In the Los Angeles Times, The Cato Institute’s David Boaz takes social conservatives to task:
Social conservatives say they’re trying to address the problems of family breakdown, crime and welfare costs, but there’s a huge disconnect between the problems they identify and the policy solutions they propose. It’s almost like the man who looked for his keys on the thoroughfare, even though he lost them in the alley, because the light was better.
Reducing the incidence of unwed motherhood, divorce, fatherlessness, welfare and crime would be a good thing. So why the focus on issues that would do nothing to solve the “breakdown of the basic family structure” and the resulting “high cost of a dysfunctional society”? Well, solving the problems of divorce and unwed motherhood is hard. And lots of Republican and conservative voters have been divorced. A constitutional amendment to ban divorce wouldn’t go over very well, even with the social conservatives. Far better to pick on a small group, a group not perceived to be part of the Republican constituency, and blame it for social breakdown and its associated costs.
That’s why social conservatives point to a real problem and then offer phony solutions.
Very well written and some great points.
The problem with so many conservatives is that when something goes awry, they HAVE to find someone to blame. The problem is, that marriage equality is not widespread so to say that GLBT people are causing family breakdown is specious at best. In Massachussets, which has marriage equality, the divorce rate is ACTUALLY lower.
I would say it is more likely that there is more divorce/family breakdown (though in many cases, divorce changes the family dynamic for the better by getting rid of an abusive spouse) is simply that divorce is much easier to get these days and women have more choices today than when if a women married, it was for life and there was no social construct to allow her to leave the marriage if her husband turned out to be abusive. If the fundamentalists want to “save marriage” maybe they should find a way to decrease divorce amongst their own adherents. The biggest threat to marriage is divorce, not loving same-sex couples.
Straight marriage really must SUCK!!!
Excellent piece…
A UK perspective on something I read this week but bear with me…..
English Police estimate there are around 6000 establisments of various kinds in the UK that are essentially there to provide sex services to men. They further estimate 6.6 women working in each. Assuming they are earning from around minimum 3-4 transactions per day for 360 days per year, then I make that 40-60 million heterosexual fornications per year outside marriage. I don’t know how much of this transferable, but shouldn’t these people be worried about a conservative 100-200million fornications outside marriage at a conservative estimate in the US?
Where are all the “Pray Away The Stray” websites dedicated to fixing the brokeness and dangerous lifestyles choices of these men? Isn’t this whole orders of magnitude greater in terms of the threat to the family? Does straight marriage really suck that much?