I’m having a Gollum-like internal struggle over the polygamy raid in Texas.  On the one hand, I’m a firm believer in the rule of law and protecting the innocent, so I can get behind the idea of saving all the children from general religious craziness.  I’m also not overly religious, so I have no sympathy in their “moral” defense.  And yet . . . isn’t there something inherently disturbing about law enforcement and child protective services storming the bigamist beaches, as it were, ripping dozens of children from the breasts of their mothers and fathers on nothing more that the fact that they all live in a town where a couple of people have been accused of rape?

I believe in statutory laws, to some extent (I have problems with the application more than anything else).  I understand that polygamy is, at least, a statutory no-no.  But this one is not passing the smell test for me.  I don’t want 13-year olds forced into marriage with 50-year olds.  I don’t want children brainwashed into some sort of mindless, communal servitude.  But I also think that parents should, within bounds, be able to raise their children as they wish.  And I certainly don’t think that the police should be able to take my kids away solely based on the fact that one of my neighbors raped a girl and we just happen to go to the same church. 

If the authorities had arrested just the specific alleged offenders and taken them to jail, I’d be all for it.  But to sweep through an entire town on the accusations of a few people is a bit much for my conservative anti-authoritarian streak. 

So, what say you, dear reader?  Is this just a visceral response to polygamy?  Do you think the State acted appropriately here, and, if so, do you really think the children, as a group, are better off now?

When I was with Georgia Family Council in the first years of the millennium, we spent a lot of time trying to show people the value of marriage and the intact family as social institutions. In other words, marriage is better than divorce. Marriage is better than living together. Having children with both parents present is superior to the alternatives. There is a strong statistical case to be made for all of the above.

I’m happy to report that more influential persons seem to be picking up the case in Georgia. Check out this excerpt from a Washington Post column by Georgia Chief Justice Leah Ward Sears:

Why are state judges such as myself so concerned about strengthening marriage? Start with the basics: Fragmenting families are flooding our court dockets. Since I became a trial judge in 1989, the percentage of domestic relations cases has risen sharply; they now account for 65 percent of all cases in Georgia at the Superior Court level. Last year more than 14,000 children were in the care of the Georgia Division of Family and Children Services, and nearly 24,000 were admitted to a youth detention center. One out of every four Georgia children under 18 has a case with the Office of Child Support Enforcement.

These figures are typical of what is happening in every state. For judges, they represent a difficult workload. For families, they represent an astonishing level of necessary but intrusive government oversight. For government, they represent a mountain of resources that could be used for other purposes. For children, they are a tragedy.

As a judge I am often frustrated that I must work within a system designed only to pick up the pieces after families have already fallen apart or failed to come together. We must work to prevent family fragmentation, because the consequences for children and society are severe.

If we look for solutions, we will find them. What we do not yet know how to accomplish, we can learn. Americans believe that problems, no matter how difficult, should be addressed and not merely endured. Whether it is racism, crime or poverty, Americans believe that we can find ways to make a difference. Accepting the decline of marriage as inevitable means giving up on far too many of our children. They deserve better than that.

Just in time for this election cycle.

Now let’s see what the state’s supreme court does with the issue.

I just found out about this controversial piece, penned by Michael Noer for Forbes, which was deleted from its website after a furious reception in the blogosphere. For this reason, I am reposting the piece in its entirety here for the benefit of those who have not yet had a chance to read it: (more…)

This should come as no surprise to anyone.

We (traditionalists) knew this was the game plan of the anti-marriage crowd all along; and now they’ve finally admitted it.

(LvC&EI!)

On their recent nuptials.

Will Baude is a smart fellow - smarter than I am, no doubt.  (Though I haven’t seen him mention what is easily the best ice cream place in DC - Max’s Best Ice Cream - and so we might already think his judgment suspect).  But here he takes Emily Yoffe, the Prudence columnist for Slate to task telling in no uncertain terms a woman that she ought to rethink her decision not to have children, and then using that occasion to write a bit more broadly about the folks we used to call yuppies and their sometimes chosen childlessness.

Will’s complaint seems to be two-fold: first, he complains that Prudie’s column was somehow “invasive” because it was an essay and not an answer in an advice column; and, second, he thinks that Prudie treads across what should be separate - the domains of “manners” and “morals.”  These are really puzzling claims, I think.

First, on the invasiveness claim.  If you write a letter to an advice columnist, I shouldn’t think you would have an “expectation of privacy.”  Now, I’ve often wondered who it is that writes into these columns (and suspect that some good proportion of them are just fakes), but one thing seems certain: you only write into an advice columnist because, at some level, you hope to see your letter in the newspaper (or on-line, as it were).  You are a publicity-seeker.  No doubt Prudie gave the woman more than she expected, but that’s the chance you take.  If you don’t want your life to be the subject of “public” speculation, maybe, just maybe, you ought not write into a nationally recognized advice columnist.

As for the “separate domains” claim, I guess I just don’t see it.  Manners are shot through with moral claims - they are all about how we ought to treat one another.  Indeed, one way of thinking about manners is as formalized rituals where we put moral claims into practice and simply make them habitual.  When children are taught “yes, sir” and “yes, ma’am” (an increasingly uncommon occurrence outside the South, alas), they are being taught a qualified deference to their elders.  The increasing informality of our culture is in some part a breaking up of hierarchical and in some sense unjust social patterns, but it is also in part a product of our de-moralization.  When the young woman who wrote into Prudie was asking about how to answer her friends who wanted to know why she didn’t have kids, what she was looking for was a way to validate her decisions not to have children.  She was looking for validation for her decision to live life in a certain way, validation for certain kinds of *moral* choices.  Maybe Prudie didn’t give her good answers - that’s a different question - but the idea that you could even have a manners or advice column without treading on the domains of “morals” strikes me as very, very strange.

Good.

(LvBlawgfather)

Stanley Kurtz has an excellent piece over at the Weekly Standard, which notes, inter alia:

More important, by training us to see marriage as a civil rights issue, gay marriage advocates have largely defanged all of these structural arguments. Redefining the family is increasingly seen as a fundamental right. And the courts are beginning to agree. In his prize-winning law review essay “Polygamist Eye for the Monogamist Guy,” Michael Myers argues that if the Supreme Court interprets Lawrence v. Texas the way the Massachusetts Supreme Court did in its decision legalizing same-sex marriage, the right to polygamy will logically follow.

The solution is to treat marriage as a social institution whose fundamental purpose is to encourage mothers and fathers to build stable families for the children they create. Same-sex marriage breaks this understanding, thus encouraging the sort of unstable parental cohabitation we see in Europe, where cohabiting parents break up at two to three times the rate of married parents

But take ye comfort in knowing that it will all be done in the name of tolerance.

Tolerance for me, but not for thee.

And the amazing thing is that the name of the town is Blackjack.

Well, at least one gentle soul at NPR is doing just that. Kudos to you, Mrs. Langston. 

Here’s the direct link to the audio.

Good.

I would also love to see every state pass a law allowing victimized spouses to sue (in tort) the person who engaged in adultery with their spouse (as an alternative or in addition to divorce). Something along these lines.

Anybody know how many states have such a law on the books?