Oct 29, 2004  |  By: LOU CHIBBARO JR.  | COMMENTS     

In a newly released collection of academic papers, sociologists, psychologists and historians argue that the institution of marriage has changed dramatically during the past century and that legalized same-sex marriage would have little or no impact on the viability of marriage in the future.

“In my view, marriage as we have known it for 5,000 years has already been overthrown,” said history professor Stephanie Coontz, who is writing a book on the history of marriage.

“But it was heterosexuals, not gays and lesbians, who accomplished this revolution,” she said in a paper called the “World Historical Transformation of Marriage.” “The demand of gays and lesbians for legal recognition of their unions is a symptom, not the cause, of how much and how irreversibly marriage has changed,” Coontz said.

Coontz’s paper was among several dozen academic papers and commentaries published in the November 2004 edition of the Journal of Marriage & Family, a 65-year-old, peer-reviewed publication that specializes in examining trends in marriage and family issues in the U.S., Canada and Europe.

The journal is an arm of the National Council on Family Relations, which holds an annual conference where university researchers and other academicians present papers on family issues.

The November edition of the journal, which was released this month, is a compilation of papers and follow-up analyses from the group’s 65th annual conference in 2003, entitled, “What is the Future of Marriage?”

Marriage on the decline
Several of the papers cite statistics from the U.S., Canada and European countries that suggest the institution of marriage is in decline. A steep rise in the divorce rates beginning in the second half of the 20th century has led to the current state where about half of all U.S. marriages end in divorce.

The growth of cohabitation among heterosexual couples also rose dramatically in the 1970s and 1980s, the papers point out, with large numbers of opposite-sex couples deciding against marriage.

Today, one out of three births in the United States occur outside of marriage, several of the papers note. In Denmark, Norway, Sweden and Iceland, the percentage of children born to unwed parents is between 45 percent and 65 percent, according to figures presented in the papers.

“We thought that, except among the poor, cohabitation would remain a short-term arrangement among childless young adults who would quickly break up or marry,” wrote sociology professor Andrew Cherlin of Johns Hopkins University, in a paper, “The Deinstitutionalization of American Marriage.”

Now, Cherlin wrote, “Cohabitation is becoming accepted as an alternative to marriage.” In some Scandinavian countries, he said, it has become “indistinguishable from marriage.”

Both Cherlin and Coontz note in their papers that these developments, which some religious leaders have attributed to deteriorating morals in the late 20th century, are rooted in profound social changes that began in the 17th and 18th centuries, long before gay marriage entered the picture.

Coontz reports in her paper that “real” traditional marriage, which developed over thousands of years, was based on economic benefits and political alliances of families and the division of labor among children.

“For the propertied classes, marriage was the main way of consolidating wealth, transferring property, laying claim to political power, even concluding peace treaties,” Coontz said. “When upper-class men and women married, dowry, bride wealth, or tribute changed hands, making the match a major economic investment by the parents and other kin of the couple,” she said.

In the lower classes, where wealth was not a significant factor, families arranged marriages for their children based on practical issues such as whether the bride lived near the groom’s family farm or whether in-laws would be a help or hindrance to the family, Coontz said.

“For all of these reasons, love was considered a very poor reason to get married,” Coontz wrote. “It was desirable for love, or at least affection, to develop after marriage,” she said. “But love was not the main thing that people took into account in deciding when and whom to marry.”

Love gains leverage
This concept of marriage began to weaken in the 17th century and by the 18th century, Coontz said, “the revolutionary new ideal of the love match triumphed in most of Western Europe and North America.”

“The marital ideals inaugurated in the 18th century represented a break with literally thousands of years ...