Progress is Fragile
This week we chatted with Julie Kohler, the co-creator and host of the podcast, White Picket Fence. She told us more about the latest season of her podcast which focuses on the current “marriage panic.” If you haven’t listened to this week’s episode yet, what are you waiting for — listen here!
Julie tells us that progress is fragile. And that’s definitely what we’re seeing right now as we’re in the midst of a moral panic about marriage. Politicians and pundits (mostly on the right) are voicing their concerns about people marrying later, and less often. They’re upset that a growing number of adults are living alone, without a spouse or partner and that divorce is relatively common. And don’t get them started about women who are having and raising kids as single mothers.
It feels like a throwback to 1992 when then-Vice President Dan Quayle blamed the title character Murphy Brown from a fictional tv show for the breakdown of family values.
This is what he said, “Bearing babies irresponsibly is, simply, wrong. Failing to support children one has fathered is wrong. We must be unequivocal about this. It doesn’t help matters when prime-time TV has Murphy Brown — a character who supposedly epitomizes today’s intelligent, highly paid professional woman — mocking the importance of fathers by bearing a child alone and calling it just another ‘life-style choice.'”
Later that year, even though he and former-President George H.W. Bush were incumbents, they were still defeated by Clinton and Gore in the presidential race.
But, it wasn’t just Republicans in the 1990’s who were proponents of so-called “traditional” marriage. In 1996, then-President Bill Clinton signed the Defense of Marriage Act. This ensured that same-sex marriages would be second-class marriages even in states that permitted them. It said that regardless of any given state’s decision to legalize same-sex marriage, no other state had to recognize same-sex couples as married, nor would the federal government under any circumstances recognize such unions.
Seventeen years later, former President Clinton said, “I have come to believe that DOMA is contrary to those principles and, in fact, incompatible with our Constitution."
Then, on June 26, 2015 the Supreme Court declared same-sex marriage legal in all 50 States.
We have made great progress since 1992, but remember, as Julie told us in this week’s episode — progress is fragile.
For example, even though covenant marriage has been somewhat obscure in recent years, Speaker of the House Mike Johnson brought it back into the limelight. He and his wife opted for a covenant marriage when they wed in Louisiana in 1999. Two years earlier, Louisiana became the first state in the country to pass a “covenant marriage” law, offering newlyweds a religion-based contract that makes it significantly harder to get divorced. The only other states to follow suit are Arizona and Arkansas.
Being in a covenant marriage lines up with Speaker Johnson’s opposition to no-fault divorce. And he’s not the only one talking about it. We’ve seen the push to end no-fault divorce by conservatives — in podcast studios and in the halls of government.
Those wanting to end non-fault divorce disguise this position as a safeguard for “traditional” marriage. But it’s actually dangerous for women, especially those in abusive relationships. It keeps them in the box of dependency and makes it harder for them to leave.
Today, as we mark the 30th anniversary of the signing of the Violence Against Women Act, we need to remember the current rise of the marriage panic is not just a matter of what family values mean to an individual person — it’s about the autonomy and safety of human beings.