Real families can’t avoid attachments
Timothy P. Carney
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Marriage is difficult, and even public figures’ marriages deserve privacy. But former New York Mayor Bill de Blasio and his wife Chirlane McCray decided to announce their separation in an interview with the political reporter who covered him as mayor.
As with much of de Blasio’s career, the decision begins as odd and then gets far worse.
New York Times reporter Matt Flegenheimer calls the de Blasios “a thoroughly modern political family,” by which he apparently means a couple that makes a mockery out of the institution of marriage.
“Mr. de Blasio and Ms. McCray are separating,” Flegenheimer reported, before adding this doozy of a sentence: “They are not planning to divorce, they said, but will date other people.”
That is, de Blasio and McCray are publicly announcing their intention to become adulterers.
“Ms. McCray asked dryly if their phone numbers could be included in the newspaper,” Flegenheimer reported.
This is where their announcing their separation to a political reporter goes from odd to obscene: They were basically asking the New York Times to publish a dual dating profile. De Blasio even asked if the paper would run a picture of him working out.
The couple didn’t stop at flaunting their infidelity. They tried to make their infidelity a virtue — a sign of progressive openness.
De Blasio articulated his philosophy of marriage in three quotations:
“Labels put people in boxes, and those boxes are shaped like coffins.”
“I never want to be stuck.”
“Avoid attachments.”
De Blasio attributed that last one to his Buddhist brother, but “avoid attachments” may very well be the philosophy of American progressive elites.
Marriage rates are dropping, community is crumbling, and increasingly personal autonomy is seen as the only good that can never be compromised.
The New York Times runs anti-marriage and pro-divorce articles almost monthly, loaded with philosophical-sounding claims that we are rewriting what love means, what sex and gender are, and what family is.
We have replaced relations with transactions, because relationships amount to “being stuck.”
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The de Blasios have long held up their marriage as politically poignant. They had two gay men officiate their wedding, and de Blasio tried to make his interracial family a political asset. Now as they enter the post-monogamous stage of their wedding, they are trumpeting this transactional, detached individualism as a beautiful sign of enlightenment.
Here’s hoping this campaign fails worse than de Blasio’s presidential run.