ST. LOUIS POST-DISPATCH
Thursday, July 5, 2007

Focus on the public purpose of marriage: protecting children
By Colleen Carroll Campbell

Battles over same-sex marriage typically turn on arguments about gay rights,
judicial activism and views on homosexuality. Absent are answers to a more
fundamental question: What is the public purpose of marriage?

In his new book, "The Future of Marriage," author David Blankenhorn explains
how confusion surrounding that question muddies our marriage debates and
obscures what's at stake in their outcome.

As president of the non-partisan Institute for American Values, Blankenhorn has
devoted his career to promoting marriage and responsible fatherhood. He has
seen the social science studies affirming that the best way to ensure the well
being of children is to ensure that children are raised by their married,
biological parents. On every measure from health and financial stability to
graduation rates, those children tend to fare better than children raised in
other types of families.

Blankenhorn worries that this child-welfare ideal is endangered by a view
increasingly prevalent among Americans: that marriage is merely another
lifestyle choice, the public recognition of a private relationship with no
intrinsic connection to parenthood.

That view is a historical anomaly. For thousands of years, marriage has existed
in nearly every society for the purpose of ensuring that a child is raised by
his mother and father. Far from simply blessing a private relationship between
consenting adults, marriage has aimed to promote stable sexual unions between
men and women whose public commitment creates a suitable context for
childrearing.

In recent decades, factors ranging from increasing acceptance of sex outside
marriage and wider use of contraception to the institution of no-fault divorce
laws gradually have changed our view of marriage as a permanent, public bond
linked to parenthood. A Pew survey released this week confirmed this trend,
finding that most Americans now consider adult happiness, not child rearing, as
the primary purpose of marriage, and most do not consider children very
important to a successful marriage.

Some see this severance of the link between love, marriage and the baby
carriage as social progress. Yet Blankenhorn sees a downside: rising rates of
divorce, unmarried cohabitation and births to unwed mothers that have resulted
in more children growing up without a married mother and father.

Blankenhorn believes same-sex marriage will exacerbate this trend. By bestowing
marriage's benefits on same-sex couples, we explicitly are endorsing the view
that children do not need both mothers and fathers, since children raised by
same-sex couples will be deprived of one or the other. We are legally
enshrining the view of marriage as a private relationship that has nothing to
do with bridging the divide between the sexes or encouraging the presence of
both fathers and mothers in the lives of their biological children.

This radical change would affect all Americans by further eroding our fragile
marriage culture. As Blankenhorn and other scholars have noted, international
surveys show that people in countries where gay marriage and civil unions are
accepted widely tend to be less positive about marriage, more accepting of
divorce and less inclined to believe that people who want children should marry.

Marriage survives in a culture as long as a critical mass of the population
views it as the socially acceptable context for childbearing and childrearing.
When popular support for marriage drops too low and public policy denies the
unique value of marriage between a man and a woman as a guarantor of social
stability, fewer men and women marry. More children are deprived of the
presence of their mothers and fathers. And marriage no longer serves its civic
purpose, which always has been more about defending child welfare than
validating adult desires.

Colleen Carroll Campbell is an author, television host and St. Louis-based
fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center. Her website is
www.colleen-campbell.com.