Ruth Institute Blog

Part One of this series is located here.

How savvy are you about step-families? Do you understand the structural similarity between step-families and same-sex marriage? Take the Step-Family Quiz to test your knowledge. I created this quiz as an engaging way to help defenders of marriage understand the cultural blind-spot that we have about step-families. Of course anybody is welcome to take it. But it is geared towards those who believe that marriage is only between a man and a woman. By the end it should become apparent why I have focused on marriage defenders. There are five questions and their answers, plus a bonus question at the end.

1. Which group was the first to claim there is “no difference” between the intact family founded on natural marriage and other family structures?

• a. Heterosexuals
• b. Homosexuals

2. When was that claim first made, and what form did it take?

Read more…

I was talking to Dr. Morse yesterday, and asked her to think back to when she was a young girl in school. “How many kids were from divorced families?” I asked her. She said she could think of one. The rest lived with their married biological parents. Before the Sexual Revolution, there used to be an important and unrecognized equality among children: nearly every child lived with his/her married parents.

Let’s think for a moment about what the Sexual Revolution has done to equality from the child’s point of view. In the name of adult sexual liberation, we now have a tremendous amount of family/structural inequality among children. Some kids live with their married parents, and many do not:

• Nearly 40% of births are out of wedlock
• A majority of teens don’t live in intact families
• One in three children live in single parent homes

Read more…

Proposal from the Ruth Institute:

Gender-Based Civil Unions

Since an essential public purpose of civil marriage in the United States has been to attach mothers and fathers to their children and to one another, and since this essential purpose is being overwritten and therefore discarded due to gender neutral marriage and parenting laws, we propose the following:

To establish civil unions that are gender based–one man and one woman. With respect to taxation, parentage, federal benefits, etc. (reference), they will be legally equivalent to (now gender neutral) marriage in everything but the name. The legal doctrine that was formerly known as the marital presumption of paternity, which existed in order to attach the father to the family, was distorted into the marital presumption of parentage under gender neutral marriage and parentage. It shall be restored to its former function of attaching the father to the family for these civil unions. Gender based terms shall be used to describe the parties, such as male, female, mother, father, etc.

Male/female couples who were previously considered married under the gender neutral system may opt into a gender-based civil union. Churches who uphold marriage as the union between a man and a woman can perform these ceremonies under whatever name they wish. If they wish to call it marriage, they can do so. There will be no speech restrictions regarding what individuals, churches, or other private entities call these unions. However, with respect to the legal code, they will be called civil unions.

Regarding divorce: generally, we prefer the state to have a higher bar to overcome before getting involved in a divorce for these civil unions than it does currently for civil marriage. Michael J. McManus, in the Spring 2011 edition of The Family in America (reference), proposes what he calls “Three Achievable No-Fault Reforms.” They are:

1. Mutual Consent.
2. Parental Divorce Reduction Act.
3. Responsible Spouse/Fit Parent.

We are open to discussion about any of these or other reasonable proposals. Our primary goals are to reaffirm sex differences in the legal code and to reaffirm the father’s attachment to the family. Secondarily, we see these civil unions as an opportunity to make long-needed reforms to divorce laws.

If you like this idea, we encourage you to share this post with your friends. You can also support our work by making a donation today. .

Did you hear about the two young guys in New Zealand who got married to enter a contest to win rugby tickets? I wrote about them the other day. The contest was open to married couples. The two guys are not gay, but have been buddies since they were 6 years old.  They got married to be eligible to enter the contest.

Now some gay activists were indignant about this marriage. They claimed that it trivialized marriage itself and made a mockery of the efforts of gay activists to win marriage equality.  I agree with them, except for this point: removing the gender requirement already trivialized

marriage.

But I will not press that point here. I want to ask a different question.

Q: Do you or I care whether these two rugby buddies stay married for a lifetime or divorce next year?  Does the public have any interest whatsoever in the success or failure of this particular friendship?

A: The public has no conceivable interest in what two men do together. Whether they are rugby buddies or golfing buddies or sodomy partners, the public couldn’t care less. (As a matter of fact, I don’t really want to know!)

Why then, does the public have any interest at all in the relationship called marriage? Read more…

 

Hi Melanie,

My name is Jennifer Johnson and I am the Director of Outreach at the Ruth Institute. Since you linked to an important document created by my organization in your post called, “Conservatives Can’t Be Pro-Marriage and Oppose Gay Marriage,” I would like to respond to you.

You said that you haven’t found a conservative to “give you a satisfactory answer” as to “how gay marriage tangibly undermines traditional marriage arrangements.” That’s unfortunate, and I’m not very surprised. However, this kind of answer is the kind of answer specialize in here at the Ruth Institute (which is no longer part of NOM, BTW).

Before I answer, let me pose a question, Melanie. Have you researched the precise manner in which gay marriage is implemented into the legal code? I would like to make a prediction: that you have not done this research. Very few have. What I have observed, instead, is that gay marriage supporters make an assumption. Their assumption goes like this: Read more…

In this story from New Zealand, two male friends (who are not gay, by the way) are about to marry each other.  Part of their motive:

Engineering student Mr. McIntosh, 23, and teacher Mr. McCormick, 24, will tie the knot to win a “The Edge” radio station competition and a trip to the 2015 Rugby World Cup in England.

Also, they really like each other. They have been best buds since they were six years old.  They expect the marriage to last at least 2 years.  Marriage has been an “easy in, easy out” proposition throughout the industrialized world since the advent of no-fault divorce. So why shouldn’t these guys get married for a chance to win a cool prize?

Gay rights groups are offended.

Otago University Students’ Association Queer Support coordinator Neill Ballantyne, of Dunedin, said the wedding was an “insult” because marriage equality was a “hard fought” battle for gay people. “Something like this trivializes what we fought for.”

Sorry Neill. No go. You evidently did not realize that when you changed the law, you changed it for everyone. Two men can get married for any reason they want.  The law does not require them to prove that they are actually “gay,” or that they “love each Read more…

I have always tried to argue that there is a very serious civil outcome to redefining marriage, and it has nothing to do with religious liberty or the idea of “sacramental marriage.”

Since marriage is society’s primary way of acknowledging and understanding parenthood, redefining marriage redefines parenthood. Here in California, the affects of “SSM” and redefining parenthood are rapidly making their way through the legislature. Last year, Gov. Brown signed a bill allowing three or more legal parents for children, which was inspired by a “SSM” custody dispute.

Now we have this: AB 1951. This bill will change birth certificates to allow for a gender neutral option for parents. Gay couples will be able to list both of themselves on the child’s birth certificate. California recently did away with the terms “husband” and “wife,” because of “SSM,” and the lead legislator for that measure said that those terms were outdated and biased. I suppose we can infer the same thing for “mother” and “father.”  Read more…

I believe that the divide between conservatives on the marriage issue runs deeper than marriage. Over on Ricochet, on Peter Robinson’s marriage thread, several times I asked a question that went something like this:

Does society have a duty to place a nature-based limitation on the number of legally recognized parents for children?

There is a specific reason I asked this question. When it comes to legally recognized parents for children, there is a divide between the socially conservative view and the libertarian view. In fact, I don’t believe there is a principled difference between the libertarian view and the extreme Left on this particular point. By “extreme Left” I am referring specifically to  that she made in about March or April of 2013: Read more…

If you’re debating marriage with somebody and they bring up the interracial marriage ban (which was struck down by SCOTUS in a famous decision called Loving v. Virginia), show them this graphic and start talking about what the interracial marriage ban actually DID. 

Yesterday, I predicted that the debate between two Princeton professors would not broach what I consider to be the crucial questions on the marriage issue.

The opening salvo by Professor Emeritus James Doig seemed more concerned with catching Professor Robert George in some inconsistency than in really exploring what the redefinition of marriage might ultimately mean.

In my reaction to his article, I posed these question. I consider them the most crucial issues.

How will redefining marriage redefine parenthood? Are we happy with that redefinition? And do we really want to change the relationship between the State and the citizen in the way that this redefinition really entails?

And I predicted that the week-long exchange between the Princeton Professors would not address these issues.

Today’s response by Professor Robert George has many interesting arguments and ideas. But he does not remotely answer these questions.

Stay tuned. Maybe Professor Doig will take them up tomorrow.

I’m not holding my breath.

No one is doing what the Ruth Institute is doing: inspiring the Survivors of the Sexual Revolution to to recover from their negative experiences and share their stories with the young. Join us here.