Note to self: post the following to del.icio.us when that site stops being a big flake.

[go_team]

30 years of research on marriage and the family convinces the author of "How Love Conquered Marriage" that the future of marriage is: it's optional. I especially like her conclusion that anything lawmakers can do to strengthen marriage will make life better for unmarried couples, and anything they can do to discourage people from living together outside of marriage will hurt the institution they think they're protecting. But then again, I like being preached to when I'm in the choir.

Comments

[istar.livejournal.com]

I love this article, and I am now stalking your del.icio.us marriage tag. :)

[iainuki.livejournal.com]

That's a really good article.

[quizro.livejournal.com]

Crazy! I'm reading a couple of books by Christian ethicist Stanley Hauerwas right now, and he talks about this very thing. It hadn't struck me until reading his essay on capitalism and gay marriage in A Better Hope that one of the problems with the gay marriage debate is that neither side seems able to articulate in a compelling way what marriage is and what it's for.

Thanks for linking to that most excellent article!

[quizro.livejournal.com]

But we cannot turn the clock back in our personal lives any more than we can go back to small-scale farming and artisan production in our economic life. It would be wonderful if we could pick and choose what historical changes we will and won't accept, but we are not that lucky.

Wow. That's kinda chilling -- we can't say 'no' to change of any sort, even bad changes? Resistance is futile? The citizens of the Roman empire (for example) never had the option of saying, "You know, having an emperor really isn't working out. Let's dismantle our empire and go back to a republican form of government"?

Eep.

[iainuki.livejournal.com]

I think her point was more that you can't undo one set of changes without reversing all the others too: urbanization, women's rights, good contraception, and a host of other effects created the environment that love-marriage exists in. Meanwhile, another bunch of changes resulted from love-marriage. To change the detrimental features of love-marriage would require giving up the idea altogether and reversing or limiting many of the other changes too.

[quizro.livejournal.com]

Ah! I see, thank you.