Just wanted to add one more thing to today’s editorial. One of the arguments made by proponents of same-sex marriage was that making the institutions of marriage inclusive of same-sex couples would “strengthen” marriage in the culture generally. It’s not hard to find voices like Jonathan Rauch saying that same-sex marriage was a “socially conservative” movement about protecting children.
Andrew Sullivan often reminds us that when he started arguing for legal recognition of gay marriage, he was opposed by the majority of the gay community who wanted no part of a patriarchal institution. Even as late as 2000, the argument that homosexuals should be in the radical vanguard of disrupting and dismantling marriage could be published in the Nation.
Proponents of same-sex marriage like Sullivan and Rauch won in the courts, and in a thin slice of the elite. But it looks more like the anti-marriage radicals won the future in the culture.
Marriage is in steady and steep decline, as the rise in unmarried and never-married adults and in the share of out-of-wedlock births continues. Some facts drawn from an article on “the end of marriage in America” in the Hill:
- “70 years ago a large majority of U.S. households, approximately 80 percent, were made up of married couples. In 2020, the proportion of households consisting of married couples fell to 49 percent.”
- “America is also experiencing growing numbers of women and men living alone as well as increasing unmarried cohabitation. In addition to the 15 percent of U.S. adults living alone, no less than one-quarter of those aged 25 to 34 years are living with an unmarried partner.”
- “Whereas in 2006 about half of U.S. adults said it was very important for couples having children together to legally marry, by 2020 that proportion had fallen to 29 percent. Today, the proportion of U.S. births to unmarried mothers is about 40 percent, double the percentage in 1980.”
The decline is so notable and the prospects of reversing it seem so hopeless that New York Times columnist Charles Blow could ask a few years ago, “whether it is fair and right to continue to reward and encourage marriage through taxation and policy when fewer people — disproportionately Black ones — are choosing marriage or finding acceptable partnerships.”
America is retreating from marriage. Of course the radicals imagined that what would replace marriage would be better. But by and large, Americans are replacing it with nothing. Resigning the married life and having fewer children means more people will live without dense networks of kin. They will live atomized lives marked by more and longer periods of intense loneliness and despair.