George Skelton of the LA Times opines that “the notion that baby-making is the principal purpose of marriage in 21st century America is plain absurd. Let’s just say that upfront.” Well that’s nice. How does he say that with such confidence?
we all know happily married, childless couples who benefit society without ever propagating. Some can’t produce children. Some choose not to. Some adopt. Some bring cats or dogs into the family. Whatever works. It’s really nobody’s business — least of all the government’s.
They get married for many reasons: companionship, physical attraction, financial protection, to make a commitment. . . . Many even get married, and stay married, because of love.
Just a couple of problems with this:
1. He is confusing the reasons that motivate individuals to choose to get married with the reasons that society needs the institution of marriage in the first place.
2. Not all marriages have children, true enough. But every child has parents. The social purpose of marriage is to attach mothers and fathers to their children and to one another. Which children don’t deserve a mother and a father? By what right do we say that children ordinarily are entitled to have their biological parents be their legal parents be their social parents be their care-giving parents, but that some children are not entitled to that?
3. Child-bearing is logically central to marriage in this sense: in the absence of child-bearing, we wouldn’t need the institution of marriage. Look at it this way. The human species reproduces through sexual reproduction (one male parent, one female parent). Our offspring are dependent for a long time. In the absence of those two biological facts, no human society would have ever come up with the idea of creating a special legal and social status for long-term sexually exclusive partnerships between men and women. As it is however, both those facts are true, and every known society has come up with something like marriage.
Marriage is not simply about health insurance and making people feel good about themselves. Marriage is society’s premier social institution linking the generations to one another.
To go back to our genius from the LA Times: if “the notion that baby-making is the principal purpose of marriage in 21st century America is plain absurd,” does he have another plan for attaching responsibility for children to parents? I mean, a plan that works pretty much automatically, without continual intervention from the state? The things that the family courts are coming up with to deal with the “alternatives to marriage,” are not very encouraging….
