The Crisis of the American Family: A Libertarian Solution
Signs are everywhere. They are impossible to miss. Fifty years ago, teenage girls dreamed of being a wife and mother, while young boys saw marriage as both something to avoid, an inevitability. Society demanded it. A recent survey shows teenage girls rarely dream of marriage. Fifty years ago, divorce was at best a tragedy, abortion a travesty. Today, divorce is as easy to obtain as driver’s license at the DMV, perhaps easier, while feminists hold up signs to celebrate their “rights” as two states permit expectant mothers to murder their babies just before birth. Is it any wonder that the United States (as is the rest of Western Civilization) is on a path to its own destruction with a replacement rate in the negatives.
What went wrong? Who is to blame for this calamity? In a word: Government. And that path goes back a lot further than you might think, more than 150 years. Yet, with any dilemma, tracing the cause back to its source provides a solution. A Libertarian solution to any problem: Go back to the Founding. Freedom. Free Markets. Freedom to Choose. Freedom to Worship. Freedom to Contract. Freedom to, as the Declaration states, to Pursue Happiness.
On November 19, 1863, President Abraham Lincoln delivered an address on the blood-soaked fields of Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. The words “dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal” rang out like the Liberty Bell, reminding his countryman of the principles of the Founding, that the United States of America is based on the idea that we are all spiritual beings and that we live in a meritocracy, where every individual has the right to life and liberty. In short, unlike the Mother Country, America was a classless society. Unlike the Mother Country, America was not a theocracy. The United States would avoid the power grab of Europe, where hundreds of thousands died in religious conflicts, each side attempting to dominate the other. England itself is a representative of the battle for control between the Catholics and the Protestants, for control meant survival, while defeat meant utter destruction, if not damnation.
As Lincoln intimated, Americans have struggled from the start with the Great Experiment. Slavery, a scourge mentioned in the initial draft of the Declaration, was a problem not easily rectified. Religious freedom, however, was different. Each new State adopted the idea of the Right to Worship in their respective Constitutions. South Carolina, for example, claimed to be a Christian state, but did not adopt a denomination. Each group, whether it be Quakers or Mennonites, Jews or Catholics, Lutherans or Episcopalians, were given the freedom to make their own way. Each had their own rituals, their own celebrations, their own prayer books, and, most importantly, their own rules on marriage and family. When Lincoln wed Mary Todd in Illinois in 1842, they did so in a private agreement, expressing their vows before their community with their choice of clergy officiating. There was no license. There was no State involvement. There certainly was no federal involvement. Just two individuals entering into a private agreement. And, in 1871, the United States Supreme Court acknowledged that fact in the case of Meister v. Moore.
Seventeen years later everything changed because four self-anointed Justices of the Supreme Court deigned it so in the case of Maynard v. Hill. In so doing, the Court, taking the role of all three branches of government, usurped the right of the individual in clear violation of the Establishment Clause as well as the Contracts Clause. According to the four, the State had “always” been in charge despite its own recent precedent stating the exact opposite. But this was no sudden change. In 1862, Congress, in its first foray into the family, passed the Morrill Anti-Bigamy Act defining marriage as between one man and one woman as an attack on Mormons. The Court upheld the Act in 1871 in Reynolds v. United States. Then there were the racial purists, who outlawed interracial marriage which the Court gave its imprimatur in 1883 in Pace v. Alabama. After all, if marriage was a private contract as the Court found in Meister v. Moore, any adult could choose to marry any other adult. Freedom meant anarchy. In fact, with its decree of State control, the Four Anointed declared the Law of the Anglican Church the Law of the Land, giving permission to State court judges throughout the nation to reach into English law and create what would come to be known as the Fault System, a system that ruled America until the 1970s. The Fault System not only permitted the State to decide who could marry, but who could divorce, with trial judges taking testimony of a couple’s most intimate secrets before determining, in their discretion, whether there was a legal basis to end the marriage.
From a purely historical basis, it could be argued, as the Supreme Court intimated in the same-sex marriage case of Obergefell v. Hodges in 2015, that State regulation was necessary (in the name of chivalry) to protect women and children. That might have been the rationale, but it was not the real reason. As a young nation, commonality was required to forge a diverse populace into one ideology, and a common marriage law accomplished that goal. Thus, post 1888, in the United States, marriage was no longer a religious ceremony, it was a legal proceeding. The word matrimony is derived from two Latin words that mean the state of bearing children. Bridal virginity was a social requirement, and thus, both spiritually and legally, the purpose of marriage was to bear children and to expand the flock. In all faiths, marriage was a means to survive, to grow, seeing all others as threatening to the community for power and control. Creating a national religion based on the Anglican Church might have been necessary to grow nationalism, making us all part of the American flock.
In short, it was a power grab, but a power grab for the greater good of the country. And it was quite successful until it wasn’t. And for that, we can blame primarily the Federal Government, and its insatiable desire to control everything. As the secularists gained control of the levers of power in the 1970s, Christianity and the Family was soon not the Foundation, but the Enemy, something not to build up, but something to destroy. And that destruction has been a horror show in the making. The 1970s brought what sociologist Lenore Weitzman deemed The Divorce Revolution, leading to what a University of California professor called The Divorce Culture, a society bent on its own demise. In the intervening years, Congress as doubled and tripled down on idiotic policy after idiotic policy attempted to impose what used to be called virtue onto innocent Americans. And as C.S. Lewis wrote, imposing virtue is tyranny.
Virtue as the Founders stated is a choice, something learned from the earliest age, something that the mother teaches, and the father demonstrates. For centuries, that knowledge was passed from generation to generation, the knowledge of how to be a wife or husband, a father or a mother, only to be lost to divorce and single-parenthood. Thus, we come to the present with a new generation desperate to find purpose, desperate to recreate what their grandparents or great grandparents had. What is the solution to this crisis? Return to the ways of the Founders, what I have deemed Free Market Marriage. Ask the Supreme Court to overturn Maynard v. Hill and return marriage and family to its roots, to religiosity, to private agreements, where couples can forge a future together free from government oversight, just as the Founders intended. True, it will take a long time to reach equilibrium, to overcome more than fifty years of utter destruction. But it can be done. It must be done. Otherwise, the nation is doomed.
Alan W. Cohen is the author of the new book, Free Market Marriage: Restoring the Foundation of American Society available exclusively on Amazon. Please visit his website at freemarketmarriageusa.com for more information.
