolution.”

Zimmerman argues that the contractual thinking of the eighteenth-century rationalists channeled the issues in the wrong direction. Political theorists such as Locke and Hume, as well as prominent French and German thinkers, viewed the family as a private agreement between a man and a woman for specific civil functions. This definition constricted the range of issues that these analysts could see clearly enough to take seriously. Once the contractual model is accepted as the basic form of the family, scholars will interpret history as the steady march from non-contractual marriages to contractual marriages, from forced or arranged marriages to love or companionate marriages. Stephanie Coontz is the best-known modern exponent of this view. Things are getting better because they are getting freer, which means more contractual.

Zimmerman escapes this trap by focusing on the sovereignty of the family. He lays out his key analytical questions in the second chapter:

Of the total power in society, how much belongs to the family? Of the total amount of control of action in the society, how much is left for the family? What role does the family play in the total business of society? . . . If we want to marry or break up a family, whom do we consult, the family, the church or the state? If we are in need, to whom do we go, the family or the community? If we violate a rule, who punishes us, the family or the state?

These questions suggest that no necessary reason requires society to “progress” on all fronts from one type of family inexorably to another type of family. He deploys three types of family: the trustee family, the domestic family, and the atomistic family. The domestic family and the atomistic family would correspond roughly to the modern family before and after the sexual revolution. The trustee family is probably the least familiar to modern readers.

The Trustee Family and the Atomistic Family

In the trustee family, “the living individual members are not the family, but mere “trustees” of its blood, rights, property, name and position for their lifetimes.” According to Zimmerman, this family system dominated in Homeric Greece of the ninth century b.c., in Rome from the earliest tribes to the period of the Twelve Tables around 450 b.c., and from the so-called Dark Ages from the sixth to the twelve centuries. The trustee family exercises the most sovereignty of any of the family types. The family is the primary power in society, controlling individual action, punishing transgressions, and providing protection against enemy attack. The concept of the “house” is more powerful than the concept of the “home.” This family type tends be the dominant one in periods when the political authorities are relatively weak. The family keeps order, out of necessity: no one else is doing that job. Individuals in the trustee family do not typically own landed property. Rather, the living members of the family receive the property as a “patrimony” from past generations and hold the property in trust for future generations.

Modern economists might view the trustee family as a family form based on “common property,” but this is an anachronistic interpretation. The “tragedy of the commons,” in which no one takes care of commonly owned resources, does not occur in societies dominated by the trustee family. That tragedy develops only in situations in which a) the state hold the exclusive or dominant power to enforce property rights and b) people view themselves as individual agents rather than as part of an infinitely-lived family, with powers of its own. Neither condition appears in the trustee family, which claims immense non-state power to enforce norms of behavior internally amongst its members and externally against its enemies.

The trustee family is simply the strongest social entity in its time, stronger than both the state and the individual. This is why the trustee family is almost incomprehensible to Americans today, in an era of hugely powerful government and fiercely independent individuals. In contrast, the atomistic family holds that sovereignty lies with the individual, as against the family. But society pays a price for this freedom from family bonds. The very idea of liberty itself changes, according to Zimmerman:

The individual is left more and more alone to do as he wishes. At first the freedom becomes an incentive to economic gain. . . . But sooner or later the meaning of this freedom changes. The individual, having no guiding moral principles, changes the meaning of freedom from opportunity to license. Having no internal or external guides to discipline him, he becomes a gambler with life, always seeking greener pastures. When he comes to inevitable difficulty, he is alone in his misery. He wishes to pass his difficulties and his misery on to others. Consequently, he continually helps build up institutions to “remedy” his misery. He willingly follows any prophet (and they are mostly false ones) who comes along with a sure-cure nostrum for the diseases of the social system.

Hence, the atomistic family and the powerful central government tend to co-exist. This could have been written in 2010 instead of in 1947.

Moderation of the Domestic Family

Between the extremes of the trustee and atomistic family models lies the moderation of the domestic family, such as that of the American family of the 1950s. Here, Zimmerman’s reasoning provides helpful background to defenders of the family that is today deemed “traditional.” He claims the domestic family “satisfies the natural desires for freedom from family bonds and for individualism, yet it also preserves sufficient social structure to enable the state or body politic to depend upon it as an aid in government.” Zimmerman credits the Catholic Church with the rise of the domestic family in the Middle Ages. The Church attempted to moderate the more barbaric features of the trustee family system, while preventing people from lapsing back into the decadent atomistic family of the late Roman Empire.

The Church strongly objected to intermarriage among cousins and closer relatives. This was a direct blow against the barbarian trustee family, which used intermarriage to strengthen the clan. The Church loosened the power of the family to control the marriage choices of its members. Marriage was a union of equals, by mutual consent of the parties, not of their parents. The Church insisted that quarrels between families were to be heard by public assemblies, not settled by blood feuds and vengeance. The Church restricted divorce, which was characteristic of the late Roman atomistic family, and “repudiation,” the barbarian trustee-family version of divorce.

The Church also stood strongly against abortion, infanticide, and the practice of exposing unwanted infants to the elements. Both the late Roman Empire and the barbarians permitted parents to reject infants, arguing that they were not social beings unless their parents accepted them into the family. Against both the barbarian trustee and Roman atomistic family systems, the Church introduced the idea that children are automatically social beings, the children of their mother and her husband, and could not be rejected. Most significantly, the Church celebrated the bearing and raising of children. As Zimmerman observes: “The family gives more and requires more of the individual than do other social organizations.” The Church’s spiritual incentives motivated people to undertake the material sacrifices necessarily involved in the bearing and rearing of children.

Modern Culture Wars

Zimmerman’s understanding of the transition from the trustee family to the domestic family corrects modern misconceptions about the evolution of the family. But his analysis of the transition between the domestic family and the atomistic family is particularly relevant to the current “culture wars” and leads naturally to The War between the State and the Family. In this book, Patricia Morgan argues that the movement toward individualism in the family was not an inevitable result of impersonal social forces, but rather the direct result of specific policies enacted by specific people. Zimmerman shows why this happens, not only in the United Kingdom of the twentieth century but also in post-Revolutionary France and in many other historical settings.

Zimmerman saw that not everyone in society actually participates in familism, meaning the social system that brings forth the next generation: “Reproduction, even in the most virile times of a society, is limited to a small segment of the living population.” He estimates that before World War Two, only about one-third of the wives were producing more than three-quarters of the children. Men and women do not necessarily understand and respect the demands of the family, just because they grew up in one:

The great and revealing experiences of familism come primarily after adulthood. The child has gone through most of the basic experiences of familism before he has even a faint idea of their real meaning. He understands only the pleasurable and receiving aspects of the family system and few or none of the sacrificial (pleasurable in a different sense) and giving aspects of the family.

Likewise, if the elites of society do not participate in familism, they will create institutions that encourage others to do the same. Everything from the design of houses, the durability of children’s toys, and the dynamics of the labor market become geared toward those with few or no children. For families to sustain themselves becomes progressively more difficult. More and more people abandon the effort, and the society stagnates demographically. Society doesn’t immediately dissolve, notes Zimmerman, because “the backward, rural, mountainous, isolated and distant populations or countries still have to be drained of their surplus population and familistic values.” In the meantime, the urban elites have no capacity to even see the problem, much less see the remedy, because they have never actually participated in the domestic family as opposed to the atomistic family.

Red states versus blue states, anyone?

Morgan illustrates this point from the other side of the Atlantic. The government of the United Kingdom has steadily enforced the march towards the atomistic family. The state wishes to show no favoritism toward marriage and no animus toward unmarried mothers. The state does not wish to encourage “income sharing” between adults. The idea that mothers and fathers cooperate in raising their children is alien, or perhaps worse, to Her Majesty’s government. Marriage is penalized in the markets for housing, for child-care options, and in the tax code. Morgan shows that under the influence of policies like these, the proportion of one-person households in the United Kingdom increased from 14 percent in 1961 to 30 percent by 2004. The proportion of out-of-wedlock births rose from 8 percent in 1970 to 42 percent in 2004.

It is sometimes claimed that Americans, like their European peers, have abandoned marriage as part of the Triumphant March of Liberation. But Morgan’s data strongly suggest that people of modest means have done no such thing. Marriage has been taken from them by their “betters.” As industrial societies continue their race toward greater individualism, fewer people have the vision to even see the problem, much less the solution. Yet Carle Zimmerman, who would not have been surprised at this, provides a profound and excellent guide to those wishing to restore a culture of familism.

[This article was first published by Family in America.org in their Winter 2009 issue.]

The term “mother” is a natural concept: a mother is the female parent, the woman who gave birth to a child. This word, “mother,” is perfectly intelligible to the whole human race. If we ask, “who is this child’s mother?” the natural answer is, “the woman who gave birth to the child.”

When the mother cannot take care of the child for some reason, Western society has created adoption as a way of helping the child. When a child is adopted, the child receives a new set of parents who have complete parental rights. We don’t let the biological mother keep some rights, and pass out some rights to the adoptive parents. Western law has traditionally done its best to replicate biological parenthood as closely as possible.

In addition to identifying a particular woman as a child’s mother, the law excludes all other women. The nice lady next door, your second grade teacher, no matter how dear they may be, these women are not your mother. The law recognizes one woman, and excludes all others, as mother of the child.

Exclusive Parental rights Make Sense

As a woman who has given birth to a child, who has been an adoptive mother, and who has been a foster mother, I think I know what I’m talking about here. It really wouldn’t have been good for our son for us to share parental rights with his birth mother in Romania. And we actually did kind of share parental rights with the birth parents and the social workers when we were foster parents. The birth parents did not have custody of their children, but they still had the right to see their children.

We had to take care of the kids on a daily basis, even though we didn’t have parental rights. We got to listen to parents second-guessing our parenting decisions, even parents who were making supervised phone calls from jail. It was a big deal for me to obtain temporary rights to make education decisions. The social workers had the final

say so about health care and other things, even though the social workers didn’t have day to day contact with the children. Sharing parental rights is a mess really, something to be done only in dire circumstances, not something to be made normal or routine.

Adult Desires vs. Child Needs

But the legal system is changing the very idea of motherhood, at the urging of the Sex Law Radicals. This is only in part due to the desires for same sex couples to have children. A whole variety of people would like parental rights, without making commitments to the child’s other natural parent. So motherhood and fatherhood must be redefined to accommodate these adult desires.

Motherhood need not be an exclusive status, they say. The Sex Radicals who authored Beyond Same Sex Marriage believe that “Committed, loving households in which there is more than one conjugal partner,” and “Queer couples who decide to jointly create and raise a child with another queer person or couple, in two households” are just as worthy of public recognition and support as any other households.

Children can have multiple parents, with different sets of rights and responsibilities toward them. Listen to law professor Melanie Jacobs, for instance, in the abstract to her article, “Why Just Two? Disaggregating Traditional Parental Rights and Responsibilities to Recognize Multiple Parent”s:

At present, the establishment of legal parentage entails all of the responsibilities of parentage, such as financial and medical support, and all of the benefits, such as the right to custody and visitation. By delinking and disaggregating all of these rights and responsibilities, more than two individuals may hold the designation of “legal parent” yet each can make different contributions. I suggest that disaggregating parentage should allow for recognition of all the relevant adults in a child’s life, yet not grant equal parental rights to all individuals, unless specifically agreed upon.

Just like the foster kids. Great idea, professor.

Every Child a Foster Child?

By the time the Sex Law Radicals are done redefining marriage and parenthood, every child will be a foster child, attached to adults by the sufferance of the state. Biological parents need not have any particular status relative to other adults who may be hanging around. And the adults who actually do the work of parenting may or may not be able to become the exclusive parents, since thefunction of excluding people from parental status will be irretrievably blurred.

Of course, recognizing the unique status of the woman who gave us birth does not dishonor the many other women whom we celebrate on Mother’s Day. This holiday is first and foremost one of gratitude to the women who have nurtured us in a multitude of ways. People honor their aunts and grandmothers, their big sisters and their godmothers, their stepmothers and their special friends.

We choose whom we honor, based on what they have done for us. Mother’s Day is a celebration of feminine nurturing, in all its forms. This is why it is quite possible for Mother’s Day to have meaning, even if your mother is no longer living, even if you yourself have no children.

But we decide whom to honor, from our own perspective as adults. Allowing the government to disaggregate parenthood is not a service to children, or to human liberty. The government is trying to redefine parenthood, at the urging of the Sex Law Radicals. I don’t believe anyone is going to be happy with the outcome, with the possible exception of the governmental officials who will come to make their livings from redefining and regulating other people’s lives. The decent thing to do is to leave motherhood alone.

I recently participated in a round-table discussion about marriage, freedom, and the state. Most of the participants were libertarians and economists. The default position of virtually everyone in the room was a presumption in favor of redefining marriage as the union of any two persons. Normally, economists and libertarians take pride in tracking the changes in incentives as far through society as possible. Yet on the subject of same-sex marriage, these economists seemed uncharacteristically incurious. They seem to think same sex-marriage will affect only the handful of people who 1) currently identify themselves as gay or lesbian, 2) are partnered, and 3) want to get married. My economist friends do not seem to see that redefining marriage will create changes in the social incentive structure for everyone. If I’m right, the behavior of many millions of people could be in play.

Permitting people to form same-sex unions will not be the last change to the legal landscape. The entire culture, including the coercive apparatus of the state, will be pressed into service to promote same-sex relationships as wholly unexceptional. The ultimate goal of these efforts will be to make the gender of one’s partner a matter of no particular significance, a mere coin toss. Society should not only permit same-sex unions, but it should also have no preference at all for opposite-sex unions. This is an undeniable — and I believe unavoidable — consequence of same-sex marriage. The provincial government of Quebec has already outlined its program for combating homophobia and heteronormativity.

This is significant because it will reduce or even eliminate the stigma attached to forming a same-sex union. Therefore, choosing a partner of the same sex will be a live option for everyone, not just for the 3% of the population that currently defines itself as gay or lesbian. We can safely predict that some women will decide that it is easier, all things considered, to team up with a girlfriend for parenting purposes. Think of it: You could have a child through artificial means and an anonymous donor. You can have the legal rights and benefits of a state-sanctioned relationship with a compatible friend. You can avoid the headaches involved with dealing with a pesky man, who, if actually the child’s father, might have his own opinions about the child’s upbringing. The baby can be entirely your project, with a little help from your friend and an accommodating legal and social environment.

A woman in this situation might very well continue to have sex with men. She could have a stable non-sexual relationship with her female partner and cycle through a series of male sex partners with whom she might or might not have kids. The stability of her non-sexual “marriage” with the girlfriend could allow her to have kids with multiple fathers. Instead of marriage being something that attaches mothers and fathers to their children and to each other, this new form of “marriage” will become the vehicle for “multi-partner fertility,” a family form that is fraught with difficulty and complications.

All the incentives for this behavior are being put into place. It is very curious that the economists are not curious about this.

Notice that I’m not saying that women will choose to become lesbians. I’m saying some women will choose to form same-sex unions, regardless of their sexual orientation. After all, we won’t insist that people prove they are gay. Anyone can choose a partner of either gender for any reason that seems good enough to him or her. In fact, a same-sex union need not be a sexual union at all.

In other words, we create the legal institution of same-sex marriage to protect the interests of gays and lesbians, believing their sexual orientation to be an immutable characteristic. But lots of people can change lots of different aspects of their behavior. Hence, what initially appears to be a small change in the definition of marriage to accommodate a few will become a legal innovation that changes incentives for everyone.

You might say, “So what? Women engage in multi-partner fertility right now. What does same-sex marriage have to do with it?” First, calling this twosome a marriage means that the two of them legally count as parents for the others’ children. The biological father is presumably off the hook for any form of child support. A certain type of man will love this, but the rest of us shouldn’t be so cavalier about it.

Again, you might say, “So what?” Why should the government care about these private decisions? Women and children in this situation might get along just fine, and think of all the conflict we could avoid if we could just get the men out of the family. But please realize what this position entails. Parenthood will be completely individualized, with the mother as sole proprietor and the state as a silent partner. Two women doing parallel parenting will be considered the equivalent of two biological parents working together as a team for the benefit of their common offspring. Society would be tacitly claiming that children need nothing from their fathers, a claim which flies in the face of hundreds of studies about the negative impact of father absence. You can hardly claim that this is “no big deal,” or even a position of state neutrality.

You might also say, “Women aren’t going to do that. They are romantics at heart and still want to get married to a man.” If you take this position, you are probably the kind of person who thought no-fault divorce would only lower the cost of divorce for the handful of people who would get divorced at all. Maybe you thought that legalizing abortion would only change the behavior of the handful of cases of rape and incest.

In other words, the economist in me is saying, “Don’t be naïve.” Incentives matter.

Same-sex marriage will put into motion a whole series of forces. We have no basis for assuming that every link in that sequence of causes and effects is going to be completely benign.

Hence, my puzzlement continues: Isn’t it curious that my economist friends are so incurious? And when, if ever, are we going to have a national conversation about whether we want the kind of society that redefining marriage will bring about?

[This article was first published in The American Thinker January 17, 2010 and is used by permission of the author.]

Two high-profile lawyers are challenging California’s constitutional ban on gay marriage.

California’s high-profile federal lawsuit against Proposition 8, which begins in court on January 11, appears to be about creating a federal case for same sex marriage. But in fact, much more is at stake. Lurking in the shadows of this case is a breathtaking expansion of judicial interference with perfectly valid elections. Whatever your views about Proposition 8, we surely should be able to agree that special interest groups can’t go into court to overturn elections they don’t like.

Ted Olsen and David Boies want to convince the court that the alleged anti-gay bias of Proposition 8 supporters should invalidate the election. But first, they have to find some such bias. This is why Olsen and Boies sought the trial court’s permission to demand confidential campaign documents. They want free reign to rummage around through the Prop 8 campaign’s computers and filing cabinets, looking for evidence of this supposed meanness. The trial judge had ruled that Prop 8 proponents had no First Amendment privilege, and therefore had to hand over all communications among members of the campaign and their contractors.

The Ninth Circuit Court issued a preliminary order against the enforcement of these outrageous demands. While this is a welcome development, it is only a temporary reprieve for the integrity of the electoral process. The Ninth Circuit should completely overrule the trial court.

I happened to know about this because I received a subpoena from Boies’ office. I was a consultant to the Prop 8 campaign. I have not the slightest concern that anyone will find any evidence of hatred hidden in my correspondence. My views are all over the internet. It is the pettiness of Olsen and Boies I find revolting. Out of over US$40 million spent by the Yes on 8 campaign, I was paid a grand total of $10,000. If they can harass little old me, nobody is safe.

But more importantly, people’s motives are completely irrelevant to the validity of an election. Think about Obama’s election. Some people voted for him because, after careful study, they agreed with all of his policy ideas. Others held their noses and voted for him, even though he is not nearly far enough to the left for their liking. Some wanted to see a black man as president. Some no doubt voted for him because they like his wife, or because Oprah told them to. Amongst the millions of people who voted for Obama, were surely some who hate white people and others who have a visceral, irrational hatred of Republicans.

None of this has the slightest relevance to the legality of Obama’s election. The motives of the voters, no matter how venal or exalted, no matter how petty or profound, are completely immaterial. Obama won in a legitimate election, with exactly the same percentage of the vote that Proposition 8 had: 52% to 48%. No court in the land should have the authority to look over the shoulders of campaign managers and voters to see if their motives pass some ideological litmus test.

The motives of the seven million Californians who voted Yes on 8 are irrelevant. The election was about adding 14 words to the California Constitution. The entire state of California knew perfectly well what those words were. The point of the campaign was to discuss the likely impact of those words. Olsen and Boies don’t like what the voters decided. Sorry. Self-government is about abiding by the results of lawful elections, whether you like the outcome or not.

Political professionals of all parties and persuasions should be completely outraged by this judicial foray into mind-reading. The rules you create against your opponent today can be used against you tomorrow. Everyone involved in politics, as a professional, spectator, or voter, has a stake in the outcome of this foray into legally sanctioned harassment. The Ninth Circuit should protect the integrity of the electoral process by completely overturning the trial court’s ruling.

And no one, gay or straight, left or right, Republican or Democrat, should support the Olsen and Boies nonsense.

This article was first printed at Mercatornet.com on January 9, 2010.

Was there some new information in this story?

Nope. It was just another human-interest story in the noble-homosexuals-who-overcome-adversity-and-stay-true-to-themselves template.

Unfortunately for ABC, a closer look at the source of the few facts in this story tells another story — one the “gay rights” lobby and its allies in the media probably would rather you didn’t hear: Same-sex “marriage” is a completely disproportionate response to an overwrought problem.

Most of the feature consisted of interviews with same-sex couples who have raised children together. But among the obvious ploy for sympathy were a few facts, including this eyepopper: “Just under 1% of all couples in the U.S. — or 594,391 people — identify themselves as gay, lesbian or transgender, and about 20% of them are raising children under the age of 18.”

Yes, you read that correctly: Two-tenths of 1% of couples in America are same-sex couples raising children.

One of the most appealing rhetorical questions posed by advocates of same-sex “marriage” is: “Gays and lesbians are already raising children. Why shouldn’t they and their children have the legal protections of marriage?” But these figures, produced by the Williams Institute, a pro-homosexuality think tank, show that a truly tiny percentage of children is at stake. We are being urged to redefine marriage to protect the children of two-tenths of 1% of all the couples in America. And we’re bigots if we resist.

This puts new perspective on demands for same-sex “marriage.” In many states, same-sex couples can use some combination of domestic partnerships or second-party adoption to share legal parenting rights. Why is it bigotry to insist that same-sex couples solve their practical problems with the legal tools already available?

Often, advocates of same-sex “marriage” will respond that it is demeaning that they should be treated differently by the law. But it is no disgrace to say that the law should treat exceptional situations as exceptions. Biology is the ordinary way we assign legal parenting rights. Adoption exists to accommodate the unusual situations in which the biological parents are not available.

Adoptive parents must get fingerprinted and investigated before adoptive children can be placed in their homes. Do we really believe that adoptive parents are second-class citizens?

No. The steps serve to protect the principle that biology is the basic way we assign parenting rights. All other cases are treated as exceptions.

I don’t know how the homosexual-rights lobby gets the major news media to do these unreflective booster articles transparently designed to garner sympathy for same-sex couples and, by extension, for same-sex “marriage.” But this particular puff piece blew up in the face of one major mainstream-media outlet. You’d think the others would notice.

[This article was originally published by NCRegister.com on 11/27/09.]