Marriage and Caste in America - 3/12/07

[Smartmarriages]

- MARRIAGE AND CASTE IN AMERICA
     
Marriage and Caste in America
By David Forsmark
FrontPageMagazine.com
March 12, 2007

BOOK: Marriage and Caste in America: Separate and Unequal Families in a
Post-Marital Age, By Kay S. Hymowitz.
Ivan R. Dee, $22.50, 179 pp.

Read it now and get it signed by Kay Hymowitz at the Denver Smart Marriages
Conference.  She will present a keynote address at Friday's lunch plenary
session.  Order the hardback for $15.30 by pasting in this link:
http://www.amazon.com/Marriage-Caste-America-Separate-Post-Marital/dp/156663
7090/sr=1-1/qid=1164125880?ie=UTF8&s=books&tag2=smartmarriages

> . . . marriage is at the center of American culture's "life script" for
> success. . . the unmarriage revolution has introduced a stagnant caste system
> to a growing segment of American life: "When the poor lost the language of
> American marriage, they lost a good deal more than a spouse.  They lost the
> touch with the values of self-sufficiency and individual ambition.  They lost
> a life script, and they lost the language of opportunity."

> Hymowitz writes there is a generational backlash against the Destructive
> Generation's legacy of self-fulfilled parents.

It is often said in conservative circles that "the best social program is a
job."  Kay Hymowitz of the Manhattan Institute makes a persuasive case in
Marriage and Caste in America that the best social program is actually
marriage.

Marriage largely consists of articles Hymowitz wrote for City Journal on the
subject.  If economist Thomas Sowell and marriage advocate Maggie Gallagher
were to team up on a book about the place of marriage in American society,
the result might be a lot like this one. Hymowitz not only probes the
oft-examined effects of marriage on children and current society, but she
also explores how marriage contributes to what Sowell calls the "cultural
capital" of America.

In fact, Hymowitz argues, marriage is at the center of American culture's
"life script" for success. Before the Founding Fathers, the American version
of marriage had been a part and parcel of New World dynamism, a blatant
rejection of the European caste system of kinship and arranged marriages
within class.  No one sat down 300 years ago and designed the American way
of marriage. It was a natural outgrowth of the freedom and
self-determination sought by those who settled here.

While it's true that every healthy society has developed some sort of
marriage tradition, Hymowitz contends that the success of the American free
market largely depends on the traditional American model of marriage and
children.  Such an institution is uniquely evolved to prepare one to be able
to take advantage, rather than be left behind, by a dynamic and rapidly
changing economy.

Hymowitz focuses not on narrow causes and effects but on the whole ecosystem
of incentives: "Marriage is not a lifestyle choice, a bundle of benefits or
a piece of paper.  And it goes far beyond planning for a wedding or a home
mortgage.  As the core cultural institution, marriage orders life in ways we
only dimly understand. It carries with it signals about how we should live,
signals that are in line with both our economy and our politics in the
largest sense.  In choosing their own spouses and planning their own home
lives, people act out the individual freedom and the pursuit of happiness
that are our primary values [and] pass the ideals of self-sufficiency and
individual responsibility on to the next generation."

American marriage makes the dynamic economy possible. It's why you don't see
American youths rioting in the streets like Parisians for the guaranteed
right to clean toilets for the next 20 years.

On the flip side, Hymowitz argues that the unmarriage revolution has
introduced a stagnant caste system to a growing segment of American life:
"When the poor lost the language of American marriage, they lost a good deal
more than a spouse.  They lost the touch with the values of self-sufficiency
and individual ambition.  They lost a life script, and they lost the
language of opportunity."

For all the Democrats' current fuss over using the minimum wage or, even
dumber, a "living wage" to haul the poor out of poverty, the fact remains
that it is very difficult for a married couple in America to remain
desperately poor.  

John Edwards will likely give his "two Americas speech" countless times in
the next two years, and even Hymowitz concedes we're approaching a day when
that division might exist as something other than a figment of his
blow-dried imagination. But not for the reasons Edwards cites. "Two-America
Jeremiahs," Hymowitz writes, "usually nod at the single parent family as a
piece of the inequality story, then quickly change the subject."  Why pick
on single moms when you have moneyed special interests that are eager to
hear about Wal-Mart, outsourcing, and the need for class-action suits?

But as Hymowitz documents, the fact that the poor are still living with the
effects of the unmarriage revolution even as the more educated and well off
are returning to a traditional marriage model, could be a cause for even
greater inequality down the road. The 1972 Supreme Court case Stanley v.
Illinois does not get the same attention of Roe v. Wade a year later, but in
declaring that the distinctions between wed and unwed fathers are
"constitutionally repugnant," the court put a legal stamp of approval on the
unmarriage revolution and overturned centuries of precedent and the laws of
most states.

Putting a legal divide between parenting and marriage opens up a Pandora's
Box of no-fault divorce and gay marriage. The only real interest the state
has in marriage is to establish responsibility for the raising of children
and to establish lineage and inheritance rights; it is not for notarizing
romantic feelings.  Hymowitz explains: "Marriage has always had a
fundamental universal core that makes gay marriage a non sequitur; it has
always governed property and inheritance rights; it has always been the
means of establishing paternity, legitimacy, and the rights and
responsibilities of parenthood; and because these goals involve bearing and
raising children, it has always involved (at least one) man and woman."

Divorce, Hymowitz writes, is a ³conundrum² for the nation because ³it
follows directly from American principles even while threatening to subvert
them."  For a long time, Americans had a slightly higher divorce rate than
much of the rest of the world because the same impulse toward freedom that
created American marriage was also reluctant to force its bonds. However, it
was not until marriage was de-linked from child rearing that no-fault
divorce enabled the explosion of broken marriages.

Like all social experiments, the unmarriage revolution affected the poor
most adversely. In the black community, thanks to a lethal combination of
political correctness, rage and social engineers run wild, marriage all but
disappeared in some urban areas.  Hymowitz necessarily chronicles this
decline and its ill effects, though it is obviously well tilled soil, and
while she puts her own stamp on the telling, breaks little new ground.  She
is less than optimistic that the current trend of young fathers expressing
the desire to "step up" for their children will be a long-term success.
While this may be a valuable rhetorical first step, only
comedian-turned-social-critic Bill Cosby is using the word "marriage" in his
criticism of parenting in the black community. And while he attracts large
older crowds, he is getting hammered by members of the younger generations.

Hymowitz expresses doubt that, without the permanence of marriage, fathers
will be around when the cute factor wears off and child-raising becomes real
work.  Even at its early stages, with fathers already moving on to other
women - and possibly creating more children - a quasi-polygamy with no legal
ties is working against them.

However, Marriage and Caste in America is the first book I have read on this
subject that ends on an optimistic note.  Despite desperate attempts by the
media - most recently The New York Times - to say that fewer adults are
living as married couples, Hymowitz writes there is a generational backlash
against the Destructive Generation's legacy of self-fulfilled parents.

Hymowitz shows that the divorce rate is falling, and the percentage of
children living with both parents is rising - even among black children.
Long life and the fact that Gen X and Millennials are getting married later
because they value marriage accounts for the misused media stats. But that
might be the most encouraging part of this trend -- that it is happening
without the "help" of the cultural elite.

http://frontpagemagazine.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=2726

Copyright©2007 FrontPageMagazine.com

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