What is killing marriage and the family?
by Belinda Brown, MercatorNet:
It’s not just the free market or big government – there’s Big Sister too.
The birth of a new Royal baby here in Britain reminds us what privileged women have, and what their poorer sisters lack: a decently earning husband and therefore the prospect of a stable family life. Of course, when that decently earning husband is a prince, he doesn’t just bring home the bacon — he owns the whole farm.
This was one of the more controversial points which Tucker Carlson, the American conservative political commentator, called attention to when he delivered his monologue on the importance of the family earlier this year. If we want to have happy, functioning societies the wellbeing of the family should be a central concern of political life, Carlson said. Most of us could sign up to that.
What was difficult for some was his suggestion that where men do not earn decent wages women don’t want to marry them; and that the absence of marriage leads to the breakdown of the family ‑‑ to fatherlessness and single parenthood, and many other social ills besides.
The link between male employment and marriage is amply supported by the data (see here, here and here), but in pointing it out Carlson exposed a tension in conservative arguments: the free market can weaken the very families it relies upon to thrive.
Not only do processes of deindustrialization weaken male employment. As households split into independent units consumerism is fed by family breakdown and divorce.
Right wing commentators David French and Ben Shapiro were quick to defend the market from any ideas which might curtail its freedom . If people had disorganised families, they suggested, this was down to individual agency. They wanted the separation between our personal lives and the economy to remain intact.
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