Marital Bedrock
Conjugal America:
On the Public Purposes of Marriage
by Allan Carlson
Transaction Publishers, 2006
(138 pages, $29.95, hardcover)
reviewed by Robert W. Patterson
Fourteen years ago, Barbara Dafoe Whitehead vindicated an embattled Dan Quayle in The Atlantic Monthly by showcasing the social science literature that demonstrates that, yes, Murphy Brown, the country’s experiment with family “diversity”—whether single parenthood, divorce, or step-parenting—has not been good for children.
While ending her 16,500-word feature with the suggestion that “societies can change, particularly when it becomes apparent that certain behaviors damage the social ecology, threaten the public order, and impose new burdens on core institutions,” she wasn’t willing to predict any pending turnaround. Whether she would be encouraged today is not clear, as marital patterns remain largely unchanged and the country finds itself debating not so much marriage but “gay marriage.”
Ironically, many social scientists who would agree with Whitehead seem unwilling to include same-sex intimacy with those behaviors that unravel the social fabric. Whitehead herself endorsed a book, Jonathan Rauch’s Gay Marriage, that argued that allowing individuals of the same sex to marry would shore up the social foundations of marriage.
So if the social scientists, who should know better, are unwilling to defend holy matrimony as the natural union of one man and one woman, who will? Enter Allan Carlson, president of the Howard Center, with his concise book, Conjugal America.
The Deeper Crisis
A leading social historian, Carlson lays out a case not only for what marriage does for adults and children but also what it is: an unchanging institution “rooted in human nature” that, representing the economic and sexual union between man and woman, dates back to primeval times and stands at the core of every human society.
In contrast to same-sex substitutes—which no society has ever sanctioned (except for very recent and limited experiments)—marriage, explains Carlson, exists for bearing and raising children, binds the generations and society together, and embodies the dynamics that make liberty and self-government possible.
Based largely on a 2004 lecture series at the Family Research Council in Washington, D.C., Conjugal America warns that “gay marriage” is not so much a threat as a symptom of a deeper crisis: the deconstruction of the institution of marriage and a rejection of the natural family in Western culture. Carlson ties that crisis to the “industrial impulse” that has severed the economically productive functions from the family, including the separation of the sexual act from marriage and of marriage from procreation.
The crisis was evident before the courts started pushing “gay rights”: Witness the high incidence of divorce, out-of-wedlock childbearing, and intentionally childless couples, not to mention the downsizing of families and the downplaying of sexual differences.
Robert W. Patterson is a former Presbyterian minister who is now Research Fellow of the Howard Center for Family, Religion & Society and writes on domestic policy issues in Washington, D.C.
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more on marriage from the online archives
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