Sex, Family, and the Culture Wars

Mark J. Cherry

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781412863094
• eBook ISBN: 9781351491198
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Marriage & Family Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Extraordinary social and moral shifts have taken place in Western societies. Sex is no longer the exclusive province of husband and wife set within monogamous married family life. The world is awash in sex: advertising, books, magazines, movies, sex clubs, internet pornography, etc. Parents, traditionally responsible for guiding their children's moral and social development, have been effectively side-lined by commercial and governmental interests.This volume pursues a detailed study of how changes in social life dating from the sexual revolution of the 1960s have affected the family. Cherry shows that attempts to redefine the family away from the marital union of husband and wife come with real costs: social, emotional, psychological, and financial. He argues that while political campaigns have fuelled attempts to undermine the traditional family, to pretend it possesses no basic biological, social, or moral reality, such ideologically driven undertakings are injurious to society.Acting as if there are no consequential differences between traditional marriage and other sexual lifestyles ignores significant data demonstrating the importance of the traditional biological family to the well-being of men and women, and the successful raising of children. The family possesses a biological and moral being that is foundational; an essential building block of society. Cherry argues that the family is the most incontrovertible field of conflict in the culture wars; others might conclude that it is the decisive battleground.

1

Sex, Family, and the Culture Wars: An Introduction

1.1 Sex and the Family

Naked Ambition: Banning the Sex Industry ran the header for The Economist’s special report on Iceland’s attempts to regulate online pornography, outlaw strip clubs, and jail those who patronize prostitutes. A picture of semiopen handcuffs drawn to resemble a woman’s breasts, a not-so-subtle suggestion of bondage pinned against a stark pink background, flanked the upper third of the magazine page. Having successfully caught my attention, I read further to this remarkable paragraph:

Iceland, however, is determinedly pro-women. Half the cabinet and 25 of the 63 members of Iceland’s parliament are female. The country is run by the world’s only openly lesbian prime minister. Iceland is also pro-sex. Its supermarkets sell condoms and mini-vibrators next to check-outs. A new sex-education film informs teenagers that sex should be something they want to do again and again, and then maybe again. Some 65% of Icelandic children are born outside of marriage, more than any other country in the OECD. Same-sex marriage has been legal since 2010 and gays and lesbians can adopt children. Icelandair ran a campaign featuring the tagline, “Fancy a dirty weekend in Iceland?”

Within one brief paragraph, The Economist managed to equate female career status, masturbation, adult promiscuity and teenage sex, the election of an openly lesbian prime minister, same-sex marriage, adoption of children by homosexuals, and hostility to traditional family life with being “pro-women.”

An extraordinary social and moral shift has taken place. Sex is no longer the proper province of husband and wife, set within monogamous married family life. The Western world is awash in sex: from advertising, books, and magazines to movies, sex clubs, and internet pornography. New York City’s health department has even released a smartphone application for teenage sex. This application provides teens with access to information regarding various sex practices as well as where to obtain condoms, other forms of birth control, and abortions. Parents and other adult family members, those persons who are most responsible for nurturing children and for shouldering adolescent moral and physical development, have been aggressively sidelined. “The colorful app—called Teens in NYC Protection+—was designed with input from youngsters and includes details on where to get free birth control, STD screening and other health services. All a teen has to do is to press a button and a selection of nearby city-approved clinics will pop up. The app even provided walking and subway directions” (Fermino 2013). The application includes educational videos supporting the normality of same-sex attraction and same-sex sexual activity. Want an abortion? There’s an app for that!

Sex is never without consequences. Children born to single mothers and sexually transmitted disease are among the more predictable outcomes of sexual activity outside of the traditional marriage of man and woman. As of 2012, Iceland was leading Europe with 66.9% of children born outside of marriage, Bulgaria was not far behind with 59.1%, Estonia 58.4%, Norway 55%, and Sweden 54%. In the twenty-eight member states of the European Union, the percentage of children born out of wedlock was 40% (Eurostat 2015). In the United States, the statistics were very similar in 2013, 40.6% of all children were born to unmarried mothers (Martin et al. 2015). With regard to health, the United States Centers for Disease Control (CDC) estimates that there are approximately twenty million new sexually transmitted disease infections each year in the United States, with nearly half of these occurring among fifteen to twenty-four year olds. The CDC estimates that total prevalence of sexually transmitted diseases exceeds 110 million cases, adding approximately seventeen billion dollars in direct costs to the health-care system each year.¹ We live in a hypersexualized culture, apparently convinced of the virtues of sexual exploration while seemingly blind to its social and health consequences. Popular culture in the Western world, as The Economist reflects, has disconnected sex from marriage and traditional family life.

Here, T. S. Eliot’s bluntness is heuristic: “Birth, and copulation, and death. That’s all the facts when you come to brass tacks” (1932, 24). His critical gaze reminds readers of the undeniable implications of the deep-seated human social and biological drive for companionship and procreation. This observation requires us to reflect on the ways in which men and women come together as friends, companions, and lovers to create and care for the human family. In contrast, The Economist is mired in post-traditional understandings of sex; they can ascertain no higher truth than the individualist search for self-satisfaction. The authors celebrate titillating social changes. They raise no doubts. They offer no critical reflection. Even their support for women’s equality is hollow. According to their reporting, Iceland seeks to outlaw pornography and strip clubs but teaches men and women, boys and girls, to use each other to satisfy sexual passions. How did the women’s equality movement come to be associated with rampant sex outside of marriage without personal responsibility and the destruction of traditional family life? Evolutionary biology suggests that men are very likely to find such easy access to willing sex partners without commitment much to their advantage.

Advocates for nontraditional lifestyles routinely contrive to undermine traditional forms of the family. Commentators maneuver to deflate the biological family’s significance, to deny that it has any important reality of its own, and to recast it as a mere social construction. The normalization of extramarital sexual activity, including homosexual relations, divorce, and cohabitation without marriage as well as progressively informal arrangements for conceiving and raising children, have had a powerful influence on the family. For example, there were approximately 7.9 million unmarried cohabiting couples of the opposite sex in the United States in 2014 (U.S. Census, table UC3 2014; Wilcox and Marquardt 2012, 78) and some 726,600 same-sex households as of 2013 (U.S. Census, American Community Survey 2013, table 3). In 2014, nearly 40% of unmarried, opposite-sex households included at least one biological child of one of the adult partners (U.S. Census, table UC3 2014). Approximately 13.5 million unmarried parents were raising children in 2014, including 9.9 million unmarried women, 1.7 million unmarried men, and 1.9 million unmarried couples with one or more shared children (U.S. Census, table FG5 2014). Such social shifts are undeniably significant. It is doubtful that one can successfully sustain the conclusion that the human family is no more than a culturally and historically conditioned social construction. The idea that the human family is a fully nominalisitic creation, without any significant underlying reality, is implausible. The key questions are: What is the reality of the family? How ought it to be rightly understood? Which public policies are conducive to recognizing and supporting the family as a cardinal social, moral, and political category?

1.2 Traditional versus Post-traditional Family Life: Contested Grounds in the Culture Wars

The family is the most conspicuous field of conflict in the culture war. Some would argue that it is the decisive battleground. The public debate over the status and role of women, the moral legitimacy of abortion, the legal and social status of homosexuals, the increase in family violence, the rise of illegitimacy particularly among black teenagers and young adults, the growing demand for adequate day care, and so on, prominently fill the headlines of the nation’s newspapers, magazines, and intellectual journals. (Hunter 1991, 176)

Traditionally, the heterosexual biological family has been regarded as a morally regulative category of social life. To speak of the family in such traditional terms as a normative form of social being, a social unit naturally constituted around the ideal of the monogamous, formally married heterosexual couple and their own biological children has become controversial. Indeed, the complex social and political fabric of contemporary Western culture has brought the very concept of family into question. In part, traditional forms of the family are increasingly controversial because of the breakdown of the family as a central moral and social institution in most developed countries. This consequence is the result of a cluster of significant social and political changes: increased divorce and cohabitation without marriage, the normalization of extramarital sexual activity, including homosexual relations, progressively informal social arrangements for conceiving and raising children, feminism,² and the rejection of gender-essentialism.

Given the prevalence of repeated divorce and remarriage as well as the phenomenon of long-term cohabitation of men and women outside of marriage, one can no longer presume that adults who live together are married, are raising their own biologically related children, or that parents and children are even united in the same family. Many human reproductive units are now increasingly informal. Marriage as the usual practice for normalizing sexual relationships is giving way to the social acceptance of couples who engage in extramarital sexual activity with one or more partners, or live together without benefit of marriage, as the statistical norm. This social phenomenon is itself qualified by the often informal arrangements between women and those with whom they choose to have, or to raise, children. Among those couples who do marry, divorce, remarriage, and repeated divorce have generated complex sets of interconnections between children and biological parents living in different households with new spouses or partners, each with some form of involvement in the raising of children. Minor children raised within the same household can no longer be assumed to be biologically related. This contemporary social fabric is frequently more complicated and conflicted than might once have been the case with the role of a stepparent after the death and remarriage of a parent. Such a convoluted empirical state of affairs significantly encumbers a simple exegesis or conceptual geography of the family.

Traditional forms of family life have also become controversial because of the increasingly dominant liberal narrative of the family as a social construction fashioned around the equal partnership of men and women. For activists, a hermeneutic of suspicion inevitably shrouds the very institution of the family. This is the case because, among other concerns, the traditional family accentuates biological differences between men and women, accents the authority of parents over children, and presents heterosexual unions as normative. The liberal narrative of the family as a social construction acts as if there are no consequential differences between traditional marriage, homosexual marriage, and other types of sexual lifestyles, such as a single mother living with her current boyfriend. Such accounts have increasingly come to ignore the significant social, biological, and demographic data demonstrating the importance of the traditional biological family, so as to appreciate the family in progressively nominalistic terms.

This point deserves emphasis: for the progressive liberal, the family is appreciated as merely a culturally conditioned social construction. Moreover, as the social creation of its participants, the family is also properly subject to public policy designed to enforce a particular understanding of fair equality of opportunity, individual autonomy, and social egalitarianism. Activists in France, for example, are endeavoring to replace the terms “mother” and “father” with “parent 1” and “parent 2” in legal documents. “Justice Minister Christiane Taubira said the legislation . . . is needed to ‘secularize the bond of marriage’ and allow same-sex couples to adopt children under the same conditions as heterosexual couples” (Vidon-White 2012). A Brazilian official granted a civil union, with all of the benefits of marriage, to a group arrangement of one man and two women (Castillo 2012). The United States Supreme Court ruled that same-sex marriage is protected by the US Constitution, ordering that same-sex couples possessed a fundamental right to marry in all states (Obergefell v. Hodges, No. 14-556, decided June 26, 2015). If the family is no more than a culturally or historically conditioned social construction, then there is no reason to believe that it ought to be based on the heterosexual marital union of husband and wife.

Feminists, homosexual activists, and other defenders of post-traditional social structures routinely support such a liberal social-constructivist account of the family precisely because they judge it as liberating women from biological constraints and patriarchal social structures as well as from the confines of traditional cultures and religious norms.³ Family members are presumed to be of equal authority and, as far as possible, as having interchangeable intrafamilial roles. Such post-traditional accounts also reject biological constraints on the structure of the family. Heterosexual normativity is rejected. Experimentation to find one’s niche for sexual fulfillment is embraced. No distinction, even in principle, is drawn regarding the type of intimate activities properly reserved to the marriage of man and woman. Moreover, men and women are not appreciated as possessing any meaningful innate biological differences. Physical differences, such as the fact that women can conceive, bear, and nurse children, are seen as meaningless constraints of nature and challenges to be overcome through scientific and technological advances. As a result, the family is not understood as ideally constituted around the reproductive union of husband and wife. Parental authority over children is judged to be limited to achieving the best interests of children and subject to state regulation. Children are to be nurtured toward achievement of their own individual autonomy and independent equality as soon as practicable. Marriage and family life are not seen as possessing any particular telos or goal beyond that to which is agreed among those persons who make up the specific partnership. The family as a social institution is stripped of any essential expression of a distinct state of being.

In short, in many quarters the traditional family has become highly politically incorrect. After all, traditional forms of the family signify social and political inequalities. Such families demarcate those who are outsiders while encouraging loyalty and affection among family members. Traditional families conserve and expend common resources to help family members succeed (e.g., family-based medical savings accounts and common retirement savings), impose costs on some members to benefit the overall good of the family (e.g., ask that some family members earn an income while other members care for the family’s children, elderly, and infirm), and in competitive environments seek success for family members over outsiders (e.g., give preference to family members in access to scarce medical resources). Preferential defense of close blood relations and expenditure of resources on family members, such as the favored nurturing and raising of one’s own biological children and grandchildren, is the experienced social norm. Successful families propagate their religious and cultural knowledge to their children and children’s children while standing as living examples of such a nonegalitarian worldview.⁴

Traditional families usually appreciate their lifeworld as formative. The family plays a key role in properly orienting husband, wife, and children toward appropriate lifestyles and goals. The family’s sovereignty over itself is understood as grounded in its nature as a sui generis social unit, existing prior to and independently of the permission of the state. As a result, the family is free to advance its own good as well as the interests of its members, in ways that collide with the political or social goals of the state. Here, the family exists neither as a contractual relationship nor as a living arrangement that is fully realized through the consent of its members. The family is a normative form of social being, which is expressive of the proper contours of human flourishing. It is a morally regulative category of social life. The good of the family is appreciated as prior to and more important than other social or political agendas, such as the pursuit of individual autonomy or fair equality of opportunity. Consequently, the traditional family stands as a major impediment for the implementation of many common progressive visions of social equality, gender neutrality, freedom of sexual expression, and egalitarian distributive justice.

Traditional forms of the family tend to embody particular religious and cultural moral norms, including appropriate gender roles and sexual activities as well as authoritative relationships among adults and of parents over children. Some family-oriented endeavors are immanent (e.g., creating and sustaining a household, raising children from infancy through the trials of adolescence to adulthood) while others are transcendent (e.g., properly orienting the family and its generations toward salvation). Not all such moral understandings or accounts of human good are fully translatable into secular terms. Here, the good of the family will be seen, at least in part, in terms of its ability successfully to instantiate its core religious and cultural understandings as well as to pass on these foundational commitments to future generations. Traditional families understand themselves as properly possessing more-or-less significant authority over their members. Such families remind post-traditional outsiders of what they have rejected—the intimate social community as well as the moral, cultural, and religious context of human flourishing. Consequently, from the perspective of family members, those who would interfere in the conduct of the family, including parental judgments over how best to raise and discipline children, are perceived as bearing the burden of proof, with perhaps a significant standard of proof, to interfere in family decisions.

Such families typically frame human life within essential religious and moral understandings, orienting children and adults to particular truth claims about the world, the nature and meaning of the cosmos, and of man’s place within it. The family is the central community through which children learn (1) piety (e.g., morning and evening prayer, regular attendance at liturgy, reverence of ancestors, or other appropriate rituals); (2) spiritual and moral discipline (e.g., routine prayer and other spiritual tasks); (3) proper virtue, such as humility (e.g., submitting to the authority of their parents and other elders); (4) love (e.g., watching the love of their parents for each other and for their children); (5) charity (e.g., realizing the need to take care of individuals other than themselves, such as brothers and sisters, parents and grandparents, and watching parents tithe to their church or donate time and money to ch...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Sex, Family, and the Culture Wars: An Introduction
• 2 The Family as a Sociobiological Reality
• 3 The Family as a De Facto Category of Social Reality
• 4 God and the Philosopher; Or Why a God’s Eye Perspective Is Necessary to Secure a Particular Account of the Family
• 5 The Family as a Liberal Social-Constructivist Social Entity
• 6 Deregulating Family Life: The Family as a Libertarian Constructivist Social Entity
• 7 The Family and the Fundamentalist Secular State: The Establishment at Law of a Fully Secular Ideology
• 8 Sex, Abortion, and Ideological Entrenchment: At the Brink of Nihilism
• References
• Index