These are the fragments of the piece that I’m planning to write for the Chicago Tribune’s Plan of Chicago project (yeah, I know, their call for submissions from the general public means the people who head up civic organizations or hold public office or have an academic position get published, and the peons get letters to the editor published, or get their submissions “published” in an online format, but it’s still something more purposeful than blogging, at least):
There was a piece the other day in the Tribune, by Deb Mell (former state legislator, daughter of a powerful alderman, who was recently appointed, in grand Chicago tradition, to take his place as alderman upon his death, and prominent as a lesbian activist), urging readers to support gay marriage, with a theme of “our marriage is just like yours” (she married her partner in Iowa): they go to church together, play with nieces and nephews, support each other in sickness and health, etc. She finishes this way:
And now we want our state to give our union the highest recognition society gives two people who want to build a life together, and that doesn’t go by any other name than marriage.
Is that what marriage is? — the “highest recognition” for two people “building a life together”? “Highest recognition” sounds like advancing to Eagle Scout, or getting a medal of honor — an award for an achievement. Why should the State be honoring people for their relationships? Should we now grant medals to people who’ve stuck together despite a partner’s illness, maybe give little lapel pins to wear?
Now, granted, it’s a reasonable desire for a gay or lesbian couple to wish to be “next of kin” for each other in the simple way that marriage grants, rather than having to have legal arrangements for power of attorney, a will, and whatever else is automatic for a married couple.
But when I read — in Promises I Can Keep, for instance (which I still have to finish my notes on), and elsewhere — that increasingly large numbers of women see no connection between marriage and motherhood, no reason to wait until marriage to have children — well, I can’t help but think that there’s a connection here. Only because marriage has turned into a notion of being all about finding your soulmate and nothing to do with parenting (because who knows when you’ll find your soulmate? or, in poor communities, any half-way responsible man at all), has support for those whose “soul mate” is of the same sex reached the majority.
And when we’ve reached that point, are we at the point of no return? It’s not hard to find people who say that there is indeed no reason why a child needs a mother and a father — two mothers will do nicely, or a mother and a grandmother or uncle or tight-knit neighborhood. And that we’d better get used to our Brave New World (yes, I know, in the real Brave New World, no one had any children, but that’s another post), and make the best of it by providing free child care and European-style Child Benefits.
Now, to be sure, among the middle-class, at least, there’s also the arguement that, a couple generations from now, highly fecund traditionalist Christians will outbreed everyone anyway. But I find that unlikely.
But anyway — there’s another piece to the puzzle. At least in poor communities, there just aren’t enough marriageable men. That’s at least part of the story: what’s the point in waiting ’til you get married to have kids, if you don’t really think you’ll find a man responsible enough to marry. A few bits and pieces of my prior read-through of Promises I Can Keep: these women are more than willing to have kids young, but don’t want to marry until they have financial independence, because they don’t want to be vulnerable to being controlled by their husbands; they don’t fully trust their potential husbands (in contrast to my safe suburban world chock-a-block full of housewives). And they describe their boyfriends as really more like children — not fully adult enough to go out and get, and keep, a job, they’re at best like an older child who can sometimes be expected to help around the house.
There’s another book, which I read a while back and have in mind to re-read: Is Marriage for White People? which discusses the problems black women, of all social classes, have in finding a husband, because many black men are struggling, to put it nicely, and the ones that aren’t are much more open to interracial marriage than black women are, for multiple reasons.
So this gets us to the boys. And it’s a cycle: boys raised by single mothers turn into irresponsible louts, which mean that their girlfriends decide they might as well have kids without being married, because there aren’t any good men, let along any role model married couples (not any young married couples, anyway — there might be those who married later in life), and then another generation of fatherless children is born. How do you break the cycle?
Maybe it’s a gradual process, like this: try to move the average age at first birth upwards among poor girls. It’s not easy to persuade someone to wait until they graduate high school, if at the same time, you give high school-aged moms free daycare. Have we at least gotten rid of the ability of a teen mom to move into subsidized housing on her own? Can we insist that teen moms, being, in fact, not adults, have to live in some kind of “maternity home” where they lose their independence and in general find themselves telling their younger sisters that they regret getting pregnant before reaching age 18? At the same time, we need to fix the boys so that they’re marriageable.
But I type that and I think — it’s a joke! It’s preposterous to tell someone who’s grown up in a world of “baby daddys” and “baby mamas”: Hey, here’s an idea! Why don’t you get married before you have kids! And they look at you and say: “but what does having a baby have to do with getting married? We’re too young to get married, and, besides, I’m waiting for my soulmate!”
So, anyway, you get the picture — I’m trying to take these thoughts and put them into more coherent form, with an answer rather than a dead end.
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