Testimony on the Marriage Affirmation and Protection Amendment (H3190)
of
Maggie Gallagher
Massachusetts Statehouse
April
28, 2003
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Maggie Gallagher is an
affiliate scholar at the Institute for American Values and the co-author
of The Case for Marriage: Why Married
People are Happier, Healthier, and Better-Off Financially.
- What
is marriage for? Marriage is a
universal human institution which in every known society is the mechanism
by which a culture attempts to secure fathers for children. The goal of marriage
is to bridge the sex divide, to bring men and women together to create
lasting unions in which men and
women will take care of each other and any children their sexual union may
produce. Why is marriage between
the sexes a universal human institution? Despite important differences in
marriage between cultures, marriage everywhere is rooted in the great idea that the
people who make the baby should
take care of each other and the baby they have made together.
(Institutions like adoption were created not in order to transcend biology
to give adults more choices in family form, but to take care of the needs
of children whose parents cannot or will not care for them.) The fact the sex between men and women
sometimes makes babies is the great biological reality which in hundreds
of wildly different cultures, consistently generates the marriage
idea. Cross-culturally, marriage is
the context where childbearing is not only tolerated but sanctioned.
Marriage is the place where we tell
young people that we will not only tolerate or permit but encourage and
welcome their desire to have children, because it is the kind of union
most likely to provide for their needs, including their deep longing for a
mother and a father.
- Does
marriage still matter? A large body of social science evidence confirms
the common sense proposition that on average children do better when
raised by their own mother and fathers in a married home. Children raised outside of marriage are
at substantially increased risk for just about every negative outcomes
that social scientists can measure: They are more likely to be poor, to
experience deep and persistent poverty, to fail at school, to suffer
physical and mental health problems, to become victims of child abuse, to
become involved in juvenile delinquency, conduct disorders, substance
abuse. They are less likely to achieve high occupational status as adults
more likely to experience unemployment, to become young unwed parents.
They have poorer relationships with both mothers and fathers, compared to
children raised in intact married homes.
The negative impact of being raised outside of an intact married
household persist even after
scholars control for factors such as age, race, and income. Thirteen leading family scholars, summing
up the evidence, recently concluded: “Marriage
is an important social good associated with an impressively broad array of
positive outcomes for children and adults alike. . .whether American
society succeeds of fails in building a health marriage culture is clearly
a matter of legitimate public concern.”
- Do
children need mothers and fathers, or will any two parents do? Advocates
for same-sex marriage sometimes use this vast body of research on the
benefits of marriage to argue that same-sex couples and their children
ought to be offered the legal benefits of marriage, too. But the benefits
of marriage do not consist primarily in its legal incidents. (Indeed for
same-sex couples who tend to adopt egalitarian family roles access to
legal marriage would probably result in marriage penalties in the tax
code.)
Rather the benefits of marriage, especially for children, are the natural
advantages of having a mother and fathers united together in a public,
committed union. Marriage protects children by singling out a certain kind
of union (faithful, lifelong, permanent emotional, sexual, financial and
parenting partnership between a man and a woman) as the ideal, or
preferred option. In authorizing
same-sex marriage, government would be informing same-sex couples that
children do not really need mothers and fathers, that two mothers or two
fathers are just as good. Given the
large body of evidence we have on the importance of married mothers and
fathers, we ought to hesitate to make that powerful statement unless we
have considerable evidence that it is true. Do we have that evidence? No.
As a body of social science, the literature on gay parenting is weak and
preliminary. Most of the evidence routinely cited as showing that sexual
orientation does not matter compares single lesbian mothers to single
heterosexual mothers. At best it
shows that children of single mothers do about the same, regardless of the
sexual orientation of the mother. To use this as evidence that children
raised in motherless or fatherless household do just as well as children
raised by their own two married parents is irresponsible. In addition the
literature is plagued by numerous design flaws that make it wildly
premature to use as the basis for an important public policy change.It
is one thing for individuals to decide to ignore the marriage message that
children need mothers and fathers. A free society gives them that
right. It is another thing for the
law to step in and actively affirm the choice to create motherless or fatherless children.
- Does
marriage discriminate against gays and lesbians? Formally speaking, no.
There is no sexual orientation test for marriage and many gays and
lesbians do choose to marry members of the opposite sex. (One therapist
estimated that half or more of all men who self-identify as gay will marry
a woman at some point.). I do not intend in presenting this fact
to judge gays and lesbians who make this
choice, either positively or negatively, (certainly not to suggest
that gays and lesbians “should” choose to marry a person of the opposite
sex). My purpose is only to note that marriage in our law and culture does
not require a person to marry the individual to whom he or she is most
erotically attracted, so long as he or she is willing to promise sexual
fidelity, mutual caretaking, and shared parenting of any children of the
marriage. In formal terms, marriage
does not discriminate based on sexual orientation. Some people who
identify as gays and lesbians can and do marry, if they decide they want what marriage
means. It is certainly fair, however, to note that marriage is
not well-suited to the wants and desires of many gays and lesbians,
precisely because it is designed to bridge the sex divide and sustain the
idea that children need mothers and fathers. Remaking marriage so that it suits the
needs of gays and lesbians requires fundamentally changing our legal,
public and social conception of what marriage is.
- Are
there any risks to same-sex marriage? Advocates ask, how can allowing John
and James to marry affect Joe and Martha’s marriage? The answer is: quite
profoundly. If marriage becomes a unisex social institution, its core
public purposes will be redefined in ways that will damage its ability to
protect children, or to direct the erotic energies of young men and women
into the social relationship most likely to benefit themselves and their
children. The message that children do not need mothers and fathers, that
motherlessness or fatherlessness is not a social problem, cannot and will
not be confined to the tiny fraction of same sex couples who choose to
marry. A society that is seriously concerned about fatherlessness, and the
dangers and suffering it imposes on children and taxpayers, will not
conduct a radical social experiment on an institution already struggling.
- Will
many gays and lesbians suffer if marriage remains an opposite-sex union?
The Census Bureau indicates that about one-half of one percent of
households now consist of same-sex partners. How many of these wish to
marry is unknown. About half of all opposite-sex cohabitors marry. If the proportion of cohabitors that
want marriage is the same among same-sex as among opposite sex partners,
the upper bound of the demand for marriage is one-quarter of one-percent
of households. Meanwhile, forty percent of children go to sleep in
fatherless households. The sexual liberty interests of adults in choosing
their own family forms should not trump the interest of state and society
in trying to strengthen marriage, and
reverse trends towards family fragmentation.
- Is
same-sex marriage a good way to expand health care? Not really. In 2001, I asked the top ten
companies listed as providing same-sex health insurance benefits on the
Human Rights Campaign website to tell us what proportion of their
employees take advantage of this benefit.
Nine out of ten companies refused to release the information. General Motors, a large company with
over 1.3 million employees, did.
Just 166 employees (or just over one-one-hundreth of one percent)
extended benefits to a same-sex partner. Redefining marriage is not an
effective vehicle for extending health care insurance to non-traditional
families. If people need health insurance, we should look for more
effective means of providing it;
In a caring and responsible society, the desires of adults
to have their sexual choices affirmed by law would not trump the interests of
children in having a mother and a father.
Tolerance is one thing. But a society that is deeply concerned about
fatherless children will not re-design its most basic social institution to
suit the needs of adults who want to create fatherless or motherless
families. If the law of Massachussetts
currently does not recognize that the fundamental public purpose of marriage is
regulating sexual unions between men and women to try to give children mothers
and fathers, then it is the law that should be changed, and made more
articulate, not our deeply-rooted
understanding of marriage.