What’s Wrong with the World

The men signed of the cross of Christ go gaily in the dark.

About

What’s Wrong with the World is dedicated to the defense of what remains of Christendom, the civilization made by the men of the Cross of Christ. Athwart two hostile Powers we stand: the Jihad and Liberalism...read more

Against the retreat from the institution of marriage

This is a follow-up to this post, in which I articulated the important benefits, to the father-child bond in particular, of civil marriage.

Here I want to pick up on the subject, on the basis of a recent exchange in a different venue (specifically, Facebook, so the exchange isn't readily available), and discuss what I see as a rather serious danger to Christians' and other traditionalists' clarity of thought. This is a danger that arises from the move to ditch civil marriage and rely instead on common-law marriage and on private religious ceremonies. Not only would Christians, if they did this, unnecessarily relinquish important legal presumptions concerning fatherhood and parental rights and custody for any children. Not only would they unnecessarily lose other benefits (such as, for example, the marriage exclusion from the federal estate tax). And not only would they downgrade their own marriages in the eyes both of the civil authorities and of the world generally. It now appears to me that they could also become confused about the very nature of marriage itself and could begin not only to downgrade real marriage to the level of a live-in relationship (aka "shacking up") but simultaneously to think of live-in arrangements without true commitment as actually being marriages. This is a very serious matter indeed.

If you can stomach it, take a look at some of the pathetic comments by various women in this thread. The Crescat, a feisty Catholic blogger with whom I don't always agree but whom I almost always enjoy reading, gives this sensible advice in the main post: "If a man says he doesn't want to marry you, believe him." It's pretty obvious. So is, "And take appropriate evasive action." But apparently a lot, and I mean a lot, of women are willing to live with men and, worse, even have children with them, when the men refuse to get married. This is about as dumb as it gets as well as being terribly unfair to the children conceived. Evidently the women hope that the boyfriend will marry them "when he's ready," which could be, y'know, years and years and years, and will probably be never.

It used to be that we just called these arrangements "living together." Or even "shacking up." Or "living with your boyfriend." Etc.

However, I have heard recently of a Christian in a Western-style country, not the United States, who counseled a woman in such a relationship that, unbeknownst to her, she really was married in the eyes of God after all. At this point, I will add the following corollary to the above advice: "If a man says he isn't married to you, believe him." But that is apparently not so obvious to everyone. The argument that they were really married, even though the boyfriend said they weren't and the unhappy woman (and mother of several children by the boyfriend) had previously believed they weren't, went approximately like this:

There is not a necessary connection between civil marriage and true marriage. It is possible to be truly married in the eyes of God even if one isn't civilly married. Some Christians are even considering not getting civilly married as a kind of protest to homosexual 'marriage'. Common law recognizes relationships as marriages if they have remained stable for a particular period of time. The man was de facto committed to the woman because he had stayed with her and their children for a lengthy period of time. Therefore, even though he refused to make a formal, public commitment to her either in a religious or a civil ceremony, they really were married in the eyes of God.

I believe this is very misguided reasoning.

There are, indeed, situations in which couples may be truly married though not civilly married. Desert islands come to mind. Or, more plausibly, in a Muslim country a convert to Christianity might not be allowed to be civilly married to a Christian, on the grounds that the convert was regarded as a Muslim for life under the laws of the country. In such a totalitarian situation, it could be possible for the convert and another Christian to undergo a religious ceremony and take one another "for better for worse, till death do us part" before God and before witnesses and be truly married even though the law would not acknowledge their marriage, because the law is perverse and will not permit their marriage. (I add: They should try really, really hard to get out of that country for the sake of their future children. But that's a prudential point.)

But where civil marriage is easily obtainable and a man simply says that he doesn't want to marry a woman, that's a different matter altogether. In this particular case, the claim was that the man considered marriage to have "religious connotations" (even though of course in the country in question it could have been done in a secular milieu) and was refusing marriage on those grounds. Without hesitation I will say that such an objection on the part of the man does not mean that marriage is impossible for the couple in the way that it is for the convert from Islam. This is just a man who has objections to marriage because of an anti-religious prejudice and a vague feeling that marriage is somehow religious. Very well, then, what can that possibly mean except that he isn't married? After all, he should know!

What does the position I am advocating mean about common-law marriage? It means that, just as civil marriage can come apart from true marriage (that is, just as someone can be civilly married but not truly married), so common-law marriage can come apart from true marriage. I am not saying that there should be no category of common-law marriage. There seem to be sensible, practical reasons for such a category to be recognized to some extent in law, though it also makes sense that there are restrictions on it (it isn't enough just to live together for a certain period of time), and it also makes sense that it has disadvantages, such as possible difficulties proving the common-law marriage when it really counts, such as when getting estate tax advantages. (By the way, the couple in the above case as described would not meet the requirements for American common-law marriage, precisely because the "husband" did not regard himself as married!)

In any event, if there is no good reason for a couple not to get civilly married and they simply choose not to (or one member of the couple refuses), this should be a fairly strong prima facie reason for considering them not to be married.

Let's consider this notion of a supposed de facto commitment. Is it really true that a man who stays with a woman for, say, ten years, has children with her, and (let's assume to be very charitable) is sexually faithful to her during that time, is committed to her in the same way and in the same sense as a man who stood up in the presence of witnesses and said, "I do"? Let's ask it a bit differently: Should we assume that he has made a true commitment to the woman? Can we simply "take it" to be true? Is such a so-called "de facto commitment" the same thing as a stated and definite commitment? I say that it is not. The whole point of marriage vows is that you are committing yourself at a particular time to a particular person and making certain promises to that person. (This, by the way, is why prenuptial agreements are frowned on by the Catholic Church. And rightly so.) Commitment isn't a mere matter of hanging around for x period of time and then saying, "Oh, gee, it looks like I sort of am committed to you after all because I've hung around this long and done all of this for you and with you." This would be what we might call the "I've Grown Accustomed to Her Face" view of marriage. In contrast, a real marriage happens objectively at a time. It isn't something that just grows on you subjectively by means of a lengthy set of choices you happen to choose to make, one day at a time.

If the idea that Christians should engage in some kind of protest or boycott of civil marriage is going to lead to muddle-headed ideas, to telling women (like all those in that pathetic comments thread) whose boyfriends won't marry them, "Don't worry. You're actually married in the eyes of God even though he says he won't marry you," then this idea of a boycott is doing a great deal of harm to the clarity of Christian thought on this matter. I suppose one can argue that it needn't cause that particular confusion. One could imagine a "boycotter" saying that this is an insult to his own marriage, because he and his wife stood up before witnesses and made lifelong vows, even though they did not obtain a civil marriage license, whereas obviously the hold-out boyfriend just got the perks of living with his girlfriend while making no such vows. But apparently such confusion is happening in some circles.

I see two understandable routes by which confusion could be happening. First, it's my opinion that those who live in a country where it would be very easy for them to be civilly married but who don't get civilly married because they want to "protest" something don't, in fact, have good enough reason for what they are doing. Therefore their refusal to be civilly married is a very bad idea. (See also my earlier arguments concerning paternal rights.) Whether their misguidedness on this point undermines the metaphysical status of their own marriage is not something I'm prepared to pronounce on, other than to say both that it needn't do so by logical necessity and also that it is a troubling possibility. One thing one can imagine happening, though, is that the acceptance of one set of insufficient reasons for avoiding civil marriage could make one overly sympathetic to a different and even more trivial reason. One might therefore be inclined to see a mere live-in boyfriend and girlfriend as being "like us."

Second, the fact that the "boycott" idea involves substituting a specifically religious ceremony (with no civil connection) for a civilly recognized ceremony could make such people sympathetic to the idea that marriage is inherently religious, which could in turn make them overly sympathetic to the special pleading of the marriage-avoiding boyfriend. "Since I believe that one gets truly married, even without civil marriage, by an explicitly religious ceremony, and since an explicitly religious ceremony is something he's going to object to, maybe it's understandable that he connects marriage so tightly with religion and feels that he has no way to get married since he is not religious. So maybe he's just doing the best he can while being honest." This is, of course, extremely muddled thinking. In particular, it takes us in the direction of saying that non-Christian marriage is always "anything goes." In other words, that the only options are Christian marriage or something intrinsically much more subjective. That has never been the traditional understanding. Non-Christians and Christians both can be married with full, unequivocal commitment, and we should not lower our standards just because someone is not a Christian.

As a general rule, I think Christians need to realize that for us voluntarily and unnecessarily to separate ourselves from the civil institution of marriage is not for us to make some sort of statement or testimony to a higher order. On the contrary: It is for us to downgrade marriage itself in the social order as a whole. It will subjectivize the very meaning of marriage, certainly in the culture at large and very possibly in our own minds as well. This can do no one any good, and it may do a great many people a great deal of harm. Certainly it will do harm to concrete people, including children, insofar as it leads to weaker parental rights. If, as now seems not unlikely, it encourages more women to live with men who have no intention of marrying them in any sense whatsoever and to bear children to these men, it will do untold harm.

So let's put the breaks on a faulty and misguided pietism. Let's not retreat from the institution of marriage and the family.

See related links here and here, and here.

P.S. There is another argument I can see people making against my position which is what I would call the "dog in the manger" argument. On this view, because no-fault divorce is already the case in America, marriage is already badly downgraded, so there is no point in holding on to anything or doing anything or caring. Or something like that. I have confronted this "argument" in a lengthy thread in the past, to the point that I groan with weariness at the thought that it will come up again here. So, here is my brief response, and at that point let's please not waste further bandwidth on this: You don't turn deliberately to destruction of what remains because other people have destroyed. That is madness. Civil marriage as it currently stands does (yes, whether the bitter people want to admit it or not) confer benefits and have value. It makes no sense whatsoever to tear down what remains of that value simply because we do not know how to get society back, right now, immediately, to the yet higher legal standing that marriage used to have. Moreover, just because civil marriage is not a sufficient condition for real marriage (for example, someone can get civilly married while making his apparent vows in bad faith, mentally trashing the whole thing and intending to get divorced whenever he feels like it) it does not follow that it shouldn't be, under normal present circumstances in countries where it is easily possible, a necessary condition. So please do not waste my time by going on about all the people who get civilly married and don't mean it. That doesn't address nor undermine my argument.

Comments (80)

It may be that the people making the "married in the eyes of God" argument are thinking of St. Paul's stance that copulation itself makes a couple "one flesh": that, to quote C.S. Lewis's exegesis of this point, "when a man lies with a woman, there and then, whether they like it or not, a permanent connection is set up between them which can only be either eternally endured or eternally enjoyed".

As for separating from the civil institution of marriage, I agree that this would be a bad idea entailing great sacrifices, but I don't think it's something we should attempt not even to think about, because the plain truth is it is entirely possible that if we don't leave it ourselves we may well get thrown out of it: if the secular State is willing to force the Church out of the adoption business for refusing to place children with same-sex couples, I cannot think they would stop at forcing us out of the marriage business for refusing to hold ceremonies for such couples. When you are aware that a catastrophic displacement is almost certainly coming down the line one way or the other, making plans for how best to adapt and survive to it is seldom a bad idea.

Stephen J., I think there is to some degree a confusion between "forcing, e.g., churches to host homosexual simulacra of marriage" and "forcing Christian couples not to have their marriages civilly recognized."

The former does not entail the latter. Even if, God forbid, the former were to happen, it would by no means follow that Christian couples should not have their own marriages civilly recognized. It might be that churches would have to stop hosting weddings on their premises. In that case, a pastor or priest could still officiate in a private home or in another venue. Moreover, Christian couples still could (and should) obtain a marriage license and the benefits of civil marriage for their children, as they can and do now.

Going back to your first paragraph, whatever St. Paul meant in the passage to which Lewis is alluding, he didn't mean that a man is literally, permanently married in the eyes of God to ever woman with whom he has ever had sexual intercourse. That would mean that not only does God fully endorse polygamy, God _creates_ polygamy, and that every man who has not restricted himself to one woman literally has multiple wives, with many of whom he has completely lost contact. That cannot be correct.

Again, it is another reductio of that view that women have no reason to believe that they are doing wrong by being promiscuous or by having sex with their boyfriends without marriage, for it would follow from that interpretation that they are automatically married to all the men with whom they are having intercourse. This would turn St. Paul's injunction to chastity on its head, providing an argument that unchastity (including living with a man without benefit of marriage) doesn't matter, since the sexual relationship creates a marriage in itself.

This is a fine post. I really don't have much to add.

Some points of amplification.

1. Common law marriages - not all states, of course, recognize these. Also, the term is really something of a misnomer: the common law never recognized as marriages, so far as I can tell, relationships in which people simply lived together as husband and wife. What the common law did recognize, apparently until the Marriage Act of 1753, were secret marriages, ones performed without public banns or official witnesses. But the rule had always been that a marriage required the reciprocal exchange of vows in the present tense communicating an unqualified commitment for the spouses' mutual lives. No vows, no marriage.

2. This Is What Happens Without a Magisterium, Part [whatever I'm on now] - of course there's some Protestant knucklehead saying you can have a "real marriage in the eyes of God" without an exchange of vows. If the knucklehead had looked at 4th Lateran or Trent, he would have seen the basic formula for a marriage: vows, present tense, unqualified lifelong commitment (plus witnesses and a priest or deacon with faculties for Catholics). But because the knucklehead thinks we all fell off a turnip truck last week, he blunders about saying stupid stuff like this. It's what happens.

Another great danger of separating "civil" and "religious" marriage is capitulation to the false idea that the civil law can define marriage any way it wants. Granted that civil law can and should legislate _about_ marriage, it lacks the inherent authority to alter the essence of what marriage _is_. When the law arrogates to itself supposed authority over certain fundamental human realities and freedoms, as in this case, it becomes unjust.

Titus, thanks for those interesting clarifications re. common-law marriage.

Re. your second point: You bring up good information concerning the canon law requirements for marriage. However, I might as well say right now that, as my related links indicate, my post is also directed against Catholics who (now with the rather cryptic apparent concurrence, in one recent paragraph, of no less eminent a Catholic than George Weigel) are thinking that priests should deliberately stop making use of their authority to officiate at marriages recognized by the state. This is the Catholic version of the "boycott" idea and would apparently require Catholic couples either to forgo civil marriage altogether or to get married twice--once before a priest without a marriage license and once before a Justice of the Peace. The Dominican blog post I linked points out that this would amount, in practice, to what is known as "mandatory marriage," which the Catholic church opposes elsewhere. Canon lawyer Peters (with whom I don't always agree but who seems to have a knock-down point here) points out that there is no real way for priests simply to "back out of the marriage business," since the reason that a priest's officiating at a marriage has civil force is that the _state_ recognizes Catholic marriages as having civil stature. And Maggie Gallagher points out the great disadvantages and misguidedness of encouraging Catholics deliberately to forgo civil marriage altogether.

All of this is simply to say that some kind of strange "boycott" idea, in one form or another, seems to be taking hold in some Catholic circles as well. In addition to all the other excellent arguments against this, I would point out that it could encourage the sort of muddle-headed thinking engaged in my my Protestant friend--namely, that it would "upgrade" mere living together in some people's minds. You can well point out from Trent, etc., that that would be contrary to official Catholic teaching, but that doesn't mean that Catholics wouldn't be susceptible to it once they had accepted the idea that it's hunky dory for Catholics to prescind from getting marriage licenses and civil marriages merely as some sort of voluntary "statement."

This Is What Happens Without a Magisterium, Part [whatever I'm on now] - of course there's some Protestant knucklehead saying you can have a "real marriage in the eyes of God" without an exchange of vows. If the knucklehead had looked at 4th Lateran or Trent, he would have seen the basic formula for a marriage: vows, present tense, unqualified lifelong commitment (plus witnesses and a priest or deacon with faculties for Catholics). But because the knucklehead thinks we all fell off a turnip truck last week, he blunders about saying stupid stuff like this. It's what happens.

Try "This is what happens when your Magisterium is corrupted." A Magisterium does in fact exist, though we reactionaries are more apt to call it the Cathedral at this point. (You Catholics seem to have a bit of a Cathedral Gap.)

The reason they're abandoning your Cathedral is because it, too, is hypnotized by feminist doctrine, thus does nothing substantial to stop feminism, and thus nothing substantial to save anything of value. You have done little to nothing to protect the rights of man, most specifically the rights of the husband, the father, and the lover, because it was not popular and you were in no mood for a fight. So now even the men who wish to live as they were married must now stay far away from marriage as an institution for simple reasons of fiscal and legal sanity.

Support and trust the men who do, as they're all you have left and anything resembling your real church is probably going to be next. Those with no powers of social enforcement have no demands on a man's responsibility.

I don't think you need a government officiated document to be truly married. And I think a lot of the "get government out of marriage" crowd are trying to point out.

As it is, there's way too many heterosexuals out there who already state very loudly - a piece of paper does not say I love you any more or less.

Vows are important because they involve witnesses to your intent. Whether it is simply a priest or if you have welcomed family and friends, it is a committment to the community you live in and the union should be held accountable by that community.

Marriage is being usurped by the secular society as being seen as a private event for intimately personal benefit. It is not private, but public. It is not for personal benefit, but for that of any child resulting of the union.

My view, anyway. I'm ok with the church performing marriages without requiring a marriage license.

Not to mention, and I'm sure you all know this, for Catholics it's simply impossible to get married to somebody and not know it. You can't just get married even if your spouse doesn't want to. It doesn't work like that.

Also worth noting: certain Eastern Catholics believe that a Priest is actually NECESSARY for a valid marriage-no "desert island" marriages, in other words.

I agree with Christiana--wasn't the civil marriage invented by the French revolutionists?
And is civil marriage even marriage?. Does it have vows? How could a secular person vow? What would he vow upon?

And is civil marriage even marriage?

Gian, in America, civil marriage is not marriage in any sense that the Christian churches with any biblical backing would recognize. It is easier to dissolve a "civil marriage" here than a privately held corporation because one party can walk into court at the drop of a hat and declare it over and liquidate the holdings.

It would be more interesting if Lydia were to ask "why are men foregoing marriage now?" The answer isn't really because they can get laid without commitment. It's because most men aren't Christians today, and most non-Christian men are surrounded by horror stories of men being raped by vindictive ex-wives. The belief that American women are poor little dears being sexually taken advantage of by commitment phobic boyfriends is popular with only two groups: social conservatives and feminists (ever notice how obsessed, nearly like feminists, social conservatives often are with the "plight of women overseas" these days?). Mainstream men don't buy it anymore.

Ok, I'll get off that soap box for now since that is the only thing I disagree with Lydia on here. The rest of her post being quite accurate.

So now even the men who wish to live as they were married must now stay far away from marriage as an institution for simple reasons of fiscal and legal sanity.

This is why gay marriage isn't our biggest fight on marriage anymore than gays in the military was that important (most of the male veterans I know, are conservatives and believe that women in the military are a far bigger threat to discipline and standards than gay men). Homosexuals are about 2-3% of the population. They are statistically insignificant. While there are violation of conscience issues and issues regarding the well-being of children adopted to them, these are still less serious than the societal effects of our current marriage regime which really isn't civil marriage. A civil marriage that can be so easily ended that it makes dissolving a LLC look like jumping through flaming hoops while wearing weights is not even civil marriage except in name.

There are a lot of aspects of marriage that even most social conservatives don't want to bring back. Chief among them is restoring actual legal authority (one way) of the husband over the wife. They may support bastardizations such as giving two way legal authority (decidedly unbiblical and contrary to over 3,000 years of Western marital practice), but they can't bring themselves to separate completely from modern thought.

A serious platform for restoring civil marriage would have to include:

1. Complete end to no fault divorce.
2. Limit divorce to adultery, abandonment, documented (as in police reports) physical abuse that is criminal in nature and psychological abuse that has at least one credible witness who can testify to a recurring pattern of psychological abuse.
3. Restore the legal authority of the husband to override the majority of his wife's legal decisions.
4. Restore the legal authority of the husband to unilaterally control the household finances, including his wife's wages, except in such cases as a vice habit which a reasonable person would regard as imperiling the family.
5. Provide legal recourse for married men to compel the prosecution of men who cheat with their wives. Additionally, provide that impregnating another man's wife is grounds for the complete asset stripping of the guilty male party on a strict liability basis. Restore the common law doctrine of provocation viz a viz male parties caught in flagrante with another man's wife.
6. Allow a man to abandon his wife with no obligation to her well-being and deny her all marital assets in the event that she has a medically abortion or any abortion without consulting him.

* medically unnecessary abortion.

(I throw that in there as a compromise to be more palatable to people who reject the Catholic view that abortion is in all times and places murder, even in cases like ectopic pregnancies where it could be considered a class of self-defense by reasonable people).

Okay, these always come in in the night, and I'll work through them gradually and sometimes briefly.

First, Dystopia Max, bag the anti-Catholicism. Sheesh, what is it about this blog that it attracts the nutcases, including anti-Catholics.

Christina, I already answered your cliches at some length. I do not know what it is about these threads that makes people not read, or not answer what I said, or talk as if I didn't say it. As far as the cliche that "you don't have to have a government document to be married," I would say that if you just sit around on your derriere and don't get civilly married where you easily could, then you are being extremely unwise, and there is reason to question whether you are truly married. It is ironic to see your reference to having a marriage before witnesses for the sake of any children resulting from the union while at the same time apparently being willfully ignorant about, or not caring about, the need to solidify that in a civilly recognized manner *for the sake of any children resulting from the union*. My old post, which I link in the main post here, goes into some of that if you're interested in more than cliches. If there is no civil marriage, the biological father is legally in approximately the same position as a live-in boyfriend. A civilly married father has default custody of his children. This could be _highly_ relevant if the mother were to die, for example, or be severely disabled. That is not the case for a father who is not civilly married.

Gian, you are committing exactly the error I discussed in my main post: You are essentially saying that secular people can't really make a lifelong vow or commitment, so only a religious marriage is a real marriage. By the way, for what it's worth: I believe you're Catholic. Your church disagrees with you. The marriages of unbelievers are not unreal.

Mike T, I expected to see you in this thread. Please read my P.S. to the main post. You are the person who always wants to tackle any post on defending marriage by saying, again and again and again, that no-fault divorce and feminism are more or less the only issues we should be discussing in this area, and that anyone who tries to discuss anything else is talking about the wrong thing, wasting time, or trying to do something that isn't worth doing. I disagree with you about _that_, and I ask you not to waste my time on and derail this thread the way that you did on the other post. For the record, I *oppose no-fault divorce*. I am a real hardliner on the grounds for divorce and am, to put it mildly, extremely uneasy with remarriage. I'm one of the only Protestants I know who thinks that if a person divorces and remarries without sufficient grounds for the divorce, he shouldn't be having sex with his new wife because they aren't really married! However, I do not agree that if we can't overturn no-fault divorce we might as well not bother discussing anything else concerning the defense of marriage, or we might as well shrug our shoulders about the rate of cohabitation, or we might as well shrug our shoulders about the homosexual agenda, and so forth. Indeed, that attitude that we might as well be hung for a sheep as for a lamb and not care about marriage anymore at all is part of the problem. Whatever else it is, it certainly isn't part of the solution. I debated your destructive metalevel cynicism at some length in the earlier thread, and I see no reason for wearing my fingers and eyes out doing it again in this one. So please, stop.

My first thought was the same as MarcAnthony, that a catholic really has no standing for being married outside of a ceremony recognized by the church. But then I imagine many Protestant branches would have similar requirements. No civil marriage would put the nonreligious in an odd position though.

But civil marriage is a relatively recent innovation, and the world spent millenia without it and didn't lapse into a sort of "anything goes" position regarding marital requirements. Are you saying that the implementation of civil marriage is a Pandora's Box that we can't go back from? Or maybe something more specific to America?

Matt, I think it's questionable as to whether the world really spent millenia without anything like civil marriage. For one thing, whatever civil authorities there were would have had some way of distinguishing those who were married from those who weren't for various civilly relevant reasons, such as inheritance and so forth. Civil marriage is the kind of thing that would have to be invented if it didn't exist, at least in an embryonic form. It could be argued that what is now called "common-law marriage" simply _was_ civil marriage. That is to say, that if various requirements were met, such as a couple's having made promises before at least one witness, having lived together for x number of years, having considered themselves married, and so forth, the law (whatever form the law took) recognized them as married and recognized the children as "children of the union."

Eventually this was codified with marriage licenses into the form we have today in Western countries. This was a fairly natural outgrowth, in an increasingly complex society, of the need to have a clear indicator of who is married and who isn't. (And non-Western countries have their own versions of civilly recognized and unrecognized marriage. Indeed, in a non-Western society, such as a Muslim country, this is more likely to take a repressive form, as in the example I gave in my main post.)

No, I certainly do not consider this specific to America. As you see, my main post was expressing concern about an incident in a country other than America.

Lydia,

I know you oppose no fault divorce. I never implied you didn't. I also never implied that we cannot talk about other issues until that issue is dealt with. What I said is that no fault divorce is simply the most radical redefinition of civil marriage in Western history. It reduced the process of ending a marriage and splitting up a family to walking away and a few court battles over the details. Civil marriage is already a dead institution because no fault divorce implicitly eliminated the distinction between marriage and cohabitation by reducing all rights and authority to privileges contingent upon consent.

The state of civil marriage is far more dire than most social conservatives seem to acknowledge. Problems like cohabitation are the result of the radical redefinition of marriage to conform with feminist theory. You don't ask what incentives make marriage more desirable than cohabitation for men. I think you know that I am right when I say that every right you can claim a married man has is best understood by adding ", until his wife decides otherwise or to leave him" to the statement. That is why I harp on no fault divorce so much. It makes everything we hope to gain out of civil marriage null and void once consent is withdrawn for even the most capricious reasons.

Also, I believe you have opposed gay marriage on the grounds that it is a legal fiction due to the delta between gay relationships and those traits intrinsic to marriage. I would argue that what passes for civil marriage today is a similar legal fiction as it confers no legal authority upon the husband commensurate with being head of household. Thus the man isn't really a husband anymore than a gay man can be a "wife."

Mike, I completely disagree that somehow, because of no-fault divorce, marriage in America is "not real marriage" in _anything like_ the same sense that homosexual simulacra are entirely unreal. And as I've said before, and am determined _not_ to have to repeat over and over again, you are obsessed with the dysfunctional relationship and are therefore apparently incapable of recognizing the workings of civil marriage in the functioning relationship. It's as if someone posed a story problem in math beginning, "Suppose you have five oranges" and you come along saying, "Well, suppose you don't?" It's senseless. Suppose you have a functional, normal, heterosexual civil marriage and the husband has some pressing need to be recognized as the father of his own children and the husband of his wife. E.g. Suppose that his wife and child are in a terrible car accident, his wife is unconscious, and he needs to be able to make healthcare decisions for both of them. Civil marriage provides protection to the husband and to the child and wife in that case. Which is important. I would have no life if I went on listing all the similar circumstances. And guess what: The husband and wife really *can be* married, and it's good for the state to recognize that. Two men really *can't be* married, it's a physical and metaphysical impossibility, and it is an obscenity for the state to pretend that they are. Your obsessions with certain issues are blinding you.

Moreover, I'm really determined that your narrow obsessions not dominate this thread, as they seem to do any time I mention the word "marriage." You've been answered again and again.

The Dominican blog post I linked to above makes the good point that we should be trying to encourage and improve civil marriage in our countries by putting in place such legal options as covenant marriage which cannot be dissolved in a no-fault manner. I would add that this approach is exactly the opposite of an approach that disparages and dismisses civil marriage because of the existence of no-fault divorce. The attempt to get covenant marriage put in place as an option for couples involves recognizing the importance and value of civil marriage and the reality of marriage between a man and a woman. Having recognized all those things, we seek constructively to find ways to make the legal situation more properly recognize and support the metaphysical reality, rather than pretending that it doesn't matter whether there is legal recognition of marriage between a man and a woman or not, or that the legal recognition is somehow so "poisoned" by other factors that it should be abandoned.

A few points.

First, although I really shouldn't feed trolls, Dystopia Max: I'm afraid I haven't the foggiest notion what you are talking about. Your insistence on using non-standard neologisms, a minor tirade about feminism that relates to nothing relevant to my statement or Catholicism, and a link related to an an incorrect summary of the political donations of faculty members at a non-sectarian university wholly impair your post's capacity to communicate an intelligible thought.

Second, Lydia: Yes, there are some Catholics who have advocated "getting the Church out of civil marriage" and "what the state says about marriage isn't really that important." These are, I believe, profoundly wrong-headed ideas that do not reflect the mind of the Church on the topic. First, the two-ceremonies concept is the bastard child of anti-clericalism. I would be rather shocked to hear Weigel endorsing it, as I read an essay he wrote once mocking its use in Iron Curtain Poland. That model requires Catholics to engage in state-mandated (or at least state-sanctioned) lying, by saying "I am not married when I go to the magistrate, and what I do before the magistrate causes me to be married." The second part of the statement is a lie always, and the first part will be a lie in most cases (unless you do your civil ceremony first).

Third, re: marriages more generally. MarcAnthony says that the presence of a priest is required for valid Eastern Christian marriages. This is only partly true. The law of the Latin Church specifies that a marriage is validly entered into by a Catholic only if it is witnessed by a priest or deacon with faculties to witness marriages. (The law provides exceptions for places without appropriate ministers.) So in effect, both Western and Eastern Catholics require the presence of an ordained minister for a valid (actual) marriage. The divide between the East and the West is in who is the minister of the sacrament: the Western belief is that the spouses themselves confect the sacrament, of which the priest/deacon is only a witness. The Eastern belief is that the priest himself confects the sacrament, of which the spouses are merely a necessary part of the matter (actually, I don't know that Eastern sacramental theology involves "matter" and "form").

Fourth, re: "But civil marriage is a relatively recent innovation." That's not really true. What is a recent innovation is civil marriage divorced from canonical marriage. The common law gave civil consequences to the canonical reality of marriages: if the Church says you are married, then the law provides X, Y, and Z in regards to you, your property, and your relations with certain other people. The consequences of wiping out those laws would be large.

Fifth, on civil marriages: I believe persons getting married before a magistrate exchange vows remarkably similar to those that would confect a valid Christian marriage. I have once looked up, but now cannot remember what my research yielded, whether two Christians, neither bound to observe the canonical form, can confect a true, sacramental marriage by exchanging vows before a civil magistrate. I think the answer was that they can, so long as they themselves do not believe themselves to be merely play-acting.

(I throw that in there as a compromise to be more palatable to people who reject the Catholic view that abortion is in all times and places murder, even in cases like ectopic pregnancies where it could be considered a class of self-defense by reasonable people).

Mike T, I'm confused. Are you saying that Catholics can't have an indirect abortion to save the Mother's life in cases of ectopic pregnancy?

This is completely untrue. Look it up-this is always the example used when talking about how to apply the Principle of Double Effect to abortion. It's one of the few cases where a form of indirect abortion is allowed to save the Mother.

Third, re: marriages more generally. MarcAnthony says that the presence of a priest is required for valid Eastern Christian marriages. This is only partly true. The law of the Latin Church specifies that a marriage is validly entered into by a Catholic only if it is witnessed by a priest or deacon with faculties to witness marriages. (The law provides exceptions for places without appropriate ministers.) So in effect, both Western and Eastern Catholics require the presence of an ordained minister for a valid (actual) marriage. The divide between the East and the West is in who is the minister of the sacrament: the Western belief is that the spouses themselves confect the sacrament, of which the priest/deacon is only a witness. The Eastern belief is that the priest himself confects the sacrament, of which the spouses are merely a necessary part of the matter (actually, I don't know that Eastern sacramental theology involves "matter" and "form").

Yes, this is definitely correct. Thanks for specifying. I should gave a "soundbite version."

Lydia,

I don't recall you ever "answering me" anymore than you answered Dalrock when you went off on him at Zippy's. Putting that aside, you consistently avoid analyzing how the changes in marriage laws and social views on marriage have influenced the way men think about marriage. A recent survey of young men and women shows that the value of marriage has declined in eyes of young men considerably (the number of young men who say a successful marriage is a high priority for a successful life is down from about 35% to ~28% over the last decade). There are many good reasons for why so many American men want nothing to do with it, and most of them are closer to self-preservation than hedonistic.

Suppose that his wife and child are in a terrible car accident, his wife is unconscious, and he needs to be able to make healthcare decisions for both of them. Civil marriage provides protection to the husband and to the child and wife in that case. Which is important. I would have no life if I went on listing all the similar circumstances.

Suppose the husband wished to stop his wife from going to Vegas with their joint account and flushing it all down the craps table. Suppose the husband wished to take away their family car's keys because his wife is an alcoholic. Suppose the husband wished to move his family away from a neighborhood that his wife loved, but that was growing dangerous. Suppose the husband wished to deny his wife her request for a new credit card because she is profligate.

The state would answer thusly:

She can blow as many joint funds as she wants, and you can only watch. If she has a license and her name is on the title, you are powerless to stop her; in fact we may regard it as domestic abuse if you try to restrain her from the use of her property. You cannot sell a house with her name on the title without her permission. You cannot stop her from getting as many credit cards as she can get.

Furthermore, in most states the benefits you described can easily be handed over to someone via a simple piece of legal paperwork. The only utility in what you describe there is the automatic default, but by no means is that a true "right." A cohabitating couple could assign each other medical power of attorney.

As I said, aside from presumed paternity and certain legal defaults which can otherwise be given to others including non-spousal partners, civil marriage confers nothing traditionally associated with marriage. A thing which confers almost no characteristics commonly associated with its given title should not be called by that title.

I don't know what you expect, since most of us agree with you that civil marriage is conceptually necessary. If all you want is to focus specifically on the conceptual necessity, why allow comments at all? Hoping that Step2 will show up and offer a different view?

Mike T, I'm confused. Are you saying that Catholics can't have an indirect abortion to save the Mother's life in cases of ectopic pregnancy?

It was my understanding that a direct abortion on an ectopic pregnancy is an act of violence whereas one against the fallopian tube is not. All I remembered was thinking how legalistic it was that both sides thought there was a moral difference (to me it is like saying that shooting a man in a closed room is murder, but blowing up the entire structure that supports the room so it collapses on him isn't murder).

A better analogy would probably be a double wide instead of a room and driving the double wide off a cliff as an analogy to removing the fallopian tube with the embryo still inside and disposing of the fallopian tube. Anyway, that was what I got out of it. I'm not a Catholic, but I respect the Catholic Church's position as it errs on the side of too protective.

You're more or less correct, if that's what you meant. It's the difference between a direct and indirect abortion.

Obviously as a Catholic I have more to say on the subject but as I have no interest in hijacking the thread I'll let the subject drop.

So the general question is a more interesting question now in light of being after the election. Before, gay marriage had won in zero referendums, and there was hope that maybe it wouldn't happen. We saw the polls showing the changes, but maybe the polls were biased for whatever reason. We could credibly make those claims before, but now we can't. IMO, and I'm interested to see if anyone disagrees, the battle for gay marriage is over and we lost. In WA people under 30 went for gay marriage at 2-1 rates, and MD was even more lopsided.

The idea of getting the government out of marriage was always a reaction to this impending defeat, a way of saying no marriage is better than perverted marriage. But if this is a non-option, what is to be done? I ask this in all seriousness. What are we to do now, and more generally what can be done in the case that a single political unit has two different and opposed concepts of what civil marriage should be?

What are we to do now, and more generally what can be done in the case that a single political unit has two different and opposed concepts of what civil marriage should be?

Well, if you are Catholic, you already have your marching orders, even if they are not specific: http://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/congregations/cfaith/documents/rc_con_cfaith_doc_20030731_homosexual-unions_en.html


In those situations where homosexual unions have been legally recognized or have been given the legal status and rights belonging to marriage, clear and emphatic opposition is a duty. One must refrain from any kind of formal cooperation in the enactment or application of such gravely unjust laws and, as far as possible, from material cooperation on the level of their application. In this area, everyone can exercise the right to conscientious objection.

Putting that aside, you consistently avoid analyzing how the changes in marriage laws and social views on marriage have influenced the way men think about marriage.

Mike T, because that is not what this post is about. What the heck is the matter with you? It's like you think everybody always has to talk about what you want to talk about, which is this one thing (at least when the word "marriage" is uttered). I responded again and again and again in the other thread to your attempts to drag all of marriage down because of no-fault, and you just.wouldn't.quit. I call that answering you. I was actually quite patient with you there, but my patience is now wearing thin. You're like an energizer bunny threadjacker with a narrow set of preoccupations. It's just incredible.

Civil marriage is conceptually necessary? Well, yes, that's one part of what I'm saying. Also that it's important and that people should defend it constructively, not say false things about it that essentially tell conservatives that it's not only unimportant but worse than unimportant--positively harmful.

Matt, I agree with Scott W. that we should resist all attempts to force us to consider homosexual unions to be equivalent to marriage. Beginning with the scare quotes, by the way, around the word "marriage" in various phrases involving homosexual couples, which I hereby state that I intend to use until the cows come home.

But beyond that, I utterly repudiate the idea that the institution of an obscene simulacrum of marriage somehow means that the rest of us should abandon marriage. That makes _no_ sense. If some court somewhere called a dolphin a person, would that mean that we should try to get the legal designation of personhood _withdrawn_ from five-year-old human children? As a protest? If part of the question is whether Christian or conservative couples should stop getting married civilly and legally because homosexual couples are receiving that designation, the unequivocal answer is "no." They are the usurpers of both the name and the legal perquisites. It does no one any good and does a great deal of harm, including harm to children who have no choice in the matter, for those who rightly deserve that name and those perquisites to give them up. Heterosexual couples should *of course* continue to get married, to make good marriages, and to be a witness in every possible way to the truth in the face of the lies that are now being promulgated in the public spaces of our land.

Oh, and btw, Mike T.: You cannot "give" your parental rights over your child to someone else by a simple piece of paperwork. Presumptive parental rights in the eyes of the state are no small matter to be blown off in a sentence. They are a big deal.

True, but presumptive paternity is a double edged sword for men who have been cuckolded. Combined with child support laws, it can easily trap men into paying for kids that aren't theirs. In fact it is very difficult for men who are wrongly named to get out of that mess.

I don't see the real value of presumptive paternity today. It is an impediment to finding adultery.

Obviously, Mike T., you and I have very different values for protecting children from legal fatherlessness and protecting the father-child bond in normal, functioning families. Frankly, I find your priorities and your one-track focus on dysfunctional situations to be appalling.

Having established that we have next to zero common ground on the matter of marriage, I propose the following agreement: I, for my part, will never expect or ask you to do a single constructive, helpful thing to uphold or defend marriage. You may take it that none of my posts urging fellow conservatives to those ends are directed toward you as such a conservative. You, for your part, having had many a chance to have your say, will stop taking up bandwidth on my threads telling us again and again how and why you think marriage is worse than worthless.

Deal?

One argument against a civil marriage is that it may be used as a weapon by social workers and divorce courts against the family unit. I am not sure how serious a danger that really is.

Quite the contrary, Anymouse. To the extent that anything can be a protection (and unfortunately social workers and family courts have far too much power), the civil marriage is a protection against that sort of intrusion. This is for precisely the reasons I have been trying to discuss, including in the older post. You see, the presumption of paternity means that the married father is treated as having presumptive custody of his children. This means that in all the areas in which parental authority is relevant, the father's parental rights do not have to be _granted_ by the court, as though he had to adopt his own children, but rather are presumed to exist from the time of the child's birth. In a world in which increasingly Christian and conservative values are frowned on and in which we have reason to believe that adoption will become increasingly difficult for Christian conservatives, it is a harrowing thought to imagine that a father would need to adopt his own children, with the default setting being that they were _not_ his children. When my children were born, of course nothing of the kind was necessary, because my husband and I were married. Had I not been married to the children's father, custody would have been a far more shaky matter, and the only way that he would have had parental rights would be if a) he could bluff his way with any relevant people, such as medical people, schools, etc. or b) if they were _granted_ by a court.

The significance of the difference between a default setting that you are your child's parent and a default setting that you are not your child's parent can hardly be exaggerated. It is of fundamental importance. Children born into non-married unions (that is, not civilly married) are legally speaking fatherless, which creates a more tenuous situation vis a vis state power and intrusion into the family.

Naturally, divorce courts are a _huge_ danger to families and children. But that is because any involvement of the family courts in deciding custody is a huge danger to families and children. A divorce when children are involved brings the state into the life of the family. An intact family, with married parents, avoids that particular intrusion, because custody is in place already. A boyfriend-girlfriend relationship (which is what a couple that is not civilly married are in the eyes of the state) has more of an opportunity for custody problems to arise--for example, if some person who deals with the child, such as a teacher or doctor, does not wish to acknowledge the father's parental rights, or if a grandparent or some other outside relative wishes to challenge the family or custody arrangement.

Let me also mention that the small number of libertarians (and it is very small) who have their heads on straight about these matters have noticed that there is a much higher level of CPS involvement with single mothers than with married mothers. Technically, as good little liberals, the members of CPS are supposed to be just as suspicious of married parents, including husbands, as they are of live-in boyfriends. I'm sure many of them try to live up to this "ideal." But at some level of some of their minds there is apparently some grain of sense. Perhaps they realize even if they can't say it that in point of actual fact live-in boyfriends are statistically more likely to abuse children than married fathers. Unmarried mothers find all sorts of aspects of their lives micromanaged by CPS. "Your son has to have eye surgery to correct that vision problem," "Your mother reported that she isn't getting enough time with the grandkids," and so forth. I am not saying that a determined social worker, acting even on an anonymous tip, could not similarly make life hell for married families. Many have done so and will continue to do so. I am saying that for various reasons it is more likely on average that if you are legally a single mother (which a woman without a civil marriage and with a child is, notwithstanding any religious ceremony), you will have such problems.

I would largely have to side with your opinion given those realities.

I am surprised that Social Workers have not become completely indoctrinated into PC regarding this issue.

Oh, theoretically, they have. Certainly, you can count on their making frivolous accusations against married fathers if given the opportunity. I don't even have a full explanation for what appears to be the higher incidence of CPS involvement with non-married families. It could partly be that non-married families actually are more often abusing their kids! I suspect that part of it is that single mothers are more likely to be surrounded by other people who think of the child as just as much their business as the mother's. For example, I remember a co-worker of mine years ago whose sister had children out of wedlock. One of the kids got an ear infection, and the child's mother wasn't taking her to the doctor fast enough, in my co-worker's opinion. So my co-worker said she'd threatened the sister to call CPS on her if she didn't take the child to the doctor for the ear infection. I was appalled, but it sounded like this was a fairly routine threat from one "loving" sister to another.

Marriage, accepted by everyone as marriage, has all sorts of implications for the way that the people around you think about you and your kids and your relationship to your kids. And it should, frankly.

Having established that we have next to zero common ground on the matter of marriage, I propose the following agreement: I, for my part, will never expect or ask you to do a single constructive, helpful thing to uphold or defend marriage. You may take it that none of my posts urging fellow conservatives to those ends are directed toward you as such a conservative. You, for your part, having had many a chance to have your say, will stop taking up bandwidth on my threads telling us again and again how and why you think marriage is worse than worthless.

Lydia, I have said nothing to you that would give you a legitimate reason to believe I regard marriage as "worse than worthless." In fact, everything I've said to you is that you are incredibly naive about how sick the institution of marriage is in broader society and how radical the changes must be in order to fix it.

If I stay away, and I will try to, it will be on the basis that you have demonstrated that for whatever reason you simply cannot bring to bear your normal sensibilities and intellect on these issues. Your responses to me are as empty, emotional and rhetorical as they were to Dalrock. Every time someone attempts to bring up actual facts about how the system really behaves, you call them "bitter." You know what that sounds like Lydia? When Amanda Marcotte or one of the women at Feministe try to win a fight with a man by claiming he cannot get laid therefore he hates women.

Frankly, your responses on these issues to me and others are disappointing because they're beneath you.

Mike, you just said that the presumption of paternity is a net loss because it does men more harm than good, acts as a way to hide adultery and sock a man for child support, etc. In other words, you think the cons outweigh the pros. That's just one reason for saying that you are speaking of marriage as worse than useless. I could point to comment after comment of yours that has the same trajectory, if I wanted to take the time or to keep on having this thread be about you or about me. My responses to you, not only here but on the older thread, speak for themselves and have often been quite contentful, but I have gotten tired of repeating myself. So far from thinking them "beneath me," I was quite pleased on looking them over the other thread the other night both at my restraint and at the amount of content I put into them. It's really just too bad if you think otherwise.

Perhaps what you're sensing is that I don't think you a particularly good interlocutor on the entire slew of issues surrounding the "bad deal" that some men get in marriage and that therefore I don't "go there" in my marriage threads, which is something you repeatedly try to pressure me to do even if that wasn't what the original post was about. That is certainly true, but that is a sociological fact rather than a logical one. For one thing it would be highly problematic and one-sided to have every post on defending marriage twisted off into a discussion of "how bad marriage is for men how bad marriage is for men how bad marriage is for men." For another, there are people I _would_ discuss those issues with and find the discussion profitable and interesting. I'm sorry to say that I've decided that you aren't one of them and that, moreover, there are enough people around the Internet who have similar and (admittedly) much worse drawbacks in that area and who will be drawn to such threads that they are unfortunately no longer topics that can even be profitably discussed in an open blog thread. At this point my far greater concern than what you think of me is to keep those people as far away from this blog as possible. You are one-sided and frustrating; they are creepy in the extreme. I hope that is clear.

Now enough meta-stuff.

Could a point be reached where the case for abandonment of civil marriage by Christians be reached? Yes, I think in principle it could, and much of the debate here seems to me to reflect whether one accepts that we have reached that point (Mike says yes), or whether there is something remaining which is reformable and worth saving (Lydia says yes).

The day will come, it may be, that the state takes on itself the right actually to declare a couple no longer married and by force to break up families that would just as soon not be broken up. Until such time I think it foolish in the extreme to declare the state's recognition of marriage to be so terrible that we would be better off without it. The problem is precisely weak and fractured civil support for marriage, and I'm also very concerned that well-meaning Christians who push a radically privatized conception of marriage doing their enemies' work.

In particular, it will encourage people to say (at first in the silence of their hearts, and then in conversation with friends, and then in newspaper columns) that "even Christian conservatives say that marriage is just a piece of paper," so what's the problem with shacking up, exactly? I see no way this will strengthen marriage which ought, after all, to be our focus. It is a counsel of despair. People must remember how much harder it will be to rebuild such crucial public institutions if we first allow them to disappear entirely. Or perhaps they no longer see that marriage is a public institution, which for many libertarian-minded people probably is the case.

The day will come, it may be, that the state takes on itself the right actually to declare a couple no longer married and by force to break up families that would just as soon not be broken up.

That would certainly be terrible, but would it make it better not to have been civilly married in the first place, and would it make it better for other couples not to get civilly married in the first place? If the state is going around breaking up families forcibly (which it's already doing, I'm afraid), it can and certainly will do this just as often for couples who have not gotten civil recognition as for couples who have. In fact, it's almost certainly more likely to do so, given the current trajectory of state involvement with single mothers. Generally, the state breaks up families when it alleges abuse or when the state for some other reason doesn't like the way parents are raising their children (e.g., hostility to home schooling). I don't think there is reason to think that the state will do that to married couples more often than to a woman who is, in the eyes of the state, a single mother living with the children's father.

I don't even see a trajectory in that direction, so I don't think it is a matter of "reaching a point where..."

Now, I suppose we can write a sort of dystopian novel in which the state _does_ directly target married couples to take their children and leaves unmarried couples whom it perceives as merely shacking up alone. In that case we would have to ask ourselves whether we would be obligated as Christians to be married in secret and pretend to the world that we were shacking up (while telling our children something different and swearing them to secrecy about the fact that their mom and dad were really married!).

But as you can imagine there are _all kinds_ of issues there of honesty and dishonesty, what that conveys to our children, and so on and so forth.

It seems to me far more likely that the government will target _Christians_ (and home schoolers) for attempted family breakup, and that not being civilly married will, if anything, only give them that much more of an excuse--e.g., because the father doesn't have automatic paternity. Remember the mass child-taking from the FLDS "spiritual marriage" commune. There was no preference there given to the group on the grounds that these extra wives were _not_ civilly married to the men. The child-taking was based on a combination of allegations (true allegations in a number of cases) of sexual abuse combined with an obvious intent to break up a religious enclave.

So it would make more sense to speculate about whether we should privatize our Christianity (in other words, hide it) to avoid being targeted for family breakup. But a lot of questions about "denying Him before men" can be raised about that!

Here's a point that illustrates my last comment: If a woman tells a social worker, a doctor, or a police officer that her husband has hit her, it's possible that the state will attempt to break up the marriage. There are known instances of such things--where social services tells the woman that her children will be taken if she doesn't get a protection order against the man and/or even file for divorce.

However, that's not an argument against civil marriage, because there is every reason to believe that something parallel could have happened had she said that her boyfriend or her common-law husband had hit her. It's just that the divorce part would have been unnecessary.

I hope that is clear.

It is. Though I'm not sure why you are so concerned about those people coming here.

Could a point be reached where the case for abandonment of civil marriage by Christians be reached? Yes, I think in principle it could, and much of the debate here seems to me to reflect whether one accepts that we have reached that point (Mike says yes), or whether there is something remaining which is reformable and worth saving (Lydia says yes).

Sage, I am not trying to make a case for the abandonment of civil marriage. Rather, I have been trying to make a case for why civil marriage in its current implementation is actually a different institution masquerading as marriage due to the wholesale elimination of most of the attributes that normally constitute marriage rights and the ease by which divorce can be had (it can be had now for any reason that it is acceptable to stop dating someone).

Most of what remains is permitted to remain because the utility to women is as high as it is to men in ways that both feminists and social conservatives can agree on. Presumed paternity is useful to feminists because it helps assuage the fears in our promiscuous society that the child is not the husband's. It also creates an environment ripe for pressuring husbands with possibly cheating wives to not seek confirmation at birth that the child is theirs. Feminists defend adultery as part of female autonomy all too often. I believe putting the screws on them is more important than Lydia's concerns about fathers having to declare themselves in the delivery room. This is just part of my general approach to politics: the only way to defeat the left is to cut them off at the knees at every turn. No quarter, no surrender.

. . . it takes us in the direction of saying that non-Christian marriage is always "anything goes." In other words, that the only options are Christian marriage or something intrinsically much more subjective. That has never been the traditional understanding. Non-Christians and Christians both can be married with full, unequivocal commitment, and we should not lower our standards just because someone is not a Christian.


As a general rule, I think Christians need to realize that for us voluntarily and unnecessarily to separate ourselves from the civil institution of marriage is not for us to make some sort of statement or testimony to a higher order.

I agree completely. In recent years I've heard some Christians say how it might be a good thing to declare marriage only a religious matter. I'm always just entirely aghast at such suggestions. My impressions from the few folks I have heard say this is that they are so convinced of the negative and positive assumptions in Lydia's characterizations I quoted above (that the non-religious don't have a real basis for marriage & that it would be some sort of affirmation of Christian sacrament respectively) are so true that it is pointless to argue against it, and I just express some general disagreement about it not being a good idea and change the subject. Really. Where would one start with such a committed idealism? I'm glad Lydia has done it. I suppose I chalked it up to being born into a Christian bubble and not having to think much about it. As someone born into a solid non-Christian family my first reaction to this attitude is how utterly shocking is the first assumption in implying the otherness of the marriage of non-Christians. It strikes me as an extreme form of the sacred-secular dichotomy. I think families who aren't hostile to religion but who aren't religious would recognize it for the abandonment that it is.

Someone should do a Simpson styled comic with a Ned Flanders who believes this and mock the idea for the abomination that it is. Or a dystopian novel. The possibilities are endless.

Thank you, Mark. It's heartening to see someone really get it. :-)

Great discussion, Lydia and all.

Two issues seem important for retaining some value and meaning in marriage. First, what is the value of marriage? Gone are the days when marriage led to an advantaged life and perhaps even guaranteed survival. Government guarantees a basic standard of living that makes marital dependency largely superfluous. It might even bring one into financial disadvantage. Personally, I am completely pro-marriage and find troubling the governmental usurpation of the role of parent or spouse. Those of us who agree here still must set forth a reasonable defense on why marriage should matter, anymore, at all.

I wish I could declare such an advantage overwhelmingly. I believe marriage provides the optimal quality of life and relationship for those so gifted by God. It can be remarkably stable, provide economic advantage, offer children the best nurture, enable the greatest sexual fulfillment, and more. But I have to recognize that these and other suggested advantages are no argument at all to people who are “willing to settle.” They are not interested in the optimum, when good-enough will do, especially when good-enough requires a much smaller investment. And the argument slides more when reaching for a grand marriage puts one at risk of suffering a relational disaster, the disadvantages of which are too terrible to tell.

It certainly must be appealing to refer to much lesser relationships as marriage, when they carry less liability and require less investment. I wish it were not so, but at this politico-cultural state of our nation, how can it be otherwise? Perhaps true marriage, like other fading moments of yesterday’s America, will not be possible until we let the bubble burst and start ministering to the hurting—because right now they do not hurt from vacating true marriage.

Second, whatever such value might be, we have to state clearly what relational forms and mechanisms are essential go securing it. I see definite value in Christian marriage (perhaps even in marriage bound by other religions), and even in a civil marriage—if the relationship is right. This is where we had better know our stuff, and be able to model it and explain it. As marriage becomes a lost art, some of us need to be visible reminders of the full glory and teachers of its lore.

This leads me to demur from the harshly and authoritarian patriarchy offered in above posts as the sort of marriage to which we should return. If I sound feminist, it is only when I perceive the “feminist complaint” is justified, and here it is. To put the wife under the thumb of a husband who holds all the cards of relational power would work only if he were a copy of Jesus. He is not. It would make as much sense to put him under the wife’s thumb (often a better choice). The fallacy in this is replacing wifely submission (a Biblical notion) with husbandly dictatorship. There is between these options a distinction in the mechanism by which a husband gains his authority. Force of law gains it too cheaply and puts it in the hands of many a scoundrel. But a husband of noble character will get all the law (or other power source) could give when his wife, in love, offers it to him. Personally, I am glad that the laws have pulled the power and the punch from husbands, because it drives us to choose between authentic two-way relating and marital failure. The true patriarch is not authoritarian, but a servant-leader driven by love and faithfulness. I’ll take the wild adventure of becoming the leader of a woman who is every bit my equal any day, to the whip, shackles, and other sanctions granted me by law only because I am male.

If a harsh patriarchy was set forth to me as the essence of marriage, I just might settle for something less too.

John, can you explain a bit more about what you mean concerning people who are willing to settle for less? I'm not sure I understand which people you have in mind. Are you thinking of people who do marry, but who marry someone less than ideal? Or are you thinking of people who marry with mental reservations, intending to divorce if it "doesn't work out"? Or perhaps are you thinking of people who settle for living together rather than getting married at all? I just wasn't sure that I followed that part of your comment.

As to the last group (those who live together), one thing I would like to see such people realize, whether Christian or not, is the injustice to children conceived under those circumstances. Jennifer Roback Morse has a number of good columns concerning the fact that non-marital models of society have no good place for children, and she's quite right.

Lest you were in any doubt, John, I do want you to understand that I do not endorse what has been said by someone else above concerning a male-centric model of marriage. The only reason that I have tried to avoid addressing it directly is because, as you can see in the thread, the whole "war of the sexes" issue is one that I'm attempting to avoid, precisely because I would prefer not to dialogue with a particular group of people who advocate the "harsh patriarchy" you mention. We've had trouble with a number of such commenters here at W4 recently; some of their comments have been vulgar and have had to be deleted. Some comments have been unbelievably bizarre. It's a group I've been trying hard to avoid having any dealings with, which is why I haven't addressed those aspects of Mike T's comments more directly.

Interesting. "Harsh patriarchy" based marriage thrived from the early days of Greece to the 19th century in the West. Then we switched gradually to John's model and marriage suddenly started rapidly (rapidly in the sense of undoing thousands of years of strength in a few generations) collapsing. It's almost like there is a lesson in there about the efficacy of different approaches or something.

B t dubs... John comes off as precisely the sort of Christian I referenced in Jeff's followup post who is embarrassed of the traditional interpretations of Ephesians 5.

John has some interesting observations. The two major issues I can pick out of what he said that strike me revolve around the questions 1) what is a proper understanding of "headship"; 2) what is the relationship between a properly functioning Christian family and the wider world.

I think the two are very closely related, possibly even two sides of the same thing. I think the finest and also the most concise treatment of the whole matter was done by Gilbert Meilaender in his book "Things That Count" in the section "Marriage in Counterpoint and Harmony", where he contrasts the approach of C. S. Lewis & Helmut Thielicke in how to make sense of "headship".

Though highly controversial now, what C. S. Lewis says is that without a proper understanding of the "headship" question #1, you're not going to have a good answer to the "love of neighbor" related question #2 because there is a certain amount of tension between them that must be resolved in a coherent fashion in a given real instance. Those without experience in real experiences likely wouldn't understand this. Understanding of the world is more gendered than we'd like to admit, and this comes out in disagreement over specific cases.

And in my opinion, the Christian romantic ideal as worked out in our culture at the present time doesn't do justice to the tension between the two, nor the biblical witness, and so we tend to cache it out in terms of crude numerical priorities that simply don't work. I can think of a couple of beautiful depictions of the Christian understanding of love of neighbor in Hollywood movies of surprising depth and beauty starring Hugh Grant or Clint Eastwood, demonstrating its grounding in common grace, but I can't think of any representation in books or art with a similar depth from an explicitly Christian perspective. Maybe there is, but not that I have found. My experience is that seeking advice on this from Christian leaders is you can't trust their judgement on this topic, and one is better off seeking out the elderly for guidance because their attitude on the treatment children is more grounded is of older more realistic type and less subject to romantic idealism, whether Christian, simply modern, or both.

This last bit is off-topic, and something for another day but I thought it might illustrate the point in question a bit. But I think C. S. Lewis has the full answer to the questions John is concerned about. We've all become so tired of the fight over what "headship" means that it leads us to try to avoid it and still answer difficult questions about families and communities without reference to it, but I think it is futile in the end. Since I'm at least partially off-topic, and since likely no one will read what I recommended anytime soon this is the last I'll mention this if anyone is worried about a threadjack.

Dictatorship of the husband
Aristotle talks about the Political rule of the husband over his wife. It means that
1) they are equal.
2) they are friends
3) the rule must be based upon reason and not on the arbitrary will of the husband.
4) The husband must consult his wife.

This is how most of the marriages, I believe, work out in practice.

John comes off as precisely the sort of Christian I referenced in Jeff's followup post who is embarrassed of the traditional interpretations of Ephesians 5.

Mike T,

By "traditional interpretation", you imply one that dates back to a certain point of time. Traditions mean nothing to me, unless they contain meanings that originate before the ink was dry on Paul's letter. That meaning embarrasses me not in the least; I have lived it for over 30 years.

Paul sets forth Christian marriage in terms of a husband modelled after the sacrificial love of Christ Jesus and of a wife whose devotion to him is unblemished. I bear witness to the grandeur of such a relationship. But this marriage is not Paul's point. That marriage is the model that explains the working of another relationship: that between Christ and the church. Both relationships are covenants. Both set forth a leader/Leader who is self-sacrified on behalf of those under his/His authority. Both set forth a "bride" radiantly submissive to precisely that form of leadership. If you understand marriage on Paul's terms, then you are able also to understand profoundly how Christ Jesus relates to His church.

It boggles that you would rather secure such authority over a wife through a legislature and, I would suppose, enforce it with a lawyer. You'll never lift a relationship to the exalted place that Eph. 5 offers on those terms.

It leaves me wondering what sort of tradition you cling to? Reformation, perhaps? Does your "tradition" spotlight the submissive wife, while giving short shrift to the sort of husband that Paul sets forth as her companion? Your appeal to this text baffles me, given the notions of marriage you have expressed.

Lydia,

By settling for less, I was picking up on the description offered in your post: "But apparently a lot, and I mean a lot, of women are willing to live with men and, worse, even have children with them, when the men refuse to get married." Many today never aspire to marriage, and just drift relationally. When they settle for less, it may not even be a conscious choice. They may come from nonmarriage homes, where marriage was never modelled to them. And remember, we are now seeing the fruit of the day-care generation.

And remember, we are now seeing the fruit of the day-care generation.

That sounds intriguing but I don't know what the connection to marriage is supposed to be. Please explain why you think it does relate to marriage problems.

Aristotle talks about the Political rule of the husband over his wife. It means that 1) they are equal. 2) they are friends

He believed that a husband should treat his wife as an equal to the degree it is possible to do so. What degree that is isn't any more clear today than in what way or ways Paul thinks women are a "weaker vessel". I also think he'd find your formulation of #2 pretty dubious, as would most classical thinkers except for Epicurus.

It boggles that you would rather secure such authority over a wife through a legislature and, I would suppose, enforce it with a lawyer. You'll never lift a relationship to the exalted place that Eph. 5 offers on those terms.

What bogles my mind is the incessant presumption that what the state permits, makes room for, or even promotes is to be understood as "imposed" or "created" by the state.

Before 1950, nobody thought that the state created the institution of marriage, nor that when the state made laws regulating entry into marriage that the institution was thus a creature of the state, subject to legislative whim. Nor does anybody think even now that the state IMPOSES marriage on anyone, even (in the case of civil marriage before a J of P, when the state crafts the specific form of the marriage promises.

The state does a lot of things that support, encourage, strengthen, or simply recognize non statutory realities, without the state being considered the "source" of them. Therefore, there is no call, as John seems to try to say, that state support and recognition of the headship of the husband would be the state "imposing" it.

I have made this point before, but I don't know where, so I will do so again: headship is an INEVITABLE facet of a union of disparate actors. Every corporation must have a chief executive, someone who has the capacity to make the "final" decision. Every board or committee has to have a chairman, if only to say "debate is now closed off, we will vote" and so on. Without these offices, the party on the "losing end" of any current disagreement will simply continue the debate as an ongoing (and therefore not finally decided) question. Or, the party whose point of view is not winning will simply walk away from the union. But for a union, some common actions have to be taken, some decisions have to be made, which are actually final. Children have to be sent to this school rather than that school. Final decisions have to be made about where to live.

It is theoretically possible for the social unit of the family to operate under a different headship model than the traditional one with the husband in the executive office. It could be: (a) up to a vote at the beginning, and if they cannot decide agreeably then they cannot contract a marriage; or (b) put the wife in charge; or (c) alternate who gets the role - Dad on even years, Mom on odd years. Or maybe some other version. What you CANNOT do is simply do without an executive, since as soon as you hit a major disagreement on a serious issue upon which the parties cannot convince the other, the union would perforce split: each party going their own way JUST IS not union. If it was serious enough, the union would HAVE to split, since neither party could countenance "going along with" the other person out of dutiful submission.

It is, also, impossible for the state to remain a neutral party to such disagreements if they are not solved internally: If the parents split about whether Johnny should go to school A or B, since Johnny cannot be split down the middle one partent has to get their way and the other party has to lose out, and if this is not brought internally it must be brought about through external means. Far, far better for all concerned if the society (and the state), instead of making each individual choice on behalf of the entire family, simply recognizes one specific model of executive authority, either the traditional one of the husband having authority, or one of (a), (b), or (c) above, and let that executive person carry out all the tasks of executive decision making that pertain to the family, as subsidiarity demands.

Given all that, John, you can stop talking about laws that recognize different roles between husbands and wives as imposing "harsh patriarchy". That harshness can take place within patriarchy isn't itself due to laws which recognize authority in fathers. That's confusing two different things. Now, if you want to instead argue that said authority isn't natural with husbands and fathers, and therefore society is making unnecessary assumptions about where to locate it if society (and the state) simply assign it to the man, then in that case you would indeed be running contrary to tradition and to Biblical understanding.

Aristotle talks about the Political rule of the husband over his wife.

Actually, Aristotle did not talk about politics within the family, he distinguished the family from the polity because they are different in meaning and structure. For example, there is a natural leader to the newly formed family, but there is no nature-specified rightful leader to a newly formed polity. (There are nature-specified optimal qualities to the leader of the polity, but these can be found in more than one person and nothing in nature specifies who shall be chosen.) Politics is about the polity, which is defined as a community of many families, large enough to be normally "complete", self-sufficient, self-sustaining, etc. The Greeks, who invented the concept "polis," distinguished that idea from the barbarians who operated in tribes, precisely because the polis is not organized by family structure.

Hi Tony,

A wise man once put it this way: "When you and your wife have a disagreement: you simply let her go her way, and you go hers!"

Someone else put it this way: "subjecting yourselves one to another in the fear of Christ" (Eph 5:21, ASV).

Someone Else said it like this, "Ye know that the rulers of the Gentiles lord it over them, and their great ones exercise authority over them. Not so shall it be among you: but whosoever would become great among you shall be your minister; and whosoever would be first among you shall be your servant: even as the Son of man came not to be ministered unto, but to minister, and to give his life a ransom for many" (Matt 20:25-28, ASV).

In my experience, the times when a husband needs to act with unilateral authority are exceedingly rare. The times when he, as a leader, needs to strengthen family relationships are constant. Follow the model offered above and your kid will get into the right school. And your wife will give you a "come hither" look. And God will smile on your household.

The essential purpose of family is to prepare offspring to advance their own families. When day-care sprang up, and parents chose career over children (we leave aside here whether the choice was valid of necessary), children in their formative years were placed in the care of non-parents. Will this impact their ability, as adults, to form marriage and parenting relationships? We are getting the answers even as we speak.

In my experience, the times when a husband needs to act with unilateral authority are exceedingly rare. The times when he, as a leader, needs to strengthen family relationships are constant.

I agree with that, John. That's how I live my married life.

What about the 4 or 5 times during 20 years when the husband DOES have to act with unilateral authority without his wife's full consent? If she has never granted that his authority rules in such cases, then when he "decides" and she "goes her way" as you put it, the marriage ceases to be a union because they cease to act in unity. (My assumption is the decision is about the sort of thing that requires ongoing communal action, such as whether to have another child, whether to leave this town and move to that town, etc. In the latter case, if the wife moves because you simply let her go her way you cease to have an operational marriage.) The theory you are espousing WORKS, and works well, in a system in which husbandly authority is presumed by all parties. If instead thee is absolutely NO executive office in the marriage, when you run into a disagreement in which neither party can convince the other either that they are right, nor believe that they can simply "go along" with the "wrong" approach because the matter is very important, then "going your own way" consists in not remaining a union.

That marriage is a permanent union by nature implies as such that marriage requires an executive authority. All the sorts of mutual associations we form are either not inherently permanent (joining a club, taking a job), so that you can walk away when you don't like the choices being made, or they also have an implicit or explicit chief executive (e.g. joining a religious order).

I submit that if you examine your example carefully, of a husband spending 99% of his effort submitting his will to the good of others, and 1% making executive choices, I think you will see that (a) that 1% is ALSO part of his proper role in care of others, and (b) presumes (for success and effectiveness on the other 99%) that his authority is accepted without debate. Within that arrangement, the wise man letting his wife "go her way" on all the matters where the conformity of husband and wife's preferences is not important, AND ALSO making an executive decision and insisting on its being conformed to by all the family in matters where that conformity really is necessary, THAT's the kind of wisdom that makes a successful family. And the good wife married to the good husband rests secure in submitting in the latter cases precisely because she knows he also has the capacity and readiness to "let her go her way" on matters where conformity is unimportant, that he has a handle on the difference. But no wife can rest in that without first knowing the meaning of due authority, which imposes a duty of conformity or obedience - it is precisely that duty of conformity that allows her to rightfully and morally give up her own view of the right choice for someone else's.

God is a God of order, and order as such implies structure, which we see everywhere in nature. Divine Law is also the source of structure in the social order, which requires order in intelligent, free agents, which implies one intelligent agent submitting to another agent in due course. This holds both in the angelic orders and in human society. And it holds true in the family, the unit of human social order. The submission to due authority is supposed to be free and willing, but is also a DUTY, in exactly the same way that fulfilling the acts of virtue is supposed to be free but is also a duty: we either freely adhere to the good to which our duty directs us, or we freely reject it contrary to our good.

Tony,

We are very close in our understandings. Once the husband sets a tone of love, faithfulness, respect, and servanthood, he can exercise necessary authority without provoking a fight (at least in my experience). I am simply insisting that we mark a distinction between being "authoritative" and "authoritarian". The wife has both a choice and an obligation to submit to her husband's authority, but the husband has no right to force her compliance. I think you and I would agree on that as well.

Differences are bound to surface between husband and wife. These can almost always be settled through careful communication and negotiating. The occasions where I have had to insist on doing things my way, without her consent, are virtually non-existant.

I plan to answer Mark on the woman as the "weaker vessel" and that discussion will explain other aspects of the authority issue.

Good talking with you!

The theory you are espousing WORKS, and works well, in a system in which husbandly authority is presumed by all parties.

Absolutely right, Tony. John seems to think it quite radical that I propose that if we wish to make civil marriage a robust institution that the law must also make this assumption when judging any dispute involving a husband and wife.

As a related aside, my employer called my wife a few months ago to ask a few wellness followups regarding a stay in the hospital. They wouldn't even discuss the most basic details with me because HIPAA prohibits that. So while it is taken as a given that any children she has by me are legally mine, I cannot even call her health care providers and ask for information about her health. Somehow that feels like being thrown a bone by the system...

[Aristotle] believed that a husband should treat his wife as an equal to the degree it is possible to do so. What degree that is isn't any more clear today than in what way or ways Paul thinks women are a "weaker vessel".

Mark,

It was actually Peter who identified wives as "weaker vessels" and it is an important consideration in the discussion of gender roles. I don't believe this refers to physical nor mental weakness. Peter said, "Ye husbands, in like manner, dwell with your wives according to knowledge, giving honor unto the woman, as unto the weaker vessel, as being also joint-heirs of the grace of life; to the end that your prayers be not hindered" (1 Peter 3:7, ASV). Nor do I think this implies inferiority for the woman or superiority for the man, except in one area: relational position relative to authority.

It was for this reason that I earlier insisted that my wife is every bit my equal, and that God would make me her leader is therefore appropriately humbling. The normal ordering of equals is horizontal, not vertical. If I am on top, it is not because I am superior. If she is under, it is not because she is inferior. Irrespective of our essential equality, we have been hierarchically ordered.

I spoke with Tony and noted that gender roles are something that we consent to and also an obligation assigned by God. While we "ought" accept our roles, the sense of obligation should not undermine our sense of gratitude. When my wife submits to my authority, I should be grateful. And I hope she will be appreciative when my exercise of authority is prompted by my own answer of God's call on me as a man.

As I read Peter's extremely wise and sensitive remarks, he indicates that God also has grateful appreciation when a wife willingly accepts the submissive role before her husband: "Whose adorning let it not be the outward adorning of braiding the hair, and of wearing jewels of gold, or of putting on apparel; but let it be the hidden man of the heart, in the incorruptible apparel of a meek and quiet spirit, which is in the sight of God of great price. For after this manner aforetime the holy women also, who hoped in God, adorned themselves, being in subjection to their own husbands: 6 as Sarah obeyed Abraham, calling him lord: whose children ye now are, if ye do well, and are not put in fear by any terror" (1 Peter 3:3-6, ASV).

Jesus once modelled this role of self-accepted servanthood (actually, He role models for both human genders: self-sacrificed servanthood and self-sacrificed leadership). Whether coming from Messiah or from wife, to recieve such treatment from one/One who is (at least) your equal should melt the heart. How could one answer it with anything less than humble gratitude? How could a husband domineer? Or how could we give less than full respect to our Foot-washer? Peter would have us "give honor" to our wives in view of their willingly taking second place.

As a man, I have to make a fair assessment of this. I am as humbled by my wife as I am by my Lord. And I truly understand that He tossed us the riddle of gender to help us learn lessons of leadership and followership. And this, not merely to provide us with great marriages, but to set those marriages forth as models that help us comprehend the relation between God and His human image-bearers.

Differences are bound to surface between husband and wife. These can almost always be settled through careful communication and negotiating. The occasions where I have had to insist on doing things my way, without her consent, are virtually non-existant.

In different marriages it will be more or less often. That's just the nature of variation. My point is that of principle, not of relative frequency: if 2 people go about doing a decades-long task that is immensely complex and has highly important goals (eternal salvation of children), it is inevitable that in some marriages at some point in the marriage Dad will think X must be done and Y is positively imprudent to the point of endangering those very important goods, and the wife will think the opposite, and they have not been able to budge the other's thinking after weeks and even months of discussion with all the good will in the world. In that case, either one of them exercises authority or they perforce must split.

It does no good for you to say the husband has no right to force her compliance. If the husband doesn't insist upon compliance when his decision is made, and he is convinced that doing Y against his orders is going to be positively damaging to the important goods of the children, his allowing the wife to proceed with her own choice without stopping her constitutes abandoning his role of authority. And, unless you want the state to step in and pretend to dissolve the union (even though Christian marriage cannot be dissolved by the state), the whole of society needs to reflect and protect the authority of the husband making such decisions. If Dad decides to enroll the kids in St. John's, and Mom goes behind his back and enrolls them in P.S. 155, there has to be someone who verifies that one of those actions prevails over the other for purposes of society's involvement. Since the family is a unit of society, it impossible for the family's actions to rest wholly internally with no effect and no contact with the rest of society.

It's the same with other voluntary associations: if you join a club and pay your dues, and you don't like the decisions being made, you can try to convince members to change, but if they don't change then you have to accept the decision contrary to your preferences. If you (say) try to grab your membership dues amount and walk away (assuming that the club by-laws don't allow for that), THE STATE will step in and enforce the by-laws and the authority of the club president - even though that president only ever had authority over your money because you joined the club voluntarily.

Even though marriage is not simply or "merely" a contract, it DOES HAVE contractual aspects to it, and the state is the organized way society enforces contracts. There is no way marriage and family can work without having an internal order of authority, and as a social unit society needs to protect and promote that natural structure by recognizing the due use of authority within the family. This is not in any way a claim that the authority of the father originates with society granting him such authority, merely of society recognizing what exists. This is analogous to to how society is obliged to recognize, support, and protect Mom's authority to make decisions over the children, even if the children try to disregard her authority. The best way to make sure that the authority of the state only rarely comes into play inside the family is to establish the absolutely clear presumptive civil force of Mom's and Dad's authority within the family. Weakening that civil presumption is precisely what leads children to sue parents over silly nonsense that should never come before the state to begin with.

Will this impact their ability, as adults, to form marriage and parenting relationships?

The real problem may be that with both parents staying in their careers they may be routinely taking their work home and providing much less relationship modeling for the child. That is more of a career problem than a daycare problem though. I don't see how daycare by itself is a disadvantage to forming and sustaining those relationships unless you can show there is something actively harmful caused by non-parental care.

What about the 4 or 5 times during 20 years when the husband DOES have to act with unilateral authority without his wife's full consent?

Tony, I echo your sentiments in the last several comments wholeheartedly of the irreducibility of headship. Two can't be co-equal in executive authority and have a functioning family for the reasons you eloquently stated. And no amount of positing the rarity of the need for a decision maker can eliminate the issue. But it is quite clear that our culture, even our Christian one, is no longer comfortable with the idea of headship no matter what they say on theology or doctrine. This isn't an abstract matter, though it rests on principle as do all things.

For that matter, what about the 1 time? I myself have been mugged by reality in the last few years. I never imagined that there would be an issue of conscience that I wouldn't be willing to budge on that my wife wouldn't wholeheartedly endorse. Then one day there was. Our art and literature is full of examples of men bowing to the pressure of women and doing something that seems clearly wrong, but we all think it is something that happens only with overtly evil people. Nothing ordinary that we'd ever encounter. But it does happen to ordinary people. And happens exactly for the reasons that C. S. Lewis described. Another thing that helped me is how just recently in thinking about it I've been pulled back into memories of my own father in his disagreements with my mother on yours truly. My parents had a wonderfully harmonious marriage, and they never argued in front of us, but there were a couple of times where it couldn't be avoided and I couldn't fail to notice or forget because the guillotine was about to fall on me pretty hard, or so I thought. Dad never raised his voice to my mother, but there came a point where she knew he saw my actions very differently and arguing with him just wasn't going to be fruitful anymore. I never heard him express any views on the place of women or the role of men of any kind. All I have are his actions to go by, and it is a good witness to the value of the headship of a man in the family. I don't know where I'd be without such a model.

Women are wonderful creatures, and they pay attention to details men often don't even notice. They are natural control freaks and 99% of the time it works for the good of them and the whole family. But there are times when it doesn't, and when that happens things can either get out of hand and people get hurt or people outside the woman's purview are excluded. The stronger the character of the woman, the more likely this is to happen. The weaker the character of the man and the less likely he is to do anything about it. No overt evil is necessary to have such a conflict, only human nature. It takes a man and a woman to raise a family because neither one has all the knowledge to do it, but it also requires that decisions be made by the person most qualified to make it. Most of the time each partner stays in their sphere of influence and doesn't second guess the other's decisions. But in certain cases, however rare, conflicts will arise that require a decision-maker, and that requires a wider perspective that men are much more likely by temperament to have. That is the old view. It still works after all these years.

I am simply insisting that we mark a distinction between being "authoritative" and "authoritarian".

A meaningless distinction in this context since no one was advocating authoritarianism. If you drew the conclusion that I was advocating it, then you need to go back and examine your own ideological tendencies which you've hinted are sympathetic to feminism.

(Contrary to what many self-proclaimed "biblical Christians" may think, opposition to feminism is more than just opposition to abortion, birth control provided by all health care plans, no fault divorce and gay marriage)

The wife has both a choice and an obligation to submit to her husband's authority, but the husband has no right to force her compliance

This implies at least two distinct possibilities: either you are assuming someone is advocating a right to use violence against wives or more broadly that a husband has no moral right to take even non-violent measures to enforce his will (ex. seizing her credit cards to prevent her from frivolously wasting money they don't have). If the former, then you've added nothing of value here since no one here would advocate the use of violence against a wife whose sole sin against her husband was being obstinate and not listening to him. If the latter, then you've just declared that anything you have to say about husbandly authority is meaningless because you believe it has no practical form in actual human relationships and civilizational structures.

Okay, tweet on the general discussion of marriage. Mike T., I'll play a dirty trick just one time on you by pointing out that, surprise, there are also spendthrift husbands who have gone out and blown all the money or gambled it or whatever, and I cannot concur in your idea that the really important thing is just to make sure the husband has legal control of the money. I could go on about other one-sidednesses in your approach but won't. And I _doubt_ that anyone agrees with you in the discussion so far about giving _legal_ force to male headship in the way that you propose.

But frankly, any moment I'm afraid the true crazies are going to show up and completely ruin the thread, at which point I'll have to shut it down altogether, which would be a shame.

This implies at least two distinct possibilities: either you are assuming someone is advocating a right to use violence against wives or more broadly that a husband has no moral right to take even non-violent measures to enforce his will (ex. seizing her credit cards to prevent her from frivolously wasting money they don't have).

There has to be an adult in the relationship but you are somehow convinced that adult is always the husband. How many times have you heard about alcoholic fathers and husbands? Furthermore, there is a world of difference between one spouse spending money they don't have on frivolous and presumably selfish items versus spending on credit for things that will enhance the marriage. Part of being a good leader is being able to convince others that your decisions are beneficial despite the associated costs.

"Again, it is a question of recognizing that anything worth having has its price. People who respect themselves are willing to accept the risk that the Indians will be hostile, that the venture will go bankrupt, that the liaison may not turn out to be one in which every day is a holiday because you’re married to me. They are willing to invest something of themselves; they may not play at all, but when they do play, they know the odds," - Joan Didion

The real problem may be that with both parents staying in their careers they may be routinely taking their work home and providing much less relationship modeling for the child. That is more of a career problem than a daycare problem though. I don't see how daycare by itself is a disadvantage to forming and sustaining those relationships unless you can show there is something actively harmful caused by non-parental care.

Step2, put it rather: whether there is something actively damaging caused by non-parental care being so pervasive that it cannot help but tend to displace the parent (in favor of the day-care provider) as the locus of attention, affection, and submissive obedience of the child.

The family is the basic unit of society, in which the young child becomes engendered into a specific culture, definite customs, particular ways of doing, ways of speaking, ways of thinking, ways of handling opposition, etc. If the parents are not, for the very young child, the primary locus of his attention, then he learns all these ways not from the parents but from the care-giver. Not only does that mean that the child to some extent never really benefits from his familial culture, customs, past, roots, language, etc. (To some extent, this is actually necessary because the care-giver should never be attempting to train the child authoritatively as a parent). In addition, there is inevitably certain ways of doing, or certain fine points of moral and human training that will be points at which the care-giver is not quite on the page with the parents - in some cases with an actual opposition. But in such circumstances, the more heavily weighted the care-giver's time is with the child, the more difficult (or virtually impossible) is it for the young child to grasp and remain affixed to his parents' ways and unaccepting of the care-giver's opposed approach. Thus the true rightness and proper claim of parental authority on the child will be damaged or even lost. (Since it is the proper parental modeling of authority by which the child first learns the meaning of the due role of the state's authority, and also God's, this has grave implications for citizenship both in this pilgrim life and in the eternal life.)

Effectively, for a young child to be raised primarily by day-care providers outside the family is for a young child to be deprived of the integrity of family in the affective aspect of his development. His root sense of self in relation to others can be permanently skewed by not grasping, below the level of conscious thought even, the true meaning of being loved unconditionally (since care providers provide love based on a contract), of discipleship, of self-sacrificing love, of natural authority properly exercised, etc. If he eventually comes to these through other relationships, he is lucky indeed, and society ought not rely on luck as the major protector of the successful development of full citizenry.

No single instance of having a child in day care for a period of time represents (simply as such) a grave damage to the child's welfare. But a heavy prevalence in using them for the bulk of the child's first 4 years, repeated throughout society on a mass scale, DOES represent danger to society.

If the parents are not, for the very young child, the primary locus of his attention, then he learns all these ways not from the parents but from the care-giver.

Newborns are able to recognize their mother's voices, so we have some instinctive factors that give priority to parental modelling. The idea that a child is unable to distinguish between a caregiver's attention and training and their parents' attention and training would require a major degree of neglect by the parents, which is obviously harmful.

Since it is the proper parental modeling of authority by which the child first learns the meaning of the due role of the state's authority, and also God's, this has grave implications for citizenship both in this pilgrim life and in the eternal life.

You know there are Christian and church-affiliated daycare providers, right?

Step2,

I'm actually not making any such assumption. I am well aware of those things being issues. What I am advocating is a restoration of a legal norm that in any given case in which there is a dispute between a husband and wife before the law, the law will err on the husband's side except in such cases as his conduct is objectively criminal or which a reasonable person would say is destructive to the family. Obviously, an abusive alcoholic would get little support from such a system.
Same for a husband who spends his family into the ground if the wife we were to seek some sort of legal injunction against him.

Lydia's definition of a good legal form of civil marriage seems to be a nondescript heterosexual union in which divorce is minimally acceptable. That is insufficient to me, as that bears only a partial resemblance to traditional Western norms. If we are going to have civil marriage at all, the only form conservatives should find acceptable as a long-term goal is a far more explicitly patriarchal form which was the norm throughout most of Western history (pagan and Christian).

Within that standard, I would gladly accept the whole package of things like presumed paternity, child support obligations post divorce, alimony, etc. In such a system, the rights and authority of husbands would match their obligations. Under the system that most conservatives support, they would not.

As a matter of public policy, we cannot let the minority dictate the standard applied generally. There is a need to have flexibility in the law to handle variations and edge cases. That is why I have no sympathy for Lydia's "tu quoque" like response. There mere existence of badly behaved husbands does not constitute any sort of rebuttal against my position from a conservative perspective; it merely constitutes a basis for demanding a more flexible legal system.

Newborns are able to recognize their mother's voices, so we have some instinctive factors that give priority to parental modelling. The idea that a child is unable to distinguish between a caregiver's attention and training and their parents' attention and training would require a major degree of neglect by the parents, which is obviously harmful.

Step2, I don't see it. If 2 modest-income parents are both working full time and have a long commute, and have a kid in day care, there is a very considerable likelihood that the parents will be spending fewer hours with the child awake than the day care providers will. In some cases, the time ratio will be closer to 1:2. In such a situation, the very young child (say 3 months to 1 year), cannot help but form up more on the day care provider than on the parents, at least with respect to some parts of development. This must be especially true of things that come to the child through cultural actions: songs, stories, language structure (and accent), being taught to wait for things that you can't get right away, being caressed out of the crankies when out of sorts, and so on. These don't come "through the mother's voice", they take constant attention in continual day-by-day activities. If the 1-year old kid is awake 8 hours out of 11 at the day care, and 4 hours out of 13 at home, the day care providers have a 2-1 edge on being the primary force of transmission of culture, of personal attention, of implicit modeling and explicit training in "what big people do". The day care providers cannot furnish to the child that distinctive turn of phrase that Mommy learned from Grandpa, or that distinctive way of holding his shoulders and arms when upset that all of us Muldoons have. They cannot pass on "family" which is (in large part) learned behavior and learned knowledge. Nor can they pass on to the child the notion of "love no matter what the cost" when the provider is explicitly "there for" the child only to the extent a contract pays for them.

You know there are Christian and church-affiliated daycare providers, right?

You know, don't you, that all such entities (religious or secular) exercise delegated authority, by virtue of being asked to do so (within limits) on behalf of the parents? But by nature they can only exercise authority to an extent. And by definition, then, they are not modeling NATURAL authority, authority held as of natural right. The way they can typify the authority held by God is much less clear, much less perfect, much more confused, than parents can do.

Ideally, parents are the primary care givers, trainers, and educators in the first few years of life, and any model of society that treats that as merely one way out of many equally good ways is a bad social model. It is one thing to accept doing something other than the ideal out of necessity (as we all must do in various ways), it is another thing entirely to call the lesser thing "just as good" out of a mistaken sense of solidarity with those who must resort to the less good options. Because a person has lost an eye and has a glass eye as a replacement is no reason for us to go around saying "having only one eye is just as good as having 2" when it is perfectly clear that's not true.

The family isn't just "natural" in the merely biological sense that the kids are genetically related to the parents. That's almost trivial compared to the full truth. The family is an emotional, psychological, affective union as well, which TIES TOGETHER the members in such a way that their individual goods are completed both (in the pragmatic sense) by having others to help them when they need help and (in the psychological and spiritual senses) of having others to give love, affection, help and support to daily. That's what a community of intelligent beings really is, not merely physically more successful, but spiritually more enriching. And so "being family" necessitates a natural life of community, a communing of many shared actions. You can't have that if the members are not actually together. As the basic social unit of society, the family is supposed to be a stronger, more intense locus of shared community than is the members of the family have with society as a whole. Thus especially in the formative years, the child must be more at home than elsewhere.

MikeT,
I don't see much difference between flexibility and minimally acceptable. My point also wasn't about abusive men, it was concerning irresponsible behavior. If he is the one being irresponsible, going through the midlife crisis thing or whatever, is it the wife's prerogative to stop him from doing so?

Tony,
I'm sorry if you can't see it but it would help to open your eyes. First, I don't grant that most couples have a long commute, nor do I grant most parents are on the same work schedules - meaning both work hours and days off. Speaking of which you somehow overlooked the parents having days off which would obviously affect the ratio of parental vs. daycare time. Second, I brought up the mother's voice simply as an indicator of my point, which is that very young children give priority to their parents' attention and teaching over that of others barring something like major neglect by the parents. So while there is necessarily a need for time together to transmit those familial and cultural behaviors, the notion that most parents using daycare wouldn't have time to provide such teaching is ludicrous. The only explanations for such a failure would be the parental neglect previously mentioned or a learning disability in the child. I'm not assuming either one. I'm also not assuming the daycare provider is cynical or subversive about caring for the children, which is what I guess your reference to contract is supposed to imply.

The way they can typify the authority held by God is much less clear, much less perfect, much more confused, than parents can do.

Parents are imperfect too. You have no way of knowing how good or bad the parents are, both in terms of their ability to to teach the child to be kind and honorable and in their ability to understand and relate to God (however you define God). On the other hand, you should expect most daycare providers to have workers who are experienced in those social training techniques and you should hope that a church-affiliated daycare would have a good understanding of God (within that faith tradition).

I don't grant that most couples have a long commute, nor do I grant most parents are on the same work schedules

My point wasn't about actual numbers of couples that fall into this situation, it was about the ones (few or many, whichever it is) that DO. And, since I know of a few such myself, you will have to grant me that there are some. That is sufficient for my central point.

Maybe what you are arguing over is the precise ratio of time. I don't think that your "very young children give priority to their parents' attention and teaching over that of others" can be valid INDEPENDENTLY of taking account of the sheer number of hours spent with each (parents and day care), and - perhaps more to the point - just how young the child was placed into long-hours day care. I will freely grant that a 3-year old just started in day care can readily distinguish between the attention of parents and that of the care providers, even if he is in the day care center 12 hours a day. Far otherwise, I think, for the baby 8 weeks old who spends 8 hours in day care. And yes, there are day care centers who willingly accept 8-week babies for 8 hours a day. Furthermore, for some couples of modest means, where both parents are blue collar (and may be paid by the piece), they find themselves sorely pushed to work 6 days a week, and thus prone to add to the day-care's side of the ratio of time with the child while decreasing their own. I am suggesting that to be positioned to be the dominant cultural and moral force capable of being all the things God designed for parents to be for the child, they need to be not merely present and in contact a goodly amount, nor even a bare majority of 51%, but a clearly predominant portion of the time a young child needs care - the more so the younger the child. And I don't think that this happens normatively when children are in day care, especially for very young babies. Yes, there are parents who overcome the potential problems by carefully dealing with the situation, but it takes an understanding of the problem and a direct intention to overcome it, which does not always obtain.

Nor am I necessarily blaming a couple who is on the losing end of such a ratio (not at all, for a couple who does this out of necessity alone). I am not saying that they SHOULDN'T DO IT, I am saying that it has inherently harmful consequences for the family and for the child - in comparison to having the child be raised by parents fully. There are (presumably) couples that don't have any choice, and thus must accept the lesser of 2 evils. OK.

The only explanations for such a failure would be the parental neglect previously mentioned or a learning disability in the child.

But I am saying that SHEER proportion of TIME available would be an explanation of such a failure. Especially because (for the illustrative couple I pointed to above who have long hours and sometimes work 6 day weeks) their time out of work is even more hectic in trying to accomplish the other mechanics of daily life that are not merely caring for the child: they are pushed. LOOK at our latch-key kid phenomenon. Look at our kids whose parents have rarely exercised true disciplinary training, because they are too tired, too scattered, to worried about being liked, too unsure of their authority - all compounded in their effect because the parents have direct oversight a proportionately small amount of time and thus don't want to use it up being "the bad guys". It doesn't take criminal neglect to have all these defects, ordinary failings are sufficient.

On the other hand, you should expect most daycare providers to have workers who are experienced in those social training techniques

Oh please. Surely there are in fact many day cares that have excellent people in charge, and some of them even do a good job of training the staff. But MOST? On what basis do you claim it?

See, day cares centers are businesses, and have to turn a profit. They are competing for laborers, and competing against each other and have to offer competitive prices. The schools get the highly educated, the ones who have teacher training. The schools pay more (even though in many places teachers are underpaid anyway.) The day cares get the lower rungs, lesser lights. Some day cares get the dregs of the lower rungs, people who are wash-outs at other menial labor. Some don't have specialized training, or just a little. (Not that I put a lot of stock in the entirety of that specialized "social training techniques", the techniques (just for example) that have foisted upon the world the incredibly stupid theory that spanking amounts to child abuse, but I recognize some of it as valuable). Sometimes their staff has high turn-over rates. You can't just claim "most" are educated, competent, trained, experienced personnel.

And in any case, some of the things I am pointing out as needing to come from Mom and Dad are things that are not even matters for professional training, like the exercise of natural (instead of delegated) authority.

I don't see much difference between flexibility and minimally acceptable. My point also wasn't about abusive men, it was concerning irresponsible behavior. If he is the one being irresponsible, going through the midlife crisis thing or whatever, is it the wife's prerogative to stop him from doing so?

Would it be her prerogative? Not entirely. As I said, the law would assume the husband's authority until the wife could demonstrate that he did not deserve for the law to recognize it. Many midlife crises would not count. For example, the whole going out and buying a motorcycle or sports car that doesn't bankrupt the family.

First, Dystopia Max, bag the anti-Catholicism. Sheesh, what is it about this blog that it attracts the nutcases, including anti-Catholics.

Saying that the Catholic Church is corrupted does not mean that I'm saying the various strains of Protestantism aren't. It's simply easier to reform and regroup with the righteous when your current corrupted church body doesn't have a whole litany of quasi scientific/historical/traditional/bureaucratic traditions to enmesh people within the congregation even when the contradiction to both Biblical statements/practice and all human experience is evident.

When I went to a particular evangelical church as a child, and the pastor was revealed to have had an affair with a woman in the congregation, my parents and a whole bunch of other parishoners left at the news, and we were later joined by the latter half once our particular denomination's founder came down and fired the offender upon hearing that the particular pastor had been preaching strange doctrines. Under the new pastor, the resulting church grew, bought a building, and planted another church. At no time was I under any illusion that our denomination's founder was infallible, that our family did wrong or endangered our collective salvation in reacting against adultery by removing ourselves from the church, or that the new pastors would never say anything wrong, or be able to fathom all Scriptural mysteries for us. In-depth Biblical discussion and personal rebuke was for the small groups within the church.

Quite possibly Catholic school could have given us a more formalized overview and a deeper appreciation of the history of Christianity, but I have a funny feeling it might have made us much more deliberately submissive to simple bureaucratic/academic authority and hesitant to act in the unequivocal manner described. Being able to openly and publicly separate ourselves from a plain moral evil enabled quick disciplinary action on the part of the leaders. (And as an American exceptionalist, I take grave and personal exception to the very public role of very respected Catholics in both personally spearheading and deliberately downplaying the effects of mass Third World immigration, from Ted Kennedy to John Boehner. The general thinking "a man is a man is a man is a man" or "a member is a member is a member is a member" would appear to dominate among Catholic priests who see only a glorious future flock in large numbers of welfare-dependent Mexican illegals.)

Has every branch of this particular denomination been as free from the corruptions of the world? Good Lord, no! Others I visited were skating so near apostasy (female pastors preaching non-expository context-free Protestant Pablum) that I stopped going entirely. But there's always hope for those willing to speak the truth.

I bear the Catholic faith and practice no particular ill will. My time in the US military has also given me an appreciation for both a sense of duty to the Magisterium and when one must necessarily disassociate oneself from it. It is never easy, nor should it be taken lightly, but to deny that the duty of the righteous to separate from the openly corrupt exists is utter foolishness. "We are all Protestants now" is a silly formulation, "We all may have to be Protestants at certain points" is much nearer to the truth and much more often left unsaid.

Max, I think it is pretty oxymoronic to say "there is a Magisterium" and then say "you have a right and duty to separate from the Magisterial Church when it is corrupt". Either there is a Power that preserves the Church as the Bride of Christ even when there are corrupt members, or isn't. If there isn't, there is no Magisterium. If there is, there is a duty to stick with the Bride of Christ and not depart from her.

I don't know if you hold to the old mistake, but "infallible" does not imply "impeccable" - though your example suggests maybe you don't get the difference. Admittedly, there are sinners even at the highest levels of the Church. If Magisterial reality rested on the moral perfection of the top people, it would have died with the Apostles - or before them! Fortunately for God's Church, the soundness of its teaching rests instead on the power of the Holy Spirit. If you want to claim, rather, that the Holy Spirit is not capable of keeping Church doctrine from error, well let's just say that's a pretty difficult proposition to defend.

We're not going to have a Protestant-Catholic knock-down, drag-out. It was the general sneering at Catholicism I was telling you to bag, D.M. I'm a Protestant myself, and nobody expects you to become a Catholic. But frankly, I don't think Catholicism per se has anything to do with (in the sense of encouraging) the retreat from marriage I'm discussing in the main post.

I agree.

Post a comment


Bold Italic Underline Quote

Note: In order to limit duplicate comments, please submit a comment only once. A comment may take a few minutes to appear beneath the article.

Although this site does not actively hold comments for moderation, some comments are automatically held by the blog system. For best results, limit the number of links (including links in your signature line to your own website) to under 3 per comment as all comments with a large number of links will be automatically held. If your comment is held for any reason, please be patient and an author or administrator will approve it. Do not resubmit the same comment as subsequent submissions of the same comment will be held as well.