Marriage, family and public policy

Jennifer Marshall writes on "Marriage: What Social Science Says and Doesn’t Say":

Social science data indicate that the intact family—defined as a man and a woman who marry, conceive, and raise their children together—best ensures the current and future welfare of children and society when compared with other common forms of households. As alternative family forms have become more prevalent since the 1960s, social science research and government surveys have indicated an accompanying rise in a number of serious social problems.

Government’s interest in marriage has been based primarily on its interest in the welfare of the next generation. Among the many types of social relationships, marriage has always had a special place in all legal traditions, our own included, because it is the essential foundation of the intact family, and no other family form has been able to provide a commensurate level of social security.

In all other common family and household forms, the risk of negative individual outcomes and family disintegration is much greater, increasing the risk of dependence on state services. A free society requires a critical mass of individuals in stable households who are not dependent on the state. The most stable and secure household, the available research shows, is the intact family. Therefore, the state has an interest in protecting the intact family and we should be cautious about facilitating other forms of household, the effects of which are either deleterious or unknown.

Unfortunately this eminently sensible approach to family policy runs counter to what I have called the "choice-enhancement state," that is, the fifth and latest stage in the liberal project, which demands that government take a position of benign neutrality towards a wide range of individual lifestyle choices for fear of making it an oppressive legislator of the good life. Over the long term such neutrality will prove unsustainable -- even utopian. People's choices inevitably have practical consequences, both for themselves and for others. Some of these will be harmful, while others will be beneficial. Because the harmful ones will require remedial action by the state, the latter would be ill advised simply to acquiesce in the indiscriminate subsidizing of all choices. Far from being just, such a policy is close to being outright foolish.