{"id":1563,"date":"2009-02-15T14:16:07","date_gmt":"2009-02-15T22:16:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/secularright.org\/wordpress\/?p=1563"},"modified":"2009-02-19T20:39:53","modified_gmt":"2009-02-20T04:39:53","slug":"marriage-lite","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/marriage-lite\/","title":{"rendered":"Marriage-lite"},"content":{"rendered":"

I happen to think that gay marriage will be a very high-risk social experiment, with consequences that we can\u2019t begin to foresee.\u00a0 But the compromises devised in the hope of placating the modern non-discrimination principle have huge unintended consequences as well.\u00a0 Nearly one-third of all official heterosexual unions in France now are a form of marriage-lite<\/a>, a civil union-type category devised a decade ago for gays.\u00a0 Ninety-two percent of all new so-called Civil Solidarity Pacts (it\u2019s no better in French) last year were entered into by heterosexuals; for every two marriages, one pacte civil de solidarit\u00e9<\/em> is created.\u00a0 The pacts can be dissolved by one party declaring his desire to separate in court; no property or alimony claims\u00a0 are allowed.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

But at the very least, the use of solidarity pacts reflects the modern explosion in personal choice and autonomy\u00a0to which \u00a0Hume recently drew attention<\/a>.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 A possible analogy would be to the replacement of the sclerotic but stable corporatist economy of the 1950s by the agile\u00a0 but high-risk deregulated economy of the 1980s and beyond, as described by David Frum in How We Got Here<\/strong>.<\/p>\n

Maybe societies only select those institutional changes that on average have more benefits than costs.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The problem is, there\u2019s one group that did not assume the risks of the individual autonomy boom.\u00a0 Children are not benefited by the unstable new co-habiting options that adults are devising for themselves.\u00a0 Adults are merely rationalizing their own preferences when they intone that children are better off raised by separated parents than in an unhappy marriage.\u00a0 Hogwash.\u00a0 Most children would far prefer two unhappy married parents to two happier divorced or never-married parents enjoying their new freedom or new spouses.\u00a0 Perhaps eventually, if any expectation that a procreative union is permanent is abolished, children will adjust, but I doubt it.\u00a0 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).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I happen to think that gay marriage will be a very high-risk social experiment, with consequences that we can\u2019t begin to foresee.\u00a0 But the compromises devised in the hope of placating the modern non-discrimination principle have huge unintended consequences as … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":50,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[207,208],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1563"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/50"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1563"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1563\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1568,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1563\/revisions\/1568"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1563"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1563"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1563"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}