THE MARRIAGE PARADOX: MARILYN PENN
Exclusive: The Marriage Paradox
Marilyn Penn
In 1993, Sen. Daniel Moynihan published a momentous article entitled “Defining Deviancy Down.†In it, he explained that by defining what is deviant we know what is not and thereby we are able to live together with shared standards. Moynihan proposed that the amount of deviancy in American society had outgrown our capacity to control it, forcing us to re-define it so that abnormal behavior became leniently accepted as normal. He listed several instances of this phenomenon, perhaps none with as far-reaching consequences as the breakdown of the traditional family whose ripple effects were felt in drug use, teen pregnancy, and crises in education and crime.
In response to this, Charles Krauthammer added his own insight that as the deviant became normalized, the normal must be found to be deviant. Thus began the stigmatization of the nuclear family seen as a “cauldron of pathology†leading to increased reports of child abuse, incest and the now discredited recovered memory therapy. Conventional marriage came to be viewed as just an alternate life choice among many other equal (or smugly better) life choices including single parenthood, co-habiting unmarried parents and gay marriage with or without parentage. Though there was much evidence by the 1990s that single parenthood was a statistical demographic disaster for American children, the mantra continued as more celebrities and high profile role models ceremoniously rejected marriage as a vestige of an un-liberated society, leading us to the Brangelinas and octo-moms of our current decade.
Today you can’t establish your bona-fides as a compassionate liberal without being for gay marriage. It goes along with viewing AIDS as the pre-eminent health crisis of our time, with viewing gender identification as a civil liberties issue and with insistence that adherence to these principles must begin with elementary school education. The same people who campaign for all of the above are paradoxically advocates of single motherhood and the rights of young women to bear and adopt children without the protective benefits of marriage deemed essential for gays. If you’re a heterosexual woman living with a man without being married, you face the same dilemmas relating to taxes, benefits and health care yet none of the feminist or social welfare organizations will champion the obvious solution of marriage except for gays.
The most current statistics reveal that almost 40 percent of births in the U.S. were to unmarried women and the majority of all families living in poverty are headed by single women. It is also true that children raised by single mothers who are economically disadvantaged are three times as likely to drop out of school and to repeat the cycle of teen pregnancy, unemployment, poverty and crime. Considering that only 10 percent of the population is gay, why would the issue of gay marriage take precedence over the epidemic of heterosexual single parenthood in liberal politics? What about the 40 percent of illegitimate children whose lives we are condemning to failure by our refusal to condemn their parents’ lifestyle?
The denial that underlies the shifting parameters of deviancy allows us to pretend that issues affecting a small percentage of our population are more significant than the wholesale damage that ensues without a stable family structure. Between divorce rates close to 52 percent and the aforementioned escalating single parenthood, we are guaranteeing a dismal future for the next generation unless we are relentless in spearheading a return to traditional values. Today’s nursery children are inculcated with messages of recycling paper and plastic before they are taught the alphabet. Can we mobilize our educators and leaders to lighten up on the garbage and teach our children to respect family values as much as they are taught to love mother earth? We can’t afford to let this question remain rhetorical.
FamilySecurityMatters.org Contributing Editor Marilyn Penn is a writer in New York who can also be read regularly at Politicalmavens.com.
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