This is really an excellent blog post from the First Things blog. David Lapp dissects one economists’ approach to the decline of marriage among the poor.
While there surely is an economic dimension to marriage, marriage historically has primarily been about bringing children and parents together. So we invented the vacuum cleaner (a standard economic-determinist explanation for why the “household labor” of women is now less valuable than it used to be JRM)—did children then stop needing a mother and father? Sure, women have access to the Pill and work in the marketplace—does that mean the children men and women keep creating suddenly lost the need for married parents? Even if we no longer need our children to be hired hands, women are still bearing children.
He concludes, in effect, that marriage is a social justice issue, but not in the way that advocates of redefining marriage think.
Marriage for the lower classes would provide them and their children, with great social benefits, not readily available in other ways.
consider the norm of bearing children only within marriage. Society says, “Trust us: even though every instinct in your body right now is telling you how wonderful it would be to be a mother and that your boyfriend will be a loving, committed father—trust us when we say that marriage is the institution designed to bind parents to their children.” The norm is meant to protect people—especially women and children—from the fickleness of human nature and to ensure that children have a mother and father. The norm of chastity (now a taboo) does the same. …the acceptance of children outside of marriage comes with a caveat: in this case, the most resourced assure everyone else that all family forms are valid, children are resilient, and can thrive just as well in single-parent families as in married families—and then turn around and admonish their children that they should never, never have children outside of marriage.
There is much more. Read it all here.