Are liberal elites dismissive of marriage?
Jessica Grose, who covers family, religion, education, and culture for the New York Times doesn’t think so.
Responding to Rob Henderson’s book Troubled: A Memoir of Foster Care, Family, and Social Class, in which Henderson recounts how classmates of his at Yale enjoyed the stability of married households while also denigrating the institution, Grose writes:
“To the extent that liberals aren’t constantly banging the drum for marriage, my sense is that it’s because the benefits of marriage and two-parent families are pretty obvious to most Americans already. It’s not some big secret that having more resources and increasing the number of loving adults in a child’s life makes parenting easier.”
Grose then cites a 2021 Pew poll that found only 14% of Democrats agreed with the statement that “single women raising children on their own is generally good for society.” She also notes that the percentage of the public who believes single motherhood and cohabitation are bad for society actually increased between 2018 and 2021.
This is all true. But that very same poll also found that 43% of all adults and 50% of Democrats said single women raising children on their own “doesn’t make a difference” for society.
If the benefits of marriage are so clear, why do half of Democrats say it doesn’t matter at all?
Turning to unmarried cohabitation, a whopping 67% of Democrats said it doesn’t make a difference for society if couples live together without getting married. In fact, more Democrats said not getting married was good for society, 20%, than said it was bad, 13%.
So yeah, not only do plenty of Democrats not see the “obvious” benefits of marriage, but a good fifth of them think marriage is outright bad!
Grose then repeats a common Democratic talking point that the problem isn’t the decline of marriage. It is the quality of the marriage.
“While good marriages are good, bad marriages can be very, very bad. That’s not to say all bad marriages are violent — they’re not — but we don’t know the individual stories when we look at sterile statistics about who declines to marry when they have a child together or who gets married and splits up. We don’t see the whys behind these decisions.”
There’s a lot to unwrap here.
First, yes, some marriages are “bad.” But how bad matters. High-conflict marriages, where there is constant fighting and the possibility of violence, are bad. We can all agree on that. But there are also a lot of “low conflict” marriages where some extra work by one or both of the parties could make the relationship happy again. Most divorces are, in fact, from “low conflict” marriages, and many people who get divorced, especially men, wish they had been given an opportunity to work harder at their marriage.
Second, unmarried people don’t stop having sex. In fact, many of them cohabitate with a sexual partner. More people have now cohabitated today than have been married. But here is the problem: Cohabitation is far less conducive to stable relationships than marriage. Cohabitating partners are more likely to break up, more likely to engage in domestic violence, and also fail to build wealth as effectively as married couples.
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Grose thinks conservatives should stop trying to save marriage and instead ”meaningfully expand the safety net so that fewer children live in poverty — which really should be the focus of all this — even if their parents don’t get hitched.”
Which is exactly what a liberal elite raised by married parents but didn’t appreciate the stability that institution has brought to her life would say.