One husband and numerous wives invites increased jealousy, deception and subjugation, and mocks the importance of "forsaking all others," essential components of the stabilizing function of marriage.
Kipnis does pay lip service to the functions of marriage beyond the sexual — "Companionship, shared housing costs, childrearing convenience, reassuring predictability, occasional sex, insurance against the destabilizing effects of non-domestic desire" — but her enumeration seems delivered in the spirit of those legally required disclosures of pharmaceutical side effects.
In the 1980s the Asian rate was 1 per 1,000 people; now it is 2. If that rise continues, Asian divorce could one day be as common as in Europe.An educated choiceThe main function of marriage in most traditional societies is to bring up children (romantic love rarely has much to do with it).
"Same-sex relationships differ from heterosexual ones in ways that can't be changed by legislation," says philosopher Brenda Almond, who argues that the primary historical and traditional function of marriage is procreative.
Marriage provides benefits which are denied to same-sex couples on the basis of their orientation; if the function of marriage is the legal recognition of loving, or "voluntary intimate," relationships, the exclusion of same-sex relationships appears arbitrary and unjustly discriminatory (Wellington 1995, 13).
Her suggested goal is to establish an "ethic of responsible parenthood," which is ironic given that the creation of that ethic is a primary function of marriage.
The problem is with changing beliefs in America about family: specifically, about the function of marriage and its impact on child bearing.
Most Americans now believe the function of marriage is to satisfy their desire for meaningful, life-long connection instead of as an institution for raising children and what children need to thrive.
If we can agree to focus on the goal of ensuring that children deserve to be raised in an environment that the research shows gives them the best chance to succeed and in which their parents can also thrive, then perhaps we can also agree that the answer to improving child well-being lies somewhere in this expanded function of marriage.
To do so, we must challenge our tendency to look at controversial issues as a zero-sum game and collaborate to identify, test, and iterate approaches that respect the evolving function of marriage and redirect its gaze back toward children's well-being.
