How America’s War On Marriage Threatens Democracy

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“Marriage is an inherently negligent activity. It’s like owning a lion. The likelihood of someone getting hurt is very, very high.”

Those are some cynical words of wisdom from James Sexton, a divorce attorney who appears on an episode of “Soft White Underbelly,” a YouTube channel that’s otherwise devoted to chilling interviews with pimps, prostitutes, drug addicts, and other victims of abuse. Sexton explains his perspective of the sacred institution, colored by his front-row view of divorce, where he sees people at their worst, where husband and wife are “weaponized against each other,” and where the majority of marriages end in divorce. Love, in his view, has nothing to do with marriage, and it’s a failed, outdated technology.

Contrast that dark view with the new book by Conn Carroll, Sex and the Citizen: How the Assault on Marriage Is Destroying Democracy, which makes the case for why marriage is the singular foundation of Western civilization, how U.S. public policy (and society, writ large) has eroded it, the consequences that resulted, and what America can do to restore its place in society.

“The assault on marriage has been a disaster for the United States,” Carroll writes. “As a direct result of falling marriage rates, America is now more unequal, less socially mobile, more violent, more isolated, more polarized, and less able to project our way of life into the future. The very future of democracy is at stake.”

Carroll begins his book by tracing the emergence of marriage across three sexual revolutions — from monogamy to polygamy, and back to monogamy again — in an engaging and well-researched narrative that comprises biology, anthropology, sociology, and history. Carroll’s history of marriage confronts a modern argument against marriage — that it’s “an institution invented by powerful men to control women’s sexual behavior,” as Carroll writes. “In fact, it is the opposite. It is an institution created to protect the most vulnerable among us by controlling the sexual behavior of the most powerful.”

Carroll uses historical examples to make his point. To wit, among Vikings, powerful men accumulated multiple wives, leaving less powerful men with fewer options for partners. That, in turn, drove them to raid Ireland, enslave or murder Irish men, and abscond with Irish women. Carroll writes that monogamy would have constrained those powerful men, leaving more marriageable women available for the less powerful Vikings, eliminating the need to raid other societies.

Fast forward from Viking days to America’s founding, and Sex and the Citizen reveals that the Founding Fathers viewed marriage as an essential building block of the republic and how U.S. presidents, Congress, and the courts undertook steps to encourage marriage. Alas, that didn’t last. Carroll writes that the “new focus on individual actualization over family obligations proved popular enough in elite circles that the Supreme Court managed to completely rewrite federal family policy in the span of just five years.”

Drilling down further, Carroll connects the dots between the Sexual Revolution, feminist thought in the 1960s, and court decisions that “coldly tossed marriage aside, elevating individuals’ wants and desires over the sanctity of the family unit,” resulting in various harms, including federal social safety net policies that punish marriage, rather than elevate it.

For many, Carroll’s thesis about this assault on marriage would be considered moralistic, outdated, and anti-feminist. In one instance, he criticizes Eisenstadt v. Baird, in which the Supreme Court struck down a Massachusetts law that allowed only married couples to obtain contraception and criminalized it for unmarried people. Instead of seeing the case as a victory for individual liberty and against the government’s interference in the private lives of single Americans, Carroll describes it as a turning point in how the court “completely dismantled state authority to channel individual sexual desires through the institution of marriage.” Carroll’s view would surely draw the ire of civil libertarians and progressives alike, who would celebrate Eisenstadt’s expansion of privacy rights and support of personal autonomy over governmental interference.

Carroll doesn’t call for a reversal of those decisions, but they’re central to his argument that when the government stopped supporting marriage, it led to a decline in marriage, resulting in consequences including greater racial inequality, poverty, crime, isolation, deaths from the opioid epidemic, political polarization, and population decline. He prescribes a series of policy solutions to alleviate those ills, including child tax credits, safety net programs, reducing the cost of childcare, curbing illegal immigration, building new infrastructure, creating jobs, and cutting zoning regulations to increase the housing supply. Ultimately, he concludes that we need to ask whether a given policy will make it easier or harder for Americans to get or stay married, and to change the way we think about family issues.

I read Sex and the Citizen in between watching hours of episodes of “Soft White Underbelly.” In episode after episode, there is one common theme: broken families and abusive childhoods are the tragic beginnings of too many lives. Take the story of Nate, a fentanyl addict originally from Indianapolis. Nate grew up without a father and was sexually abused by his brother, who shot him up with heroin when he was just 13 years old.

“I just had a mom who worked 12-hour shifts, seven days a week,” Nate says. “I had to raise myself.” Today, Nate is an addict living in Los Angeles and he is very aware of what not having a father meant to his life. “I didn’t know how to live my life. I didn’t know how to do things by myself … that really impacted me in growing up to be the man I am,” he laments.

For Carroll, Nate’s story would probably be emblematic of the societal decline resulting from a decades-long assault on marriage. And unlike divorce attorney Sexton, he doesn’t see monogamous marriage as a failed or outdated technology. Rather, Carroll makes the case that it’s an institution in decline that needs to be restored and that in doing so, America will be stronger for it. “Marriage does not guarantee anyone’s happiness… Many marriages fall apart. But no institution better channels our primal emotions of loneliness, lust, anger, jealousy, and joy into productive behavior of loving another person, than monogamous marriage.”