Luke Morris

The latest Center for Constructive Alternatives (CCA) seminar at Hillsdale College addressed questions involving the traditional ideas of marriage and the family, as well as certain contemporary challenges to that view. The speakers brought up issues of divorce, gay marriage, gender differences, and the raising of children, and attempted to resolve them in light of the traditional view. All in all, the speakers were homogenous in their positions. Whether they supported a Constitutional marriage amendment or not, they almost unanimously agreed that the traditional family was the ideal setting for the raising of children, and that the prospect of homosexual marriage represented a threat to the traditional family. Both of these views, as generalizations, are incorrect. While a traditional family setup can be the best surroundings in which to bring up a certain child, there is nothing saying that this will necessarily be so; and, though some gay couples may wish to denigrate the traditional concept of marriage, it is an unfair stereotype to say that gay marriage is necessarily an attack on the family.

We might define the traditional idea of the family as consisting of one man and one woman, legally joined in marriage, raising their children. It involves constraining sexual activity to a monogamous relationship, bound by law, and orchestrated for the purpose of conceiving and bringing up children in a well-balanced, two-parent home. As Hadley Arkes puts it, “‘marriage,’ taken seriously, involves a combination of biology and legal commitment” (Arkes 3). The legal commitment is important here, since “laws have ever been a part of the understanding or construction of families” (4).[1] Thus marriage, a voluntary permanent union of people, becomes a construct of the state, an institution of that great gray entity “society,” whom none have seen, yet all know well. According to Arkes’ view, marriage has never been only about two (or more) people publicly stating their private love and commitment to each other. It has always been about the political rules of “society.” And, of course, there can be only one main purpose, or telos, for a man and a woman to marry: the begetting and rearing of children.

Never mind that such a view of marriage undermines the individual’s autonomy, self-worth, and search for his own happiness; it also decimates his personal moral esteem, telling him that the only moral end he can seek in a life-long romantic relationship is to bow before the law and fulfill his biological function of continuing the species. As Arkes says, “marriage is inescapably sexual in its meaning, and in the strictest definition that applies to sexuality even now, the sexuality that finds its function and purpose in begetting” (17). Homosexual marriage, then, cannot be allowed within the “laws.” The purpose of these laws, apparently, is to encourage the creation of the traditional family, to push men to marry women (and vice-versa, monogamously), and to bring into being the next generation of humans, that they may be raised as ‘good’ people always have been, and so that we may continue the ever-expanding Darwinian propagation of our species.

Why is there such a legalistic basis to what Douglas Kmiec calls “an institution that is not created by the state” (Kmiec 31)? Apparently, “society,” or the state, the government, the monopolist agent of retaliatory force within given territorial boundaries, must hold the propagation of the species as one of its interests. This seems absurd, and there should be no reason why we would have to consider such a claim. For one thing, “society” is not a real entity; it has no thoughts, beliefs, or feelings; it does not create morality or decide on questions of ethical relevance; it is a convenient fiction, an abstract concept that subsumes under its banner all the distinct and fundamentally different individuals living within a particular government’s protection. The individuals that the state must protect (and only protect, if it is to be a legitimate state) are all viable humans in themselves, with all the rights and responsibilities that our rational human nature entails. And it is these citizens, living today, whom the government must concern itself with today. It is not the state’s function to force or “encourage” procreation in order to ensure its own survival by providing itself a new generation of taxpayers. In short, the state should not be butting in on the family at all – so the legalistic peg of the “traditional” family definition is here removed.[2]

So why, then, should we assume that the traditional family is, in each and every case, the ideal situation for raising particular children? It is certainly not impossible to imagine a situation where a certain homosexual couple could be more loving, nurturing, and supportive than a certain heterosexual couple, if the same children were in one situation or the other. In fact, it is hard to deny empirically that this is not sometimes the case. So, simply because a homosexual couple cannot technically have their own family, that does not necessarily entail that they might not be suited to adopt one or more children. They could then bring such children into a loving home that is bound together by a personal and public commitment (through some third-party institution, such as a church) – in other words, by marriage. Yet, as Kmiec states, “Affirming a marital union between two individuals of homosexual orientation still leaves the vital state interest in procreation unaddressed” (32). Of course, Kmiec is begging the question. He is assuming, in his premises, that the state has an interest, and that such an interest could justifiably be drawn towards the sexual activities of private citizens. Collectivist thinking like this certainly does not help Kmiec on moral grounds, particularly applied to a belief in natural law.

Still, Kmiec, Arkes, and other neo-conservative types toss around the argument that the survival and health of all the individuals within a state depends on the ongoing stability of the state as a whole, and that this ongoing stability depends on the continual production of well-educated and responsible citizens. Taking this argument to its logical conclusion, though, why should the traditional family be the form in which this ideal is realized? Why shouldn’t we have a Platonic Republic, with a ‘community of women and children,’ in which the children would be raised by the community as a whole, and taught the virtues of good citizenship as handed down to the commonwealth by the philosophical ‘guardians’ of the perfect state? If it is true that, as Kmiec says, “The public sovereign respects the private marital union so long as it yields an uninterrupted supply of new individuals with sufficient qualities to sustain the on-going functions of the community as a whole, public and private” (Kmiec 11), why should we respect the value of any one individual at all? The state is obviously primary. Society is of more worth than the individuals of which it is comprised, a whole far greater than the sum of its parts, as Hegel and Marx would have it. Thus, we have no necessary moral reason to respect a private union of individuals, when empirical evidence could show that a communal, common-parenthood society might produce more and better new citizens of the state.

If we take the arguments of the CCA speakers seriously, this idea seems a plausible solution to many of the problems with family dilutions and breakups prevalent in the modern world. After all, as these people readily admit, the family unit, as traditionally defined, is crumbling. And, as David Popenoe states, in comparing marriage, divorce, co-habitation, and other familial statistics in the U.S. and Sweden, the real cause of family breakdown “lies not in politics or in economics but rather in the culture of modernity that has come to be pervasive in all advanced, industrial societies. Basic to this culture is the growth of radical individualism, the single-minded pursuit of personal autonomy and self-interest, which leaves marriage and the family in its wake” (Popenoe 12). Whatever this “radical individualism” is, though, it is not individualistic. The problem with Sweden and the U.S. is not individualism, but collectivism, the desire to follow the status quo, to latch oneself on to the fad of the day and trail along to whatever “society” feels one should do. The 1960s explosion of “free love,” socialism, and rebellion was not expressing individualism; it was expressing the desire to belong, to be part of the next big thing, that thing that ‘everyone was doing.’ To try to re-replace this new collectivism with a collectivism of a more traditional sort is not going to help solve the family problem in any way. To paraphrase Ambrose Bierce, “the ‘conservative’ is enamored of old evils, while the ‘liberal’ seeks to replace them with new ones.” The answer, then, if any can be found, will come from a re-awakening of classical individualism – realizing that each person’s life is his own, that he must be free to live it for himself and to enter into the relationships and commitments that his reason and conscience lead him to, and that he must accept full responsibility for all of the actions he takes. The solution to problems that particular families face cannot be found in outlawing certain forms of marriage, in restricting child-rearing to heterosexual married couples, and certainly not in “rescuing marriage and the family from the grip of a self-interest-fostering market economy that is tethered increasingly to a morally corrupting popular culture” (Popenoe 12).

That pop culture is morally corrupt, I will not endeavor to deny; it is, in many ways. To truly rescue marriage and the family from the free market (where men are able to make their own choices, and are held to them), however, would logically lead us towards a community in which “society” was responsible for all, and no one responsible for himself.[3] After all, it is in the state’s best interests for everyone to procreate, is it not? In truth, we are corrupting the concept of “family” if we use any particular meaning it has as a universal, all-encompassing “best” situation in which children should be raised. The virtue of raising a particular child in a particular situation is situation-dependent, and dependent upon the virtues of the participants involved. Including some new or different combinations within the concept of “family” represents no threat to those who hold to the traditional conception. Again, each person is an individual, and is free to apply certain concepts as he and those he associates with shall choose, without dependence upon some “law” that is supposed to make men moral simply by its say-so. Morality is objective, but it arises from personal choice, not from social commandment. And thus, moral blanket-statements[4] are (typically) morally depraved.

Problems With the “Traditional Family”: