Redefining marriage will bring profound and perhaps unintended consequences

Why Is It So Difficult to Discuss Marriage

Jean Bethke Elshtain's 2006 Foreword to The Meaning of Marriage. (1)

Redefining marriage will bring profound and perhaps unintended consequences for the ways in which we think of ourselves as men and women, and for the kind of society we live in. Adapted from the Foreword to The Meaning of Marriage (2006).

This book addresses a difficult issue, the status of the institution of marriage in twenty-first-century America. Unfortunately, the topic has entered our public life at a time when the terms of our public discourse seem poorly equipped to engage in a serious and nuanced discussion concerning the nature and purpose of marriage in American (or any other) society. The political and legal maneuvers leading to the legalization of same-sex marriage in Massachusetts in the spring of 2004 forced the marriage debate into American public discourse in a broader and more divisive way than in previous decades. The polarized, "rights monist," and oftentimes over-moralized tone of American public discourse has made it difficult for intellectuals, scholars, and policymakers to model for the wider public a reasoned inquiry into the nature and purpose of marriage. At times, intellectuals seem to push for, or endorse, a breakdown of the very discourse that would enable Americans to consider this topic in all its depth and importance--as controversial and even painful as that might be.

Why is it so difficult to discuss marriage? One reason, of course, is that we all have a stake in the debate and its outcome. No one is left untouched by marriage, including those who never marry, because marriage is such a pervasive institution in our society. One recent estimate indicates that 88 percent of women and 82 percent of men will marry at some point.

Beyond that, the problem lies in a hardening of the categories of debate. I noted "rights monism" above. This stance is one that conducts public debate exclusively in a narrow language of rights and celebrates an individualistic notion of "choice." The distinguished sociologist Robert Bellah, along with his colleagues, pointed out in the 1988 bestselling book Habits of the Heart that Americans have lost ways of talking about their commitments and what gives their lives meaning, except in and through a subjective kind of rights-talk. Other "languages" central to the American political tradition--civic republicanism or a rich scripturally-inspired language (here all one need do is read Abraham Lincoln's great speeches)--have faded as rights-talk has triumphed.

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Jean Bethke Elshtain was, until her death earlier this week, the Laura Spelman Rockefeller Professor of Social and Political Ethics at the University of Chicago, a Senior Fellow of the Witherspoon Institute, and a founding editorial board member of Public Discourse.

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Read more: www.thepublicdiscourse.com

(1) Synopsis

The movement for same-sex marriage has triggered an unprecedented crisis in the social norms and laws governing marriage. All great civilizations have sought to unite, in the institution of marriage, the goods of sexual intimacy, childbearing and childrearing, and life-long love between adults. But the last five decades have witnessed the erosion of marriage as a public institution in the developed world. The separation of the goods previously united in marriage has led thoughtful people to question why marriage should be denied to homosexuals. This volume brings together the best of contemporary scholarship on marriage from a variety of disciplines - history, ethics, economics, law and public policy, philosophy, sociology, psychiatry, political science - to inform, and reform, public debate. Rigorous yet accessible, these studies aim to rethink and re-present the case for marriage as a positive institution and ideal that is in the public interest and serves the common good. The essays in this volume were presented to an audience of scholars, journalists, public policy experts, and other professionals at a conference at Princeton University sponsored by the Witherspoon Institute. The authors are among the most eminent authorities on marriage and public policy in the English-speaking world.