Marriage Conceptions Leading to Divorce, and Same Sex Unions' Use of These Conceptions

Here is some interesting commentary. There is widespread distaste for and rejection of the views of marriage that have resulted in rampant divorce. Many of those who have grown up as the children in these families do not accept the view of the family as expendable if the romance dies between the parents. Yet same-sex unions are being based on this idea of marriage, posing a further exascerbation of this misery.

"... David Blankenhorn writes in his recent book The Future of Marriage against the idea that marriage is a private relationship based on an emotional commitment between two adults. Marriage, Blankenhorn persuasively contends, is and always has been a social institution with the primary public purpose of ensuring that children will have an emotional, moral, and legal relationship to the parents who are responsible for their existence. Blankenhorn quotes approvingly the counsel of the German theologian-martyr Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who wrote to a young couple getting married that it is not only their love that will sustain their marriage but also their marriage that will sustain their love. Blankenhorn argues in a very civil manner free of polemics that the idea of same-sex marriage is a further and potentially fatal deinstitutionalizing of marriage….

As Blankenhorn argues in The Future of Marriage, the crucial factor is not the number who deviate from the norm, although that is not unimportant, but the effectiveness with which the norm is defended. The idea that marriage is a private relationship based on an emotional commitment between two adults has no doubt gained ground in recent decades. More important than its impact on agitation for same-sex marriage is the impact of that idea on the prevalence of divorce. Many millions of children have been subjected to the wrenching experience of the divorce of their parents, and studies suggest that young people today have little patience with the notion that the family is expendable if the adults responsible for holding the family together do not find their relationship emotionally satisfying. That is a hard-earned wisdom born of much sorrow, but it is wisdom, and it enhances the persuasiveness of David Blankenhorn’s argument in The Future of Marriage….There is nothing speculative about the millions of children of divorce who have a deep personal interest in not further destabilizing what is meant by marriage and family. "

http://www.firstthings.com/onthesquare/?p=943