A Marriage of Culture and Disenfranchisement

Apparently, it's time to dust off the Federal Marriage Amendment; the California Supreme Court has redefined marriage to include same-sex couples. For those who may have forgotten, the most prominent version of the FMA read as follows:

Marriage in the United States shall consist only of the union of a man and a woman. Neither this constitution or the constitution of any state, nor state or federal law, shall be construed to require that marital status or the legal incidents thereof be conferred upon unmarried couples or groups.

As I argued at the time, the effect of this language would be to prevent the expansion of the definition of marriage to include same-sex couples and, while enabling state legislatures to grant rights to same-sex couples (a moral, even necessary, capability in some respects), to require that all civil union–type laws to explicitly grant rights to any new unions without the shorthand of referring to marriage.

That arrangement is as it should be for a changing culture because:

1. It leaves culturally central definitions such as that of marriage to the people
2. It allows states to acknowledge and accommodate changing life arrangements and adapting social practices, while forcing them to consider what has changed and what that change requires.
3. If the changes effected by number 2 become sufficiently thorough — and thoroughly accepted — the amendment can be stricken to erase the legal distinction to mirror the by-then erased cultural distinction.

This process is the appropriate one because it enables our society to bring about change in such a way as to preserve that which is good and necessary in marriage, while experimenting with the expansion of its principles to other groups. Of equal importance, it arrests divisive government trends that have made all cultural battles national in scale and hinged them on the largely unelected judicial oligarchy.

Of course, the more likely course of events is for people who think they're marching on "the right side of history" to push their preferred change by any means possible, consequences be damned (or consequences be dismissed and wished away), while other people seek to avoid making ideologically defining decisions that often put them at odds with their own emotional inclinations, as well as the emotional inclinations of those whom they love and respect, thus forcing the opposing side into ever-more-defensive maneuvers, thus ensuring further cultural division and an escalation of civic hostilities.

All I Needed to Know About the Latest Ploy for Same-Sex Marriage, I Learned by Listening to Gordon Fox

Only in the deliberately abstruse logogriph of same-sex marriage advocacy could such a statement be made:

"Divorce can be a more fundamental principle than marriage because it has to do with the due process that's the bedrock of American jurisprudence," Fox said before the hearing. Prohibiting it effectively denies "a fundamental principle of democracy."

Ah, the intellectual contortions that follow a denial of the obvious, which, in this case, means a denial that one cannot be granted a divorce from a marriage that is not marriage. With the smoke and mirrors of "due process" claims, Representative Fox wishes to obscure the reality that a couple must be married in order to end their marriage.

Of course, the goal, here, is redefining marriage, not ensuring procedural democracy... or making sense.

Capricious Iniquity!

I expect it won't be long until courts begin to realize that this capricious obstinacy has no basis in rational adjudication:

Two elderly sisters who live together have lost their final appeal in a discrimination case that claimed they were victims of discrimination under Britain's civil partner law.

Joyce Burden, 90, and her 82-year-old sister Sybil (pictured) claimed that the partner law should have included any two people living in an interdependent relationship.

By not being included in the law they claim they could lose the their family home if either of them dies because the other could not afford to keep the home and pay Britain's death duty tax.

The women fought their case all the way to the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg. ...

The civil partnership law was passed in 2004. It grants same-sex couple of all of the rights and obligations of marriage except the name.

When the case began in 2006, Joyce Burden said that "If we were lesbians we would have all the rights in the world. But we are sisters, and it seems we have no rights at all."

In UK law there is a 40 percent inheritance tax an exemption for the first $500,000. Married couples, and couples in civil partnerships, are exempt from the tax.

The sisters’ house cost about $14,000 to build in 1965 but was recently valued last at about $1.6 million. That would mean the surviving sister would be required to pay nearly $600,000 in death tax.

Great Britain should ditch the oppressive death tax, and if it wants to maintain a law that grants partner benefits to people who cannot, by the nature of their relationship, conceive children, then it should do so fairly.

The Cost of Divorce

A recent study (PDF) produced by a group of family-values organizations, led by the Institute for American Values attempts to quantify the public monetary costs of divorce (emphasis in original):

Based on the methodology, we estimate that family fragmentation costs U.S. taxpayers at least $112 billion each and every year, or more than $1 trillion each decade. ...

These costs arise from increased taxpayer expenditures for antipoverty, criminal justice, and education programs, and through lower levels of taxes paid by individuals who, as adults, earn less because of reduced opportunities as a result of having been more likely to grow up in poverty.

Arguments could and should be had over the methodology, but inasmuch as I'd intuitively accept the general proposition that divorce comes with a public price tag, that's not what concerns me. Rather, it's the policy implications section that catches my eye (emphasis in original):

First, public concern about the decline of marriage need not be based only on the important negative consequences for child well-being or on moral concerns, as important as these concerns may be. High rates of family fragmentation impose extraordinary costs on taxpayers. Reducing these costs is a legitimate concern of government, policymakers, and legislators, as well as civic leaders and faith communities.

Second, even very small increases in stable marriage rates would result in very large returns to taxpayers. For example, a mere 1 percent reduction in rates of family fragmentation would save taxpayers $1.12 billion annually.

Given the modest cost of government and civic marriage-strengthening programs, even more modest success rates in strengthening marriages would be cost-effective.

This is one of those areas in which I think the cultural right has been corrupted by the modern impulse toward big government. If we wish to help families, we should remove some of the stress imposed by high taxes and pervasive regulations. If we wish to encourage marriage, rather than filter money through layered bureaucracies in targeted efforts within the compromise boundaries of public expenditures and support, we should clear the way for those who would teach marriage, so to speak, as a matter of moral imperative.

It isn't too outlandish of a quip to suggest that those who wish to strengthen the culture of marriage ought to focus on such measures as changing the education system to allow parents to choose whatever schools they like for their children — whether religiously based, or not (provided the schools meet a standard of academic rigor). After protecting the definition of marriage, traditionalists should content themselves with dismantling walls against religion and free speech that have sprouted like weeds in the law.

In the long run, expanding the nanny state will do more damage than good.

Not Seeing the Cultural Forest for the Sexual Trees

Doesn't it often seem that modern society proceeds according the following order of operations?

1. On emotional grounds, declare a change obviously beneficial and of minimal cost, with objections dismissed as outdated or inherently bigoted.
2. Implement change.
3. Ignore evidence that the naysayers were correct.
4. Let things proceed to crisis level.
5. Restate the original objections under the protection of groundbreaking studies and disguised as much as possible as compatible notions to the original emotional impulse.

Perhaps I've overstated, but such is my general response to this sort of discovery:

An analysis of national data conducted by Child Trends, a research center that focuses on children and youth, found that sexually active teens who identify their relationships with a partner as romantic and who go out socially with that person are more likely to use contraceptives than similar teens in more-casual relationships. ...

In light of this study, Manlove said, it's not enough for parents to focus simply on whether their kids are having sex. They should engage their kids in conversations about what healthy relationships look like, pay attention to the power dynamics of any relationship and stress the importance of contraception.

Not to point out the obvious, but one way in which parents can illustrate, for their children, "what healthy relationships look like" is to raise them within the context of faithful marriages. It's sort of like being "romantic" and "going out socially" for grownups.

Of course, the Western brains aren't yet ready to let go of other ideological blankies from which the "studies" ought to encourage weening. Withholding and being selective when it comes to sex, for example, will give young ladies an edge in "power dynamics." Some adults may wish to give girls that sophisticated view of interpersonal politics whereby sex is perfectly fine, even advisable, when the scepter is betwixt feminine fingers, but recent decades haven't really proven sophistication to be a match for instinct and the reality of biological responsibility.

A second example comes between the lines of the carefully phrased instruction to "stress the importance of contraception." The moderns have learned, you see, that the advice to "use contraception" is a bit too revealing about the likely implications of the mandate. It's as if they think parents' panegyrics to contraception require merely a new choice of words to avoid exacerbating the fruits of decades of safe-sex training:

Use of contraception, in fact, is not as regular as health officials might hope. Four out of 10 sexually active students reported not using contraceptives at all or using them only infrequently. Students who reported having multiple partners were particularly likely not to use protection. ...

... For example, a teen's contraceptive use may change from partner to partner. Using birth control consistently in one relationship doesn't necessarily mean that a young person will do the same with another partner.

The new, improved (and still in-denial) message to children: It is very important that you use contraception even when the sex is casual.

Extremism in the Service of Vice Is No Virtue

Is our society so corrupt that we must remake the argument against prostitution? The seediness, peril, and potential for corruption ought to be clear enough, but they are ultimately reasons for taxation and regulation. Have we been so seduced by an anything-your-heart-desires notion of freedom that we must hesitate over a state-level ban?

Lovers of freedom will certainly find an attractive simplicity in George Carlin's old reasoning that sex is legal, selling's legal, so selling sex should be legal. A step beyond simplicity, however, it becomes apparent that one could just as reasonably suggest that sex is legal, being in public is legal, so having sex in public should be legal, and few of those who would tolerate prostitution (I hope) would accept the requirement that we allow pornographic street theater. No, just as being in public changes the nature of the sexual act, so too does its being for sale.

At the same time, the potential states of a particular thing or act affect its essential meaning. Either we allow it to be in the nature of sex to be salable, or we treat its sale as unnatural. Our choice between the two makes a difference in the import of our decisions about whether and when to give it voluntarily.

Such cultural reasoning isn't generally carried out on an individual basis. The teenage girl contemplating her first sexual encounter won't look to the legal and social treatment of prostitution to gauge the significance of that to which she's being pressured. She might, however, give her submission a deeper level of thought — perhaps even lingering over her intentions and hopes for the future — if her choice is made within a culture that holds sex as too intimate to be commodified. Too sacred to be permitted the attenuating pull of market forces.

(Did I just say "sacred"? Well, yes. Part of our broader illness is our confusion about whether it is appropriate for our pluralistic society to treat certain things as sacred. It is entirely appropriate, as long as we don't hand definitional authority to the priestly caste of a particular religion.)

In the course of her consideration, the young lady would find the purpose of sex to be an unavoidable factor. In largest part, sex affects her future via its essentially procreative nature, with the related impact on that biological and emotional tangle between partners. The thread runs deep:

Economists believe humans act rationally (a somewhat irrational belief, if you ask me), so some conclude that all this out-of-wedlock childbearing is a logical response to market forces, not the result of something as amorphous as "culture." Since many working-class men do not offer the financial stability they used to provide, women see little incentive to marry them. As Obama said, "[M]any black men simply cannot afford to raise a family." (The out-of-wedlock birthrate among black Americans is close to 70 percent.) I'm trying to follow the logic here. I can understand that a woman looking to get married may decide that a man is such a poor economic prospect that he's not husband material (even if a husband with a low income is better than no husband and no income). But how then is that same man, or a string of them, worthy of fathering her children?

And if not worthy of fathering her children, how then worthy of a degree of intimacy once reserved for husbands? The evil of objectification rears its head in multiple corners: loose sex inherently presumes that the other person is merely for pleasure, which is what exempts him or her from being judged by the scale of a lifelong partner, and accepting your own sexual favor as something that can be doled lightly brings into view a price for allowing others to objectify you.

At this point, some minds will be entertaining clichés: that ship has sailed; the horse has left the barn. Sex is what it is, in our society, so why not err on the side of freedom? Let the men be honest about their desires and the women turn a profit. The tacit presumption, though, is that matter won't end badly.

Ships can be turned around over time; horses can be found; and if the legality-by-omission of prostitution in Rhode Island isn't sufficiently shocking to begin the return, then we'll have to hope that a chance remains to do so when the shock comes via discovery of Rhode Island's daughters' means of putting themselves through college.

Religious Freedom in a Cave, Under a Blanket, with a Flashlight

Jon Pincince responds to my most recent post on same-sex marriage essentially by making the counter-assertion:

First, of course society should "allow dissenting opinions about the significance of homosexual relationships," but those opinions should not be written into our laws to deny equal civil rights to those who enter into what some may consider less "significant" relationships.

Second, we must begin with equal civil rights. If there are consequences that flow from that position, then our society's people, organizations and institutions will have to make adjustments to deal with those consequences. For instance, if the Catholic Church is "torn from the adoption business" because it refuses not to discriminate against lawfully married same-sex couples, then other institutions and organizations would have to step in to fill that void, and they would. This would not impinge on the Church's, or any individual Catholic's, religious freedom. They would remain free to believe what they believe and practice as they wish. They would not be free, however, to use religion as an excuse to be exempted from adhering to laws that grant equal civil rights to all members of our society.

His argument has the pleasant consequence (for the pro-SSM side) of avoiding all of the procedural difficulties inherent to life in a free, democratic society in which people disagree about fundamental principles. Civil rights come first, and your bigotry is not a right. We win. You lose. The End. Knock the gavel.

But by what contorted vision of religious freedom — that is, religious citizens' civil rights — can it not be a prohibition of "the free exercise" of religion to bar a Christian organization from offering charitable services in accordance with its members' beliefs?

In keeping with that wispy dismissal of a weighty question, Pincince goes on to treat consequences lightly, indeed. In the delicate balance required of our form of society and government, Pincince insists that his definition of civil rights must come first, with a promise of answered obligation: "other institutions and organizations would have to step in to fill that void, and they would." Would they? Apparently, the Catholic Church's involvement answered some kind of a shortage. More likely than not, the other institution or organization that must step in would prove to be of a taxpayer-funded sort.

From the Catholic's perspective, the mandate of this particular brand of civil rights has harmed those unfortunate children anted as investment in a flawed concept of family — deprived by design of the closest representation of mother and father available to them. Now from the society's perspective, the entire citizenry (with emphasis on the working and middle classes) will be further burdened with the weight of expanding government as a drain on their resources and a meddler in their lives and with the consequences of having brushed away the wise tradition of mother, father, marriage, child, family.

And for what? So that a group of people — better educated and wealthier than the average — can answer the ever expanding requirements of their refusal to acknowledge that, whatever the moral implications, their affections are out of keeping with an historical norm that has value as such. Worse yet: so that a broader segment of society can absorb a ready-made balm of being "on the right side of history," with no direct cost to themselves and many moral and personal palliatives.

Under the preferred regime of Mr. Pincince, Esq., citizens would not be free "to use religion as an excuse to be exempted from adhering to laws that grant equal civil rights to all members of our society." What he doesn't explain is why his civil rights construct ought to be imposed upon his fellow Americans. Perhaps he understands, deep down, that it is built upon a worldview that is ultimately no more objectively founded than the religious views of those to whom he would dictate the law.

Not Just a Right

As Anthony Picarello, General Counsel for the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, explains marriage isn't just about the rights of the individuals; it's about the individuals' relationship with society:

The moral implications of changing the definition of marriage are where the debate has been largely centered. But, the legal implications of that same change are potentially very far-reaching and are beginning to be dealt with across the country, Picarello said.

The legal term "marriage" appears "everywhere" in law, he said, which means that changing the definition of who can legally be married will change countless other laws — from tax laws to employment laws to health care laws.

"Throughout the law, your rights hinge very often on whether or not you [are married]... so, to change the legal definition of marriage in turn is not to change one law but to change many, many at once. These laws, in turn, regulate religious institutions," he said.

For example, the Church employs many teachers whose rights are guaranteed by Rhode Island's employment laws. If one of those teachers were to travel to Massachusetts to marry a same-sex partner, the diocese would immediately be put into the difficult situation of retaining a teacher whose personal moral views were clearly at odds with the Church's and the school's moral codes. Or, the diocese could fire the teacher and likely face a wrongful termination suit.

Picarello provided many more hypothetical examples of the ways that allowing same sex marriage in Rhode Island could affect the way the Church is run. He also detailed the experience that Catholic Charities of Boston has had since Massachusetts legalized same sex marriage in 2004.

It's fair to say that most folks who've an emotional urge to be on the side of those proclaiming the expansion of civil rights will be susceptible to advocates' promises that nobody else will be affected by same-sex marriage. The advocates, themselves, however, are after precisely this forced equality, this forced negation of others' religious freedoms.

The question can be posed thus: Is it better for the Catholic Church to be torn from the adoption business, or for society to allow dissenting opinions about the significance of homosexual relationships?

Attacking the Church in the Name of Freedom

Wielding their new cost-free weapon, radicals continue to attack Christians in Canada:

Catholic Insight, a Canadian magazine known for its fidelity to Church teachings, has been targeted by the Canadian Human Rights Commission for publishing articles deemed offensive to homosexuals.

The commission has been investigating the Toronto-based publication since homosexual activist Rob Wells, a member of the Gay, Lesbian and Transgendered Pride Center of Edmonton, filed a nine-point complaint last February with the government agency in which he accuses the magazine of promoting "extreme hatred and contempt" against homosexuals.

Apparently, there are no repercussions for filing frivolous complaints, and the burden of proof is on the defendant to prove his innocence. Welcome to the world of modern tolerance — intolerant of speech and increasingly anti-democratic:

The commission is investigating a similar case against the Christian Heritage Party, a political party co-founded by pro-life Catholics and Protestants. The complaint against the party was also initiated by Rob Wells.

Slipping into Marriage

It's only because I know the dispersal of accountability to be a specialty of Rhode Island politicians that I'm suspicious, but a couple of items related to marriage have caught my attention this week. First is news of legislation to be proposed by House Minority Leader Gordon Fox (D, Providence) making same-sex divorce a reality in Rhode Island:

Following December’s 3-to-2 state Supreme Court decision to ban same-sex divorce in Rhode Island, advocates say it is time to take the issue to the General Assembly.

House Majority Leader Gordon D. Fox will sponsor the bill to be submitted in the coming days.

"I think the divorce [legislation] is a high priority and I’m going to be working with the people from [Marriage Equality RI] and the ACLU. That's something that should be corrected," Fox said yesterday. "Obviously there was a Supreme Court decision that I agree with the dissent, but even the majority opinion talked about how it's a legislative purview, so I think it's something we should have before the legislature to discuss this year."

Providence Journal writer Cynthia Needham's advocacy-cum-reportage clearly frames the divorce bill as part of the movement for same-sex marriage, which makes me wonder about the following part of the house rules bill (PDF) that Dan Yorke has made infamous for a more egregious matter (underlines and strike-throughs denote proposed additions and deletions):

There shall be a consent calendar on which shall be entered such bills and resolutions as the Speaker, the Majority Leader and the Minority Leader or their designees shall agree upon, and shall be proposed to the House by the Majority Leader or the designee of the Majority Leader on each Thursday during the session in the form of a motion to move the consent calendar. The consent calendar shall contain bills for the restoration of corporate charters and bills for the solemnization of marriage (which shall be assigned to the consent calendar immediately upon introduction), and other bills and resolutions which are of a routine or non-controversial nature, whether originating in the House or the Senate, and in no event shall the consent calendar be considered as a substitute for the regular calendar. Matters of substance shall be placed on the regular calendar and be fully debated and considered by the membership according to these rules. No bill or resolution shall be included on the consent calendar on the date the consent calendar is moved unless copies of the consent calendar in the same form as shall be moved form as it is intended to move the same have been made available to the membership no later than two (2) legislative days prior to the day on which the consent calendar shall be proposed to be moved. All bills and resolutions included on the consent calendar shall be made available in printed form and/or electronically to the Majority Leader, the Minority Leader, the State House library and the Clerk of the House at the same time that copies of the consent calendar are made available under this rule. At the request of a member any bill or resolution shall be removed from those included in the motion. All bills and resolutions designated for action on the consent calendar shall be passed on motion without discussion unless, prior to adjournment on the Wednesday preceding such Thursday a member shall have requested at any time prior to the motion for passage, a member requests removal of a bill or resolution from the consent calendar, in which case such bill or resolution shall be so removed and placed on the regular calendar. Any bill or resolution so removed shall be considered as having appeared on the regular calendar for a period of time equivalent to that during which it appeared on the consent calendar.

Unless I'm misconstruing the process, legislators will be able to solemnize (which means "grant," I believe) marriages on the undebated all-or-nothing consent calendar provided they put forward the proposal before the end of the day Tuesday. The calendar is meant to be for uncontroversial items, but the decisive factor appears to be whether anybody objects, thus moving the item to the regular calendar. In that regard, the new rules cut the window for objections to the end of the session on Wednesday. Come Thursday, the whole calendar must be passed (without discussion) or struck down.

Could it be that the Democrats in the General Assembly are hoping to create an avenue for same-sex marriage without ever having to admit to their constituencies that they have done so?

Getting Them Young

It's taken a while for me to get to it, but it's still worth noting a surprisingly high-profile, front-page, Sunday Journal article by Jennifer Jordan:

About 40 girls under the age of 15 become pregnant each year in Rhode Island.

The number of girls ages 10 to 14 who become pregnant is substantially lower than for older teens. But it underscores the need for better sex education in middle school and at home, say health and education officials.

"This is a public health issue," said Miriam C. Inocencio, president of Planned Parenthood of Rhode Island. "We should not be seeing kids this age getting pregnant, many of whom don't have enough information and don't know any better."

Dr. Patricia Flanagan, who heads the Rhode Island Teen Pregnancy Coalition, says that while most youth are not sexually active in middle school, adults should ask themselves if they are doing enough to talk to young teenagers and make sure they understand the consequences of being sexually active.

Throughout the rather long unpaid advertisement news report, there is not a single indication that any trend or shift suggests that increased sex ed for kids is warranted, let alone necessary. Indeed, according to the Planned Parenthood–friendly Guttmacher Institute, in 2000, that 40 girls was 60 (PDF). In other words, the rate is, if anything, dropping. And it fell without programs. Without workshopper "skills." It fell without training, condoms, or pills. (Apologies to Dr. Seuss.)

A cynical reader might muse — as an appropriately skeptical reporter might pursue — that the teen pregnancy, family planning, safe sex, abortion industry has a financial incentive to expand its base, even if it's not socially necessary. Even if it's not culturally advisable. Get them realizing that they need your products and services young — that's the game, and parents shouldn't be comforted by the industry's assertions that the kids won't be spurred to wonder what it needs them for.

RI Supreme Court: Gay Couple CANNOT Divorce in Rhode Island

7to7:

The state Supreme Court has ruled that a same-sex couple married in Massachusetts may not divorce in Rhode Island.

The court was split, 3-2, on the decision.

In the case, the court was asked by the Rhode Island Family Court whether Margaret R. Chambers and Cassandra B. Ormiston, two women who were married in Massachusetts, could divorce in Rhode Island.

***

In the majority opinion, authored by Justice William P. Robinson III, the court said that “well-established principles of statutory construction would lead us ineluctably to conclude that the General Assembly has not granted the Family Court the power to grant a divorce in the situation described in the certified question.”

According to a press release, the court wrote, “The role of the judicial branch is not to make policy, but simply to determine the legislative intent as expressed in the statutes enacted by the General Assembly. In our judgment, when the General Assembly accorded the Family Court the power to grant divorces from ‘the bond of marriage,’ it had in mind only marriages between people of different sexes.”

Later in the 30-page opinion, the court wrote, “We are cognizant of the fact that this observation may be cold comfort to the parties before us. But, if there is to be a remedy to this predicament, fashioning such a remedy would fall within the province of the General Assembly.”

The majority consisted of Chief Justice Frank J. Williams, Justice Francis X. Flaherty and Justice Robinson.

Justice Paul A. Suttell and Justice Maureen McKenna Goldberg dissented.

In a dissenting opinion, according to the press release, Suttell wrote that the certified question was extremely narrow in scope, and that it sought recognition of a same-sex marriage for the limited purpose of divorce and no other purpose. Suttell wrote that the question did not address the eligibility of same-sex couples to marry under Rhode Island law. The couple were lawfully married in Massachusetts, and had satisfied the applicable domicile and residence requirements for divorce in Rhode Island.

“The subject matter jurisdiction of the Family Court does not turn on the gender of the parties; rather it turns on their status as a married couple,” Justice Suttell wrote.

“We are in complete agreement with the majority on one critical point, however. The legal recognition that ought to be afforded same-sex marriages for any particular purpose is fundamentally a question of public policy, more appropriately determined by the General Assembly after full and robust public debate.”

Full opinion here.

UPDATE: Apparently, the majority of the RISC took a contextualist approach. From the decision:

Upon contemplating the question certified by the Family Court, it became clear to us that the precise issue we must decide is ultimately the following: What is the meaning of the word “marriage” within the Rhode Island stature that empowers the Family Court to grant divorces—or stated even more precisely, what did the word mean at the time that the members of the General Assembly enacted the statute? It is imperative that we direct our attention to the meaning of this statutory term at that point in time.

When we are called upon to decide what the General Assembly intended when it enacted a particular stature, we always being with the principle that “[t]he plain statutory language is the best indicator of legislative intent.”…It is clear to us that in this instance we are not confronted with an ambiguous stature. Therefore we simply must determine what the words in this stature were intended to mean….

Words can have different meanings at different points of historical time, but it is the role of the judiciary to ascertain what meaning a particular word had when the stature containing that word was enacted. It is possible that today’ members of the General Assembly might have an understanding of the term “marriage” that differs from the understanding of those legislators who [created the Family Court] in 1961, but our role is to interpret what was enacted and not to speculate as to what some other not-yet-enacted statute might say or mean.

With respect to the case at hand, there is absolutely no reason to believe that, when the act creating the Family Court became law in 1961, the legislators understood the word marriage to refer to any state other than “the state of being united to a person of the opposite sex.” The quoted words are the definition of marriage that is set forth in the 1961 edition of Webster’s Third New International Dictionary of the English Language. {They cite other similar definitions – ed.} In each case, the primary dictionary definition of marriage refers only to a union between a man and a woman.

It is pertinent to note that Chief Justice Margaret Marshall, writing in 2003 for the plurality in Goodridge v. Department of Public Health…expressly acknowledged that the decision of the Supreme Judicial Court in that case “marks a significant change in the definition of marriage as it has been inherited from the common law, and understood by many societies for centuries.”…

As we understand the language of the existing divorce stature, it does not constitute “express language conferring subject-matter jurisdiction upon the Family Court” whereby it could entertain a divorce petition involving two persons of the same sex….Moreover, “[i]n the absence of a clear legislative intent to the contrary, such jurisdiction cannot be inferred.”…The plain meaning of the word “marriage”…indicates to us that the Family Court is without jurisdiction to entertain the instant petition for divorce.

Arguing from Opposite Sides of the Dollar

As an early-grave-working father of three children, whom my wife and I deliberately brought into the world at a relatively young age ourselves (by modern standards), with nowhere near the income nor savings that an accountant might require to balance out the cost of progeny, I find myself strangely split in my agreement with both parties of the following exchange from the Dan Yorke show:

URI Feinstein hunger center director Kathleen Gorman: How is a woman going to go to work making a minimum wage job or a low wage job if she doesn't have some help with child care?

Dan Yorke: Why did that woman have a child in the first place, not to be able to afford it on her own?

Gorman: You think only wealthy people should have children? That's crazy!

Yorke: Yes! Now we're getting somewhere! Only people who can afford it should do it. That's the core philosophy! Only people who can afford it should do it. We got there. Do you agree?

Gorman: Absolutely not. If all people waited until they had enough money to support their children, there would be no children in the world.

I suspect, however, that my agreement with Ms. Gorman might be superficial: The emphasis on money and affordability, it seems to me, allows a spin (or else a delusive elision) by which practitioners in the welfare industry steal more agreement than they actually deserve.

I don't believe that only "wealthy people" should have children, and I suspect that Yorke does not either. Moreover, the notion of having enough money requires clarification: Have my wife and I come up with the resources to keep our children healthy and well nourished? Obviously. Do we currently have any feasible plan for paying for the grander expenses of the future, such as college? Nope.

Life requires a bit of playing by ear. (And I'd note that Yorke and my shared Church requires us to believe that God is ultimately calling the tune.) Indeed, it would be a mistake to leave out the possibility that having children can play a crucial role in fostering responsibility in the parent — a point of principle that applies regardless of socioeconomic standing. The irreducible notes in the melody are not income and savings, but openness, intentionality, and a willingness to sacrifice.

If it's all about the money, then the Gormans of the world can create the easy illusion that single parents who persist in having children ought to be seen as in familiar circumstances to anybody who ever had to take a night job to cover the cost of braces. That's clearly how this Gorman framed her rejoinder, and I worry that a too-resounding "Yes!" from Yorke may strike populist chords that need not resonate beyond the gimme choir.

The Next Step of SSM Dialog, 3: Too Many Won't Abide Their Own Children.

The third mechanism that I posit as likely to undermine marriage should the definition be changed to include same-sex couples speaks to the core justification of public recognition and government encouragement of the institution.

As I argue in terms of the first mechanism, if the state's irreducible interest in encouraging marriage is to foster mutual care, with its various benefits, then subsequent borders around the definition will not withstand assertions of individual freedom to choose the other person (or the other people). In terms of the second mechanism, I argue that one of those borders is the presumption of sexual intimacy; people with non-sexual relationships would rightly have a claim to benefits that are intended to encourage stable interdependence.

With or without sexual intimacy, if marriage is primarily about the spouses' watching over each other, then doing the hard work to keep a marriage together depends more on the man's (or woman's) desire to care for a particular woman (or man) than on a personal interest in watching over any children whom they've created. There was a time when a man who impregnated a woman was expected to marry her as a matter of course. Now, it's hardly expected that parents should compromise their own emotional impulses so that children born within their marriages can be raised within them, as well. Same-sex marriage would etch this corrosive definition of marriage unreformably into the law.

It is at least plausible to suggest that the reality of same-sex marriages would not affect current marriages between spouses intent on staying together. The obvious observation, however, is that such couples don't need public encouragement in the first place. As with any cultural institution, marriage involves a broad social transaction of investment and benefit: Healthy, advantaged couples model their relationships toward an ideal of marriage for the benefit of those who incline toward the wrong track.

Sterile couples (as actually rare as they are) and the elderly do not disturb the simple message of the investment, because it is clear, on a fundamental level, that an intimate relationship exclusively between a man and a woman is about that which a man and woman can uniquely do together: create children who are the merger of their two genetic and ancestral lines, their two selves. In ordinary dealings with married couples, one cannot tell the parents from the non-parents. Among the latter, one cannot tell the sterile from the attempting from the expectant from the regretful. It is simply known that men and women who are intimate with each other get married, and with the vast majority of marriages' involving procreation, the message is clear.

In part through the law (from no-fault divorce to on-demand abortion), modern culture has made a shameful effort to distort clarity about familial ideals and healthy social behavior. And as one might have expected, that legacy has most harmed those in most need of guidance and encouragement toward good decisions: the poor, the oppressed, and the wayward. If is justifiable to fret about polygamy's ability to create a permanent male underclass, it must be more so to worry about a permanent underclass of bastard children and their irresponsible parents.

In part because it ultimately provides cost savings from social programs serving that underclass, the government's role in the cultural transaction that is the institution of marriage is to acknowledge it and to offer some incentive to fulfill its objective. Culture is fluid, and it would be contrary to the grand idea of our nation to deny citizens the right to work to change it, but government recognition of same-sex marriage would not only open the way for its diminution by dissipation, it would provide the baseline definition by which the culture must operate and would thereby ensure that it fails to operate.

Poly Want Some Evidence?

Well, whaddaya know:

Many speakers highlighted the fact that as polyamorists, they didn't see themselves as adulterers or swingers. Instead, polyamory involves several simultaneous committed physically intimate relationships. Also, unlike polygamy, made famous by HBO's "Big Love," both females and males may have multiple partners.

Polyamory NYC hosts monthly meetings at the LGBT Community Center averaging about 40 members, with more than 1,000 visiting their Yahoogroup. Members often belong to other local sexuality networks, including Body Temple, Sexy Spirits, One Taste, and various bondage groups. Religious commitments vary from Paganism to Judaism and Unitarianism.

Most members like Normal Ellis, 45, say that monogamy is not a natural state for relationships. After his divorce several years ago, he found himself in a monogamous romance headed toward a second marriage.

"I did some soul-searching and realized that I just wasn't wired that way," said Ellis. He started meeting polyamorous women online and has dated as many as four partners at a time.

Many polyamorous couples have a primary partner, whom they may be married to or live with. They may then form a triad with a third partner, or one partner may take on a second lover outside the relationship. Sometimes a triad will share a home in a "polyamorous V," or both partners will take on a boyfriend or girlfriend outside the relationship. ...

But the purpose of the pride weekend went beyond cuddling and coupling. For many, the politics of polyamory are fraught with discord. Justen Bennett-Maccubbin, the mohawked founder of Polyamorous NYC, said that there is sometimes friction between the gay and polyamorous communities.

"Polyamory is just as much an orientation as being gay," said Bennett-Maccubbin, who started his first polyamorous relationship when he fell in love with a gay couple at 19.

The thing that the SSM movement has to realize is that, when you create a template, people tend to follow it. And in this case, there's no rational basis to stop them from following it all the way to the end.

The Next Step of SSM Dialog, 2: We Won't Abide the Government in Our Bedrooms.

In my experience with the same-sex marriage debate, the second corruptive mechanism that I suggest in answer to the question of how incorporating homosexual relationships would undermine marriage is often asserted to be the weakest, but it's also the least well understood (whether the fault is mine, a failure of the imagination, or a desire to avoid).

M. Steven elides entirely my explanation in order to find the suggestion "unfair," writing:

It implies that arrangements that are not intimate would increase by allowing same-sex couples to marry by adding a reason to exploit the law for the purpose of mutual care. Yet the same impetus already exists for opposite-sex arrangements. To me, this is sort of a stereotypical 'liberal' argument in that something should not be allowed due to the possibility of exploitation for self-interest. The pro-SSMer could argue that allowing it would decrease the number of corruptive non-intimate arrangements between gay and straight opposite-sex persons.

I'm not suggesting that SSM would add a reason to exploit the law — the reasons exist already — but rather an excuse. My entire argument is that same-sex marriage, as something new, would not carry with it the same instinctive reverence, nor the same cultural connotations. Like it or not, to the average heterosexual, a same-sex marriage would not be a real marriage. It could be laughed off.

Hollywood movies to the contrary aside, there would be no continuing, and extremely minimal initial, test of intimacy. (That's why I titled this point with reference to the government in the bedroom; once the image was used to create the specter of the prurient public spy seeking to ensure that nothing sexual was going on, but it could just as easily involve a prurient public spy verifying that something is.) A readily available prenup, a few words rendered meaningless by divorce law, and the benefits would be acquired. The cost to anybody secure in his or her own sexuality would not exist. Friends and family don't even have to know.

Pragmatist misses the point when he argues that "most heterosexuals marry people of the opposite sex, so the number of heterosexuals eligible to do this is small to begin with." People would not enter into legally exploitative marriages with the intention of permanence. I can easily imagine having married my friend/roommate out of high school if there'd been a gain to it; we would have joked about it with the girls whom we pursued.

But I'm not presenting the exploitation, per se, as the objectionable result. Rather, as I stressed in my extended explanation of corruptive mechanism #1, I'm offering the possible development as an outcome that would undermine the institution of marriage for all.

Heck, I'm not even presenting non-sexual marriages as exclusively exploitative. If the justification given for recognizing civil marriage at all is thinned out in order to include couples that can't, by their nature, almost inadvertently create children, then sex is incidental to the relationship. Pragmatist offers two "non-child-centric" bases for same-sex marriage:

• It is good for society as a whole when people are paired with someone else who has the "job" of looking out for someone else.
• It is generally a good thing that men are coupled with partners.

And a third basis for marriage:

• "The raising of children is one of the most important functions of marriage."

The first and third bases clearly apply to non-sexual couples, including friends and family members. The second arguably applies, as well. One can deduce from Pragmatist's argument that he doesn't believe that it is women who domesticate men. Surely it isn't sex, or even monogamy. Rather, men's participation in partnerships, as Pragmatist writes, "promotes positive social relationships and instills responsibility." Having some degree of declared responsibility is what makes waifish men grow up. In a world that increasingly leads men and women to be well into their adult years before doing the family thing, it would seem to be as much — or perhaps more — in the public interest to encourage heterosexual bachelors to grow up as it is to do the same with homosexuals. (I should note, though, that I believe that it is ultimately women and the procreative link that provide the real impetus in marriage for male maturation.)

Again, the reason same-sex marriage would increase the likelihood of the institution's being treated in this way is that it inherently separates procreation from marriage, not only as a matter of the the individual relationship, but as a matter of basic principles. With marriage bound up in the nearly mystical interweaving of selves (genetically, in children), tying together lines of ancestry into the past and progeny into the future, marriages of convenience carry a natural burden of denial. With the event of SSM, that denial would be ready-made.

Marriage wouldn't be about having babies. It would be about two (or perhaps more) adults helping each other out. Or, as friends might say, getting each other's backs.

And that brings us to mechanism #3.

The Next Step of SSM Dialog, 1: Equal Rights Abide No Arbitrary Boundaries.

This happens with most highly charged topics, but with the same-sex marriage debate, it seems especially common (making the debate particularly tedious after years of engaging in it): After a few steps setting the mutually understood context, the thread becomes lost in opponents' eagerness to make their total case. To review the discussion thus far:

• Pragmatist asked why the state shouldn't encourage monogamous homosexual relationships.
• I replied that I'm not opposed to its doing so, except if done from within the institution of marriage, because modifying the definition of marriage in order to encompass same-sex relationships would undermine the institution, diminishing its ability to encourage stable, monogamous relationships between anybody.
• Pragmatist asked how incorporating homosexual relationships would undermine marriage.
• I replied that three corrosive mechanisms would follow a change in the essence marriage from a relationship between a potentially procreative pair to one between intimate adults:
1. Equal rights abide no arbitrary boundaries. Further changes to the definition of marriage would follow, notably polygamy and intra-family marriages.
2. We won't abide the government in our bedrooms. The new twist on marriage would be prone to abuse by heterosexuals, who would treat marriage less like a romantic relationship (at least on a temporary basis), and nobody wants the government to be checking to make sure that the relationship is sexual.
3. Too many won't abide their own children. Muddying the simple definition of marriage as the relationship into which parents ought to enter with each other will make it less effective in creating a cultural expectation that will draw those who might be inclined to shirk their responsibility into stable families.

In short, the argument on the table is that the state should not change marriage in such a way as to include same-sex relationships because doing so will undermine marriage for the three reasons listed. The two possible contrary responses are (A) to argue that equal rights (or some other consideration) make the diminishment of marriage irrelevant to the legitimization of SSM and (B) to argue that none of the three mechanisms will harm the institution significantly. The unfortunate tendency, as an alternative to these two possibilities, is to address each point as if it is intended to stand on its own; the discussion becomes impossible to pin down, because the goal is merely to push the points off the table rather than to address the total argument. It's the difference between testing the strength of a model and rolling marbles onto a pool table.

In this post, I'll endeavor to explain why no responses heretofore made in answer to my assertion of the first corrosive mechanism have any effect on my argument as I've laid it out thus far.

M. Steven, who appears ultimately to come down on my side on the marriage issue, suggests that the "ban on incestuous relationships is already an arbitrary boundary within the current definition... based on moral grounds." In other words, its degree of arbitrariness would not change with the introduction of same-sex relationships into marriage. But this is certainly not true: The arguments against incest are, first, that it does physical and psychic harm to begotten children and, second, that it corrupts other interpersonal roles and affects development. Clearly, same-sex marriage eliminates the concern about the first (which I would consider the more decisive) point, and to the extent that the second point remains, it seems to me to have less force when one pictures two brothers, say, rather than a brother and a sister.

Beyond arbitrariness, though, implicit in the SSM cause is the principle that it is unjust for citizens to impose their moral beliefs on others when it comes to something as personal and inalienable as marital rights.

For his part, Pragmatist takes a broader tack, including social, rather than moral, arguments against incest and polygamy (which M. Steven doesn't address), as well as power dynamics, but I don't think he appreciates the radical change that would be wrought by the separation of gender from marriage. His suggestion, for example, that both incest and polygamy are socially objectionable because "the power dynamics... lead to the exploitation of women, especially young women" is utterly extinguished if marriage ceases to be defined as an opposite-sex affair. Especially with the case for SSM being made on equal rights grounds, and even more so with its leading edge being in the judiciary (what with "rational basis" tests and other attempts at logical adjudication), a definition of marriage that hinges on individualistic love and mutual care offers no justification for an argument from power dynamics.

This consideration also erases Pragmatist's attempt to differentiate homosexual relationships from incest and polygamy because "homosexuals are denied the right to marry anyone they love," as opposed to someone they love (which is supposed all that will be denied of the incestuous and polygamous). I don't think it would disturb his meaning to edit thus: "homosexuals are denied the right to marry anyone they could constitutively love." But the distinction is irrelevant to the legal, or even rights-based, arguments of those who desire incestuous relationships. Is the court (or the legislature) to explain to a man that he may not marry his sister because he has other options?

A person who is truly in love, and who has already chosen a compatible mate, could with reason be termed "that-person-sexual." If, from society's point of view, marriage isn't above all about the children who may be born within the family that it creates — that is, if it is only about the adults' relationship — then the external basis for interfering in the choice disappears. Allowing the someone/anyone distinction would make it valid to argue that barring interracial marriage doesn't interfere with citizens' right to marry someone. "But I don't love any white women," the Caucasian man might say; "I love this black woman."

Polygamy reenters the discussion with the distinction between a legal relationship and a legal marriage. I wouldn't support the criminalization of homosexual relationships. Does Pragmatist support the criminalization of adult incest? Of extramarital affairs and swinging (i.e., non-marital polygamy)? Or consider this one: extra-marital relationships with mutual care and emotional connection, but not sex? One could point out that the polygamist is free to bring others into the relationship but is only allowed an official marriage with a single spouse. Likewise, on could argue that homosexuals are free to form their relationships as they choose; they are only able to enter into marriage according to its definition: with somebody of the opposite sex. (And nobody is forcing them to have civilly recognized marriages.)

The point is that there is a difference between the denial of marriage rights and the denial of relationships. Pragmatist claims never to have "heard of a genetically predisposed polygamist," but it has seemed a commonplace to me that all men are genetically predisposed thusly. That, indeed, is what makes the following a legitimate concern:

Polygamy undermines the social structure because over time, high-status males will attract multiple partners while low-status men will have no options. Society is unwilling to create a permanent underclass of unmarried males.

Again, though, Pragmatist is apparently unaware of the heterosexist underpinnings of his thought. A man who marries a woman and then marries another man is actually alleviating that underclass. On the other hand, considering that a general takeaway of the reading that I've done with respect to sexual orientation is that women's sexuality is more fluid, it's not difficult to imagine women marrying each other even though they might have some attraction to men. In such cases, even a two-person marriage contributes to the creation of a single-male underclass. If that concern were proven to have a significant likelihood of fruition, would that allow "discrimination" against homosexuals with respect to marriage?

Pragmatist may attack my "reflexive conservative support of what society has adopted in the past," but he's at least as inclined to rely upon precisely that traditional understanding of social implications. In a world with same-sex marriage, old calculations no longer apply. In a world in which procreation is not conceptually intrinsic to marriage, why must marriages be presumed to be sexual at all? Why, for example, couldn't a mother-daughter pair claim a right to the mutual-care benefits of marriage? It would certainly assist them in jointly raising the daughter's child from a failed relationship. Or suppose a gay man and a lesbian create a child together and then seek to share parental responsibility, within the structure of marriage, with their gay partners?

And that brings us to mechanism #2.

Questions and Answers on Same-Sex Marriage

After some brawl-in-the-schoolyard circling, commenter Pragmatist and I have started up another round of the same-sex marriage dialog on Anchor Rising, thus far in the form of a question and answer exchange. Thinking the exercise worthwhile (and curious to see how far we'll get with it this time), I considered a post of its own to be justified, beginning with his first question:

... why shouldn't the state encourage monogamous homosexual relationships? Unless you are prepared to take the position of the president of Iran that homosexuals don't exist, then aren't strong, stable, monogamous homosexual relationships better for society than the opposite?

To which I replied:

I'm not opposed to states' seeking to do so, as long as they structure the new institution of same-sex unions from the ground up, without reference to marriage. (When constitutional amendments have been proposed, I've always backed versions that would leave that possibility open.) My reasoning (on the secular/civil side) is that modifying the definition of marriage in order to encompass same-sex relationships will undermine the institution as it exists, thus diminishing the states' encouragement of stable, monogamous relationships between heterosexual couples (which, after all, have the added consideration that they can produce children with minimal intention).

I've long said, by the way, that my calculation might change if the pro-SSM movement took up the cause of tighter divorce laws. No takers from your side, yet.

Response:

Yes, I have heard this argument many times. But I have never heard a convincing unbundling of this amorphous concern: "modifying the definition of marriage in order to encompass same-sex relationships will undermine the institution as it exists." How? How does encouraging MORE stable relationships undermine the institution? Perhaps the struggle of homosexuals to establish this right despite overwhelming odds should reinforce the importance of the institution for heterosexuals? Maybe heterosexuals should be inspired by the struggle and value what they have already even more?

I'll start by saying that I do think there's likely been positive development among heterosexuals as the struggle over same-sex marriage has raged, but not because they are inspired by homosexuals' striking belief in the institution. Rather, in formulating their own positions on the issue, at least those who don't take their views directly from the oracles of popular culture are spurred to consider what marriage means to them. What the institution is for, and what that meaning requires of them.

That really is the central question: What is marriage about? Reformulated for use in discussion of public policy, the question is: What is the purpose of the government's recognition of it? By changing the essence of what marriage is, and what it hopes to accomplish, same-sex marriage would undermine the institution in three interrelated ways:

1. Equal rights abide no arbitrary boundaries. If we enshrine into law the principle that marriage is the recognition of intimate adult relationships, defined according to the proclivities of the individual, all subsequent distinctions are fundamentally arbitrary. Polygamy and adult incestuous relationships will follow. Marriage as the encouragement of a particularly stable form of grouping will become meaningless.
2. We won't abide the government in our bedrooms. Our culture still has strong presumptions about male-female relationships. Yeah, men and women can be friends, even roommates, but there are boundaries that begin to raise suspicions — notably, living together. For the most part, those suspicions have protected marriage from corruptive arrangements of pure self-interest. The gay rights movement has, to some extent, raised suspicion about platonic same-sex relationships, but were same-sex marriage to become available, I think it likely that heterosexuals would exploit the arrangement for economic reasons. And frankly, I don't see why they shouldn't. If the civil impetus for recognizing marriage is to encourage mutual care of independent citizens (allowing various assumptions of trust and rights such as the famous hospital visits), then there's no reason pairings that don't involve sex shouldn't be included, whether they involve friends or relatives.
3. Too many won't abide their own children. The most important of the consequences of codifying the romantic, mutual-intimacy-centered vision of marriage into the law is the competing vision that it displaces: that marriage is fundamentally a desirable relationship between a man and a woman because their intimacy can result in the birth of children. Our society gives marriage weight in order to create a cultural expectation that will draw those who might be inclined to shirk their responsibility into stable families. If marriage and the potential of procreation aren't intrinsically linked, then there is less pressure on a man to stick with the mother of his children (or a woman their father) for the family's benefit, even if fleeting romantic feelings don't fulfill his (or her) fantasies.

Once Again Making the Central Point, Which Supporters of Same-Sex Marriage Somehow Never Manage to Address (At Least Not Until the Debate Has Gone on Long Enough That the Average Person Has Stopped Reading)

How is it possible that people who ostensibly pay attention to the news and to the public dialog still make such arguments as Charles Bakst's on behalf of same-sex marriage without addressing a response — stated in many public discussions for years, now — that is central to the opposing side's worldview? Here's Bakst:

[Bishop Tobin] admits the sky hasn’t fallen in Massachusetts. "But I don't think the sky would fall if Massachusetts legalized prostitution, polygamy or incest either."

I cringe when I see such words employed in any discussion of two men or two women who seek the joy, stability and respect offered by marriage.

The bishop asserts that "the onslaught" of gay weddings "should create more than a little anxiety for thoughtful and insightful people." The dictionary defines "onslaught" as "a fierce attack." But gay marriage is not an attack on anyone else or anyone else's marriage.

The movement to recognize same-sex relationships as marriage is an attack on the very meaning of marriage and, as such, harms anybody who benefits, or would benefit in the future, from a strong culture of marriage as it has historically been defined. Topping a list that ultimately includes every person alive and yet to be born are those whose economic, emotional, and (yes) spiritual wellbeing is threatened by their own inclinations away from stable, monogamous marital relationships and those who are born to such people. The increased strain on people who are irrevocably homosexual — and are therefore unlikely to enter into such marriages as they, in possession of full equal rights, are absolutely permitted — is regrettable, but the repercussions of the alternative would be exponentially more so.

Bakst's point of view entirely lacks sense unless "marriage" is, by definition, merely an intimate, committed relationship between adults. However much he might cringe, therefore, both incest and polygamy between consenting adults fall under his representation of equality.

Advocates for the maintenance of traditional marriage have been challenged, in recent years, to define their view of marriage in such a way as to exclude alternative definitions without relying on religious dogma or bigotry. They have done so much more thoroughly than advocates of same-sex marriage (but nothing further) possibly could. Little wonder the latter are so apt to ignore the points of the former.

Perhaps Mr. Bakst, with his expressed wish for "more people, wherever they stand, [to] speak up," will endeavor, in a future column, to prove me wrong.

A Nutritionist in Every Classroom?

Last week, the Warwick School Department sent our kids home with an opt-out letter from the city-wide Body Mass Index (BMI) measurement of all students. Of course, the actual "opt-out" portion was only mentioned after a longer legitimization of why the program was being implemented (PDF). The letter included dire warnings of the spread of childhood obesity and was followed by an explanation of how our school department was helping to combat the epidemic by attempting to measure the BMI of all Warwick students. It all sounded good on the face of it.

My wife and I discussed the BMI measurement program. We recognized that there may be an overall benefit of having our healthy kids added to the statistical baseline for Rhode Island students. We even briefly played "what if" over whether or not our kids would "suffer" long-term emotional scarring when all of their friends got their BMI and they didn't (heh). In the end, we opted-out. But the BMI is just one component of the "Healthy Schools Initiative" that is being implemented in Warwick. Again, while it all sounds like a good idea, things are getting a little out of hand. Some kids have actually had their lunch boxes searched for contraband by the in-school Food Police.

[Eileen] Brown said...“The teachers sent home [another] letter saying that only healthy snacks would be permitted as of Sept. 17,” she said. “They’re taking what the child eats out of the parents’ hands.”

Eileen said she does her best to send her kids to school with healthy snacks and food that is good for them, but she said she has a problem when teachers start dictating what her children can and can’t eat.

“There’s a possibility of kids not being allowed to eat a snack if the teacher deems it unhealthy,” she said. “They’re dictating what the kids should eat, but that should be a parent’s decision.”

Eileen said she sent one of her daughters to school with a Quaker oatmeal fruit bar, but the girl was told it contained too much sugar and her teacher took it away from her.

Eileen said she looked up nutrition facts for the oatmeal bar and compared them to other fruit snacks, like an apple or grapes and found that the oatmeal bar has less sugar and is healthier than either the apple or grapes.

“Teaching healthy choices and teaching the food pyramid is a good idea, but I don’t agree with kids being told they can’t eat a snack,” she said.

Since when did we ask our teachers to be nutritionists? I've heard them say they do enough already (and they do). Why are we asking them to take time (and, implicitly, money) away from doing the core mission of our schools: EDUCATION.

Now, I understand that healthy eating habits may fall within some broad definition of education, but isn't it up to the parents to decide their child's nutritional needs? But, of course, the school system bureaucrats don't think that enough parents are up to the task of raising healthy kids on their own. They know best. Even better than your child's pediatrician, as a matter of fact.

The Wellness school paradigm is affecting other areas, too. The Sunday ProJo ran a NY Times piece about the "cupcake wars."

...cupcakes have also recently been marched to the front lines of the fat wars, banned from a growing number of classroom birthday parties because of their sugar, fat and “empty calories,” a poster food of the child obesity crisis. This was clear when children returned to school this month to a tightening of regulations, federal and state, on what can be served up between the bells.

And it has led some to wonder whether emotional value, on occasion, might legitimately outweigh nutritional value.
...

When included on lists of treats that parents are discouraged or forbidden to send to school — and when those policies are, say, put to a vote at the P.T.A. — “cupcakes are deal breakers,” Professor Nestle said. “It sounds like a joke, but it’s a very serious problem on a number of levels. You have to control it.”

As the article implies, cupcakes and other no-no's are integral parts of more than just in-class birthday parties (which are really just snack-time with treats provided by the celebrant's Mom). What would a PTO bake sale be with out things that are, um, baked? The reality is that the PTO (or "A") holds many fund-raisers that have a "sugar component" to help generate revenue for everything from playground equipment to class trips. (Of course, they wouldn't have to do so much fund-raising if the school budget had a little more flexibility). Take away these fund-raising staples, and it gets harder to raise money. It's easier to sell cookies than candles, after all. Ever heard of a Veggie Sale (Carrot Cake and Banana Bread don't count, do they)?

Don't get me wrong, I'm not advocating for school improvements built on the tummies of our kids, but this all-encompassing program seems like another bureaucratic over-reach. Look, no one can argue against limiting the sugar and fat intake of our children, but an all-out ban leaves a sour taste in my mouth (couldn't resist). Besides, it could lead to an unanticipated kickback. (Imagine that, a government program that doesn't take unintended consequences into consideration).

Let's say the programs are effective and kids eat healthy for the 6-7 hours at school. What about the rest of the day? I'm sure that some kids and parents will alter their lifestyles and become healthier eaters, but I'll also bet that just as many--if not more--will just put-off the "junk food" gorging until after-school (never mind what can happen over the summer). Heck, some parents may even fall into the trap of thinking that, because little Johnny eats healthy all day at school, he can have chips and a soda because he ate healthy all day.

And this all doesn't even take into account the make-up of the average school lunch (PDF). I wonder who'll be inspecting them? Mmmm, Cheeseburgers, Pizza, Chicken Fingers (Deep Fried), BBQ Ribs, Hot Dogs, Tacos, etc. Oh, sure, there's some veggies, too. But who are we kidding? Are the lunch room monitors going to ensure that every kid eats his veggies? Doubt it.

I bet Mom can pack a lunch that is quite a bit healthier than that, which will contain food that she knows her kids will eat. If they don't, she'll find something that they will. And the school department won't even have to tell her to do it. That's the way it should be.

Gay Marriage Fails in Maryland

Dale Carpenter writes (h/t):

By 4-3, Maryland's high court today rejected a claim for same-sex marriage under the state constitution. The opinion is more than 100 pages long and is studded with more citations to cases, law reviews and books (including, notably, William Eskridge's Gaylaw), and sociological and scientific studies, than any case yet on the issue.

***

SSM has lost in every state high court to consider the issue since the stunning success in Goodridge in Massachusetts in 2003. SSM legal advocates lost outright in Washington state and New York in 2006. New Jersey's high court also rejected an SSM claim in 2006, though it did order the recognition of civil unions and left open the possibility of a future pro-SSM ruling. A case is still pending in California's supreme court.

When you consider that SSM legal advocates have carefully chosen the most sympathetic venues since Goodridge, this record of losses is especially significant. It means that strong anti-SSM precedents are being created in the friendliest states, making pro-SSM rulings in other states even more unlikely in the near future. Once California is decided, the initial phase of post-Goodridge litigation will have pretty much run its course. That was the phase that was supposed to start an avalanche of pro-SSM judicial rulings that would quickly lead to gay marriage around the country. It didn't happen. Other cases are pending in states like Iowa, and there's nothing to stop gay couples from filing anywhere else, but the odds are now longer. If SSM is to advance much in the near future, it will probably have to come legislatively.

Carpenter also explains that:

The Maryland court rejected the argument that the ban on gay marriages is a form of sex discrimination...

It rejected the argument that sexual orientation discrimination should be subjected to heightened scrutiny, citing gays' legislative success in the state as evidence the group is not "politically powerless" and thus needs no unusual judicial protection from the majority.

It added that there is not yet a sufficient scientific consensus on whether sexual orientation is "immutable."

The court also decided that there is no fundamental right to marry another person of the same sex.

Finally, the court concluded that the limitation of marriage to opposite-sex couples is rational because it furthers (however imperfectly) the state's legitimate interest in encouraging procreation. If the correct level of scrutiny is the traditional rational-basis test, this conclusion is hard to dispute.

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Studies Show: You Should Let Us Teach Your Children About Our Product!

I'll admit that I was suckered into believing that yet another opinion writer had come to a faulty conclusion about sex ed:

A SHORT ARTICLE in the Aug. 14 New York Times reported that, according to a survey of more than 15,000 young Americans, abstinence-only programs do not work for HIV prevention. The analysis was published in the August issue of The British Medical Journal and tracked 13 studies.

Most of the programs were school-based. The random trials included control groups. “None of the programs made any significant difference in preventing pregnancy, reducing unprotected sex, or delaying sexual initiation,” reported The Times. The study replicates results from similar trials.

Not to be picky, but the report was actually an analysis of various much smaller studies, not a large survey of that many children. And not to repeat myself, but although these studies purport to have scientific control groups, such claims are ludicrous in the face of the children's mingling and their natural interest in collecting information about sex and, moreover, they involve "programs," usually curricula, as opposed to sustained socially based efforts at encouraging specific behavior. (I'd also point out that British researchers might do more good by studying their own problems.)

Of course, in the case of Barbara Dickinson's op-ed, all of these arguments become moot once the sales pitch is made:

If you can’t bring yourself to have this conversation, Planned Parenthood of Rhode Island offers a wide range of educational resources and teaching tools on human sexuality and reproductive health available to teenagers and parents. We have skilled counselors who can help your teenager make good decisions.

As you may have discerned, Ms. Dickinson works for Planned Parenthood, as the chairwoman of the organization's Rhode Island branch. In other words, it's as if a fast-food restaurant's top RI executive placed an op-ed citing studies that eating a balanced lunch once a week for a month didn't have an appreciable effect on health.

To Fix Education, Fix Families First

Julia Steiny wrote in the ProJo on Sunday:

Over the course of this summer, I studied a whole range of troubled kids. Instead of seeing them from the outside as the upsetting little pains-in-the-tush they are, I tried to get a glimpse of their lives. I met kids recovering from sexual abuse, neglect, violence, drug involvement, or their parents’ drug involvement. I talked to the community workers who deal with kids whose lives have been torn apart by a parent going to prison or because the state removed them from their families. Distressed kids sit in our own kids’ classrooms all over the state. We can’t just put them all out — or ignore them.
...

Focus instead on the family.

Because when we put these kids out of our communities into alternative schools and residential placements, we encourage the root problem to fester and get worse. Alternatives — shelters, group homes, the Training School — provide very expensive, rarified worlds that have nothing to do with a kid’s real life.

Yes, of course, psychiatric hospitals, foster care, and group homes will always be necessary. But we overuse them unconscionably. We have to stop waiting until kids are in a crisis.

Schools have plenty of problems of their own. But when it comes to troubled behavior, the solutions often lie in the homes. If we fix the family’s dysfunction, we fix the context that is producing a kid’s wiggy behavior. And if the family can’t be fixed — addiction is often the reason — terminate parental rights, and search among the child’s relatives for a healthier permanent family.

Only by helping the families can we stem the social chaos streaming through the schoolhouse doors.

And this compassion will be far cheaper than what we’re doing now.

Along this same vein is a book review by Bradford Wilcox in the August 27 issue of National Review. The book--The Natural Family: A Manifesto, by Allan C. Carlson and Paul T. Mero--contains some interesting theories and prescriptions.

...Allan Carlson and Paul Mero’s The Natural Family: A Manifesto...give[s] us an engaging and accessible primer on the importance of the “natural family” for the American experiment in ordered liberty. They define the “natural family” as “the fundamental social unit, inscribed in human nature, and centered around the voluntary union of a man and a woman in a lifelong covenant of marriage for the purposes of satisfying the longings of the human heart to give and receive love, welcoming and ensuring the full physical and emotional development of children” — and sharing a home based on a common social and spiritual life. By turns philosophical, political, sociological, and economic in its subject matter, The Natural Family makes three particularly important arguments.

First, as against the libertarian vision of [the CATO Institute's Bruce] Lindsey et al., Carlson and Mero correctly argue that the natural family, not the individual, is the “source of ordered liberty, the fountain of real democracy, the seedbed of virtue” for the nation. They point to a large body of social-scientific research that shows that children who grow up with their married parents make markedly better citizens than their peers who are not so fortunate. For instance, one study of 20,000 American adolescents funded by the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development found that teen criminality was lowest among children from intact married families and that parental involvement, supervision, and closeness were highest in these families. They also point out that family breakdown leads inevitably to what should be a libertarian nightmare — the rise of Leviathan, as the state steps in to establish order and supply social services when the family breaks down.

This argument is borne out by, among other things, our nation’s recent history with crime and policing. As George Akerlof, a Nobel Prize–winning economist at Berkeley, has observed, it was no accident that a tidal wave of violent crime, police hiring, and prison building swept the country in the late 1970s and 1980s, following closely in the wake of the nation’s retreat from marriage in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Starting in the late 1960s, because of this retreat, growing numbers of poor and working-class teenage boys and young men ceased to be socialized by fathers and wives; consequently, they were much more likely to get into trouble and stay in trouble than their peers of an earlier era. This led, in turn, to the effort of Republicans such as Rudy Giuliani to reach for “Big Government” law-and-order solutions to reassert order in communities hit hardest by the breakdown of the natural family.

Second, Carlson and Mero rightly argue that strong families depend upon much more than sentiment or even the right “family values.” In our day, affluence, state programs, and the organization of work and leisure have all conspired to strip the family of its traditional functions — economic production, leisure, moral education, and religious education — and to minimize the practical and economic dependencies linking spouses, children, and parents to one another. Accordingly, in many families, sentiment is the only real tie that binds, even though — for many families — sentiment is much too fragile to serve as the basis for an enduring common life together. Thus, Carlson and Mero argue that we must re-functionalize the home — by encouraging measures such as home-based work and businesses, a “family wage” for parents who have to work outside the home, home schooling, and home-based care for elderly parents. In sum, the natural family will be renewed only when our