The Supreme Court’s 2015 decision in Obergefell v. Hodges has left many of us thinking about what Stephen Macedo says is the main question of this book: “what’s next for marriage?” (12). Organized around three questions, each of which take up three chapters: “Why same-sex marriage? Why marriage? Why monogamy?” (13), the book takes its cues from conservative opposition to same-sex marriage. So the real question of the book seems to be “what’s next for conservative arguments for marriage?” There is much that is useful here, and much that is left on the table at the end of the book—which is to say that on such a broad topic, no book, as Macedo notes, can address all of the important questions.
It has been challenging to write about marriage equality over the past decade—every time you write something, it is overtaken by changes in the law. So this book was likely started when conservative arguments seemed more salient, before they had been tried and found wanting in American courts. This is partly a strength of the book: the reconstruction of conservative arguments and their demolition is useful. Macedo notes that one way to see the demise of conservative arguments in opposition to same-sex marriage is as an exercise in public reason-giving, a practice at the very heart of a democratic society, and “Enshrining a sectarian ideal of marriage in law would fail to respect the range of reasonable opinions in our society” (36). Macedo provides a very useful dissection of conservative natural law arguments. This is certainly a service to the rest of us, so that we do not need to read this particularly unpleasant group of fellows (and they are fellows). As Macedo notes of some of these arguments, it is “striking…how distant it is from anything resembling sympathetic engagement with the lives of actual people” (51).
Implicit throughout the book is the crucially important question, what is the relationship between marriage and democracy? This is a key question for political theorists to address, as feminist political theorists have been arguing for a couple of centuries now, and there is still much to discuss here. The book is at its best when Macedo is speaking directly to these questions, and in his own voice. As he notes, “Making moral judgments about the questions that lie before us requires a modicum of openness to the quality of the lives that actual people live” (52).
We are what we read—and reading conservative natural law theory surely shaped this book in ways that are unhelpful for addressing the most important questions facing us—Americans, political theorists, democrats—regarding marriage. The most interesting and important questions about marriage and democracy are actually not being asked by conservatives. While Macedo has read some feminists, the book would be much stronger if he had read more feminist theory, and more importantly, if his arguments actually took seriously feminist arguments about marriage, racism, care, class, intersectionality, structural inequality, mass incarceration, intimate partner violence, and about what the important questions are in political theory regarding marriage. Macedo usually lumps feminist and queer theorists together as critics of marriage—without thinking any more carefully about some of the differences between those arguments, the longer feminist genre of marriage critique (if we take seriously that he means queer theory, which can only fairly be seen as originating in the late 1980s), and the deeply intersectional nature of the questions about marriage and democracy that lie before us. Racial inequality and racism do not really make an appearance in the book, except in relation to the class divide, and then only briefly. Yet much of the conservative marriage movement has taken its cues from the ideas in the 1965 Moynihan Report (The Negro Family: The Case for National Action), and racism, white supremacy, and racial inequality are deeply related to what we talk about, and what we do not talk about, when we talk about marriage in the United States.
Perhaps it is because I have not really studied the question, but I was puzzled upon reviewing the table of contents, and remain puzzled after reading the book, about why it was necessary to spend three chapters discussing polygamy. It seems that this question came from the conservative argument that marriage equality leads to polygamy: “one oft-repeated question is whether there is a public case for monogamy in the wake of gay marriage” (141). And if the question is “why monogamy” it is not really clear why polygamy (and not, perhaps, serial monogamy or adultery) is seen as the main alternative to monogamy. In short, polygamy does not seem, even on Professor Macedo’s account, to be the most important question about marriage facing the U.S. at this time.
Rather, class differences in marriage patterns seem to be more important. Macedo says, “This class-based marriage divide, not same-sex marriage, is the greatest problem facing us” (100). Unfortunately Macedo does not spend much time puzzling over the question of why or how these differences have come about, and, like many conservatives, chooses conservative moral gestures over empirical evidence (112–115). Without reference to any actual empirical evidence, he concludes that “An important part of the marriage divide seems to be explained by culture, values, and social norms” (115). This is a common mistake, endemic to the conservative marriage movement over the past several decades. Marriage is not the independent variable that leads to education and economic prosperity. The causal arrow, it is fairly clear from the social science evidence, points in the other direction. Economic well-being and educational attainment lead to marriage. So, if you want people with less economic security to marry, give them more economic security, through structural social supports such as universal health care, real access to quality K through 12 and higher education, universal child care and preschool, a basic guaranteed income. When conservatives start to make this argument, we might actually have a chance at improving our democracy in the United States. Of course, I am demanding a great deal here, but I am doing so because like Macedo, I think the stakes are very high: I do think, like most feminist political theorists, that democracy itself is at stake, once we start to think in great detail about marriage and democracy.
Writing as a political theorist about matters of public policy, matters about which there are both strong normative theoretical arguments and a great deal of detailed social science evidence, is a difficult task. It is difficult to be conversant enough in all of the relevant literature to make useful arguments. And there is also a critical matter of judgment: on what topics is normative argument most relevant, and on what topics is empirical evidence most important? The book would benefit on several matters from paying more careful attention to empirical social science evidence, rather than resorting to the normative arguments that Professor Macedo happens to agree with. This is certainly true in the discussions of gender. For example, in the chapter that addresses the benefits of marriage, Macedo cites all of the scholars of the marriage movement who have been making the same argument for almost three decades, most of whom are not empiricists, and who have a very specific agenda in support of traditional gender differentiated marriage (see pages 108–112). This is most obvious when Macedo is citing the benefits of marriage: the actual empirical evidence shows a gender difference in the benefits of marriage, a gender difference that none of the scholars he cites see any reason to note because they believe in gender-differentiated marriage. But the positive effects on health, for example, are gender-differentiated: there is a “consistent finding that men derive more benefit from marriage” (Rebekah Wanic and James Kulick, “Toward an Understanding of Gender Differences in the Impact of Marital Conflict on Health,” Sex Roles, 65: 5–6, 2011, 297).
Macedo has every intent to be inclusive of feminist ideas about marriage, but his argument focuses on feminists who argue for the dismantling of marriage as a civil contract. There are actually many feminist positions on marriage, and a more helpful guide to some of the questions that he wishes to address regarding caring relationships outside of civil marriage would be, for example, Joan Tronto’s book, Caring Democracy (2013), which is a deep meditation about how we should think about the place of care in democracy and about what democratic citizenship might be when we take the quality of the lives of all people seriously.
Professor Macedo is smart and thoughtful, and I really want to know what he thinks should be done about what he says is the most important public policy question about marriage: the class divide. So it is my sincere hope that he might now take up the question “what is next for marriage and democracy?” and offer us his thoughts on that subject. The conversation, the public reasoning process, about marriage, can do much to improve political theorists’ ideas about democracy. Hopefully, this conversation might also inform democracy in practice.
