The Social Issue Conservatives Won’t Touch
By David Oatney (12/03/04)
Over the past year, campaigns were launched in several states to pass amendments to state constitutions which prohibited in law homosexual “marriages” which already do not exist in fact.
On November 2nd, the nationwide uproar over the notion that two men or two women should be granted the same legal rights or status as married men and women came to a head, and eleven states voted to protect the institution of marriage from encroachment by a social and cultural movement that threatens to destroy the family unit as the bedrock of American life. Social conservatives should be justly proud that they were able to mobilize even those who voted for John Kerry to vote to protect marriage, as exit polls showed in states such as Ohio on election night. If protection of marriage is an issue that resonates with the public, and conservatives believe, as we say we do, that marriage is worth fighting for, then the right ought to use its new-found political power not merely to save marriage from the gay agenda, but to try and save the American family itself.
Perhaps the least-reported argument in the media which pro-gay forces gave for allowing homosexual marriage was that the social institution itself was on shaky ground. Over half of all marriages end in divorce, some argued, and the same forces that were fighting the idea that homosexuals should be allowed to marry were doing little to combat the high heterosexual divorce rate. It is rare for liberals to attempt to nail conservatives to the wall by debating the right on its own cultural turf, but the impartial and reasoned observer might be forced to admit that this argument holds some serious weight. Conservatives have made all kinds of political noise over the last year about bringing the notion of gay marriage to an end, as well they should, but many conservatives have done little to try and stop the threat posed to the American family by an insanely high divorce rate. In fact, so little is said within conservative circles about the issue of divorce that it may be fair to say that the breakup of existing marriages and families is accepted within conservative political circles, all while the conservative movement attempts to make an issue out of protecting Holy Matrimony.
According to the online edition of “Divorce” magazine (a publication which claims to offer “divorce support”), the number of U.S. marriages that end in divorce was at 50% in 1997, and some sources claim the number is now even higher. Over one million children were involved in divorces that same year, and the figure is steadily climbing. Over 20 million kids live in a home without both parents. These numbers aren’t new to most Americans; and even many on the left agree that the statistics indicate that, from a historical perspective, our culture is in a state of rapid social decline. The left chooses to sit by and does nothing while the culture remains in decline, and cultural liberals often fan the flames of disintegration. Conservatives have fought the culture war bravely and laudably on every issue of concern on the social front, from abortion to gay marriage, but leave the issue of divorce conspicuously off the table.
The conservative movement holds as the cornerstone of its social theory that the traditional family is the building block of society as a whole, and that without the family, the larger society will collapse. If we indeed hold this to be true, it makes little sense that we would defend marriage from homosexuality, but not from easy divorces. Our entire social attitude toward divorce has changed markedly in the last half-century, and even conservatives now find divorce to be socially acceptable, whereas in 1954, a household shattered by divorce was more commonly referred to as a “broken home.” Today, that term is rarely used even by people old enough to have been adults in the 1950’s.
The culture war hangs in the balance more over the issue of divorce than gay marriage, largely because matrimony itself is left meaningless if it is so easily dissolved. Protecting families was one of the prime reasons many proponents of the marriage amendment crusade gave for wanting to define marriage in law. If the defense of the family is at the heart of conservative social policy, conservatives must make the preservation of marriage a major priority.
Many social conservatives claim that the state of Louisiana made great strides in marriage preservation and divorce reform when it passed its Covenant Marriage Law in 2001. (Arkansas and Arizona also have similar laws on the books.) The Covenant Marriage Law doesn’t require that couples enter into the stricter covenant arrangement, however, and covenant marriage is an option, not a legal requirement.
Conservatives need to take a hard look not only at what is being done to win the culture war, but also what is not being done that may lose it. We cannot be a movement that claims to protect families if we fail to take action where possible to keep families together. Such action may mean a re-examination of marriage laws to make married status just difficult enough to obtain in law that the extra effort to get down the aisle may make couples think twice before destroying their family, or it may mean doing away with no-fault divorce laws and making the legal grounds for divorce more difficult to prove in law. Whatever approach is taken, conservatives need to talk about the damage divorce is doing to our society, and the breakdown of marriage needs to become as public an issue as the recent debate over gay marriage. If conservatives continue to ignore the very issue that does more to destroy American families than any other, the culture war may already be lost.
(Printer friendly version) Email: David Oatney
