Sixty years ago, it was just common sense. The best environment for raising children was in a married household.
But starting in the 1960s and then accelerating in the 1970s, elite opinion began to shift. In 1965, when the Supreme Court held that states could not violate a married couple’s First, Fourth, and Fifth Amendment right to buy contraception, the majority Griswold v. Connecticut opinion called marriage a “sacred” institution that promoted “harmony” and “loyalty” in the United States.
Fast forward seven years to Eisenstadt v. Baird, the decision that held state laws denying contraceptives to people violated the due process clause of the 14th Amendment, and all reverence for marriage was gone.
“It is true that in Griswold the right of privacy in question inhered in the marital relationship,” Justice William Brennan wrote for the majority. “Yet the marital couple is not an independent entity with a mind and heart of its own, but an association of two individuals each with a separate intellectual and emotional makeup.”
Throughout the 1970s, the Burger Court would go on to eviscerate almost all state laws that privileged married couples over unmarried relationships. In Weber v. Aetna Casualty & Surety Co., the court held that states must give workmen’s compensation survivor benefits to both the legitimate and illegitimate children of deceased workers. And in Richardson v. Davis, the court held that illegitimate children have an equal claim with legitimate children to the Social Security survivor benefits of deceased parents.
Over that same decade, the percentage of households led by married couples began to fall, farthest and fastest among black households, but both white and Hispanic households have begun to catch up in recent decades.
George Mason University associate professor Bethany Letiecq leaves this little history out of her latest paper, “Theorizing White heteropatriarchal supremacy, marriage fundamentalism, and the mechanisms that maintain family inequality.”
And once you get past jargon such as “White heteropatriarchal supremacy” and “settler colonial theory,” it is easy to understand why.
Letiecq, who draws “upon feminist theory and intersectional frameworks,” wants to tell a story where “White European settlers” used “mass colonial brutality” to “violently reconfigure sex, gender, sexuality, kin relations, and reproduction among” the previously peaceful nonbinary indigenous populations of North America.
The purpose of the “new gendered and racialized social contract” created by the colonists was to “channel the flow of resources between the generations of White male property owners to maintain their dominion, power, and control over others.”
Letiecq tells this story to add a fourth pillar to the existing “three pillars of White supremacy,” which, in her words, are: 1) anti-black racism, 2) anti-indigenous settler colonialism, and 3) anti-immigrant orientalism. Letiecq’s proposes a fourth “pillar of White supremacy” in what she calls “marriage fundamentalism.”
This inherently racist “marriage fundamentalism,” according to Letiecq, not only extends back to Colonial times but is still propounded today by “Christian right-wing organizations such as the Heritage Foundation, the American Enterprise Institute, and the Family Research Council.”
By identifying the “overarching framework for interrogation of how structural oppression and unequal power relations operate to reproduce the systematic advantaging of [white heteropatriarchal nuclear families] and the marginalization of other families,” Letiecq hopes to “develop new family theories and new imaginations that challenge Whiteness, White supremacy, marriage fundamentalism, and the unfettered promotion WHNFs.”
In other words, by labeling monogamous marriage as racist, Letiecq and her feminist allies hope to promote alternative family forms including “plural marriage” and “extended kinship systems.”
For all Letiecq gets wrong about the history of marriage both here in the United States and the world, she does get some elements right. European colonists did bring a unique understanding of family relations to North America. Like every other continent on the planet, the most powerful civilizations in North America practiced warfare, slavery, and polygamy. The Aztecs, Incas, Mayans, Malians, Zulus, Egyptians, Babylonians, Indians, Chinese, Japanese, Mongols, and Vikings were all polygamous. Since the beginning of agriculture through to just 150 years ago, almost all of humanity lived in polygamous societies. The indigenous people of North America were no different.
So yes, Letiecq is correct: European settlers did use violence, coercion, custom, and law to bring monogamous marriage to the New World. Where Letiecq is wrong, however, is that they did this with racist or patriarchal intent.
If European colonists wanted to “channel the flow of resources between the generations of White male property owners to maintain their dominion, power, and control over others,” as Letiecq claims they did, there is no better institution that does that than polygamy. Polygamy is the ideal family structure for rich and powerful men who want to preserve their family wealth for future generations.
Starting with the Catholic Church, the Christian world was the first to reject the patriarchal power of polygamy and enforce the much more egalitarian model of monogamous marriage. This embrace of monogamy eroded clan-based patriarchal power structures, allowing trust-based civil society to grow and thrive, thus setting the stage for both democracy and the industrial revolution.
First the colonists and then the United States government ruthlessly enforced these monogamous norms on all people, regardless of race. Witness the decadeslong struggle between the federal government and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
Between 1862 and 1887, Congress passed not one, not two, not three, but four laws specifically targeting the practice of polygamy by Mormons, who were very much white, by the way. The last of these laws, the Edmunds-Tucker Act, not only banned the LDS Church entirely but confiscated all of its property. Each of these laws was contested all the way to the Supreme Court, and the Mormons lost every time.
It is worth quoting from some of these majority opinions.
“It is impossible to believe that the constitutional guarantee of religious freedom was intended to prohibit legislation in respect to this most important feature of social life,” Chief Justice Morrison Waite wrote in Reynolds v. United States, the first of the Mormon cases to reach the court. “Polygamy leads to the patriarchal principle, and when applied to large communities, fetters the people in stationary despotism, while that principle cannot long exist in connection with monogamy.”
“It is within the legitimate scope of the power of every civil government,” Waite continued, “to determine whether polygamy or monogamy shall be the law of social life under its dominion.”
Seven years later, in Murphy v. Ramsey, Justice Stanley Matthews wrote, “No legislation can be supposed more wholesome and necessary in the founding of a free, self-governing commonwealth than that which seeks to establish it on the basis of the idea of the family as consisting in, and springing from, the union for life of one man and woman in the holy state of matrimony.”
And in Late Corporation of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints v. United States, Justice Joseph Bradley wrote, “The organization of a community for the spread and practice of polygamy is, in measure. It is contrary to the spirit of Christianity, and of the civilization which Christianity has produced in the western world.”
“The state has a perfect right to prohibit polygamy and all other open offenses against the enlightened sentiment of mankind,” Bradley continued, “notwithstanding the pretense of religious conviction by which they may be advocated and practiced.”
So again, Letiecq is absolutely correct that, for many years, it was the express policy of the federal government to privilege, protect, and sustain the monogamous nuclear family as the foundation of the republic.
Or, as Joseph Story put it in 1832, “Marriage is an institution, which may properly be deemed to arise from the law of nature. It promotes the private comfort of both parties, and especially of the female sex. It tends to the procreation of the greatest number of healthy citizens, and to their proper maintenance and education. It secures the peace of society, by cutting off a great source of contention, by assigning to one man the exclusive right to one woman. It promotes the cause of sound morals, by cultivating domestic affections and virtues. It distributes the whole of society into families, and creates a permanent union of interests, and a mutual guardianship of the same. It binds children by indissoluble ties, and adds new securities to the good order of society, by connecting the happiness of the whole family with the good behavior of all. It furnishes additional motives for honest industry and economy in private life, and for a deeper love of the country of our birth.”
For over a hundred years, there was a rock-solid consensus around the belief that the monogamous married household was the foundation of American society. As mentioned above, however, that all began to change in the 1960s and 1970s, as evidenced by the shift between Griswold’s pro-marriage decision in 1965 and Eisenstadt’s anti-marriage decision in 1972.
Letiecq completely ignores it, but beginning in the ’60s, the federal government also began creating literally trillions of dollars worth of welfare programs that penalize marriage and encourage alternative family formation. These programs include:
- the Food Stamp Act of 1964, which created what is now known as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program;
- the Economic Opportunity Act of 1964, which created Head Start;
- the Social Security Amendments of 1965, which created Medicaid;
- the Child Nutrition Act Amendments of 1972, which created the Women, Infants, and Children program;
- the Social Security Amendments of 1972, which created the Supplemental Security Income program;
- the Housing and Community Development Act of 1974, which created Section 8 housing subsidies;
- the Tax Reduction Act of 1975, which created the Earned Income Tax Credit;
- the Balanced Budget Act of 1997, which created the Children’s Health Insurance Program;
- and the Affordable Care Act of 2010, which expanded Medicaid and created health insurance premium subsidies.
Every one of these programs, which collectively spend over a trillion dollars every year, punishes working-class parents who want to get married. And it is these working-class families where monogamous marriage has suffered the most.
In her conclusion, Letiecq celebrates the fact that “the majority of families in the United States ‘have absolutely no resemblance to this dominant [WHNF] definition.” And unfortunately, she is right. But only recently so. From the first census through 1960, the percentage of American households headed by a married couple hovered around 80%. For most of our history, monogamously married couples were the “dominant” definition of family. It has been falling steadily since the 1970s, dipped below 50% during President Barack Obama’s first term, and has continued to fall since.
So, yes, there is a “marriage fundamentalism” movement that includes conservatives who believe that, in Letiecq’s words, “a family composed of a cisgender heterosexual married couple is the ideal family form for rearing children” and that government policy should encourage that ideal. But Letiecq is wrong when she says people support monogamous marriage to ensure “White heteropatriarchal supremacy in America.”
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If that is so, then why did Japan outlaw polygamy in 1880? And Thailand in 1935? And China in 1950? And India in 1955? Are all these nonwhite countries also trying to preserve “white heteropatriarchal supremacy in America”?
Or maybe the monogamous nuclear family is far more beneficial to everyone than Letiecq gives it credit for.
