“When we continue to see a decline in marriage and a redefinition of marriage, you get less marriage,” he said. “You get families that aren’t as strong, and as a result, society generally, the economy suffers.” So let’s follow Santorum’s theory. First marriage
rates are down, which he doesn’t like. But if you expand the number of people who can get married by legalizing equal marriage Santorum believes we will … see less marriage … which will … hurt the economy?
“Do you know if you do two things in your life — if you do two things in your life, you’re guaranteed never to be in poverty in this country? What two things, that if you do, will guarantee that you will not be in poverty in America?” Santorum said at the time. “Number one, graduate from high school. Number two, get married. Before you have children,” he continued. “If you do those two things, you will be successful economically. What does that mean to a society if everybody did that? What that would mean is that poverty would be no more. If you want to have a strong economy, there are two basic things we can do.”
While it is always worth pointing out that Santorum is a bigot and shoddy thinker, the bigger thing here is that arguments about whether or not marriage is good for the economy or good for people’s personal financial well being shouldn’t matter. The state sanctioned nature of your relationship — or your relationship status in general — should not dictate whether or not you get to feed yourself or your family. That is a really ridiculous and profoundly uncaring thing to argue.
But people do argue that, quite a lot. Because, among the many other things that marriage is, it is also a conservative dream about privatizing economies of care and eliminating the social safety net. This is just one of the reasons why we need to start talking seriously about abolishing civil marriage.
Getting legally married — the actual signing of a marriage contract — has nothing to do with being in love. The contract part is only about the state and its view of your newly assigned obligations to your spouse. The economic underpinnings of marriage are about shifting the so-called burden of your care from the state to the individual. That’s why our current system incentivizes marriage (at least for straight people who can get married everywhere in this country). Women who live in poverty are
encouraged to marry men who have wages and benefits that are either better than their own or are better when combined with their own so that they won’t rely on the state for things like housing, food assistance or childcare.
The conservative thinking goes: Once you get married, you become a “private” burden (insert ball and chain jokes here, etc.) instead of a “public” burden. Now, of course, this isn’t actually how marriage works. As noted above, lots of married people continue to live in poverty because of a number of social and political factors that basically amount to the system being rigged to keep poor people poor.
Conversations about which relationships the state will recognize remain vital at this current moment, and the marriage equality movement is tremendously important for that reason. But we’ve got to think bigger at the same time, because marital relationships aren’t the only relationships that matter. As Lisa Duggan, professor of social and cultural analysis at New York University and a critic of marriage from the left,
recently told me, households are increasingly defined by relationships that exist outside of so-called traditional marriage — single mothers, breadwinning mothers, multigenerational families, co-parenting families, aging friends and others.
“Talking about kinships networks being broader — if you start saying that, you are talking about collectivity,” Duggan said. “The way that we are collectively responsible for each other and how we can provide for that. We have to democratize and decenter the ways we recognize these relationships. That should be the goal — not moralizing about ‘proper’ and ‘improper’ forms of love.”
Expanding the legal definition of marriage to include gay and lesbian couples is wildly important at this moment, but can also only ever be a partial victory when it comes to changing the way the state allocates benefits, privileges certain relationships over others and conceptualizes the social safety net and its obligations to citizens (and non-citizens).
And we’ve never been poised to talk about these things more than we are right now, and that has everything to do with recent gains in the marriage equality movement. “This [political moment] is definitely an opening to raise a set of questions about how our personal relationships are recognized by the state,” Duggan, explained: “We need some kinds of recognition for things like health proxies, childcare, child custody and jointly owned property. There are circumstances where we need to have these relationships recognized, but it doesn’t make any sense that rather than recognize the relationships we actually have — whatever they are — that the state only recognizes conjugal couples.”
Plus, if we want to stop talking about Santorum or allowing his bigotry and the bigotry of others to matter quite so much, we need to start talking more seriously about getting the state out of the marriage business. Because the only reason that men like him hold sway is because of how this civil institution is bizarrely intertwined with religious ideas about what relationships are “good” relationships. If we can disentangle these two things and conceive of more radical alternatives to marriage — including more robust social programs to support families and individuals and more expansive recognitions for the relationships that define so many households — then Santorum and the adult diaper guy can have all their feelings about
man/dog unions and we can have a more just system that doesn’t hinge basic things like health care proxy or child custody for non-biological parents on who you are planning to have sex with until you die.
How we do this is a big question, but it’s a conversation we should want to have. If only to make Santorum go away that much quicker.
Rick Santorum (Credit: Jeff Malet, maletphoto.com)
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