Secular Right

I happen to think that gay marriage will be a very high-risk social experiment, with consequences that we can’t begin to foresee.  But the compromises devised in the hope of placating the modern non-discrimination principle have huge unintended consequences as well.  Nearly one-third of all official heterosexual unions in France now are a form of marriage-lite, a civil union-type category devised a decade ago for gays.  Ninety-two percent of all new so-called Civil Solidarity Pacts (it’s no better in French) last year were entered into by heterosexuals; for every two marriages, one pacte civil de solidarité is created.  The pacts can be dissolved by one party declaring his desire to separate in court; no property or alimony claims  are allowed.

Obviously one would want to know if the pacts are merely coming on top of the usual marriage rate–and thus are a step up from the nauseatingly cowardly practice of co-habitation–or if they are actually drawing down the marriage rate, before reaching any preliminary conclusions about their effect on marriage.

But at the very least, the use of solidarity pacts reflects the modern explosion in personal choice and autonomy to which  Hume recently drew attention.  It may be that on balance, adults are better off liberated from the weight of tradition and stigma, free to sample from an ever more varied buffet of lifestyle choices, notwithstanding the costs in insecurity and impermanence.  A possible analogy would be to the replacement of the sclerotic but stable corporatist economy of the 1950s by the agile  but high-risk deregulated economy of the 1980s and beyond, as described by David Frum in How We Got Here.

Maybe societies only select those institutional changes that on average have more benefits than costs. 

The problem is, there’s one group that did not assume the risks of the individual autonomy boom.  Children are not benefited by the unstable new co-habiting options that adults are devising for themselves.  Adults are merely rationalizing their own preferences when they intone that children are better off raised by separated parents than in an unhappy marriage.  Hogwash.  Most children would far prefer two unhappy married parents to two happier divorced or never-married parents enjoying their new freedom or new spouses.  Perhaps eventually, if any expectation that a procreative union is permanent is abolished, children will adjust, but I doubt it.  The preview afforded by the black community is not reassuring (though I admit that inner-city Milwaukee is not readily comparable to Lyons or Stockholm).