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The Daily Signal
Like No-Fault
Divorce, Gay Marriage Will Change Our Relationships Culture
Mark Regnerus
September 06, 2015
Advocates of same-sex marriage have often mocked those who assert that
a legal alteration in the very structure of marriage will most
certainly affect the institution itself. Now that the Supreme Court has
imposed same-sex marriage on the entire nation, these competing
hypotheses will play out for all to see.
Same-sex marriage does not merely add access for those couples that
desire it. It also reflects a more significant and comprehensive, if
subtle, shift in the wider relationship “ecosystem.” To borrow from the
lexicon of environmental scholars, such a change will act back upon the
entities from which it sprang. That is what happens when social
structures shift.
Just as no-fault divorce altered the institution of marriage—enshrining
the rights of parents to disband their unions at will and to prevent
the other parent from daily participation in the life of their own
children—altering the very heart of the sexual structure of marriage is
shaking the marriage ecosystem. These changes have led us to balk at
sexual difference and all that it entails, as Pope Francis explained in
his recent encyclical on human ecology.
The costs to the ecosystem are not all immediate, of course, but to
solidify in law the mentality that marriage is no longer rooted in the
physicality of biosexual difference and has nothing essential to do
with the fruit of sexual unions is to set in motion a series of further
shifts that are not easily halted. Just as environmental changes have
ripple effects, the following alterations in marriage are to be
expected.
First, children’s needs will become more easily set aside or redefined.
It is already difficult to speak sensibly of the idea that a child
might need a mother and a father. An altered institution will cater
more carefully to its target consumers—adults—and what they wish for
rather than what children need—communities that encourage and safeguard
their parents’ unions rather than pay them no heed or play neutral in
the name of “fairness.”
Following upon the first shift, it is also clear that interest in
having children will likely recede further. This will not amount to a
wholesale plunge in the birthrate, but the more we perceive marriage as
having nothing to do with children, the more a life without them will
appear compelling.
Finally, the law will take a more central place in family life. It is
ironic, given the call for the state to get out of the bedroom and out
of our marriages, but the increasing complexity of families must be
arbitrated somehow in the wake of weakened norms and traditions.
This list could continue, but it is unfair and untrue to blame all of
this on legal recognition of same-sex marriage. Marriage has been in
the throes of deinstitutionalization for some time. Indeed, legal
same-sex marriage has become possible because of the declining marriage
rate. A weakened institution was easier to alter than a strong one was.
Therein lie the seeds for further change.
Of course same-sex marriage will change the institution: That’s how
social change works. University of Virginia sociologist James Hunter
asserts that culture change such as we are witnessing is a work of
legitimation and delegitimation, of naming one thing normal and right
and its competition inferior, ridiculous, or just plain wrong. Hunter
calls this the power of “legitimate naming,” a move that, when
successful, penetrates the structure of our imagination, the frameworks
for how people think and converse.
The reality of marriage, however, is robust. After the dust settles—and
it may take decades—the longstanding meaning of marriage will
re-emerge, because it is not nearly so subject to social construction
as many claim it is.
Originally published in The Heritage Foundation’s 2015 Index of Culture
and Opportunity.
Read this and other articles at The Daily Signal
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