It says something for the courage of anyone on the left that they bothered to post in response to the latest Centre for Social Justice publication. It's not as if a lack of other news left them no choice but to respond to an interim report by a Tory-linked think tank proposing various measures to support marriage, including more stringent divorce legislation and recognition of pre-nuptial agreements. So props to all mentioned below for bothering to comment and respond. That done with, why are they so wrong?
Let's start with the core point. Does marriage actually produce the virtues claimed of it, such as stability and myriad benefits for children? Even Mary Dejevsky, who has plenty of words of praise for Iain Duncan Smith and whose disagreements with the report are subtle, still feels inclined to ask: "Does marriage make a relationship more stable, or are those who marry predisposed to form stable relationships anyway, which is why they chose to marry?"
Liberal Conspiracy doesn't even bother with the rhetorical questioning, adopting straightforward ridicule:
"If you’re not married but you have a partner you may be more likely to slap a child or fraud the system in your quest for council flat Eldorado... IDS explains his ideas are based on statistics. They’re all saying cohabiting couples went from 10 per cent in 1988 to 25 per cent today. S***. That’s where all that knife crime and crack consumption comes from."
Brilliant stuff. I suppose someone could actually do an analysis of the family backgrounds of those convicted of knife and crack cocaine offences and see how many were in fact raised in the stable marriages the CSJ is hoping to promote. But what would be the point? Whatever the findings - and I doubt they'd reflect poorly on marriage - it's always possible for critics like this to find some noxious social trend not entirely explained by family breakdown and imply that those who worry about the fatherless family are suggesting that it is.
Alix Mortimer is still more scathing, and confident that she knows better than the CSJ. Linking child abuse to family breakdown is a "truly numbskulled confusion". She explains: "the kind of dysfunction that causes people to abuse children may also cause them to be bad at holding together relationships. Parents who abuse children are more likely to be single, not the other way round".
How do we know they aren't right? Well, for a start, let's examine the claims on stability. Could it be no more than that while marriage itself is a mere piece of paper, people inclined towards stable relationships are more likely to marry? The trouble with this claim is that it does not account for increasing instability through time as marriage rates decline. You can argue that far from the days of higher marriage rates meaning greater relationship stability, in fact unstable couples were just as common back in the days when marriage was much more common - only they then felt cohabiting wasn't socially acceptable so they married. But if this is the case, you must also reckon with the fact that couples stayed together a lot more then than now, with illegitimacy a tiny fraction what it is now. In other words, if marriage doesn't contribute to the stability of a relationship, you'd expect to see far, far more instability in those days when marriage was almost universal.
As for the claim that child abuse is much more common when children are raised outside marriage, Mortimer argues that "correlation by itself proves nada". This is a claim seem increasingly from liberals when they encounter social science findings they don't like. Usually, they simply don't understand what they are talking about. Believe it or not, serious statistical analysis is not limited to drawing a graph of two trends against each other and looking for a pattern. It's probably too much to expect the man in the street to understand what multiple regression is, but is it too much to expect of bloggers who pontificate about the subject - or rather, in blatant pig ignorance of it? There are sophisticated ways to work out the association between two variables by controlling for other variables, and to calculate how much of the variance in y is explained by x and so on. For example, you can actually control for income, intelligence and other measures to test claims that these factors alone explain the virtues associated with marriage. Instead of pontificating endlessly about which is cause and which is effect, why not look at the researchers that have done this? What does the data say?
Mortimer's confident denunciation flies in the face of some of the most famous and shocking academic studies of recent decades, by the scientists Martin Daly and Margo Wilson. Fatal child abuse is a hundred times less likely to happen in homes where the child is raised by two genetic parents, they found. Abuse is still quite rare in any household, so it's not that single or step-parents are more likely than to abuse their children than not. But those inclined towards both violent and sexual abuse seem far less likely to subject their own children to it, for reasons explained by evolutionary psychology. When they are made responsible for step-children - or worse, when children grow up with a string of live-in boyfriends - the results are less happy. You don't even need to postulate an inclination towards abuse, these researchers ventured. You only need to imagine the rage of a normal parent or step-parent as they face yet another sleepless night. Do they stop short of that extra smack in a split second or not? Genetics sometimes seems to make an impact on this. Again, it's not so much that the man in the street should know this - it's the arrogance of the blogger who condemns those all too familiar with it for knowing what she doesn't.
Curiouser and curiouser is the Liberal Conspiracy attack on the recommendations of the CSJ. In a five paragraph post, the author manages to make three separate references to wife-beating. "Don’t worry if your husband beats you... Sod that black eye" and so on it goes. It's difficult to know how quite how to respond to posts like this. How to get inside the head of someone who, when he meets with arguments for lifelong marriage, keeps thinking of wife-beating? Suggest divorce sometimes happens for ... other reasons? Point out that marriage is not in fact a legal obligation to remain living with a wifebeater in any case?
I've not seen the data on this, but I'd be willing to bet Theodore Dalrymple of decades experience of the underclass and prison class knows far more about these matters than does Stan Moss of Liberal Conspiracy. To read Dalrymple is to read not of domestic harmony between couples that invariably decline to marry. It is to read of so many women beaten by their live-in boyfriends for as little as eye contact with other men - by partners so insecure in their relationship they find violence their only means of control. I don't know whether it's worse for a man to marry a woman because he wants a punchbag or for him to beat a woman he hasn't married because he feels she will otherwise leave him - but it is doubtful the former is more common. If your stance on marriage is inspired by an obsession with preventing domestic violence, you should probably love the institution.
Relatedly, Alix Mortimer writes that "no liberal should find anything wrong with people hankering for past social mores (so long as they don’t visit them on us and our transbisexual menages-a-quatre communes, obviously)". You can object to the adolescent shallowness of this type of vision, but it's hard to detect much of a sense in which it harms anyone else. The real trouble is the reality of lifestyle diversity is not millions of transbisexuals forming communes, any more than domestic violence is really a problem of stable married couples. The grim reality is in fact millions of children growing up without fathers, with all the associated emotional and social consequences. Oh, how delightfully transgressive and progressive, darling!
Finally, what if one does fully accept the benefits of marriage? One can still doubt that the CSJ recommendations would help. But not very plausibly, I think, if ones argument is based on the liberal view whereby history is divided entirely and neatly into two moments - 'the progressive era' and 'everything before about 1963'. Mortimer explains: "Once upon a time, couples stayed together because [of] morals, prevailing global socio-economics and a more communitarian way of life ..." (Okay, okay, I made the "upon a time" part up). But if ones understanding of history and social trends is a little more sophisticated than this, one can see how positive and noxious trends alike can and have been followed and then reversed many times in the past. Masses of economic research suggest people respond to incentives, and that is where the CSJ report - and its work more generally - appears to point so insightfully in the direction of giving people more incentive to pursue the relationships that are better and more stable for them, for their families and for society. How feeble are the arguments that have so far been offered in opposition.
