Opposing Viewpoints

What’s Good About Marriage

Why do some gays and lesbians want the right to marry?

Formal vows in ritualized language • The ideal of marriage as lifelong commitment -- "to have and to hold .. for better or for worse ... for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health .. ‘til death do us part" (Book of Common Prayer - written in the 16th Century – Church of England) • Service used to include – “to love, honor, cherish … and [for the bride] obey”

Same Sex Marriage: Opposing Viewpoints • The Economist (a • Back-bench "family weekly business caucus“ in Canadian magazine) published a Federal Parliament lead editorial (1996) (1990s): "A family in with the title: “Let our society is not two them Wed.” people of the same sex.“

1 "A family in our society is not two people of the same sex" • 1992, the Canadian Federal Govt. proposed to add sexual orientation to the list of prohibited grounds for discrimination. This list already included religion, race, ethnic origin, age, sex, marital status, disability and family status. • Back-bench "family caucus" would tolerate same- sex long-term live-in relationships, but would deny the right to call such relationships "family" or "spousal" relationships.

Supreme Court of Canada

• Feb. 1993. ... same-sex couples do not constitute a family and therefore do not in law have the same family benefit rights as mixed-sex couples. • 1995. … decided 5:4 that denying a survivor's pension to a long-time same-sex partner was discrimination but decided 5:4 that this discrimination was a reasonable one. • M vs H. May, 1999. …decides 9:1 that a section of the Ontario Family Law Act is unreasonably discriminatory in giving rights to heterosexual but

not to same-sex common-law couples. 5

Is marriage good for society?

• What's so good about marriage that gays and lesbians would want the state to allow same-sex marriage? • How did the state obtain control of marriage anyway?

2 Study done at Univ. of California at San Francisco • looked at 7,651 people in 1971-75 and again in 1982-84 • 23 per cent of unmarried men between ages 45 and 54 died within 10 years • compared with 11 per cent of married men • "Even single men who live with someone other than a spouse have a higher death rate [than married men]“ • "It seems to be the presence of a spouse that's protective" 7

Study done at Univ. of California at San Francisco • 7.7 per cent of single women aged 45-64 died at some time over the ten year period * compared with 4 per cent of married women. • "Men derive a lot of social support by being married, but women have a more widespread social support system outside marriage"

What Would Durkheim Say?

• Sociologist Emile Durkheim saw marriage as a protection against suicide (higher suicide rates among the unmarried than among the married), via reduction of “Egoism” and of “Anomie.” – Hence he opposed liberalization of French law on divorce. • Eminent demographer Nathan Keyfitz has shown that married people live longer than the unmarried.

3 Married people are:

• Happier than singles (or so they say in questionnaires) • Healthier than singles • Less prone to suicide than singles • Less likely to need supports from the welfare state than singles

Is it Causation or Selectivity?

• Maybe to some degree causal (marriage causes health and happiness) • or maybe partly Darwinian selection (the less happy/healthy cannot get married or cannot stay married or cannot get remarried – perhaps Nature’s way of eliminating poor genes)

Benefits to society

• Marriage is a social stabilizer, particularly of men. • … shapes identities of men and women. • … provides a support system for child- raising. • Marriage is supported by social policy, tax structures and law.

4 Responsibilities and rights of the legally married • in some jurisdictions - responsibilities for each others' debts ("for richer, for poorer") • responsibilities of mutual care ("in sickness and in health") • [where conflicts of interest are possible] responsibilities to disclose the spouse's interests to be considered as one's own (securities legislation) • responsibilities/rights of sexual exclusivity • rights to share medical benefits

Responsibilities and rights of the legally married • rights to share pension or survivorship benefits • rights of guardianship and power of attorney over the affairs of a spouse who is incapable of living independently • rights to make decisions about medical treatments on behalf of a spouse who cannot make decisions for him/herself • rights to inherit from a deceased spouse • rights to pass citizenship to any children of the relationship 14

Marriage: advantages & disadvantages • Legal advantages: legitimacy of children • Social advantages: sexual exclusivity • Legal disadvantages: spouse's holdings can involve a person in "conflict of interest" situations • Social Disadvantages: sexual exclusivity

5 Married people are to some extent “the same person” • Securities legislation includes someone's spouse's holdings as well as their own holdings, when considering issues of conflict of interest for that person. The assumption is that spouses don’t act independently of each other. • Not clear how this has been applied to common-law or same-sex couples.

Informal marriage

• Cohabitation before marriage formalities has been known in the past - in England & other countries, before Church and State obtained ideological and practical hegemony over spousal relationships.

More on informal marriage

• In regions where people normally married late, some people in rural areas lived together publicly "in concubinage". This was regarded as second best but still a positive living arrangement, because it assured - or tested - that the "marriage" would be fertile. Too much delay until a legal marriage was possible might have eliminated the possibility of childbearing. (Gillis)

6 “Temporary Unions” in Montaillou • Interrogations of villagers in 14th Century France show that around 10% of the couples were “living in sin” in at least one remote village. • European marital conduct was tightened up in 17th & 18th Centuries during the Reformation (for Protestants) and the Counter-Reformation (for Catholics)

"Broomstick weddings"

• … may have been common in country districts and could easily be reversed. The union was formed by a couple publicly and ceremonially jumping over a stick together. It was repealed by their jumping backwards over a stick in another public ceremony. These rituals may have been largely confined to young couples without children and may thus have been "trial marriages".

16th Century language still popular in Christian weddings • "Who giveth this woman?“ • "With this ring, I thee wed ... • to love, honor, cherish and obey ... • with all my worldly goods I thee endow ... • for better or for worse • for richer for poorer • in sickness and in health ... • til death do us part ...".

7 Implications of the language

• Permanency • Mutual obligation • Separation from families of origin – (woman transferred from her father to her husband)

Lord Hardwicke's marriage act in England (1753) • Required thrice-called announcements (banns) or purchase of license from a bishop or one of his surrogates ... Parental consent for those under twenty-one. – With this legislation the institution of marriage came to be more closely controlled by Church, Synagogue (Jewish), Meeting House (Quaker) and State. • Similar legislation in Catholic Europe (the Council of Trento, 1563) extended the control of the Catholic Church over conjugal relations

Heiresses elope to Gretna Green

• Gretna Green is on the England/Scotland border • “Blacksmith's marriages” began in 1754 when England tightened marriage laws re-parental consent / age over 21. But age stayed 16 in Scotland. Age of consent in England only lowered from 21 to 18 in a 1970 Act. • Tighter defining and control of marriage and bastardy by the church and the state. Davidoff (1990 : 90) quotes Lord Hardwicke's Act of 1753 and also the new Poor Law of 1834.

8 Scottish Matrimonial Law

• … was based on pre-Reformation law until 1939. • As well as church/synagogue/meeting house marriages, Scots law also allowed irregular or clandestine marriage: – mutual exchange of present consent (abolished 1939) – promise of future marriage upon which intercourse followed - marriage by consummation (abolished 1939) – marriage by cohabitation with habit and repute, whereby a man and woman openly cohabited as husband and wife, leading to a presumption of exchange of matrimonial consent. 25

Scots law remains different

• The Marriage (Scotland) Act 1939 abolished two of the three “non-standard” forms of marriage: – marriage by mutual exchange of present consent – marriage by promise of future marriage upon which intercourse followed • But did not abolish the third “non-standard” form: • “Recognition of marriage by habit and repute is still a vibrant doctrine in Scots law." Clancy, Michael P. letter to The Times, June 29, 1991 : 13.

Spousal benefits packages which would support family life • These negotiated so as to assume model family of a male breadwinner married to a female home- maker whose most productive years were spent raising children and who would also be expected to care for the aged and infirm. • Tax deductions for a dependent spouse and spousal coverage in medical and drug plans, as well as survivor pensions all continue to be based on this model – even for childless couples.

9 Why can’t same sex couples have marital benefits? • After changes in social norms made it possible for gay and lesbian couples to live together openly, they asked why they could not have the same spousal benefits & social recognition as were given to childless heterosexual couples. • Why not indeed?

What are marital benefits for?

• “Family values” groups interpret state benefits as incentive or payment for the production of children and care of the old and sick. • But many heterosexual couples neither have children nor intend to have them, while some same-sex couples (not very many to be sure) adopt or foster children.

Evolution of marriage in an era of low fertility • The marriage certificate has become not just a private contract between families with no financial implications for the state or the employer • It is also the entry ticket to potentially significant material benefits, even if the couple has no children and does no caring for older dependent family members. • Hence a recent emphasis on definitions which stress mutual caring between the adult partners as the essential characteristic of marriage.

10 Effects of “Modernization”

• “Modernization" appears to bring about greater possibilities for the exercise of individual choice ☺, reduced power of older family members over their children ☺, "nuclearization" of domestic groups and kinship relationships. • Social conservatives argue that forces of modernization, globalization, etc. reduce “social cohesion” & “social capital” and hence make people less contented than they were before

Positive Aspects of “Modernization” • We have reviewed materials regarding arranged marriages, honor killings, parents expropriating their children's labor and other "patriarchal" arrangements. • Thus the process of modernization seems to be generally positive for anyone who is not currently a family head and to be particularly positive for women.

Emile Durkheim’s View on Family and Society

A sociologist in France around 1900

11 Durkheim: People Need Structures • Emile Durkheim argued that people function rather poorly when left to their own devices. (Higher suicide rates among the unattached than among the married. Durkheim’s book: Suicide) • Social forces leading to higher suicide rates: – “Egoism” (= Lack of networks: lack of social support) – “Anomie” (= Normlessness: lack of a clear world view)

Social Conservatism (Sacks)

• "A way of life is not only constituted by what people do, but also by the framework in which they understand what they do. Removing the legal and moral sting from cohabitation, divorce, illegitimacy and homosexuality does not leave the world unchanged. The gradual transformation by which sin becomes immorality, immorality becomes deviance, deviance becomes choice and all choice becomes legitimate, is a profound redrawing of our moral landscape, and alters the way we see the alternatives available to us." 35

People are happier, more productive etc. when they have: • 1) Norms: clear social roles, unambiguous social norms, a coherent symbolic universe • 2) Networks: social ties to others, (i.e. they are embedded in active social networks, perhaps by marriage etc.) • You could argue that these two elements of "the social" often overlap; e.g. regular attendance of Church, Meeting House, Mosque, Synagogue, Temple etc.

12 Durkheim Opposed Liberalization of Divorce Laws. • Catholic Church was still powerful in France • He (as an intellectual of Jewish origin) was supposed to be on the side of secular modernizing forces (republican values), Durkheim was against making divorce easier to obtain. His opposition arose from his belief (supported by evidence) that marriage is an institution which stabilizes the lives of individuals.

Durkheim: How Social Regulation Makes Society Work. • Social regulation proceeds through daily social interactions and through social exchange much of which may be largely symbolic. • “Collective Effervescence” of social gatherings contributes to “Social Cohesion”

Public Ceremonies & Rituals

• Durkheim would argue that public ceremonies & rituals involve families, friends & the community, emphasizing that marriage is more than a private contract between individuals: generating a network of people who have some stake in the marriage.

13 Symbols of Social Position

• Symbols & rituals remind each individual of his/her place in relation to family, community and larger scale organizations. • (Fascist governments in 1930s & 1940s are an extreme modern example of official proliferation of ritual and symbolism - an example of "applied sociology"). (Durkheim: The Division of Labor in Society: The Elementary Forms of Religious Life)

Wholesale Status Distributions

• Status distributions in fascist Germany • "Like a super Elks Club, the Third Reich pampered the familiar human weakness for distinction on a scale probably without precedent • .. This in the form of jobs, medals, uniforms, irrespective of authority, was status distribution in the grand manner, personal identification for thousands with the brave new world Hitler offered them.

The Social Ties that Bind

• Durkheimian ideas under the heading of "Power- Control Theory". Basic idea is that people are much more likely to engage in deviant behaviour when their ties to family and community organizations are weak. • This leads us to a recurring theme in discussions about "the family"; that weakening the traditional family will lead to "individualization" (in the bad sense of loss of “social cohesion” / “social capital”), more suicides, higher levels of deviance and criminality, (codes for Race Issue in USA?) 42

14 Can we invent worthwhile substitutes for families? • One response to this (not yet tested by experience) is that just as new religious movements have been created and could have useful social functions, so people can invent novel kinds of domestic groups and family-like social organizations based on something like "fictitious kinship". • Kibbutz is one such attempt. Many “utopian communities” have tried other forms of domestic group.

Evaluating “Common-Law” as a social invention • As we have noted, many couples began to live "common-law" during the last 25 years of the 20th Century. At the time, this was a significant departure from traditional family life. • Was it a positive social development or not? • Does it “strengthen a marriage” to live common-law before getting married?

Who Gets Divorced?

• Predicting who gets divorced • Are people who have lived common-law more likely to bail out when a marriage gets difficult? • If so, is this because of “selectivity” (people who lived common law are different) • - or because of “socialization” (the experience of living common-law does something to people.)

15 Le Bourdais on Risk of Divorce

• “Women whose first conjugal union was common-law were nearly twice as likely to separate.” Canadian Social Trends, 2000 : 16.

“Nearly twice as likely”: working with odds and odds ratios. • “Nearly twice as likely” means that (controlling for other factors) the odds of union dissolution among couples who had lived common law before marriage were about 1.9 times the odds those among couples who had not. • The ratio of the odds was about 1.9

Selectivity Hypothesis: Hall & Zhao • Hall and Zhao. Cohabitation and Divorce in Canada: testing the selectivity hypothesis. • Hall and Zhao used General Social Survey (GSS 5), carried out in 1990 • Telephone interviews: target sample of 10,000 individuals over the ten provinces with an over-sample of 2,000 from Ontario and another over-sample of the elderly

16 Predicting the Odds of Union Dissolution • General pattern of analyses like this is that we try to predict an outcome (a dependent variable) from a number of prior characteristics of the respondent. • Technique used here is "survival analysis" in which we look for whether certain predictors increase or decrease the odds ("risk") of divorce, adjusting for the influence of other factors. • Dependent variable is outcome of respondent's first marriage

Outcome of 1st Marriage

• a) dissolution by separation or divorce b) dissolution by death of spouse (censored) c) still married at the date of the survey (censored) • Total of 8,177 survey respondents had ever been married

Predictors of separation/divorce in first marriage. Hall & Zhao. • Pre-marital cohabitation (increases risk times 2) • Stepchildren (increases risk times 4) • Respondent's wife had been married before (reduces risk) • Respondent's parents apart (increases risk) – "Do your mother and father live together?" • Respondent's wife more than 5 years older than respondent (increases risk) • Respondent's husband more than 5 years older than respondent (increases risk) 51

17 More predictors of dissolution of 1st marriage. Hall & Zhao. • Pre-marital pregnancy (reduces risk) – (= first child born within seven months of marriage date) • Marital birth (reduces risk) • Born 1945 or earlier (reduces risk) • High religiosity (reduces risk by one third) – (= church attendance in last 12 months) • Higher age at marriage (reduces risk) • Postsecondary education (increases risk)

Conclusion from Hall & Zhao

• The "cohabitation effect" (increasing the risk of separation/divorce) remains even after controlling for many plausible "selectivity" variables. (Cohabitants might be less religious, etc. etc.) • If “Selectivity" is implausible as an explanation of the cohabitation effect, we are left with the conclusion that the experience of cohabitation before marriage makes that marriage less stable. • Durkheim would say that non-marital cohabitation is both symptom & cause of weaker social norms.

Some things that don’t predict hazard of divorce • Some factors which do not predict dissolution of 1st marriage (after everything else controlled): – Province, premarital birth,