Leading a Worthy Life in a Scattered Time: A Conversation with Leon Kass
Marriage, Market, and Politics in Middlemarch
Andy Lidstone/Shutterstock.comUnderstanding Love and Marriage with Rousseau
The Visit to the Nursery, by Jean-Honore Fragonard, 1775. From Moynihan to Murphy Brown
If there is one thing Pat Moynihan taught us, it is that talking about the family can be fraught with peril. Published at a time when nearly one in four African American children was born outside of marriage—seven times the rate for whites (see Figure 1)—the Moynihan Report gave a “faithful contemporaneous portrait” as Greg Weiner says. Yet it drew bitter reactions, he says, for its “sweeping historical and sociological analysis of the African American family.” According to the Report: “The Negro family in the urban ghettos is crumbling” because “in terms of ability to win out in the competitions of…
More Responses
Knowing what we know today about family breakdown among Americans and across the modern industrialized world, it seems that Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s The Negro Family: The Case for National Action mistakes the particular for the general and might reflect a misunderstanding of the decline of the family. Moynihan’s 1965 Report emphasizes the ways in which…
One of the advantages of looking at The Negro Family: The Case for National Action after 50 years is perspective. Perspective is a form of knowledge that allows us to see from a different vantage point and to bring new information to bear on a problem. In responding to Greg Weiner’s essay, I bring the…
In assessing the Moynihan Report at 50, I have the privilege of far more thoughtful interlocutors than Daniel Patrick Moynihan—who was subjected to a digest of calumnies for the rest of his life—enjoyed on the original product. I am grateful to Scott Yenor, Robin Fretwell Wilson and Susan Love Brown for their thoughtful commentaries. Yenor…
Don’t get into theological arguments with Masters of Divinity, and don’t argue Daniel Patrick Moynihan with his most astute intellectual biographer! That is a good rule of prudence, but fools rush in . . . sometimes. Moynihan is mostly known in conservative circles for his emphasis on the limits of social policy, and my question concerns…
Miraculous Marriage
Many worry that marriage is in its death throes these days, at least here in the prosperous West. Even Pope Francis commented at his recent conference on the family in Rome that “We now live in a culture of the temporary in which more and more people are simply giving up on marriage as a public commitment.”
Many today see liberation from the commitment to marriage as a positive social gain. Francis responded that this “revolution in manners and morals has often flown the flag of freedom but in fact has brought spiritual and material devastation to countless human beings, especially the poorest and most vulnerable.”
Isabel Sawhill’s new book Unbound: Drifting into Sex and Parenthood without Marriage reports the numbers for the United States. They suggest that the word “revolution” is not an exaggeration.
ARTs and the Reconceived Family
For some time now, three of the most powerful forces in society—technological science and the moral values of equality and freedom—have been applied to the redefinition and reworking of a fundamental human and social institution: marriage and the family. Same-sex marriage is the most recent wave in this transformative endeavor.
Post-Modern Marriage and Our Relational Longings
Marriage and parenting may be disappearing in large parts of sophisticated Europe and Japan, but not so much among our high achievers. It’s true that our elitists don’t think that marriage is required for sexual enjoyment or even to validate romantic love. They’re accepting of same-sex marriage to avoid being judgmental or hateful. Marriage equality is part of “multicultural diversity.” And so it’s an issue about which it’s no longer possible for decent people to have diverse opinions.
Our meritocracy based on productivity embraces diverse lifestyles, and nobody believes that women were born to be anything but free and equal individuals just like men. And so parenthood and marriage have to be freely chosen, allegedly part of that mysterious power that one has to define one’s personal identity. Except when it comes to the responsible imperatives of personal productivity, the talk of our successful sophisticates often seems stuck in the Sixties. But not so much their behavior.
Marriage, Change, and the Future of Constitutional Self-Government
Marriage and family life are not what they once were and this “change” should continue with the embrace of further reforms in the direction of disestablishing or de-institutionalizing both institutions. The winds of change are blowing, and law, as pragmatic adaption to changing circumstances, must adapt, reflect and foster these changes. This is the core theoretical argument of Mark E. Brandon’s States of Union, a legal realist contribution to the history of marriage in law and public consciousness. The story Brandon, a Professor of Law at Vanderbilt University Law School, tells parallels those seen in other fine histories of marriage and…
Justice Sotomayor, Today’s Paternal-Rights Case, and Tomorrow’s Marriage Cases
Tomorrow the Supreme Court will issue its opinions in the marriage cases. Today, in a less prominent case, the Court treated the issue of parental, and more particularly, paternal rights. As I've discussed here, there is a constitutional presumption in favor of natural-parental trusteeship, a presumption that is in tension with the contradictory presumption that arises where the state recognizes same-sex relationships as marriage. Today's case, Adoptive Couple v. Baby Girl, involved a statutory, and not a constitutional, issue. Still, the dissent , authored by Justice Sotomayor, took pains to mention the constitutional presumption that I've emphasized. There is, she…
The Equal Familial Rights of Gay Parents and Their Offspring: The [Limited] Unconstitutionality of the New Marriage, Part II
In my first post on the unconstitutionality of the new marriage, I argued that the Due Process Clause, as originally understood, limited governmental power over children’s locomotion in at least one respect: the government must respect a presumption in favor of natural-parental trusteeship. Children have a right to their mother and their father. And by providing this presumption, the Due Process Clause protects this right.
I mentioned that in a subsequent post, I would elaborate the way in which the new marriage unconstitutionally disregards this presumption. While preparing this second post, Greg Weiner did me the honor of writing a thoughtful response to the first one. In particular, Weiner (1) disputed the claim that the Due Process Clause establishes any such presumption, (2) questioned the way in which this presumption might affect gay couples, and (3) cautioned reading one’s policy proclivities into the Constitution. I believe this post answers the second and third of his objections. In a subsequent post, I hope to elaborate the originalist evidence indicating the incorporation of this presumption into “due process of law.”
Let me begin by emphasizing my agreement with Professor Weiner that one should not read into the Constitution something that is not there—even if that missing thing is one’s strongly-held beliefs. Rather, I should say, it is my strongly-held belief that the rule of law is good, that rule by a written constitution is particularly good, and that it is good to tell the truth about such a constitution—especially a constitution as noble as ours.
