” Wedding is an inherently careless activity. It’s like owning a bear. The likelihood of people getting hurt is pretty, pretty high”.
Those are some sarcastic words of wisdom from James Sexton, a divorce lawyer who appears on an event of” Soft White Underbelly”, a YouTube channel that’s usually devoted to cold interviews with gangsters, prostitutes, drug users, and other victims of abuse. Author explains his view of the sacred organization, colored by his front-row view of marriage, where he sees people at their worst, where husband and wife are “weaponized against each other”, and where the bulk of marriages end in divorce. Love, in his view, has nothing to do with matrimony, and it’s a missed, outdated technology.
Contrast that dark view with the new book by Conn Carroll, Sex and the Citizen: How the Assault on Marriage Is Destroying Republic, which makes the case for why relationship is the singular bedrock of Western society, how U. S. public policy ( and nation, writ large ) has eroded it, the implications that resulted, and what America can do to restore its place in society.
” The abuse on marriage has been a hazard for the United States”, Carroll writes. ” As a direct result of falling marriage costs, America is now more uneven, less socially smart, more violent, more isolated, more divided, and less able to project our way of life into the future. It is important to consider the future of politics.
Carroll begins his guide by tracing the introduction of marriage across three physical revolutions — from monogamy to polygamy, and again to monogamy once— in an interesting and well-researched narrative that comprises biology, anthropology, sociology, and history. Carroll’s history of marriage confronts a modern argument against marriage — that it’s” an institution invented by powerful men to control women’s sexual behavior”, as Carroll writes. ” In fact, it is the opposite. It was established to control the sexual behavior of the most powerful among us, making it an institution created to protect the most vulnerable among us.
Carroll makes his point using historical examples. To wit, among Vikings, powerful men accumulated multiple wives, leaving less powerful men with fewer options for partners. That, in turn, drove them to raid Ireland, enslave or murder Irish men, and abscond with Irish women. According to Carroll, monogamy would have restricted those powerful men, leaving the less powerful Vikings with more marriageable women and preventing the need to invade other cultures.
Fast forward from Viking days to America’s founding, and Sex and the Citizen reveals that the Founding Fathers viewed marriage as an essential building block of the republic and how U. S. presidents, Congress, and the courts undertook steps to encourage marriage. Alas, that did n’t last. According to Carroll, the “new emphasis on individual actualization over family obligations proved popular enough in elite circles that the Supreme Court was able to completely rewrite federal family policy in the span of just five years.”
Further tying the dots, Carroll makes a deeper connection between the Sexual Revolution, feminist theory in the 1960s, and court decisions that” coldly tossed marriage aside, elevating individuals ‘ wants and desires over the sanctity of the family unit,” leading to a number of harms, including federal social safety net policies that punish marriage rather than elevate it.
For many, Carroll’s thesis about this assault on marriage would be considered moralistic, outdated, and anti-feminist. He criticizes Eisenstadt v. Baird, a Massachusetts law that made contraception for unmarried people illegal and made it illegal for married couples, in one instance. Carroll describes the case as a turning point in the court’s” completely dismantled state authority to channel individual sexual desires through the institution of marriage,” rather than as a victory for individual liberty and opposition to the government’s interference in the private lives of single Americans. Civil libertarians and progressives would undoubtedly object to Carroll’s viewpoint, who supports Eisenstadt’s expansion of privacy rights and support for individual autonomy over governmental interference.
Carroll does n’t call for a reversal of those decisions, but they’re central to his argument that when the government stopped supporting marriage, it led to a decline in marriage, resulting in consequences including greater racial inequality, poverty, crime, isolation, deaths from the opioid epidemic, political polarization, and population decline. He prescribes a series of policy solutions to alleviate those ills, including child tax credits, safety net programs, reducing the cost of childcare, curbing illegal immigration, building new infrastructure, creating jobs, and cutting zoning regulations to increase the housing supply. In the end, he draws the conclusions that we must consider whether a particular policy will facilitate or hinder American marriage and alter our approach to family issues.
In between watching hours of” Soft White Underbelly,” I read Sex and the Citizen. There is a common theme in episode after episode: broken families and abusive childhoods are the tragic beginnings of too many lives. Take the story of Nate, a fentanyl addict originally from Indianapolis. Nate was sexually abused by his brother, who shot him up with heroin when he was just 13 years old, and he was raised without a father.
” I just had a mom who worked 12-hour shifts, seven days a week”, Nate says. ” I had to raise myself”. Nate is an addict who lives in Los Angeles today, and he is aware of what losing a father has meant for him. ” I did n’t know how to live my life. He laments that I did n’t know how to handle things on my own because it really helped me develop into the person I am today.
For Carroll, Nate’s story would probably be emblematic of the societal decline resulting from a decades-long assault on marriage. And unlike divorce attorney Sexton, he does n’t see monogamous marriage as a failed or outdated technology. Carroll instead makes the case that America will become stronger as a result of its restoration of an institution in decline. ” Marriage does not guarantee anyone’s happiness … Many marriages fall apart. But no institution better channels our primal emotions of loneliness, lust, anger, jealousy, and joy into productive behavior of loving another person, than monogamous marriage”.