Dads Against the Divorce Industry

DA*DI is devoted to reinstating the societal valuation of Marriage and the traditional, nuclear American Family, with particular emphasis on the essential role of FATHERS.

DA*DI offers contemporary reports and commentary on culture; its aberrations and its heroes.

THE ATTACK OF THE DIVORCEPHILES


Gallagher's first book, Enemies of Eros: How the Sexual Revolution is Killing Family, Marriage and Sex, was published by Bonus Books in 1989. Judge Robert Bork called it "lucid, witty, profound, devastating," and George Gilder pronounced it "the best book ever written on men, women and marriage."

Currently an affiliate scholar at the Institute for American Values, Gallagher has worked as an article editor of National Review, senior editor of the Manhattan Institute's City Journal, and as a senior fellow at the Center for Social Thought.

Maggie Gallagher

4/2/97

The New Republic has just published a cover story on "The Case Against The Case Against Divorce" which is an attack on Barbara Dafoe Whitehead and me, a.k.a., as "divorcephobes."

Actually those of us concerned about family breakdown get called a number of names in this charming essay: "doomsday scenarists," "lachrymose calvacade," "nostalgic," "alarmists" and my personal favorite, "splenetic suburbanite Maggie Gallagher." (If I were still living in Brooklyn, would I then be an "umbrageous urbanite"?)

This is the second time in less than a year that I have been attacked by name (along with Barbara, my Institute for American Values colleague David Blankenhorn, and former Clinton adviser William Galston) in the esteemed pages of The New Republic. Our crime? Daring to suggest that, at 50 percent, our divorce rate is too high.

The revenge of the divorcephiles has an odd sort of quality to it: Call it defeatism disguised as idealism. Sure, children suffer from divorce, author Margaret Talbot admits, but there's not much anybody can do about it. Divorce, Talbot asserts, is a time-honored American tradition. "Nuanced" thinking, the kind that has respect for "paradox" and "ambiguity," recognizes that "Divorce was an expression of idealism about marriage, not a concession of realism about it." We esteem marriage so much that we just have to divorce when our marriages don't meet our expectations.

But the place she really digs in her heels is at the idea that divorced and unwed motherhood are in any way similar: "Neocons such as Maggie Gallagher lump them together as casualties of the same moral malady," chides Talbot, but "What, after all, does the child of middle-class divorced parents ... have in common with, say, the child of a crack-addicted, never-married teen-aged mom?"

I admit I have little patience with this argument, which always seemed to me to amount to some version of "sexual morality is for the poor; we affluent can do what we like." Still, many Americans seem to find it persuasive.

Here is a brief answer: Of course middle-class children of divorce don't face the same hardships that beset the child of the inner-city crack mom. However, the (begin itals) losses (end itals) these children sustain may be as great. After all, the teen-age crack mom who marries is quite unlikely to obtain for her children a middle-class, college-educated father -- precisely the asset that the majority of middle-class children of divorce lose. Economically the average middle-class child experiences a 50 percent drop in income as a result of divorce -- even greater than the average child of divorce.

Divorced kids also lose a great deal of access to their educated mothers. Kids in stepfamilies are the most likely to complain they don't get enough time with their mothers, and they also do worse than kids living with never-married mothers on some measures (school performance, for example).

Finally, divorce and illegitimacy are related phenomena. Children of divorce are more likely both to divorce and to have children outside of marriage. Historically, a rise in divorce is followed by a rise in illegitimacy, precisely because the two are joined by the answers we come up with as a society to certain basic questions such as: Is marriage necessary? And: Do fathers matter?

Almost all children experience their parents' divorce as a great loss. Many will overcome the hardship. Some will not. As these children grow up and begin to form (or not form) families, yet more of the next generation will experience divorce and illegitimacy as a direct result of one or both of their parents' failure to sustain the marital bond.

If you are choosing between these two life courses -- becoming a teen crack mom or a divorced middle-class mom -- by all means choose the latter. But don't imagine that begins to answer the questions of whether our divorce rate is too high and, if so, what we can do about it.

COPYRIGHT 1997 MAGGIE GALLAGHER

DISTRIBUTED BY UNIVERSAL PRESS SYNDICATE



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