On Friday in Maxwell Auditorium, Kay Hymowitz, a leading critic of contemporary marriage and child rearing and a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, laid out her claim that marriages are failing in America because parents are not raising children responsibly.
The lecture, followed by a question-and-answer session, was the last of the Maxwell School of Citizenship's State of Democracy Lecture Series. Hymowitz's speech, entitled "Marriage and Family American Style," focused on topics ranging from the role of the founding fathers in the construction of marriage as a public institution to the possible effects gay marriage could have on the institution.
Hymowitz spoke from her experiences raising her own children and was disgusted by the liberty that spouses have taken over the course of the past 40 years. She decried the fact that divorce has become a viable and acceptable answer to marriage conflicts.
Many married couples have forgotten their responsibility to raise children, Hymowitz said. She said that since the 1960s people have lost touch with the true meaning of parenthood and its connection to marriage. Between 1960 and 1980, divorce rates doubled, and the number of children born out of wedlock quadrupled, she said. This failure of marriage has become catastrophic and has led to the limiting of options for the children, she said.
"Overall, children born to families with two parents do better than those that aren't," Hymowitz said.
She said, however, that there are cases in which children from single-parent homes also succeed. Hymowitz included the hotly debated topic of gay marriage, which has gained a very large audience since President Bush's call for an amendment banning the marriage of two people of the same sex.
"The idea of gay marriage created a titanic clash between individual freedom and the social needs that define marriage," Hymowitz said. Marriage's main purpose, she said, is to socialize children.
To support her statement that marriage has weakened over the past 40 years, Hymowitz attacked the idea of gay marriage because she felt it could increase the gap between marriage and child rearing. The response against this idea in the question-and-answer session was resounding; hands soared all over the auditorium.
"Her argument turned vague, and she did not explain why gay marriage would undermine the institution of marriage," said Patrick Wilcox, a history graduate student. "There was no connection between American marriage and the institution."
"There is no one definition of marriage," said Debra Von Ausdale, an assistant professor of sociology at the Maxwell School "Hers is stunningly problematic."
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