Stigmatizing unmarriage

John, if you want your question to be taken seriously, and to invite conversation, try being serious. By putting it like that, you demonstrate that you don't want to talk, only to bloviate. Fine with me -- just don't expect an answer.

John E. has forfeited his right to a response, but I'm interested in the answer, so I'll ask seriously. As a Christian, I'm always skeptical of any statement of the form "We should stigmatize..." because I automatically see Christ lining up on the side of the stigmatized. We cannot be stigmatized away from sin, we can only be redeemed from it. He who would stigmatize brings judgment on himself. "Vengeance is mine, i will repay." Our job is to shine a light and help pick up the pieces. Is it really so wrong of me to think like this?

I'd second John's question if not his approach.

Because once you have the pregnant woman - which is what we're talking about - you also have a completely innocent party in the transaction. I can't figure out how, as a practical matter, you can "stigmatize" the mother without hurting the baby.

What we may for convenience call "the old culture" had no qualms about this, and being illegitimate was a life-long stigma. This undoubtedly discouraged unmarried pregnancies (and increased abortions), but at a certain cost, one I gather you would no longer be willing to pay.

Coates, I come from a non-traditional family - actually, several generations thereof. Both my grandmothers were divorced from husbands who beat them regularly - my mother's father died, and her step-father beat her mother, and her mother divorced him. My father's mother left her husband and never divorced him, but lived the rest of her life with her unmarried sister, raising her two sons, after my grandfather beat my grandmother so badly (she'd had polio and walked with a cane) with her own cane that she was hospitalized.

My parents were set up on a blind date by their respective mothers, who worked together as operators at the telephone company. They met, got pregnant out of wedlock in 1972 shortly after both finished college, and married ('cause of me). They had two more children and an unhappy marriage for a host of reasons, most of them having to do with my mother being gay, but there was plenty to do with my father being a difficult man.

My mother and father seperated when my mother discovered she was gay in the late 70s, and she has been happily partnered with the same woman for 30 years. This woman, now legally my step-mother helped raise my sisters and I. My father remarried and redivorced. My family consisted of grandparents, divorced, one remarried with step-children and step-cousins, another living with my great-aunt. It consisted of grandfathers who had mostly repented of their actions and their new families. It included the extended family of my step-mother, all heterosexual, and extensive aunts, uncles and cousins through them as well as the biological ones. It includes an ex-step family with whom we're still connected, foster siblings who are still siblings, and assorted in and out laws - there is, for example, no formal title existing for the cousin of my lesbian step-mother who adopted a daughter from Vietnam in her 50s and now raises her with her mother. "Aunt", and "cousin" for the daughter, the same age as my eldest son, are sufficient.

I certainly would not propose my family structure as ideal - but I would also note that it began in every case in a sincere attempt at heterosexual marriage. My partially paralyzed, post-polio grandmother didn't leave her husband because she rejected marriage as a model - she longed to be married, but the institution of marriage enabled her husband to abuse her freely, with no protection, and she eventually fled it, and never dared enter that institution again. My other grandmother sought a father for her two children in a man with two children of his own - and then found that she could only escape from him by running. This was in the 1950s, when there was plenty of stigma attached to a woman leaving a marriage, where that disapproval conspired to keep both women imprisoned in violent marriages, their children beaten by their fathers.

The problem I have with the narrative of disapproval is that it transfers approval to institutions that have themselves at times contributed to their own destruction. I have little doubt that my father's multiple divorces can be laid at least partially at the feet of the marriage modelled by his parents. My mother's successful marriage to my step-mother could probably have never been duplicated with any man - had she not found her identity, I wonder what my childhood would have been like, either with a divorced single mother struggling, or with a series of failed step-fathers looking for an attraction my mother could never produce?

That is, the unnuanced version of this story, the one where we approve of marriage and disapprove of deviation often leads us back to the bad old days of traditional marriage - to the ugly things that lay beneath those marriages, to the victimization of women and children (and sometimes men too) in situations they felt they could not escape from. I would assume that humane Christians would feel that people should be able to escape abusive marriages, that men should not have to be married to women who cannot provide sexual satisfaction to them because they are gay. And yet, both my grandparents's marriages and my parents's marriage were a product of precisely the stigmas and societal aprpovals you wish to reinstate - a society that stigmatizes single motherhood, or one that only allows for heterosexual marriage is one that creates, by necessity, unhappiness and victimization along with happiness.

My concern is that the right seems ok with this - these must be statistical outliers, is the answer. And they probably are. I can say conclusively (if anecdotally of course) that my children, in a stable heterosexual marriage, are happier than my sisters and I were in our complex, mixed family. On the other hand, the model I had for a stable and happy marriage was my mother's loving lesbian relationship - along with some extended family traditional ones. To some degree, my happiness as an adult is a product not of valorizing one kind of relationship, but of the values produced in a family that has had to accomodate itself in complex ways to others, to strange and new family structures. In past days, these were frequently necessary because of death and remarriage - these days they have other reasons.

So I'd ask, with John - what kind of stigma do you propose? And are you then prepared to pay the price of that stigma - the price in abusive marriages, and miserable marriages, and people choosing marriage over other interests? I have no doubt that sometimes this would be the better choice. I also have no doubt that sometimes it isn't. You wish to speak in general terms - I'm fine with that, but what percentage of personal suffering is acceptable for societal good? This is a sincere question - I agree, it would be better if more people were married and stayed married. This is an easy thing to say. When we get to specifics, however, are you prepared to deal with a percentage of people who won't be better off? And how would we sell it to them?

Sharon

It is very hard to stimatize folks who respond by laughing at you. The implication is that they would care enough to modify their behavior but if they do not care it is not going make much of a difference.

Well, we could start by not applauding it. Ms. Noonan's memory reminds me of a similar revelation I had. A while back I realized that people use "single parent" as a term of honor. Sure, it is difficult to be a single parent and requires perseverance. As the child of divorce, I understand this to some degree, but it still is a bit odd to hear the perseverance of the parent honored more than the difficulties which the singly parented children experience.

Another memory: A co-worker recently got divorced after kicking the father of her three teenaged daughters out of the house. Other co-workers threw her a party complete with Halmark cards celebrating her liberation. Again, as a child of divorce it is unimaginable that we care more about the liberation of the adult than we do about the abandonment of the children.

Maybe we don't need to stigmatize divorce and unmarried parenthood, but it would be a good start to stop honoring it.

Sharon is asking the right questions. Most important, I think, is the question of how much personal suffering do we need or want to accept for the good of society.

I'd also like to hear more about the specific stigmas being proposed. There are things we could return to, like sending young, unmarried women away to have their babies if they become pregnant. We could shun the parents of these women, for having failed to keep their daughters chaste. We could shun the men who impregnate these women, refuse to give them jobs. Refuse to talk to any of these folks when we see them in the grocery store.

If we don't want to do these kinds of overt things, and we just want to stop applauding, then how will anyone know there is a stigma?

I mean no snarkiness here. I genuinely would like to know what a stigma would look like.

I'd also like to hear folks respond to the questions at the end of Sharon's post.

**You don't help someone deal with the consequences of wrongdoing by pretending that they didn't do wrong in the first place.**

Maybe, Rod, but in your own anecdote of casting stones, Jesus FORGAVE the woman. When you forgive (as Mealworm pointed out), you are inevitably moving away from stigma (Old Testament values) and toward New Testament values. And of course, many see Old Testament family values as hypocrisy, and rightly so.

Now, from a purely social science point of view, at least a case could be made that society is still better off based on such hypocrisy. But just as you say don't deny the sin, don't deny the hypocrisy that led people to rebel from "shotgun marriages" and the like.

I'd love to see your response to Sharon Astyk ...

>>> If you preferred to take a more rationalistic approach, you could point out the reams of social science data, to say nothing of practical wisdom, showing that the institution of marriage is critically important for social stability because of the rearing of children

Might you please cite any of them? I’d honestly like to view them. Two of my family members are single parents. One of them is an adoption agent who simply never wanted to get married. They are raising 4 children between them, all well adjusted and very bright.

That said, I could have just responded with two words; Barack Obama.

Get used to that response whenever generalizing attacks on the validity and strength of single-parent homes are made.

>>> (and please, let's not turn this into yet another interminable thread about same-sex marriage)

But Rod, you do have a tendency, at least in my opinion, to jab at the GLBT community and then act frustrated or baffled when people respond in kind to the points you yourself brought up. Even in this post, directly after asking people not to bring up same-sex marriage, you made a comparative statement of your points to... same-sex marriage.

The American Academy of Paediatrics endorses same-sex marriage and parenting.
- Source 1: http://aappolicy.aappublications.org/cgi/reprint/pediatrics;109/2/339.pdf (Please note the sources in the footnotes.)
- Source 2: http://pediatrics.aappublications.org/cgi/content/full/118/1/349 (With some extremely interesting statics!)

But, hey, I won’t open that can of worms if you don’t.

Honestly, Rod, did you even read TNC's post? No where in any of this line of posts does he argue that one parent households are desirable or to be encouraged. In fact, he goes out of his way to condemn fathers who abandon their kids. But with your blinkers on, all you can see is no marriage=no father. TNC's point is fathers and mothers are important; marriage not so much. Now if you want to argue that the institution of marriage encourages two parent households, then make that argument. And when you do, address why a society that stigmatized divorce produced children who felt that it was better to de-stigmatize divorce than to grow up in homes with parents who were miserable.

One more point, quoted from Peggy Noonan's elegantly written piece:

The old America had a delicate sense of the difference between the general ("We disapprove") and the particular (Let's go help her").

The old America had no such thing. It was perfectly content to stop with the former point and completely ignore the latter.

With respect to homosexuality (an area where I have some small amount of experience), when it came to the particular, its response was to beat the gay out of you and, when that failed, throw you out of the family.

No one really disputes that you can raise a family without traditional institutions like marriage.

Marriage is a tool-- something that makes it easier to love one person and raise children together.

Lots of things are possible without tools, but tools are still good. Tools keep us from needing extraordinary gifts and superhuman effort to reach good results.

I've seen miracles worked with bailing wire and spit. But there's a reason that's not all they sell at Autozone.

Oh, for crying out loud:

" . . . address why a society that stigmatized divorce produced children who felt that it was better to de-stigmatize divorce than to grow up in homes with parents who were miserable."

-- Um, no. What we have is *adults* who have convinced themselves -- abetted by the culture of "personal fulfillment" -- that if they're happy, their children will be happy. This commenter appears to believe that little Molly might say, "Mommy, Daddy, even though you have provided me and little Johnny with a financially and emotionally stable two-parent home, I can tell that you are unhappy, that you're faking it. I think it would be better for *all* of us if you two were to split up, start new lives, shuttle me and Johnny between two households, risk financial instability, and begin dating others who might not have your children's best interests at heart (to put it mildly)."

That's the selfish parent's fantasy. See The Unexpected Legacy of Divorce. Except in households where abuse is present, most kids want their parents together. Social science bears this out.

Connie Connie,

Please don't treat abortion and divorce as in any way similar situations.

Divorce is, in many situations, a bad and antisocial thing and contrary to the spirit of Christian love. However, it's not nearly as bad a thing as abortion. Abortion involves an assault not just on morality but on life itself. Society can't 'leave it up to the individuals' when someone's life is at stake.

"please, let's not turn this into yet another interminable thread about same-sex marriage"

Why ever not, Rod? It's the prime example of the kinds of "unmarried" families you do dismiss/stigmatize.

And, we agree with your sentiment that: "the institution of marriage is critically important for social stability because of the rearing of children". Many gay families also have children yet you would deny them that very same "social stability" that you deem so important to the rearing of children. Why? Curious minds want to know.

Franklin, you are so very perceptive...

"The simple issue is not marriage, not an institution. It is what Sharon had (finally) in her same-sex parents. It is what I found with my wife, not so named when our first child was born. It is what people are looking for when they talk about getting married."

"Commitment."

"We have to use that word, because it is the core of the issue. Its subsets are promises made and kept, trust, honesty. In the end, also, that subset called religion is of no consequence unless it is recognized as one of a list of valid motivations for the actual behaviors being discussed."

Snip ...

"Teach commitment, not because its in some holy text, not because of what the neighbors will think, but simply because it is independently a value that is worthy of being taught, promoted, supported and celebrated."

Thank you. You have perfectly described the core, the spirit of my (legal, gay) marriage.

I am reminded of the (in)famous Mike Wallace's comment from the 60s (and never refuted or withdrawn by him since) that gay men did not "nay, can not create stable, committed relationships". Sadly, America bought that false message hook, line and sinker then, and conservatives and the 'religious' "right" seek to promulgate and perpetuate the myth to this day.

Turmarion, I think the objection that many people have is that the focus is in the wrong place. As much as I love the standard nuclear family, I recognize that in certain situations it just plain does not work. So in those situations, should there not be alternatives available that will enable the underlying values that marriage is designed to promote?

I also appreciate the point that it's difficult to police the practices as opposed to the institutions. But I would submit that the old model didn't so much police the practices as paper them over. So long as everything appeared to be fine, then everything was fine. Is such a preoccupation with appearances truly the best way to build a good and just society?

To put it another way, I don't think that so many people would have abandoned the nuclear model in the first place if it was, in fact, working for them. Yes, there are issues of selfishness at work here now, but fundamentally the decision to go down the road we are on was taken precisely because people were being failed by the institution.

And this goes right to the heart of the issue I take with social conservatives: they do stick up for a lot of things that are well worth sticking up for, which makes it hard to argue with them. Who isn't for happy, stable heterosexual nuclear families? But they fundamentally seem to believe "What is good for me is good for everybody." It ain't necessarily so.

Most people understand what happened to the American family over the last half-century along these lines:

History is far older and more instructive than "the last half-century."

The longer story goes like this: Family became clan became tribe, and then over the past 400-500 years tribe gave way to clan, which gave way to extended family, which gave way to nuclear family, which gave way to individual.

The major advances of Western civilization since 1700 have depended upon this devolution from tribe to individual.

The Americas, and the USA especially, lights the way down this path. We are inhabited by immigrants who were seeking better than what their tribes or clans could provide. We celebrate our "rugged individualism" and "self-reliance" and carry on campaigns urging "personal responsibility." We concluded that "self-interest" was the driving force behind all human activity.

The challenge for American conservatives is how to encourage social cohesion in a society that preaches individualism. Stigmatizing unmarriage doesn't seem the best way to achieve that goal.

Bristol.
Palin.

Yeah, Conservatives really, REALLY stigmatized her.

EddieInCA said:

Bristol.
Palin.

Yeah, Conservatives really, REALLY stigmatized her.

Rod actually had a post dealing specifically with this issue here, where his attitude seems to be more or less in line with the Peggy Noonan philosophy cited above: 'sustain the distance between "official" disapproval and "unofficial" succor'.

The point would appear to be that if you fail to live up to the conservative ideal, you can admit your mistakes, do your best to bring yourself in line (as Palin did by deciding to keep her baby and marry her husband) and you will be welcomed back and supported. In other words, Bristol was playing the role of the prodigal son and the conservatives slaughtered the fatted calf when she returned to the fold.

This, to my mind, explains how religious people can do some truly abhorrent and horrific things to people (the ex-gay movement springs to mind) with the best of intentions. Since the mere state of being gay is a fall from grace, it makes perfect sense to destroy gays psychologically in order to bring them into accord with the doctrine.

The unfortunate blind spot is that it never occurs to them that it might have been the doctrine that was wrong (or even not universal) in the first place.

But the reaction is completely logical, if you accept their premises.

the Stupid Chris:

You would have to adopt a pretty imprecise definition of tribalism to find it in 17th century Europe, so your grand historical thesis is just a trifle over generalized.

If the way Rod puts it is correct, women are opting out of marriage. I can't be sure whether this is supposed to be because there are no men out there, or because they aren't satisfied with the men out there. Either way, I want to know why. Why are there no men out there that these women want to marry?

me - There are women of good character, but it's much harder to determine than you imply, and the risks are huge. As long as the legal structures surrounding marriage and family are so heavily-weighted toward women, then it will be an institution that has less appeal to men. The whole "bridezilla" phenomenon makes it seem much worse culturally for men too.

Hymowitz' article is shallow prattle. She thinks the problem is angry, overwhelmed, and sex-obsessed men in the face of a new generation of empowered women. Hogwash.

Rich, actually I thought the Hymowitz article I linked to (not her earlier man-child article that prompted this one) was pretty hard on women. The bottom line is that its just a mess out there. No one is really benefiting from it except, perhaps, purveyors of porn. (I wonder how the porn industry will be affected by the economic down-turn!) My husband and I sometimes grab drinks at a local watering hole and I feel so sorry for the singles there. It's just pathetic; men looking to score, women looking to score, men who would probably like to find someone special, women who would like to find someone rich, women hanging onto men who are worthless, probably violent POS's, men with women who are looking for their next boyfriend/roommate in the crowd, people uncomfortable in their own skins to a one. I'm too young to say with any confidence that things were better at some point in the mythical past, but it would be almost impossible to convince me that they were much worse.

...your grand historical thesis is just a trifle over generalized.

ROFLMAO! You think? All of human history in one line, and you'd expect specificity?

Nonetheless, even in post-Enlightenment Europe in the 1990s we witnessed what were essentially tribal conflicts.

Jon, and others who think that wages are at the bottom of this problem, I'm going to go waaaaaaaaaaay out on a limb and guess that you have minimal actual experience with anyone who has grown up in a low income environment. Declining wages don't help, but they are hardly even responsible on the outer margins for what is going on here. As Emily Yoffe points out, the logic is wacked anyhow: "so you don't make enough money for me to marry you, but I guess we can have kids anyhow?" That doesn't even begin to make sense. It's cultural. It's complicated. In the black community, it's got historical roots that go back to slavery. It's not going to be affected much by wages. As a matter of fact, back in the early 70s, the thing that Patrick Moynihan found so alarming about the sudden spike in illegitimacy among african americans was the fact that it was coinciding with an equally rapid increase in wages and opportunities for black men.

tSC, the conflict in the Balkans was only "essentially tribal" if you are using tribalism in the haziest of ways. Which tribes, exactly? We aren't talking the Tutsis and the Hutus here.

If you are meaning the term in the sense that we refer to Goths or people with tattoos as tribes than your thesis explodes, because we still have those kind of tribes, so I'm assuming that you mjean the term in a more exacting way. How are you defining "tribe" now? When you've defined that,please do tell me, what was Milton's tribe? Boccaccio's? Shakespeare's? Christopher Columbus? Thomas Aquinas? These tribes must have existed and must have names, per your confident assertions.

And why 1700? Those who make a more exacting- and better- argument than yours trace the rise of individualism to the Renaissance, which unfortunately for your claims preceded the 1700's.

Finally, given that this change occurred hundreds of years ago (whether we are dating this change from the Renaissance or your arbitrary 1700), and that societies were able to uphold moral standards alongside individualism for those hundreds of years, why can't conservatives attempt to do the same now?

Maybe you'd prefer to roll on the floor laughing than to answer any of these questions :-)

More than 50 posts and no one has made any suggestions for what specific actions people should take to stigmatize unmarried parents.

I've concluded that there really isn't one that doesn't also punish the children (who, of course, are innocent). Some here, I'm suspecting, really wouldn't mind punishing the children if it advanced their social agenda, but they can hardly say so.

You're not going to get an answer, because people understand perfectly well that you don't want a conversation, you want to yell.
I'm not playing that game, and I'd be surprised if anybody else did either.

Sharon's right: there is no easy answer to any of this. Unwed parenthood ought to be strongly discouraged, because it will wreck society by providing a poor psychological and emotional environment for children to grow up in. People ought to be strongly encouraged to form stable, durable bonds. Marriage is how people have done it since time immemorial. To endure the difficulties of married life and child-raising, most people need the psychological, moral, emotional and social support that marriage as a religious and social institution provides. Society cannot endure without what Philip Rieff called remissions -- "thou shalt nots" that have to be enforced somehow. I think the example of Christ, in which he showed mercy to the woman caught in adultery, but he also insisted that her adultery was morally wrong, and that she should repent of it, is the best model for us to follow. There is no formula that applies to every situation. Children should be brought up, in word and by example, to esteem marriage and despise sexual promiscuity. But we are human beings, and when we fail -- especially when that failure involves the creation of another human life -- our first duty is to mercy. We have to negotiate that somehow.

The answer is not to deny the existence of standards, or to effectively do so by acting as if they don't exist. That is neither wise, truthful or, ultimately, merciful. The rest I have to say about this topic is here.

In fact, why don't you explain to us exactly how you plan to fulfill your duty to stigmatize Mr. Coates. If you think stigmatizing is the right thing to do, why not share your wisdom with us benighted unbelievers?