MAY 20, 1992 — Actress Candice Bergen, portraying television’s “Murphy Brown” cradles her newborn baby. Then Vice President Dan Quayle attacked the character for having a child out of wedlock. (CBS)
Mark Joseph Stern writes in Slate that, in response to the recent Supreme Court ruling legalizing same-sex marriage, congressional Republicans “introduced a bizarre bill that would legalize discrimination against not just gay couples — but also single mothers.” Stern continues:
That language was probably designed to legalize discrimination against gay people . . . But by its plain text, the First Amendment Defense Act’s secondary effect is clear: It would wipe out all federal protections for single mothers.
This consequence is so obvious that it’s difficult to see how the act’s drafters didn’t anticipate it. A mother who conceived a child out of wedlock engaged in “sexual relations” outside of a heterosexual marriage. Federal law currently protects single mothers from discrimination in many contexts — but the act would nullify those protections.
I agree with Stern that this seems like out-of-control lawmaking, perhaps the legislative equivalent of when a chess or poker player goes on “tilt” and makes increasingly wild moves when behind in the game.
But what really struck me in Stern’s story was the bit about the single mothers. Where does that come from? Are they the new group to discriminate against?
[There’s something about (Charles) Murray]
And then I remembered a discussion a couple years ago on my blog. It started when I published a review of the book Coming Apart by social critic Charles Murray and, at my request, the journal published a response from Murray. When linking to this all on my blog, I highlighted this bit from Murray’s reply:
When a society’s elite is confident that its own values are the ones that all of society ought to adopt, those values get communicated. They’re in the air — in the way journalists cover stories, editors write editorials, television networks choose the new season’s series, and screenwriters create plots. They are reflected in the way that members of the elite talk with their children, with their professional colleagues, and whenever those topics relating to their values come up in a public setting. In all of those settings, today’s new upper class tends to be obsessively nonjudgmental.
If you doubt it, try bringing up the issue of single women having babies at your next dinner party, and see how many of your companions are willing to say, even in a private gathering of friends, that it is morally wrong for a woman to bring a baby into the world knowing that it will not have a father, and morally wrong for a man to impregnate a woman knowing he will not be a father to the child. Fifty years ago, no one at the same kind of dinner party would have said that it was not morally wrong.
It is statistically highly likely that all of the biological children of the people at a dinner table of today’s upper-class adults have been born within wedlock. If there are childless never-married women at the table, it is likely that they have deliberately foregone having a baby, even though they might want one, because they have decided it is unfair to the child not to have a father. Put another way, it is likely that all of the people at the table have made moral evaluations and behaved accordingly. “Preach what you practice” simply means to stop being nonjudgmental in public about moral principles that you hold in private.
As I wrote at the time, I have no idea what Murray’s personal view is on the matter, but from the above passage I take it that he thinks it is okay for people to think that “it is morally wrong for a woman to bring a baby into the world knowing that it will not have a father,” and that it is “obsessively nonjudgmental” to not think it is morally wrong for a woman, etc.
I think there’s something generational going on here. I actually know several women who’ve knowingly brought fatherless babies into the world — and they and their kids seem to be doing just fine.
What amazed me was some of the discussion that followed in the comment thread, in particular this comment by someone who seemed to agree with Murray that it is wrong for a woman to have a baby with no father:
And just to be clear, raising a child by a lesbian couple is a completely separate subject and we should not be trying to lump it together with raising a child by a single mother. Murray’s “moral wrongness” of “bringing a baby into the world knowing that it will not have a father” does not include the case of the baby having two mothers.
What struck me about this comment was that here you have someone with a culturally conservative view, but they went out of their way to emphasize that they had no problem with same-sex marriage — it was unmarried heterosexual mothers that bothered them. I was stunned, as at the time I thought that the sort of people who disapproved of unmarried mothers would really disapprove of gay couples having children.
Yes, the Monkey Cage is all about social science, and there’s a limit to how much we can learn from a single, non-randomly-sampled comment thread — but I think there’s something going on here, an attitude among at least some conservatives that the battle against the gay lifestyle has been lost, and that this particular cultural battle might switch to the economic realm. Many of the arguments given for disapproval of single mothers centered on the idea that children of single mothers were poorer and had worse outcomes, compared to children of married couples.
My point here is not to express any opinions on all these issues but rather to express interest in the direction of the debate. Based on that blog comment thread, I was not so surprised by what Stern noticed with this new bill in Congress. It is a shifting of the targets.
Finally, it wouldn’t be a Monkey Cage post without some numbers, so here are some data for you:
From the Gallup report, “Do you think marriages between same-sex couples should or should not be recognized by the law as valid, with the same rights as traditional marriages?” Response: 60 percent said yes, 37 percent said no and 3 percent had no opinion.
And here’s another one from Gallup: “Regardless of whether or not you think it should be legal, for each one, please tell me whether you personally believe that in general it is morally acceptable or morally wrong. How about having a baby outside of marriage?” Response: 61 percent said that it was morally acceptable, 35 percent said it was morally wrong and 4 percent responded “other” or no opinion.
So maybe an attack on single mothers won’t be so politically successful either.