Center-left media outlets know they can gin up a couple of curiosity- or hate-based clicks by periodically profiling some new “trend” in the upper-middle-class mating scene.
“Ethical nonmonogamy” has had its day, “polyamory memoirs” get respectful reviews, and major broadcast networks know they can pull in some rubberneckers curious about pairings that go from “Couple to Throuple.”
After all, once society has deconstructed marriage down to the point of meaninglessness, why should we have any compunction about celebrating such creative alternatives to bourgeois fidelity? If Bob and Carol and Ted and Alice want to go all in on creating a modern-day polycule, what difference does that make to us?
The push to unwind traditional social scripts around marriage, fidelity, commitment, and procreation hasn’t just been a question of individual fulfillment, but also has had widespread social consequences.
That’s the argument made by Washington Examiner commentary editor and former Senate staffer Conn Carroll in his new book, “Sex and the Citizen: How the Assault on Marriage Is Destroying Democracy.”
Carroll takes the reader on a globe-trotting tour across the ages, dipping into evolutionary psychology, anthropology, and history to make the case that “monogamous marriage binds men and women into a long-term project of cooperative care for each other and their children,” and that we tinker with that wisdom at our peril.
The casual reader’s mileage may vary on how much academic speculation about the mating habits of primates or our Pleistocene-era ancestors can tell us about the form and structure of what family life should look like today. But Carroll’s dissection of how modern liberals and leftists try to justify their preference for maximum autonomy by appealing to prehistoric biology and postmodern critical theory is worth taking seriously.
And the anthropological excursions are in service of a broader point; namely, that marriage is instituted for the well-being of children, not the two (or more) consenting adults that would enter into it. As former Heritage Foundation scholar (and my current boss) Ryan T. Anderson pointed out in 2013:
“State recognition of marriage protects children by encouraging men and women to commit to each other and take responsibility for their children. While respecting everyone’s liberty, government rightly recognizes, protects, and promotes marriage as the ideal institution for childbearing and childrearing … [yet] in recent decades, marriage has been weakened by a revisionist view that is more about adults’ desires than children’s needs.”
The cultural and legal skirmish that ended in Obergefell v. Hodges was just one form of attempting to redefine marriage around adult companionship, rather than being the institution properly ordered toward the bearing and rearing of children.
Marriage is no longer about how best to order society to support the children male-female romantic partnerships inevitably produce, and is instead about increasingly surpassing the bounds of tradition and biology in the name of autonomy.
And as we are seeing in popular magazines, and will doubtless see in courts, an uncomplicated logic of “love is love” has no inherent guardrails to prevent against ethical monogamy, polyandry or polygyny, or other forms of nonexclusive romantic relationships from being recognized in the same way as traditional marriage.
Some left-wing activists don’t just want to abolish the gender binary when it comes to self-expression. They’d like to see the entire idea of the binary relationship at the heart of parenthood blown up and replaced with one of “chosen family.”
We see this in the push to replace or erase a child’s biological parents on birth certificates, robbing them of not just information about their biological ancestry, but potential information about their genetic predisposition to certain diseases.
Italy’s recent decision to ban international surrogacy for its citizens is a welcome pushback against the mindset that children should be able to be purchased on the open market, rather than the natural result of a loving two-parent household.
Carroll delves into the historical record to argue that the monogamous, conjugal family so many think of as traditional was actually an outgrowth of the distinctive understanding of the human person that Christianity introduced to the Western world.
Perhaps it should come as no surprise, then, that as traditional religious belief begins to decline, so too does the traditional conception of marriage as being oriented toward procreation, permanence, and fidelity.
Now, marriage is just one life path among many, to be undertaken once the participants are materially comfortable, having sown their wild oats, gotten that big promotion, and are ready to throw a big party for their friends and extended family.
Carroll rightly worries that “marriage” is becoming, in the words of Johns Hopkins sociologist Andrew Cherlin, a “capstone” rather than a “cornerstone.”
We’ve hollowed out the economic and social privileges that used to be associated with marriage, which means that it is now predominantly being entered into by those who already have those benefits. That helps explain why the decline in marriage rates have been fastest among adults without a college degree.
Carroll has a proscriptive vision for conservatives: “Marriage doesn’t have to be the new marker of class and privilege. It can be a foundational, egalitarian, and democratizing institution for every American again.”
That will require a shift from the current GOP, which tends to offer lip service in favor of being pro-family without necessarily offering economic and social policy plans up to the task. Making men more marriageable, rewarding marriage over cohabitation, prioritizing an affordability agenda, and more should be at the top of a Republican agenda.
The cultural trends that Carroll traces didn’t happen overnight. Restoring marriage may well take decades, if not longer, but can be accelerated through sound economic policies.
After all, the familiar wreckage he highlights from marriage’s decline—more children raised in unstable homes, depressed rates of economic mobility, higher levels of loneliness and social isolation, rising opioid deaths, falling birth rates—are too important to shrug our shoulders at.
Seeing marriage as something more than simply one life choice among others—that is, more than just serial cohabitation that starts with a blowout party on a Caribbean island somewhere—would go a long way to restoring a popular understanding of family as the cornerstone of a healthy society.
“Sex and the Citizen” is a welcome contribution to these discussions, and Carroll’s point—that marriage has an inevitable social dimension, not just an individual one—is one that more conservatives should understand and apply to debates about how to best to save America in the years ahead.
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