Public Policy, Rapidly Headed in the Wrong Direction

The American public is in a frenzy over changes that certain social norms are undergoing. With the rise of cohabiting couples, changing family structures, and especially the gay marriage debate, panic has ensued. As a result, concerned masses are desperately resorting to public policy to disguise personal opinions, preferences, and prejudices as pride in the aim of protecting what they call "tradition."

Well, if we're going to resort to tradition as our model for what is best, let's be informed. Furthermore, let's be consistent.

And in no time, you will observe a need to be a bit more realistic:

Author, scholar, and marriage history guru, Stephanie Coontz, pointed out that the most widely accepted tradition of marriage has been polygamy throughout the majority of cultures in human history.

If that's the case, our current fixation on monogamy is a blatant violation of so-called tradition. In the name of preserving tradition, we as a society must quickly remedy this, as every husband who faithfully exhibits lifelong commitment to his lone wife is clearly a disgrace.

Only for the past 30 years has American law denied husbands final say in their households. If we really want to uphold tradition, I have an inkling that we'll need to reinstate Head and Master laws before the very foundation of our society crumbles away completely.

For nearly fifteen years now, marital rape been a crime in every state--what utter foolishness. What is marriage anymore if a wife has the right to decline intercourse when her husband requests it? I don't know what the world is coming to....

In the past, love was considered a poor reason to get married, yet our current society considers pre-marital absence of love as a near tragedy. But since tradition indicates a need to get over it, love needs to find its way back out of the picture if we really want to strengthen marriage in our society...

But here's the real kicker: when it comes down to it, marital tradition, at its very root, eliminates the very roles of both religion and public policy within the institution. Traditionally, words of consent between a man and a woman were enough to validate a marriage. Marriages existed and lasted long before the emergence of any requirement of legal or religious approval, so who needs them to validate our unions now?

But i digress.

The point is, as hard as it may be to believe, it might actually strengthen the goals of American public policy to consider the value of some alternatives to our currently preceived traditions.

Coontz points out in several essays that what our society considers as traditions are inevitably quite young compared to others that had existed before--others that our own "traditions" trumped at some point because changes in social norms either made them less relevent or completely obsolete.

Thus, let us not blaspheme against the good name of "tradition" by insinuating that tradition necessarily trumps change--clearly, the tradition IS change in correspondence with the advancement of the culture in question.

That said, if we take a few steps back, we will probably realize that we are probably in the midst of such a transition now, and change would probably do us good. We might come to terms that with our changing perceptions of ourselves and our societies, much of what we currently consider as tradition doesn't hold anymore.

By refusing to acknowledge this, creators and enforcers of public policies condone negligence and irresponsibility among themselves. IF they insist upon involving themselves with marriage, instead of trying to revert the institution of marriage to something that it once was, public policy should move with it and embrace the changes of which we're in the midst in order to properly adjust policy in a way that will actually serve our society.