Welcome to part two of my live-blog reading of David Blankenhorn’s The Future of Marriage (2007). You can read part one here. Even though the Family Scholars Blog has gone on hiatus, I have decided to complete this live-blog series (and the book!).

According to Blankenhorn’s introduction, the first five chapters of his book focus on a single question: “What is marriage?” (9). He argues that existing histories of marriage are either so narrowly focused as to “tell us little or nothing about marriage as a cross-cultural institution,” or overly-broad, necessarily “superficial and unsatisfying” in their attempt to provide a trans-historical narrative of a diverse institution. Not himself a trained historian, David B. does not attempt “a history of marriage, but [does] aim to capture the essence of marriage as a human institution” (10).

So as a historian — one who finds both narrowly-focused monographs and ambitious synthesis histories to be of value — I am naturally interested in Blankenhorn’s alternative approach: what sources does he use, what bodies of evidence does he draw on, and what analytic tools does he employ, to answer the question “What is marriage?” in a meta-historical, essence-seeking sense?

To begin answering these questions, let’s take a look at chapters one and two.

Chapter One: “What is Marriage?”

Chapter one, a mere 11 pages in length, seeks to establish that the status quo in marriage understanding is deficient — is too vague. In order to wrestle with the question of whether or not same-sex partners can or should be granted social and legal access to marriage as an institution, we need (David B. believes) an “adequate answer … a working definition of marriage for our time” (21). I have three observations about this opening salvo:

• David Blankenhorn’s sources, ranging as they do across time and space and context (Andrew Sullivan op-eds, E.J. Graff’s book-length history of marriage, legal decisions from the U.S. and Canada, a Mae West quotation…), are cherry-picked soundbites that don’t offer us any sense of the cultural specificity. In what historical or social context were these observations made?  An opinion piece by a gay marriage advocate like Sullivan, for example, is a different type of source than is a quip by Mae West than is a court decision in a specific case, than is a journalist’s argument about the historical meaning(s) of a social institution. To pick out the one source I have recent knowledge of, David argues that E.J. Graff’s definition of marriage is, “a commitment to live up to the rigorous demands of love, to care for each other as best you humanly can” (12). This may be technically accurate, as a quote, but it is misleading. Graff actually lays out a detailed set of interlocking answers to what marriage has been for: it has been an economic arrangement, a sexual arrangement, a way to organize procreation and parenting, a way of creating kinship networks, and a way to exert social control over individuals through institutions (the church, the state). Using Graff as an example of modernity’s squeamishness over providing concrete responses to the question “What is marriage?” is a poor choice at best, and intentionally misleading at worst. 
• Even if we were to accept that modern definitions of marriage are vague (historians might argue they are going through a period of flux — something marriage definitions have done before, and will no doubt do again), I find myself wondering what’s so bad about vague? Does that make marriage any less real to you and me? As you all know, I just went through the process of getting married myself. It didn’t feel vague. It felt concrete, it felt real. Hanna and I made specific promises — promises drawn from legal and religious tradition. We signed our marriage license paperwork and our own marriage contract. We had interlocking webs of meaning — religious, legal, social, political, historical — with which to make sense of what we chose to do. Just because Joe Schmoe down the street or Mary Smith up the hill might have radically different conceptions of what it means to marry, or be living out radically different married-life arrangements than Hanna and I are currently living, doesn’t make our marriage less meaningful or specific than if we were all living cookie-cutter replicas of one anothers’ lives. We live in a pluralistic society, and as long as people aren’t stabbing one another with olive forks, and are responsive when I shout out the window to turn-the-music-down-please, I’m pretty okay with that.
• Along those lines, I found myself thinking about E.J. Graff’s multi-strand approach to marriage definition(s), and I wonder why we need to reduce marriage to a single “working definition” in order to move forward. Marriage, as David B. acknowledges has never had “a single, universally accepted definition of marriage — partly because the institution is constantly evolving, and partly because many of its features vary across groups and cultures” (11). That’s certainly a statement I’d be willing to get behind! So why, then, are we immediately turning around to search for an “adequate….working definition”? Surely we might more usefully observe that there are a cluster of marriage behaviors  or meanings that can be seen across many, if not all, marriage relationships historically and globally. Within that cluster of behaviors and meanings, some will be more constant than others, some will crop up in some cultures and historical periods only to fade away … and then to return. Some might be said to fairly reliably appear in most marriages — sexual intimacy, for example — although we would be inaccurate to say such a behavior was a requirement of marriage; very few cultures police their married members’ sexual activities and some people who marry never or cease engaging in sexual intimacy with one another (or altogether). This more fluid, descriptive approach may be entertaining and illuminating, without the strain of requiring such human diversity to fit into a single concept across all time and space. 

The evidence base for chapter two is archaeological, anthropological, literary, philosophical, with a liberal dose of evolutionary psychology thrown in. I will admit to a strong bias against any theory that tries to account for human behavior through narratives of human physical evolution. Quite simply, as Blankenhorn himself acknowledges, human prehistory “is a time about which we can only speculate, based on sparse and fragmentary bits of evidence. Yet scholars have speculated on the subject for more than two millennia” (23). Given the dearth of evidence against which to reality-check one’s work, it’s all too easy to read into our pre-human ancestors and our bodies a biological determinism that — presto! — just happen to fit with our own dearly-held desires for what human society or human beings “naturally” are, or what we are “hard-wired” to do. It’s a situation ripe for confirmation bias. And obviously, cultural conservatives are not the only culprits: there have long been feminists arguing the case for a prehistoric matriarchy, and anyone who bases their case for queer acceptance on a “born this way” platform is standing on similarly shaky ground.

However, in this instance we’re talking about a narrative of prehistory that suggests that marriage was developed by humans “to increase the likelihood of survival and success [of] the infant human,” because human young “need a father and the human mother needs a mate” (35). It is because of this survival strategy (keeping male humans involved in parenting their young) that relational sex, rather than simple procreative sex, developed: “A lot more sexual intercourse among the humans, not so as to make a baby, but to make a couple to raise a baby” (35).

Which … okay. Like, if that’s the (pre)story you want to tell yourself? But human biology and human behavior interact in really complicated ways, as any responsible neuroscientist will tell you. This all makes for a great story (if you find that kind of gender-essentialist shit attractive, which I don’t, but we’ll get to that later) but it doesn’t really tell us much about how humans might best respond to their current environment.  Because here’s the thing about evolution … it’s evolutionary. We keep on changing. So the way human societies worked in the past tells us about the past, not so much about the present and what our present-day needs and desires might be.

Two additional points before we close this post:

• I’m not trained in the fields of evolutionary psychology, human neurology, or prehistorical anthropology. However, it is my understanding that the theories that David B. uses to sketch out his prehistorical narrative are deeply contested by feminist scientists and others. Yet this chapter reads authoritatively — despite its opening caution about speculation. It reads, quite frankly, like the work of someone who has recently read some stuff in the field and is wowed by its arguments. There is little critical analysis of the researchers’ potential bias or the quality of their work. All of this gives me pause, and would give me pause even if the person was arguing for something I might philosophically be disposed to want evidence to conclude: for example that humans sexual variety was “hard-wired” or that early human males were “hard-wired” to wash the prehistorical dishes and offer to do the laundry when their prehistorical female partners were busy lactating for the youngins.
• Blankenhorn posits that the sexual division of humans (male and female) is “the primary division in our species,” and argues that long-term coupling created a “new way of living [that] bridged that divide” (30). I am skeptical on two levels about this assertion, which is presented as uncontested fact. First, I question whether sex differentiation is, in fact, the primary division of the human species. Certainly, in our modern world, sex (and its kissing-cousin, gender) feel like a primary division. But we could just as well imagine that rather than sorting by male/female we might sort by left-handedness and right-handedness. Or by skin tone or eye color or height or any number of physical characteristics. We have chosen to over-determine peoples’ lives through gender expectations. Second, I am uncertain what he means when he argues that coupling “bridged that divide.” Did it need bridging, particularly? Are female and male humans naturally at odds with one another? Would our agendas really be so dissimilar if we were not drawn to one another in sexual desire (setting aside, for the moment, procreation)? After all, other species have solved the care and keeping of infants problem in other ways: human females might have surrendered care of infants to the males (a la sea horses), or might have banded together to care for their young while keeping a few males on hand for procreative purposes (science fiction is rife with such scenarios). It is not a biological imperative that we exist heterosocially — only that we make arrangements to procreate sexually. And yet, we do. Presumably because we have more in common as a common species than we do differences as a species with two general sex-types and all the lovely variation that comes around and between. 

Since I started guest-blogging for the Institute for American Values’ Family Scholars Blog back in January, I’ve been meaning to read IAV founder David Blankenhorn’s The Future of Marriage (Encounter Books, 2007). To the extent that David B.’s views on marriage equality have shifted since he authored this text it’s outdated — yet it remains an influential text. Furthermore, David himself has affirmed that he still believes in his central argument in the text: that access to marriage as a civil right (one “good”) must be balanced with the rights of children to be raised by their biological male/female parents (another “good”). What he terms “goods in conflict.”

So I felt that it was important to get a book-length sense of where he is coming from, as I have from reading his colleague Elizabeth Marquardt’s One Parent or Five? study. So this morning at the local public library I checked out a copy of The Future of Marriage and sat down to read it with a cup of tea when we got home. I can tell right away I’ll need to live-blog it, or a review will never happen (too much to talk back to / about) so I’m going to put together my informal thoughts chapter by chapter.

Here are my notes on the Introduction.

• He makes the assertion that “marriage is fundamentally about the needs of children,” as opposed to fundamentally about the needs of adults (2). I’m curious to see how this argument plays out across the book for a couple of reasons. First, because I wonder why we need to set up such a dichotomy (children vs. adults … why not “marriage is fundamentally about the needs of human beings”?). Must it be an either/or? Second, if we were to accept that marriage, as a social institution, were “fundamentally” about the needs of children the question obviously arises as to the place in such a social institution for married couples with no children (and no capability for procreation and/or plans to  parent). Regardless of the sexual orientation of those non-parenting couples, one wonders how we understand their marriages. This is obviously a very personal question to me since I am a married person without a) the capacity to procreate with my spouse and/or plans to become a parent.
• He introduces the “goods in conflict” framework, using the following example: “It is good to deter crime by punishing criminals; it is also good to forgive” (3). While he doesn’t explicitly say so, I assume he believes this to be a self-evident example of two “good” things. I’d point out that this is not necessarily the case: not everyone agrees that either a) punishment actually deters crime, or b) that it is  always a good thing to forgive. Similarly, the two “good” things David suggests stand in conflict in the marriage debate are not always both seen as “good” goals. There are those who don’t believe in privileging bio-parent families, and there are those who don’t believe access to marriage for same-sex couples is a positive thing. So I will be interested to see how he speaks to this dis-unity on matters of social goods.
• Why choose marriage as a key social issue? This is something I’ve been thinking about a lot since I started writing for FSB, where participants across the political spectrum seem to take the notion mostly as read that marriage as a social institution isn’t only something we should all have the option to access, but also something which has broad social benefits. (The corollary to this is, of course, that marriage promoters spend a lot of time wringing their hands about peoples’ reluctance — at least the right peoples’ reluctance — to marry.). I obviously chose, in agreement with my wife, to become married. I do not, however, think of marriage as a blanket social good. I am skeptical of its powers for social betterment. If we are interested in enhancing the well-being of the greatest number of people, I don’t think marriage promotion is a very efficient campaign — nor do I like the way it overlaps so significantly with intrusive moralizing about peoples’ personal life choices (“settle” for a man — any man! — before it’s too late; marry your “baby daddy,” “take responsibility” for your pregnant girlfriend, etc.). 
• I was struck by the repeated use of the term “marriage” where the broader notion of “family” might actually be more appropriate? For example, “[Humans] have devised an institution to bridge the sexual divide, facilitate group living, and carry out reproduction. All societies have this institution. They call it ‘marriage’ ” (5). I would have said, actually, that the institution in question is actually “family,” and that “marriage” is one tool in the toolbox for creating family. It strikes me as a peculiarly American/Western way of conceiving of family — as something that could be reduced to (or at least centers around) the married pair. In other times and places, the married pair has been subordinated to other familial structures. 
• Does marriage “bridge the sexual divide” (5)? And what does that even mean? I actually suspect it means that the state of being married is society’s way of ensuring that men and women (those oh-so-different creatures!) must  learn how to co-exist. I suspect this because it’s an argument I’ve heard from sexual conservatives who preach gender complementarity. If we don’t force hetero young people into “opposite”-sex pairings, what will the world come to!? Women and men won’t know how to communicate or co-exist any more! For obvious reasons, I am skeptical that it is only through a normative culture of marriage that the differently-sexed members of our humans species would learn to get along.
• David B. refers to the notion that marriage is “a commitment between two people … an intimate, caring relationship … an expression of love” as “inadequate” (9). Rather than “inadequate,” I might have picked “flexible,” or “big tent,” or “pluralistic” (although one could quibble about the last, since it actively excludes more political-transactional notions of what marriage is for). It is interesting to me that David finds such general notion of marriage to be disturbing — surely it leaves us all room to flesh out the particulars of our own family lives and values? To get too rigidly prescriptive about what marriage means for all people would be to define many people who currently marry out of the state of marriage. Which is not to say I don’t, also, have boundaries in mind for what marriage is and is not — but I think my line in the sand for actively policing those boundaries for other peoples’ relationships falls in a very different place from David’s. I will be interested to learn more about where his boundaries are (or were, circa 2007).