What is the future of marriage? To answer this question, we have to first know what marriage is. I define marriage as society’s approved and preferred institution for sexual activity and child-rearing. The new trend in marriage law is to claim that there should not be any legal or social preference among sexual and child-rearing arrangements. No one form of relationship should be “privileged” over the others.  This is, by definition, the end of marriage as an institution.

The result of this trend will not be greater individual freedom, contrary to the expectations of its promoters. Instead, the government will have to act as mediator and regulator among more aspects of personal behavior for more individuals than ever before. That is because the social functions performed by the institution of marriage have to be performed by some other institution, usually the government.

This trend is evident in Northern European countries and in Canada. The ideology was on display in Sweden in 2004, when the local youth wing of Sweden’s Social Democrat party endorsed the idea of replacing marriage with a gender-neutral, multi-partner-friendly marriage system. Conspicuously absent, is any discussion of the impact of multi-partner marriages on children.

The subject of children in multi-partner marriages was discussed briefly in a series of reports in Canada. A four study report commissioned by the Status of Women Canada to study Polygamy in Canada: Legal and Social Implications for Women and Children, most of the authors noted that polygamy is often associated with the abuse of women and the neglect of children.  Nonetheless, two of the four reports endorsed the decriminalization of polygamy. These authors concluded that it would be better to legalize polygamy or at least decriminalize it, and then attempt to regulate its excesses.

But regulating the excesses inside a polygamous household is something that Canada has already found extremely difficult to do.  In the renegade Mormon community called Bountiful, reports periodically surface of child brides, child abuse and abandoned teen-age boys. The authorities always have difficulty prosecuting any perpetrators because complaints are notoriously difficult to verify.  Disaffected members of the community complain, but no one within the community will corroborate their stories.  Only much more intrusive interventions by government authorities will make it possible to “regulate the excesses” that are so often associated with polygamy.

The “privilege no relationship” ideology bore fruit last fall in the Netherlands. A man and his wife took advantage of the domestic partner registration law to register a partnership with another woman. This three-way marriage was dismissed as insignificant by American media who favor same sex marriage. But it is quite clear that the blurring of all distinctions among types of families paved the way for this three-way marriage.

In Scandinavia and the Netherlands, registered partnerships have effaced the distinction between cohabitation and marriage. Sweden passed the Homosexual Cohabitation Act in 1987. At the same time, Sweden extended most of the protections of marriage to heterosexual cohabiting couples. In 1997, the Dutch legalized registered partnerships.

A couple can choose to get married, to register a partnership, or simply live together. In the Netherlands, a new informal two-step route to divorce has appeared: “the flash divorce.”  It works like this: a married couple that wants to divorce applies to have their marriage changed to a registered partnership. These partnerships can be dissolved at shorter notice than is required for the dissolution of a formal marriage.

One consequence of all this is the separation of marriage from child-bearing. In the Netherlands, 40% of all first births are out of wedlock. Even the arrival of a second child does not necessarily induce a couple to marry. Of all second and further children born in 2003,  23% were born out of wedlock.

When a Swedish child is born out of wedlock, (as 56% of them are) the couple often lives together initially. Studies from around the world, show that cohabitors break up at two to three times the rate that married couples divorce.  So although children born out of wedlock are initially raised by two cohabiting parents, many of these couples later break up. This means that many children spend all or part of childhood without two parents. 

You might think that the generous welfare state of these northern European countries would offset some of the disadvantages of unmarried parenthood that are so well documented in the U.S. A Swedish study in 2003 examined the impact of living with a single parent compared with living with two parents.  Girls living with a single parent committed suicide at twice the rate, and were three times more likely to die from drug or alcohol addiction as girls living with two parents.  So even with a social safety net far more generous than any likely to be enacted in the U.S., the Swedes still face social pathology as a result of single parenting.

Although marriage takes different forms in different times and places, every known society has had some boundaries marking off acceptable from unacceptable sexual and child-rearing conduct. Every society has had some form of sanctions for deviations from its norms. The modern attempt to create a society in which no one family form is privileged over any other is literally unprecedented in human history. It is, by definition, the abolition of marriage.

And when the family falls, the state expands.

Big Love creator overcomes the "yuck" factor

The one thing that doesn't ring true is Scheffer's claim that he had initially resisted Olsen's idea for a show about polygamy because he thought the practice was "yucky." Given the fact that Scheffer's Falling Man and Other Monologues includes a scene in which noted serial killer, necrophiliac, and cannibal, Jeffrey Dahmer, gives cooking lessons from his "kitchen in heaven," the idea that Scheffer found polygamy "yucky" is a bit hard to credit. In any case, it makes sense that Scheffer and Olsen like to tell that story. The notion they're out to promote is that polygamy seems "yucky" at first, but is actually just fine once you get to know some really nice polygamists. Or, as Olsen told Newsweek. "The yuck factor disappears and you just see human faces."

Stanley Kurtz

Scheffer adds that what attracted him to the Big Love project was "the subversive nature of how we deal with family values....I think what's really exciting about the show is the nonjudgmental look we have on our characters."

Stanley Kurtz

We told you polygamy would be next

With the sweetly titled HBO series "Big Love," polygamy comes out of the closet. Under the headline "Polygamists, Unite!" Newsweek informs us of "polygamy activists emerging in the wake of the gay-marriage movement." Says one evangelical Christian big lover: "Polygamy rights is the next civil-rights battle."

Polygamy used to be stereotyped as the province of secretive Mormons, primitive Africans and profligate Arabs. With "Big Love" it moves to suburbia as a mere alternative lifestyle.

As Newsweek notes, these stirrings for the mainstreaming of polygamy (or, more accurately, polyamory) have their roots in the increasing legitimization of gay marriage. In an essay 10 years ago, I pointed out that it is utterly logical for polygamy rights to follow gay rights. After all, if traditional marriage is defined as the union of (1) two people of (2) opposite gender, and if, as advocates of gay marriage insist, the gender requirement is nothing but prejudice, exclusion and an arbitrary denial of one's autonomous choices in love, then the first requirement -- the number restriction (two and only two) -- is a similarly arbitrary, discriminatory and indefensible denial of individual choice.

Charles Krauthammer

Mass. court limits ‘gay marriage’ to in-state couples; ruling a win for conservatives

More than two years after handing down its controversial decision legalizing "gay marriage," the highest court in Massachusetts ruled March 30 that a 1913 state law prevents out-of-state homosexual couples from obtaining marriage licenses if such documents would not be recognized in their home state.

The 6-1 decision by the state's Supreme Judicial Court prevents couples from most, if not all, states from getting "married" in Massachusetts. The ruling is significant because it limits the ability of homosexual activists to spread "gay marriages" elsewhere.

NY appeals court rules same-sex marriage bar constitutional

A New York appeals court has ruled [opinion, PDF] that the state's marriage law, which allows marriage between a man and a woman but not between same-sex couples, is constitutional. The 5-0 decision covers three separate cases filed on behalf of same-sex couples who were denied marriage licenses. The couples argued that the Domestic Relations Law, which defines marriage as a union between a man and a woman, violates the equal protection, privacy, and due process clauses found in the New York constitution. The appeals court disagreed, saying that the legislature, not the courts, was the appropriate forum to change the definition of marriage. The NYCLU has said it will appeal the decision to New York's Court of Appeals.

French Government Report Says No to Homosexual “Marriage”

PARIS, February 16, 2006 (LifeSiteNews.com) - A government commission set up at the request of the President of the French National Assembly has concluded that homosexual 'marriage' and adoption by homosexual couples, and medically assisted procreation for homosexual couples should not be permitted by law. The decisive factor to the report's conclusions, after an investigation of more than a year, was the commission's decision to act "to affirm and protect children's rights and the primacy of those rights over adults' aspirations."

Homosexual Activists' War Against Christianity

"All churches who condemn us will be closed." That was what Michael Swift, a "gay revolutionary," declared in a February 1987 issue of the Gay Community News.

"Michael Swift" was a pseudonym, and the first line of the now-infamous homosexual rant -- which was even reprinted in the Congressional Record -- claimed that the entire piece was a "cruel fantasy" that explained "how the oppressed desperately dream of being the oppressor."

The "dream" was filled with a nightmare scenario that seemed like something out of a fascist coup d'etat: "All laws banning homosexual activity will be revoked .... [W]e shall make films about the love between heroic men .... The family unit -- spawning ground of lies, betrayals, mediocrity, hypocrisy and violence -- will be abolished .... All churches who condemn us will be closed."

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