ROUND TWO

MND Roundtable Discussion on
Fathers' Rights and the Marriage Movement

Rebecca O'Neill makes a distinction with important implications not only for families but for modern politics.

The marriage movement, she says, consists of people encouraging something we all agree is "good." The fathers' rights movement, on the other hand, is concerned with injustice against themselves. Though some in the marriage movement seem to regard this as a claim to moral superiority (I do not detect this in Ms. O'Neill), politically this is precisely why fathers are the only people (with one exception) who can actually restore marriage.

All the people she lists encouraging marriage -- "politicians . . . academics and political commentators, and marriage educators" -- stand outside the marriages in question. Only fathers are within them. (Mothers too, of course, but in the main mothers are the ones breaking up the marriages.) All these people may indeed be doing "good" (Ms. O'Neill's Civitas is an excellent example, providing fine scholarship). But like anyone who makes a living combating a problem, these people can easily develop a vested interest in perpetuating the problem they are paid to solve. Professions notwithstanding, their self-interest thus becomes not preserving marriage but destroying it. Fathers, for all their imperfections (which Tom Sylvester will no doubt find an opportunity to point out) are the only ones in whose self-interest it is to restore marriage. And the self-interest of flawed individuals, as a self-described libertarian like Ms. O'Neill must surely recognize, is a more reliable basis on which to build social stability than a few saintly souls doing good.

Actually, one other group has almost an equal self-interest in preserving marriage. Ms. O'Neill does not mention them, but her suggestive comments at the end involve them.

These are clergy (another group whose imperfections have been the object of much attention). For the integrity of the clergy is connected with the integrity of their holy offices (whether these are conceived as sacraments or contracts), perhaps foremost marriage. By consecrating a fraudulent contract, however inadvertently, pastors dishonor their calling and bring themselves into contempt. This is not so true of civic officials, who may also perform marriages but for whom honor is secondary.

In the Anglophone world, political trust is based on an implicit contract -- and an explicit one in the case of the US Constitution. There is also a sacramental element -- for example, the constitutional requirement that all public servants to swear an oath to protect and defend it. And there is something almost diabolically sacramental about the violation of one contract and oath leading to the violation of others.

The divorce industry is a governmental regime founded upon the betrayal of trust, and it requires the widespread violation of what most people still hold to be the most sacred trust or at least the most solemn promise one makes in life. It is no accident that public officials whose livelihoods depend upon encouraging citizens to betray their private trust will have little hesitation in betraying the trust conferred upon them by the public. This is all the more likely when the public who once held them accountable is increasingly comprised of those same citizens, whose private morals the government has had a role in corrupting. One need not believe in the entanglement of church and state to recognize that a society that fails to enforce its contracts or otherwise value one's word is a society that will hold no one - including public leaders - to their promises. Then order depends solely on police power.

Ms. O'Neill's "politicians . . . and political commentators" (and one might include the "marriage educators" once they are on the public payroll) have at least a partial self-interest in marriages breaking down, because while it compromises public trust in them, it increases their power, and power is at least as much a part of their business as trust. Clergy have a purer self-interest in the integrity of marriage, not because they are necessarily more saintly, but because trust is their entire business.

This is why marriage promoters who want to silence fathers and put clergy on the government payroll are, for all their pious professions, really destroying marriage: They are diffusing the only voices who have an enduring interest in protecting it.

Stephen Baskerville