Shari Motro: “Singles' rights advocates face an uphill battle because their demands for equality are easily mistaken for anti-marriage assaults. Furthermore, because most Americans, myself included, believe that marriage provides a valuable social framework, many are quick to dismiss challenges to marriage-based benefits as a threat to the institution. Though well intentioned, this impulse makes no sense in the face of current realities.”
I have no problem with the "most" in that paragraph, but the "many" is a little vague. Also, any use of the phrase "common sense" (later on in the article) in a sentence makes my right brow reflexively furrow. Also, there's no mention of the stigma associated with being eternally single—in the "not dating anybody at all" sense—in a world which values coupled—at the very least—units.
Laura Kipnis: “you can also see why conservatives might be getting nervous about the marriage issue. According to the historian Nancy Cott, marriage has long provided a metaphor for citizenship. Both are vow-making enterprises; both involve a degree of romance. Households are like small governments, and in this metaphor, divorce is a form of revolution — at least an overthrow. (Recall that our nation was founded on a rather stormy collective divorce itself, the one from England.) Come November, how many of the disaffected might start wondering if they'd be better off with a different partner? How many will find themselves murmuring those difficult, sometimes necessary (and occasionally liberating) words: "I want a divorce"?”
Daniel Drezner calls bullshit on some of Kipnis' stats as well as the Fukuyama citation.
Dorothy A. Brown: “The politics of tax law are always complicated, of course, but there is no denying that more "traditional" families receive better treatment under the tax code. The marriage bonus is greatest when only one person in a household works outside the home. The marriage penalty is greatest when both husband and wife have jobs and earn roughly equal amounts.”
I love how the last paragraph of the last one doesn't preach in moral terms, but rather appeals to Bush's self (which is to say electoral) interest.
