In this episode, Trent sits down with Dr. Jennifer Roback-Morse of the Ruth Institute to discuss why society needs to strengthen and defend the institution of marriage.
Welcome to the Counsel of Trent podcast, a production of Catholic Answers.
Nick Chamberlain: Hey everyone, and welcome to another episode of the Counsel of Trent. Whoa, whose voice is this? Hey, everyone. It’s Nick Chamberlain and I am the audio engineer here at Catholic Answers, as well as the producer behind the Counsel of Trent. This week, Trent is out of the office and he asked me to go ahead and upload a new podcast for you all to hear. This is a great throwback interview that Trent had with Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse. In this episode, Trent and Dr. Morse, they talk about why society needs to strengthen and defend the institution of marriage. This is still very appropriate today and I hope you all enjoy this episode.
Trent: Hi, I’m Trent Horn, an apologist and speaker for Catholic Answers. Today, we’re talking with Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse, the founder and president of the Ruth Institute about the subject of marriage. Dr. Morse, welcome.
Dr. Morse: Thanks for having me, Trent.
Trent: Well first, why don’t you just tell us a little bit about yourself and how you became involved in the current work that you do?
Dr. Morse: Well, I had a fairly conventional career path back in the ’70s and ’80s. My plan for myself was that I would get my doctorate in economics. I would teach at a major university, get tenure at a major university, and then and only then would I begin my family. At that time, I should mention that I was not a practicing Catholic. I was a Cradle Catholic, but I had left the practice of the Catholic Church. Well, imagine my surprise when the baby did not arrive during the month that I happened to have set aside for it, so we were thrown into an infertility crisis, my husband and I were. That infertility crisis is the thing that brought me back to the practice of the Catholic faith because that was the first time in my life that I couldn’t get what I wanted by trying harder and being smart and all of that kind of thing that’s supposed to make everything work for you in your career. I came back to the practice of the faith and we resolved our infertility crisis by adopting a little boy from a Romanian orphanage who was two-and-a-half years old at the time we got him. Then we gave birth to a little girl six months later, so 1991 was kind of a busy year for us. What happened with the little boy was that he taught us just how much children need a mother and a father because he had been profoundly neglected. We were involved with him and with other children who came from Romania around that same time and we just saw the same pattern of problems that all of them had, being unable to speak, being unwilling to make eye contact, having no social development, and all that kind of stuff.
Trent: This is from the collapse of the dictatorship in Romania that brought about these children not having parents?
Dr. Morse: No. They had been in these orphanages under the Ceausescu regime and it was only the collapse of the regime that made it possible for foreigners to adopt them. In 1990, ’91, ’92 that was a period when a lot of people were trying to reach out to those kids and, all of a sudden, these kids are available for adoption. They’re darling little children. They look good. Of course, in your heart, you want to help and everything, but no one was really prepared, I think, for what the neglect that took place in those orphanages really did to the kids. I mean, people have been adopting internationally for a long time without encountering this kind of problem. I mean, I know the specialists probably knew, but most of us who are adoptive parents, we’re not psychologists or whatever. We didn’t know what we were dealing with. It just became clear to me that children really need a mother and a father and that married mother and father delivers the goods, you might say, to kids in a way that is more reliable and more loving and more secure than any other method. Even though I was trained in economics, had no background in child psychology or anything like that, I came to see that really, the whole society needs mom and dad to be there doing their job. All these substitutes for marriage that everybody was talking about … Back in the day, they called them substitutes for marriage or alternatives to marriage, that kind of talk that was going on in the ’80s and the ’90s, that just isn’t going to fly. The first book that I wrote was called Love and Economics and it was about this very point, that kids need their moms and dads and because kids need their moms and dads, society needs some structures that support moms and dads in their relationship with their kids. That’s what got me into the whole subject of marriage and no-fault divorce and cohabitation and all the other things that we talk about at the Ruth Institute.
Trent: Then you founded this organization, the Ruth Institute, so how did that come about and what is the purpose of the Ruth Institute?
Dr. Morse: I founded the Ruth Institute in 2008. I left academic life in 1996 to become a full-time mom, stay at home, which was really a relief to be able to have that be my primary job and to be able to tell people look, I have this research position at the Hoover Institution at Stanford, but listen fellows, I’m only here a quarter time and the kids come first. They all got it. They all accepted that, so it was a big relief to do that. Over those years, starting around 1996, I kept talking about these subjects and I saw that young people, particularly young women, wanted to hear about how you don’t have to stay on that career path absolutely every single minute of your life. They were relieved to hear somebody say it. By the time the kids grew up enough and were leaving the nest, in 2008 I decided to start the Ruth Institute to be a vehicle and a forum for dealing with all of these issues that have to do with marriage and seeking the right things within marriage, seeking the proper public policies that support marriage and so on. That just happened to be at the same time that Proposition 8 was happening here in California and so I got involved in that because I knew a lot about marriage. Even in 2008, more people were willing to talk about it at that time, but a lot of people who knew, weren’t willing to talk about it because it was already kind of toxic. Of course, it’s only gotten more toxic since then, but I got involved in that simply because I was there and I had a lot of expertise and we had just started the Ruth Institute. I couldn’t see not speaking out about it. It just seemed to me to be so important that the state affirm the reality of mother, father, baby and that that’s a social structure that needs support from the whole society. I just couldn’t be quiet about it.
Trent: That leads very well into what I wanted to ask next, which is about the issue of marriage itself and what you’re working towards protecting, which is what is marriage? I mean, a lot of people talk about marriage and about it being an institution that maybe they don’t want to be committed to or they’re institutionalized. Why is marriage so important and worth studying and worth fighting for? What is marriage and why does it matter?
Dr. Morse: Well, marriage is such an interesting … I find it endlessly fascinating subject because you can look at from so many different perspectives. Let’s just start with looking at it from the public policy perspective. I realize this is a Catholic Answers product that we’re creating here of Catholic Answers conversation that we’re having, but let’s talk-
Trent: There’s lots of people who aren’t Catholic who get married.
Dr. Morse: Exactly. Exactly. Exactly. The public has an interest in the institution of marriage. Let’s just start with the question what is the essential public purpose of marriage? Let’s start with that. I would say that the essential public purpose of marriage is to attach mothers and fathers to their children and to one another. It’s essential in the sense that if you didn’t need to get that job done, there wouldn’t be a public institution called marriage at all. In other words, if new human beings came about through some method other than a man and woman having sex with each other and if new human beings were adults and ready to take care of themselves, if any of those kinds of things were true, well who would’ve ever thought of marriage? Who would’ve ever thought of lifelong sexual exclusivity and commitment? Just it wouldn’t have made any sense to just-
Trent: You’re saying if children were more like reptiles or snakes, like when snakes get together, the baby snakes kind of slither away and that’s it.
Dr. Morse: That’s right. There’s no pair bonding in the reptile kingdom as far as I’ve ever seen, so this is a mammal thing that we’re doing here. Children need us to be committed to one another. If you start from that perspective, so that’s why it’s essential and it’s also public, Trent, in the sense that people have many, many reasons that they want to get married and many private motivations. People get married because they want to be affirmed or they get married because their mom and dad are leaning on them to get married or they get married because they want to have the beautiful dress and the big party or they want to irritate their previous boyfriend. I mean, you can have all kinds of reasons privately why you want to get married.
Trent: Some better than others.
Dr. Morse: Some better than others, but taken all together, they don’t add up to a public reason.
Trent: So what’s the reason why we all care people get married, the public reason?
Dr. Morse: That’s correct. That’s correct, so why? Let’s go back to the child. At the Ruth Institute, I must say we try always to refer back to the child because we think the discourse is way too focused on adults and what they want, so let’s start with the child. The child has an entitlement to a relationship with both of their parents. They have an entitlement to know who they are, to know their own personal identity, their genetic, their social heritage, all of that. They have a right to have care from both of their parents, a relationship with both of their parents. Marriage is the adult institution that delivers that to kids more effectively than any of the other choices. If you just start ticking them off in your mind you can see, well, being a single mom okay, you have a relationship with your mom, but it’s not so clear what you’re going to have with your dad. You have divorce. You have a kind of broken relationship between mom and dad. The cooperation between mom and dad is an extremely powerful social reality that everybody benefits from and that we need to support. That’s the basic answer about the public purpose of marriage.
Trent: How does marriage provide these goods to children? I mean, I think we agreed that children, they’re helpless.
Dr. Morse: That’s right.
Trent: My son was just born two weeks ago and he’s far more helpless than even a Jack Russell terrier. He needs his mom and dad. How does marriage, specifically, the institution of marriage, provide these goods to children? How does it do that?
Dr. Morse: Well, if you think of marriage as being a lifelong relationship between the husband and the wife, they might not have any kids, but marriage is a lifelong relationship between the husband and the wife. They make themselves irreplaceable to one another. Why? Because they’re going to be irreplaceable to the child, right? Sometimes people will say to me, “Well, Dr. Morse, this can’t be right because it can’t be true that marriage is all about children because some marriages don’t have kids.” I say, “Well, that’s perfectly true.” Not all marriages have kids, but every child has parents and so we need to do something for every child. If we don’t do something for every child, then we’re creating vast structural inequalities in the society between the kids who have both of their parents and the kids who do not have both of their parents. That, it seems to me, is a much more important fact for all of us as adults to be attentive to than whether adults get to do what they want. We just need to reorder our priorities here.
Trent: You’re saying that marriage is this universal human institution. We’ll talk a little bit more about what the Church specifically teaches about it, but at its base it’s this universal human institution and that it’s ordered towards the good of children that come out of these unions quite frequently. Tell us a little bit about the history of marriage and if this has traditionally been the way that marriage is. I mean, I hear a lot of people say well, marriage has been redefined all throughout history and marriage is really, it was just about fathers transferring their daughters like cattle to suitors. That’s all marriage has basically been for. What’s wrong with this kind of cynical view people have about the history of marriage?
Dr. Morse: Well, people have the idea that we only discovered that marriage is about love sometime around 1965 or something. I mean, but the fact is, the Song of Songs is about the love of the husband and the wife for one another.
Trent: The book of the Bible, the Song of Songs.
Dr. Morse: Yeah, in the Bible, so it’s ancient. The love between a husband and a wife is an ancient reality. It’s known to every culture, known to every society.
Trent: In fact, your institute is named after such a love in the Bible. Explain a little bit about that.
Dr. Morse: Ruth, Ruth, Ruth, yes, the Ruth of the Bible. We picked out Ruth for a number of reasons. One is we wanted to have a patron, so to speak, or a patron saint, but we didn’t want her to be too Catholic. We wanted somebody, a male or female. At the time I was thinking about it, I didn’t care about that. It needed to be somebody that would appeal to people across the religious spectrum and Ruth is a woman of the Old Testament, so everybody loves Ruth, the Jews, the Catholics, Protestants, Latter Day Saints. Everybody loves Ruth. The reason people love Ruth is because Ruth is symbol of love and loyalty and putting your family first. She would not leave Naomi just because her husband had died, so that’s what we love about Ruth, so yes. She falls in love with Boaz and Ruth and Boaz really love one another and would be recognizable, I think, to any modern couple, as yeah, they love each other.
Trent: Boaz didn’t just purchase Ruth as chattel, yes.
Dr. Morse: No, no. No, that’s right. Oh, and the other thing about that idea of treating wives as chattel, that’s not uncommon throughout human history for that to be happening. There are two points about that. One is to see that the Catholic Church was an institution historically that put a stop to that because the Catholic Church always said as early as it had any authority to speak on the subject and as often and as loudly as it could, the Church always said the consent of both parties is a necessary part of the marriage. That’s right in Canon law. Now it’s codified, but always, from the very beginning, it was like no, you don’t buy and sell people for marriage. You can’t do that and so we have the early virgin martyrs who said, “No, I don’t want to marry the man that my father’s picked out for me. I want to be with Jesus,” came to St. Agnes, whose feast we just celebrated. The Church has always celebrated the fact that consent is a necessary part of the marriage. The other thing that’s important about that historically speaking is that people will say to me well, it wasn’t really about the children and their welfare. It was really about property and transferring property and making sure that inheritance was intact and so on and so forth. The thing to point out about that is that in order for marriage to have been something useful to transfer property, it had to first of all do the thing that I say it had to do, which is to identify inheritance, identify the family. Who’s in the family? Who’s your daddy? That’s the question. Who’s your daddy? Marriage answers that question by saying your daddy is your mommy’s husband.
Trent: Because DNA tests are relatively … That’s a very new invention.
Dr. Morse: You could say that’s a new thing, yeah. If you take how marriage works, how marriage worked in the common law, how marriage works today, up until the last five minutes or so, historically speaking, the way marriage works is it answers the question who’s your daddy by saying your mother’s husband is presumed to be the father of any children that she gives birth to during the life of the marriage. The woman who gives birth to you is presumed to be your mother. Now, even that has changed in recent times because we have surrogacy and so the woman who delivers the baby is not necessarily the legal mother anymore, but before-
Trent: Because someone may have created the child as an embryo in a Petri dish and then implanted them in this woman’s womb.
Dr. Morse: That’s correct.
Trent: Okay. Wow.
Dr. Morse: That’s correct. That’s how that works now, but when we were in the world of natural conception and only natural conception, what marriage did was to identify the child’s mother and the father. What it also does is to say these two people are the parents of this child and nobody else is. Nobody else has the right to march in and say, “I get parental rights. I get visitation rights. I get this kind of right or that kind of right.” The grandparents are excluded. Your previous boyfriend is excluded. Everybody else is excluded. It’s you and your husband. That’s it. As we go to redefine marriage in the various ways that we’re doing that now, as we uncouple or de-link sex from procreation in the various ways that we’re doing, that whole question of who counts as a parent legally is unraveling and is becoming increasingly the business of the government to say who’s your daddy rather than the government simply recognizing a natural pre-political reality. The government’s creating the reality of parenthood and that’s one of the really problematic things that’s coming down the pike at us all.
Trent: Just tell us a little bit then what happens. What are some of the practical consequences? What happens when we redefine and we change marriage from being ordered towards uniting children with their parents and their parents with one another, when we change that idea of marriage to just being well, marriage is about uniting adults who romantically care about one another? What are some of these practical problems that arise when we start tinkering with and changing this definition?
Dr. Morse: Well, the first big step in that direction would be no-fault divorce or unilateral divorce because that changed the presumption that the marriage would be permanent. When you think about the interest of children, a permanent relationship with both of their parents is obviously something that’s of benefit to them and so it really doesn’t matter from the child’s perspective how old they are when their parents divorce from each other. It continues to be painful no matter how old the person is when it takes place. We had a conference about a year ago. The Ruth Institute had a conference called Healing the Family. We had a whole session on children of divorce and we gave people the opportunity from the audience to talk about it. I was amazed, Trent. I was amazed at what came out. One person talking about how his father and mother were divorced when he was in his 30s and when his father divorced and then remarried another woman, the father was only interested in that woman and her children. Her children became the grandchildren in that family and his father lost interest in him, lost interest in his natural grandchildren. The grandchildren, in effect, lost their grandfather. It’s not a small thing just because the kids are older. This is a mistake. More than that, if it happens when the children are small, it’s immediately devastating to the child. We have something on our website called kidsdivorcestories.org. People go there and write their stories about what it was like for them when their parents divorced and separated. A lot of these stories, Trent, are from people it happened 30 years ago and it’s so raw even now. It’s still raw, some of these things. If there are people listening to this who are in this situation, I would invite you to go and look at those stories so that you know you’re not alone. A lot of times, kids feel like they’re alone, especially if you’re really small when this happens. You think I’m the only person or in their little minds sometimes kids think it was their fault. A lot of difficult, painful things happen around that. The other purpose that we have for that kidsdivorcestories.org is for people who are considering divorce to go look at that because if you know somebody who’s thinking about pulling the plug on their marriage, you tell them go look at this site. That’s your kids 30 years from now. You think your kids are going to get over it. Maybe they will. Maybe they won’t. You need to see this before you make an irrevocable decision.
Trent: That’s kidsdivorcestories.com?
Dr. Morse: Dot org.
Trent: Dot org. Okay.
Dr. Morse: I’m sorry.
Trent: Yeah, just search for kids divorce stories, kidsdivorcestories.org.
Dr. Morse: It pops right up. It pops right up, yeah.
Trent: This leads in well to asking I think a lot of people say when it comes to divorce well, isn’t it just better for kids not to be stuck in a marriage where their parents are always fighting and there’s discord? You’re saying that that might actually be better than just tearing the marriage apart.
Dr. Morse: It depends on the level of discord.
Trent: Sure.
Dr. Morse: Okay. My background’s in economics, a very empirical, statistical kind of discipline. I’ve read a lot of the studies around this and so I can tell you that there is a kind of consensus among the sociologists and psychologists who study this matter. That is if you’re in what is called a high conflict marriage, where there’s maybe substance abuse, domestic violence, high level quarreling, high level tension, then yes, the kids are better off if that stops because that’s a problem that’s obvious to the kids and it affects their lives. But, but that situation was grounds for divorce under a fault-based system in virtually every jurisdiction. You could get a divorce for cause. This is what people forget, that under a fault-based system, your husband being an alcoholic and beating the crap out of you counts as a cause. You could get a divorce.
Trent: Let’s distinguish then. You’re saying something that has really destabilized marriage now is the introduction of no-fault divorce versus the concept of fault divorce. What’s the difference between the two?
Dr. Morse: Yes. Legally speaking, it means that you have to show cause if you’re going to end the marriage.
Trent: That’s a fault, like somebody’s at fault.
Dr. Morse: There’s a marital fault and so somebody’s at fault and yes, you have to have evidence. You have to prove it. Typically, there were four A’s. There was adultery, abuse, abandonment, and addiction, addiction, so those would be the four A’s. There were legal procedures. You had to produce evidence and so on and so forth. There’d be some recognition of a marital fault in that the blameless party would receive some kind of recognition or benefit from the fact that they had kept their vows and the other person had not. When people said well, this is a stupid system because the husband and wife who want to get divorced, they have to conspire and invent a story so they can go into court with evidence and get the divorce that they both want. Here’s the thing to notice about that. They literally both want it. They can’t do the conspiracy unless they both want it, right? They have to provide evidence. They can’t just go make stuff up. Now what we have is, quite often, the person who wants a divorce is a person who’s committing the marital fault, namely adultery, so there’s a person … You’ve already got a sweetie on the side. You come in. You say, “I want a divorce.” The other person’s like, “I don’t want a divorce. I know you’re not doing what you’re supposed to do, but I want to work this out. I want to stick together.” What does the government do? The government takes sides with the person who wants the marriage the least.
Trent: Because people have determined that what marriage is for is for adults, not for the kids that come out of it.
Dr. Morse: Exactly.
Trent: So they side with the adult who wants to leave and have a new marriage.
Dr. Morse: Exactly. Exactly. Exactly. I’m not saying that when this came down the pike in 1968 that everybody had that all worked out in their minds and so on, but at some visceral level, I think they probably knew that’s what they were doing or about to do. It’s certainly the way things have evolved and the way things have unfolded, that the kids … You want to talk about chattel. The kids are moved from week to week between two houses. I once heard of a family law judge who said, “Anybody who comes to my court and gets a divorce, here’s what they’re going to get from me. The child stays in one house and the adults have to move.” What he said was that a lot of the adults kind of said maybe we should work this out because this is not going to be a lot of fun. Well, you think about that. What we ask of children is something that very few adults would willingly endure. That should be our clue that there’s something wrong here.
Trent: Now, I think it was G.K. Chesterton who once and he wrote a great treatise on this subject called The Superstition of Divorce. He said that if people can be separated for no reason, they will find no reason to be united in the first place. Do you think that the introduction of no-fault divorce laws has created, has an unintended consequence of people would say oh, well, this will make marriage stronger in that people will be able to get out of bad marriages. Has it made, actually, marriage weaker in that people don’t want to even get married at all because they’re afraid of divorce?
Dr. Morse: That’s a very powerful point that you’re making there because a lot of young people today are afraid of divorce. This is part of why you see so much cohabitation. A lot of young people have already experienced divorce and they want lifelong married love for themselves and they want lifelong married love for their kids. They don’t want to put their own kids through what they went through and so they wrongly conclude that the solution to that is cohabitation, which there are a lot of reasons why that’s not the correct conclusion. The fact is, they are slightly freaked out about getting married and staying married and what makes that possible. The culture that we’ve created has been a whole culture of impermanence. People walking down the aisle think to themselves well, I can get out of this if it doesn’t work. That’s a problem. The other thing that it does is that it changes the way you behave inside the marriage, so even if there aren’t big problems in the marriage, if you have the idea that it’s impermanent, this also applies to cohabitation, too, because cohabitation kind of by definition you’ve got one foot out the door, sort of. You’re not sure what’s going to happen. You don’t invest in the other person in the same way. You think to yourself well, maybe today’s the day that he’s going to pull the plug. Maybe today’s the day when I’m going to say I’ve had enough. I’m out of here.
Trent: That drive around the block becomes a drive out of town.
Dr. Morse: Right. That’s right. That’s right. That’s right. As you know and as people who’ve been married for a long time know, there are many moments, small moments in the life of your marriage where you have to sacrifice your immediate impulse or your immediate desire. You have to zip your lip. You have to think about what you’re going to say. You have to give way to what the other person wants. You have to say well, what I want is not that important. I’m going to let it go. There are many times like that, multiple times per day that you have to do that. The thing that encourages and supports you in doing that is the idea that this is it. I’m not out there still half dating looking for a better deal, looking for a better partner. When we said I do, we landed on the shores of a foreign country, and we burnt the ships. We’re not going back. My husband and I can have that attitude toward marriage. You and your wife can have that attitude toward marriage, but the reality is, if one of us changes our mind, the government will take sides with the person who wants the marriage the least. We’re all vulnerable in a way that we didn’t used to be.
Trent: Talk a little bit to then especially even young people in my generation, Millennials and others, who see divorce, who have seen how marriage has been negatively affected over the past decades, if not centuries. I mean, you’ll hear people say well, why even bother? Marriage is an outdated institution. We just don’t need it anymore because the idea that it’s broken. Is it marriage that’s broken or it’s just our understanding and how we’ve been raised to think about marriage is the thing that’s really broken?
Dr. Morse: I think you answered your own question there, Trent, but when we say marriage is an outdated institution, when people talk like that, they’re forgetting that children still come from a mom and a dad. Children still have one mother and one father. That’s how it works. That is not going to go out of style. That’s not going to be outdated. The idea that it could be outdated is a very peculiar thought process that we’ve done for ourselves by saying well, we think it should be all about me as an individual having what I want and having the sexual relationships I want and having the lifestyle that I want and so, therefore, the only just thing to do is to create new technology that’ll make it possible for me to do whatever I want. I’m like you know what? That’s backwards. That’s like saying everybody gets to have a privately-owned nuclear weapon because you live in a dangerous neighborhood. That’s just not the right way to use your technology or your way to interact with your technology. There’s a basic reality here, which is the need for reliable love and the idea that love is more than a feeling, but love is a decision. Those are eternal realities that are not going to go out of date and so, therefore, the basic structure that supports that, it might change a little bit around the edges, but it’s got to have the same core features. It’s got to be one man, one woman, sexual exclusivity, permanence. That’s what it’s got to be. Those are the pieces of that puzzle that we’ve been throwing them away one by one and we’re hurting ourselves a lot in the process.
Trent: Then if we change it, we reduce marriage to almost essentially just a cohabitation certificate.
Dr. Morse: Yes.
Trent: It’s recognized, but it’s as flimsy as two people who happen to just live together and can move out at some point.
Dr. Morse: Yes.
Trent: What do you think then are some of the behaviors or attitudes in our culture that contribute to marriages failing, to an increase in divorce? What are some of the, I guess, yeah, behaviors and attitudes people might adopt and so consequently, things people should avoid so they don’t fall into this divorce trap, essentially?
Dr. Morse: Pope Francis periodically talks about the throwaway culture, the culture of people being disposable. I think there’s a Spanish term that he uses that refers to that. I think that mentality is a very dangerous mentality. I mean, I think he’s right to call attention to that, that we treat each other like we’re consumer goods, so if you are my sex partner and I say, don’t worry husband, wife, don’t worry. He’s not really my sex partner. We’re really in the radio studio.
Trent: Hypothetically.
Dr. Morse: Hypothetically, yes, hypothetically. I look at another person. I said this person is here to give me sexual satisfaction. That’s what they’re here to do. If that’s the way I look at them, then what that means is when they stop giving me sexual satisfaction or I no longer like the way I feel when I’m around them or the friendship doesn’t exactly work, well, I’m entitled to get rid of them or throw them away. We’re treating one another like consumer goods instead of facing up to the organic reality that sex makes babies and that sex builds bonds between a man and a woman, sex creates natural bonds, natural forming of bonds. If we deny that, then we don’t see the organic reality that’s around human sexuality and marriage and then we start treating each other like consumer goods. That filters into all kinds of behaviors. If you really start tracking that mentality through, you go wow, that’s not very attractive. That’s not very appealing. If I act like that, my husband, poor man. He’s not going to have a happy life and he’s going to want to throw me away.
Trent: Right. I’d like to get your opinion then. We’ve talked about marriage and its intrinsic link to sexuality, that the two, and I think the problem in our culture is there’s kind of a split. There’s sex over here, which is something you just want to have, and there’s marriage over here when you’re complete and ready and you want to embark on this venture, that the two aren’t related in any way. I’d like your opinion, I guess, especially as an economist. What are some of the problems in engaging in sex outside of marriage? What are some of these practical problems we see in thinking that oh, we can have sex outside of marriage and there aren’t really any problems from that? I mean, what would you say they actually are?
Dr. Morse: Well, there’s a third thing that we’re taking out of the equation. We have sex over here. Marriage over there. Then there’s another thing, which is the babies.
Trent: Right.
Dr. Morse: Right, so the babies are not attached either to marriage or, necessarily, to your sexual activity, but marriage, let’s remember, kind of review the fact, marriage is like an umbrella that integrates your love for your child’s other parent, your love for your child, your sexual activity, and the process of creating a new child. All of that’s united under one thing. What the sexual revolution has done is to take all of those elements and chop them up and separate them and disintegrate them and so we feel kind of chopped up. We feel kind of separated. We feel isolated from one another. If you just look at the most basic, practical problem that is extremely expensive both privately and publicly and that is people having babies without being married. Okay. Problem with having sex without being married is that you end up having babies without being married. Contraception often fails. I imagine you’ll talk about this in another [crosstalk 00:33:43]
Trent: We’ve seen from the studies I think it’s something like on average, about 40% of children today are born outside of marriage.
Dr. Morse: That’s correct.
Trent: And it’s about something like 72% in the African-American community.
Dr. Morse: It’s not just the African-American community. It’s as you go lower into the educational and the economic realm, regardless of race you see this increase in the number of kids being born outside of wedlock. It’s not a race thing. It’s an economic status kind of thing, so it’s a very debilitating thing because it means the sexual revolution is falling most heavily, the costs of it are falling most heavily on the poor and the least educated.
Trent: Why is it bad for children to be born outside of wedlock?
Dr. Morse: Yes, let’s get back to that point. That’s what we were trying to get to.
Trent: Right. We see, I mean, I think it’s when people say well, it’s so common. I mean, isn’t this the way-
Dr. Morse: Yeah, how can it bad? How can it be bad?
Trent: Exactly.
Dr. Morse: Well, there are two problems with it. Well, three problem, actually. First of all, typically, in a situation where a woman has a child and she’s not married to the child’s father, she’s at risk for her next child being born to a different man. That is so common now that the demographers have a special term for it. They call it multiple partner fertility or multi-partner fertility, so now think about that. You’re living in a family and you have an older brother. Your older brother has a different dad than you have. Your younger sister has a different dad than you have and your mom’s current boyfriend is not the dad to any of you. Think about your relationship with the men that come through that household. They are coming through that household because they’re interested in your mom. They’re not interested in you by and large. This is why the cohabiting boyfriend is statistically the person most likely to abuse a child. That’s been proven in multiple studies. There’s simply no doubt about that that the unrelated, cohabiting boyfriend is very dangerous to children, to a woman’s children. That’s problem number one is that his interests, his sexual interest in your mom excludes you as an object of his interest quite often. I don’t want to say it happens every time, but it’s a huge risk, obviously a huge risk. If your mom and dad are married to each other, it means every kid in the house has the same mom and dad and there isn’t this kind of pitting against one another, this kind of loyalty oh, he favors his kid and he doesn’t like us. We’re leftovers from mom’s previous relationship. Am I going to see my dad? What’s going to happen when it’s my birthday? Will my dad be there when I graduate from high school? Am I ever going to see him again? Well, no, I’m not going to see him again because he and mom don’t really like each other anymore and the new boyfriend doesn’t want him around. It gets to be very complicated with the needs of the child left to the bottom. That’s why it’s not good for the kids. It’s not good for the men because the men do not get the benefit of focused married fatherhood. When men get married and have children, they grow up. They grow up. That’s not politically correct to say, but it’s a statistical fact that married fathers behave differently than other men. They earn more money. They sleep around less. All sorts of things have been shown are different there, so they’re missing out. The men are missing out.
Trent: No, and I’ve seen this in my own life. I’ve been married for about two years. We just had our first child. Would you say the reason is just now finally when men get married, they realize oh, well life, it isn’t all just about me anymore.
Dr. Morse: Yes. That’s very important. It’s not just all about me anymore. That’s right. Men, I think, need a sense of purpose in their lives and I think men really thrive when someone needs them and they can fulfill those needs. If someone needs them and they can’t fulfill those needs, that’s when dads go to pieces a lot of times. That’s why unemployment can be very hard on men because it just it wounds them, in a way. The ability to care for others in that way is deeply built into the male psyche and it’s beneficial to them to have it. When we think about the sexual revolution as being something oh, we’re all going to have fun. It’s going to be great. The men get to play the field. Isn’t that great. Well, only immature men think it’s great. Grownup men realize I was wasting my time back then. That was a waste of time. I’m more of a man now than I ever was and I’m grateful to my wife and my children. I hear that all the time. I’m sure you do, too.
Trent: Oh, yes.
Dr. Morse: Then from the woman’s point of view, it might look like well, she gets to get out of abusive relationship, she gets to pick the man she wants and so on and so forth. What it really means to her is that she doesn’t have the stability or the presumption to know that any one of those guys is really going to be there for her. There are losses all the way around and those losses translate into problems such as increased mental health problems, decreased school performance, higher likelihood of criminal activity and ending up in the criminal justice system. All those things that social science people love to measure have been measured and it’s true that married mothers and fathers have fewer problems. Children of married mothers and fathers have fewer problems than any of the alternatives to marriage. We can prove it statistically, but I think it’s important to see behind the numbers, behind the statistics there’s a human face. The human face is that people really need these permanent attachments because people feel a need to belong and feel a need for reliable love and feel a need to be cared for.
Trent: And so this isn’t just for children of these unions. It’s even for the men and women themselves because I think this is an important point. I’d like your observation on it. When it comes to that issue of cohabitation, even cohabitation before marriage, some people will say to you, “Well, Dr. Morse, what’s so bad about us living together before we get married? I mean, you want to test drive the car, make sure everything’s working. What could be so bad about that?” You’re probably saying actually, that’s not the best idea.
Dr. Morse: Well, when you test drive a car, you drive it around the block and you decide I don’t want the car. You leave it at the lot. The car does not get hurt feelings over that and so that test drive analogy works great if you think of yourself as the driver, but if you think of yourself as the car, it doesn’t feel so good. The reality is, both people are both the car and the driver, so you’re vulnerable through the whole process. I’ll just speak from experience. My husband and I, when we got together, I was out of the Church. We lived together for a few years and then finally got married and then finally I came back to the Church and so on and so forth. During those years of cohabitation, mentally, you are wondering is today the day? When you’re wondering is today the day, you kind of guard yourself. You kind of protect yourself. You’re kind of looking over your shoulder. We kept separate bank accounts, for example, for a long time. It was only after the kids were here after we were married, after I was back in the Church and the kids arrived that I go, “Honey, this is ridiculous. We’ve got to stop this.” One of the things that the social science people will tell you is that even if you get married after cohabiting, a lot of times, there are those behaviors and those patterns and those habits that have to be overcome. You don’t have as good a marriage as you would’ve had if you had done it the Catholic way and remained chaste until you get married or remain sexually abstinent until you get married. Then you can completely entrust yourself to one another without fear and the level of trust and communication is correspondingly higher in that kind of situation.
Trent: So far, we’ve covered a lot of ground talking about what marriage is and why it’s good, that marriage, it isn’t just about affirming adult romantic feelings. It’s about uniting men and women to one another in a lifelong, sexually exclusive union and it unites them to each other and any children that they might create. That’s good for society. I think with that as a bedrock for all of us listening, how do you approach the issue of so-called same-sex marriage? I mean, that is the number one, hot-button issue that can get people just riled up in anger over. How do you approach that issue when many people say well, if you’re against same-sex marriage, you’re just a bigot, plain and simple? What rational response do you give to those who make this charge?
Dr. Morse: Well, first of all, to say if you’re against gay marriage it means you’re a bigot, we have to recognize right away what that is. That is an attempt to end the conversation. That’s an attempt to say that questioning this issue is forbidden, so that’s not a rational statement. Already, that’s suspect. That should give us a clue that there’s something wrong there that maybe they can’t defend themselves as well as they think that they can. The way I approach the question of genderless marriage and this is what I call it. I use the term genderless marriage because that’s what it’s doing. It’s removing the gender requirement from marriage and saying that that’s no longer significant. If you believe that the public purpose of marriage is to attach mothers and fathers to their children and to one another, if you believe that’s the essential public purpose of marriage, you can see right away that that purpose is going to be different for a same-sex couple than it is for an opposite-sex couple. The presumption of paternity is not going to apply to a same-sex couple. The presumption of paternity is what I mentioned earlier on when I said the law presumes that any children born to a woman, that her husband is the father of those children. That’s the presumption of paternity.
Trent: But if you have two women who are married that to go to the hospital and one of them gives birth, the other one-
Dr. Morse: Yes, so you would think that we need a different legal institution to handle that situation, even if you thought that situation was okay, which I do not concede, but even if you thought it was okay, you’d need something different. No, it’s got to be the same, so what are they doing? What they’re doing is redefining the presumption of paternity and turning it into a presumption of parentage so that that other woman who goes to the hospital, because of their legal union, she is presumed to be the child’s other parent. The child has no legal father, but he has two parents. That means the father has to be safely escorted off of the stage somehow. Somehow, they acquire his sperm, but he is out of the picture. I believe that that is a structural injustice to the child. I don’t care what you think about gay sex. I’m not here to argue about gay sex. Doing that is a structural injustice to the child.
Trent: When the child looks at their birth certificate when they’re older and sees two women’s names, but their father’s name, it’s gone, essentially.
Dr. Morse: That’s right. That’s right.
Trent: I noticed this myself when I filled out my son’s birth certificate a few weeks ago, the things. It says mother/parent, father/parent.
Dr. Morse: That’s right.
Trent: I’m grateful at least mother and father are still there.
Dr. Morse: I know. I know.
Trent: Eventually, I’m going to be parent A or parent B.
Dr. Morse: That’s right. That’s right. That’s right. The thing for people to understand is that when you redefine marriage, you are also redefining parenthood. The people who are advocating so strongly for genderless marriage do not want to call attention to that fact. That’s why they’re calling you names and changing the subject and so on and so forth. Let’s come back to this basic fact. What does it mean to have a mother and a father? They want to say that that’s a social construct and we can reconstruct it any way we want. I want to say that is really dangerous. We’ve been doing that when we say kids don’t need a permanent relationship with their parents through no-fault divorce and how’s that working for us? We know that’s a failure. We know that doesn’t work. Now we’re going to have an even more radical disconnect between children and their parents? I will never say that it’s okay. I will never say that that’s okay.
Trent: I guess to talk about the harm this causes, it outweighs what I think many people put forward, just this kind of emotional objection. Well, if two people love each other, isn’t that what marriage is about, affirming this love people have for one another? What’s wrong with that kind of thinking?
Dr. Morse: That campaign, the campaign for genderless marriage has put that into the public discourse and said love makes a family. What I want so say is well, what happens when love goes away? Does the family go away? The child no longer need their parents? Does that all go away when the love goes away, especially when you have this kind of emotional understanding of love. Thomas Aquinas would tell you love is to will and to do the good of another. That’s a lot more than just how you happen to feel at the moment, right? That campaign to say love makes a family, as if nothing else mattered, as if your definition of love was the only thing that mattered, that excludes the necessary permanence that we think and I think anybody who’s been through divorce would realize is so important in people’s lives.
Trent: It’s more important to say love is necessary for a family to function well, but what really makes a family is the lifelong, sexually-exclusive union of a man and woman. When you have that, then you have mom and dad not going anywhere and right there for their children. Love is the oil that greases the machine. When you take love away, yeah, the gears start to clank and the marriage, it can become difficult to go through.
Dr. Morse: Well, to put it a different way, do you really want the government in the business of affirming love? Is love a legal category? Well, it never has been. If you go down to the city hall and say we want to get married, they’re not going to ask you if you love each other. They’re going to ask if you’re of the appropriate age and you’ve never been married before. They’re not going to ask you do you love each other. They don’t care.
Trent: We don’t have the government regulating our friendships and saying oh, this is my best friend and we want the whole world to see that we’re best friends and everyone’s got to recognize that.
Dr. Morse: That’s right. That’s right.
Trent: If we don’t do that for best friends, why does it matter for best friends who have sex, essentially?
Dr. Morse: In a sense, what genderless marriage is doing, see, what we’re doing is we’re redefining the institution of marriage to accommodate a gender neutral situation. We’re taking away everything that has to do with gender differentiation. When you do that, what you’re left with is a government registry of friendships because there’s no public purpose left to it anymore. The public purpose has been removed, replaced with private purposes. The other thing I think people need to see is in addition to these harms to children and our understanding of parenthood, the other thing that’s going to follow in the wake of redefining marriage is this, is that removing the gender requirement for marriage, part of the objective there is to remove all recognition of gender differentiation at all from the law and so mother and father is taken out of the law. Husband and wife is taken out of the law, as you noticed with your child’s birth certificate. Anything that looks like gender differentiation is being removed systematically from the law. That means that further what you might call gender bending type of legislation and type of social change is coming in the wake of the redefinition of marriage. You think about what do you need to believe in order to think that two men are the same as two women are the same as a man and a woman? You have to believe that men and women are completely interchangeable and that’s not true. That’s not true. If you take something that’s not true and try to put it into law and let that run all through the legal system, you’re going to do a lot of harm. You’re going to do a lot of damage that we’re not going to be able to easily predict today what all that’s going to look like.
Trent: Piggybacking off of that point about men and women being different, some people are going to say well, children just need two parents that love them, that mother and father, that doesn’t really matter having a man or a woman. It’s just having love is what children need. What research do we have? Do we have anything that shows that having mother and father in a child’s life really does make a difference more than just parents, genderless parents?
Dr. Morse: Well, you raised a number of issues there, Trent, because traditionally, the mother-father package has included the biogenetic connection between the children and the parents. It has included gender differentiation and it has included their physical and legal presence in the child’s life. All of that, when we talk about a married couple having children, all that’s one thing, so when you take it apart, you’re not always sure how you’re taking it apart. We have a number of studies that tell us that any two people is not good enough. The studies we have that tell us that are all about the situations of divorce and remarriage because in a divorce and remarriage, you’ve got a parent of both genders, but one of them’s not genetically related. If you ask well, are step families different from intact married couple families, the answer is yes, they are different. There’s a whole unique set of problems associated with the step families. When I say that, please understand I recognize that not every family has all of these problems, but I bet many families will recognize the problems when I mention the conflict of loyalties, the difficulty of disciplining. The stepdad quite often is asked to not be involved in discipline because mom thinks he doesn’t really understand and so on and so forth. The idea that two people who love each other and who love the child, that that’s all going to be enough, we already know that’s probably not true. We already know that. Now, as to studies of same-sex couples themselves, there have been about 50 such studies and many of them had serious methodological flaws to them, which include the most important one is that the samples of people were self-selected. In other words, people would go to gay newspapers or gay coffeehouses and say, “Would you like to volunteer to be part of our study of same-sex parenting?” And so the only people who are going to volunteer are going to be people who are going to basically say, people-
Trent: Well, our marriage is going well. Let’s do this study.
Dr. Morse: Ours is going fine. That’s right. Exactly. Exactly.
Trent: The people who might not be doing so well-
Dr. Morse: Are not going to volunteer because they understand the ramification. The other problem is that those studies typically look at the adults and ask the adults how is your child doing? Quite often, it’s just the parent. They don’t go ask the teachers, for example, how are they doing in school to get an objective measure. Those kinds of problems added to the fact of very small sample sizes make those studies problematic, very problematic. You could say yes, okay, this nice lady in Berkeley who got 50 of her friends to talk about their children, we’re very happy that your friends and their children are doing so nicely, but can we generalize from that? The answer is probably not. There’s no reason to think that we can generalize from that sample. There was a study done a couple of years ago that made a very conscientious attempt to deal with all of those problems. It got a large sample. They spent a lot of money gathering data, interviewing people, and they got people who were adults. They asked them about their parents’ living situation when they were kids. What they found is that if you looked at children whose parents had had a same-sex relationship sometime in their childhood, those adult children now reported substantially more problems of different kinds than the children who didn’t have that in their past. That study was by a professor named Mark Regnerus. That study was attacked. It was savaged. It was just savaged, but it was a very good study. As a matter of fact, it was quite a good study. It was the best study that we have. If his study is no good, none of those other studies are worth a dime because it was better than those. The very interesting attack that came on it was to say he looked at people who reported that one of their parents had had a same-sex relationship. Among those who reported that, many of them had instability within that relationship. What people said was yes, those kid had problems, but it was because of their parents’ divorce. It was because of the subsequent turnover in the relationship or the prior turnover in the relationship. That’s what the problem was, not same-sex parenting. You think about that and go well, there’s something to that, of course. We know that’s harmful. Then if you looked at the data, what you saw is that the people who had a same-sex relationship very, very few of them actually had the longterm, stable relationship that the gay lobby likes to talk about all the time. That case of the couple that gets together, stays together, never has any further change of partners or anything like that, there aren’t that many people doing it like that. There’s a lot of other churning that’s part of the relationship. That’s what we know right now about what’s likely to happen if we have a widespread acceptance of same-sex parenting.
Trent: Okay. I think this all, once again, is coming back to our central point, which is what marriage is, being this universal human institution uniting men and women to each other and the children they might create, that that’s important and we can’t change it. As we come to our close a little bit here, we’ve talked about marriage as this universal human institution, but we know as Catholics that the crisis has raised this human institution to the level of a sacrament, so how is Catholic marriage different from just this public policy view of marriage? What is the difference and some of the joys that come from that difference?
Dr. Morse: Well, in the old Baltimore Catechism, they ask you. I think one of the questions is what are the graces of the sacrament of matrimony? One of them is that you get the grace to bear patiently with your spouse’s faults, which I think is a very charming way of putting both a natural reality and a supernatural reality. The thing that’s inspiring about the Catholic view of marriage is that the Catholic Church teaches that marriage is a miniature cosmos. Our view of marriage reflects our view of the cosmos, so when we are united in marriage, that is a foretaste of the unification of Christ and His Church at the end of time. The joy and the ecstasy that we experience in marital union is something that is just a little taste of what we’re all going to feel when we’re united with Christ in Heaven. On the natural level, that helps us because we can know that it’s worth the problems that we’re putting up with. There are always these little irritations and problems. That’s natural because we’re all these crazy children of Adam and Eve, who lost their minds a long time ago. We lost our ability to be completely moral, so we’re difficult and it’s a challenge to live with another person like that. The knowledge that it’s a foretaste, it’s a sacramental foretaste of the cosmological end times, it inspires you to know that it’s worth the trouble. It’s worth the effort. That can be a huge thing, I think, in keeping your marriage together and keeping you working together as a team.
Trent: I guess my last question would be this. For those who are listening who are excited at the prospect of marriage or they’re in a marriage now whether it’s good or it’s having its problems, what are some practical tips you can give for those either preparing for marriage or who are married to have stronger, healthier marriages, to work towards that goal of lifelong unity and exclusivity? What can people do to have these really good marriages?
Dr. Morse: At the Ruth Institute, we have a book that we put together called 101 Tips for a Happier Marriage, which I coauthored with Betsy Kerekes and so that’s available at our website. That’s got a lot of helpful things in it. The very first tip that we have in that book is to say remember that God is God. You are not God. Your spouse is not God. The reason that’s so important is because a lot of times, we think that we’re entitled to have our own way happen because we know everything or we’re good, we’re best, or whatever. Oddly enough, at the same time that we expect our spouse to defer to us totally, we also expect our spouse to be God in that they love us completely, unconditionally. They know everything about what we need and want and they’re right there to take care of it for us. Well, you know, that’s not very realistic. It’s not a realistic expectation for yourself or for your spouse, so to have that very first concept in mind that God is God and you’re not, that’ll go a long way to helping.
Trent: Very good. Well, Dr. Morse, thank you so much for being here and speaking with us. How can people learn more about you and your work and to find resources related to what you do?
Dr. Morse: You can go to the Ruth Institute at ruthinstitute.org or you can like us on Facebook. We have a Ruth Institute Facebook page, too.
Nick Chamberlain: Thank you so much for listening to this episode of the Counsel of Trent. If you would like to support us in our mission here at the Counsel of Trent, please go to counseloftrent.com and become a monthly supporter. To learn more about me, Nick Chamberlain, please go to nccaudio.com and you can listen to the latest episode of the NCC Audio podcast. Thank you so much, everyone. God bless.