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Not spectators anymore; Gays demand role in growing 'marriage movement' WASHINGTON -- The debate over gay marriages, families and adoption is ratcheting up across the country. Rosie O'Donnell has taken up the banner of gay parenthood. President Bush says children should be adopted by traditional couples. Some researchers are arguing that children of gays do as well as those of heterosexual parents. In all this dissonance, one voice remains virtually silent: that of the growing "marriage movement." But that may be about to change. The movement is a loose, grass-roots coalition that seeks to reduce the divorce rate and promote marriage as the best arrangement for raising children. It is on a roll, gaining clout across the country. Partly as a result of its influence, Bush suggests using federal funds to promote "healthy marriages," various state legislatures debate changes in divorce laws, and school districts consider requiring the teaching of relationship courses. But questions are being asked both inside and outside the movement's ranks. The key query: How can you support marriage in general and exclude gay families? "At no time does the question not come up: What about gay families?" says Diane Sollee, who addresses gatherings around the country as founder of the Coalition for Marriage, Family and Couples Education. Her Web site is www.smartmarriages.com. The site discusses programs that many types of couples could use to increase the stability and length of their relationship, she says. But the focus of the marriage movement "is clearly on heterosexual couples, how to stabilize relationships" and protect children. "That is our challenge." Audience members brought up the topic again at a recent Washington, D.C., conference on the marriage movement. There was no great rush by panelists to provide answers. Maggie Gallagher, co- author of The Case for Marriage, said the movement sometimes "tries to avoid this whole contentious issue." She says now, "It may not be possible to keep these issues separate. Advocates for gay marriage want to push the issue. It may be better to talk openly about it in some truthful, civil, thoughtful way, without name-calling or bigotry. There may be no alternative." David Blankenhorn -- author of Fatherless America and a founder of the Institute for American Values, a think tank on the family -- helped sponsor the one-day meeting. He says the advocates of gay families and same-sex adoption have made "remarkable progress in the last couple of years" in influencing public opinion. "It has become almost a moral litmus test among educated young people, as (favoring) the civil rights movement once was," he says. "It has become the thing, a symbol of inclusiveness." The American Academy of Pediatrics stunned many involved in the debate with its policy statement in February. The nation's largest pediatric group called for state laws that would allow homosexuals to adopt their partner's children, protecting their rights to health insurance and survivor benefits, among other things. Their position was based on research showing that the children of gays develop as normally as kids in straight families, the AAP said. Statistics on the number of children raised by gay couples are hard to come by. The AAP cited a survey claiming between 1 million and 9 million kids live in a home with at least one gay parent. Critics questioned the statement's research base and the AAP's foray into the political arena. The American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry has the same view of gay parents. It reissued its statement supporting gay parenting right after the AAP brouhaha. High-profile talk-show host Rosie O'Donnell has injected herself into the controversy. She is holding herself up as a model for gay parenting. The mother of three adopted children recently announced that she is gay. She has publicly challenged Bush's statement that children ought to be adopted in families with a married man and woman. The research that those at loggerheads cite is contested bitterly. The marriage movement itself is divided about the value of various studies. "We really have very little research on how marriage actually works, and virtually none for gay and lesbian couples," says University of Chicago sociologist and researcher Linda Waite. "We just don't know," says Waite, co-author with Gallagher of The Case for Marriage. Given a long-term commitment, and the same legal and social supports given heterosexual couples, "marriage could work the same way as with heterosexuals," she says. As for parenting, "Who knows?" she asks. "There is some child development literature that shows that moms and dads play different roles, and given that there would be differences. Kids raised by two dads may get more of the dad stuff and less of the mom stuff, but really, this is all just speculation." William Doherty, a researcher and professor of family social science at the University of Minnesota, says he belongs to the "progressive" wing of the movement. He understands those opposed to homosexuality on religious grounds, he says. But at the same time, "I am for lifelong committed relationships, whether those are gay or straight. Those relationships are the best environments for children to grow up in." So far, he says, "if you look at the studies, imperfect as they are, to see how the kids of lesbian parents do -- there are very few children with gay men -- those kids look like they do as well as those raised by two parents of opposite genders." In the social sciences, "you never get a final answer," Doherty says. "Some critics will say the study sample sizes are too small, or not representative, or the children haven't been followed into adulthood. But if there were some big smoking gun, it should have shown itself by now." That opinion doesn't play well with other movement leaders. "The research used by some advocates to make the case that children in gay families do just as well as those with a married mother and father is extremely weak," Gallagher says. "It is irresponsible to use this kind of research." And Blankenhorn says, "We're going to find out with same-sex couples just what we found out with divorce. The children are at higher risk for problems." Critics of the movement say its view is too narrow to consider homosexual families objectively. "The marriage movement has said all along that marriage belongs to heterosexuals," says Marianne Walters of the American Family Therapy Academy. "It is not a matter of their not being interested (in gay families). It is a matter of how they are going to address this. It is too difficult for them, for the way they think. It is a conservative movement for sure, and they would just like gays to go away." Blankenhorn says the movement is not "afraid" of the issue of gay families. "It's not like nobody can bring it up." And he notes that "it has been overwhelmingly the heterosexuals in our society who have weakened the institution of marriage" and the protections it offers children. The time may have come to approach the issue directly, Blankenhorn says. The movement may decide to handle the controversy in some future forum and acknowledge "a division in our ranks," he says. "It could be that these issues will seek us out, whether we seek them out or not."
From 'I Do' to 'I Don't' In the 1970 movie ''Lovers and other Strangers,'' Beatrice and Frank are sitting at the wedding of one son, trying to persuade their other son and his wife not to get divorced. Look at ''Anthony and Anita -- cheek to cheek,'' Frank tells them. ''Did you know that Anthony has not said one word to Anita for two years?'' ''But they're still together,'' Beatrice declares. These trends have precipitated a movement -- a marriage movement -- that has gained adherents in the statehouse and the White House. Oklahoma offers training courses on marriage and relationship skills; Louisiana offers a ''covenant marriage,'' which requires premarital counseling and makes it tougher to get a divorce. And just last month, President Bush made strengthening marriages a centerpiece of his welfare plan, promising $300 million to finance experimental programs that teach the benefits of marriage and offer premarital counseling. Now James Q. Wilson, one of the most influential conservative thinkers around, who is best known for his work on crime prevention, has taken up the cause in ''The Marriage Problem.'' He has outsize ambitions for this short volume: to review the research on marriage, divorce and children; to recount the biological, social, economic, political and cultural history of marriage and family life; and to offer policy recommendations. To Wilson, the erosion of marriage is eating away at society's foundations. More than anything else, it is responsible for the poor, troubled and wretched corners of America. He offers a sobering look at the vast array of research on poverty and single-parent households. Being poor exacts a terrible toll. But rich or poor, white or black, children raised by one parent, whether divorced or never married, tend to have a tougher time. And it's not just the children who are worse off. Surveys have repeatedly shown that people who say ''I do'' are on the whole happier, healthier and wealthier than those who don't. So why don't people do what is obviously in their own best interest? To answer that question, Wilson recounts the familiar arguments of the evolutionary psychologists about men being biologically programmed to have sex with as many women as they can. Women, meanwhile, are geared toward finding a reliable provider for their children (never mind that giving birth and liking sex are not mutually exclusive activities). Wilson also says the marriage marketplace is out of whack: the fact that there are not enough stable, employed men to go around makes the desirable hunks even less likely to hook up with only one woman and shoulder the duties of a family. More refreshing is Wilson's capsule history of marriage, which includes interesting tidbits like the 17th-century interest in liberalizing divorce. John Milton (who abandoned his wife a month after their marriage) and John Locke both believed that unhappy couples should be able to separate at will. Wilson also traces the changes in child welfare policy, showing how government assistance, once limited to the ''suitable homes'' of widows and abandoned wives, was eventually extended to unmarried women. He is careful, though, not to dump the whole problem on welfare's doorstep. (He thinks the fact that unmarried motherhood is no longer shameful plays a bigger role than government checks in encouraging single women to have children.) And for once the 60's -- the favorite bugaboo of conservatives -- aren't blamed. ''It would be remarkable if an institution as old and as universal as marriage could prove so vulnerable to one decade of cultural change,'' he says. Instead, he argues that one of the West's greatest achievements -- the Enlightenment -- and one of its greatest shames -- slavery -- are jointly responsible for the weakening of the family. Slavery, ''that vast, cruel system of organized repression that denied to slaves the right to marry, vote, sue or take an oath'' and ''allowed their own children to be sold on the slave block,'' grievously injured family life, Wilson persuasively writes, countering critics who deny the connection. Certainly it is at least part of the explanation for why nearly 70 percent of African-American babies are born to single mothers, compared with 22 percent of white infants. Meanwhile, the glorious intellectual, scientific and personal liberation ushered in by the Enlightenment unhinged marriage from its traditional social moorings and turned it into a mere contract -- like any business agreement. What the Supreme Court called a ''sacred obligation'' in the 19th century was referred to as ''an association of two individuals'' by 1965. The Enlightenment also opened the way for the emancipation of women, which Wilson calls the ''single core event'' underlying the questioning of marriage. Women were no longer forced to rely on men to provide them with a home or social status. Many finally had the financial and emotional wherewithal to leave abusive or neglectful relationships. But along with the dead-on insights are some batty assumptions and curious lapses. Why, for instance, does Wilson omit the work of E. Mavis Hetherington, one of the field's most respected researchers, who recently argued that the ill effects of divorce on children are not nearly as long-lasting as many feared? Why does he dabble in tinhorn biology to claim that men are better at climbing the corporate ladder and more likely to work longer hours because he-man aggressiveness was once an evolutionary advantage? Or declare that a mother wonders whom the baby resembles, while a father ''suspects that the infant looks like -- well, a baby''? (Unless he's been watching one too many stand-up routines on Comedy Central.) And what about his portrayal of ''career women'' as bitter, frustrated spinsters, whose only boyfriends are likely to be married men or weirdos? Those who do marry, he adds, have a good chance of ending up divorced. (Not sure how I'll break this one to my husband.) No wonder women are often suspicious that calls to return to the traditional family cloak a desire to return them to second-class status. Of course the marriage debate isn't just about economic incentives and social policy but about values. Is living together immoral? Is having children outside marriage? Absolutely, Wilson says. Everyone wants to help children, but we should do it by encouraging marriage from the ground up, not by easing the burden on unmarried parents. Shame single women who get pregnant and clamp down on assistance to unwed mothers. He even suggests that sending fatherless children to orphanages might be better than giving aid to unmarried mothers -- once known as ''morally unfit.'' In the end, though, government can do only so much. The ''effort must be done retail, not wholesale, by families and churches and neighborhoods and the media, not by tax breaks or government subsidies.'' Such views will not warm everyone's heart. Even hard-core welfare critics are likely to blanch at the notion of bringing back orphanages. Abusive fathers, not to mention uncaring, unconcerned ones, are as much (if not more) trouble inside a marriage as out. That's no reason for Wilson to shrink from his opinions. But his ideological slant will narrow the book's audience, which is too bad, because there is a lot here -- from his analysis of certain trends to his ideas of what to do about them -- that would persuade many people on the left and the right. Instead, the book can be too easily labeled as another volley in the culture war, rallying like-minded readers, alienating others and having about as much staying power as some of today's marriages. Back to Top
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