NORMS REQUIRE STIGMAS: Letter to MarriageMovement.org

I don't think it's really possible to support "regular" mother/father families without stigmatizing other types of families, whether single-mother or same-sex parent. I myself am of single mother of the least stigmatized sort--i.e., a widow--but both my child (now grown) and I have had to cope with some fairly insensitive comments and remarks over the years.

Just one example: my daughter came home from grade school one day, about a year after her father had died, and asked me whether she was an orphan. The reason? A group of girls had surrounded her on the playground at recess time and pelted her with Pepperidge Farm Goldfish crackers, while chanting, "Orphan! Orphan!" This was, by the way, at an expensive private school. ...

Now, it may be that the goal of getting and keeping mothers and fathers married to each other is so important that the rest of us just have to bear with odious comparisons. That a stigma exists does not, per se, mean that it must be abolished. The cost of abolishing it, and treating all arrangements alike, may just be too great for society as a whole. That's a social science question that I don't feel qualified to answer. I do think, however, that you're being too optimistic in thinking that society can single out marriage for special support while simultaneously not stigmatizing other arrangements. Call one arrangement special--heck, call it "regular" or "normal"--and other arrangements--and the participants therein--will automatically be viewed as inferior.

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[Eve: I guess I don't see what the alternative is, though. The alternative to acknowledging that some family forms are better than others--and encouraging the better ones while discouraging the worse ones, when that's possible--is pretending that all forms, and all decisions by parents, are equal. This hurts children in two ways: First, by making it more likely that they will grow up in bad situations, and second, by telling them that there is no basis for their pain and their sense that the family has been broken or only half-formed. Kids who feel pain when their family situations are lousy are right, and they shouldn't be told that they're being unreasonable in hopes that this will make them feel better.

[(Specifically, since the woman writing to Elizabeth Marquardt here is a widow, I don't see how it would help--or whom it would help--to say that being widowed is no worse than not being widowed.) People will definitely be jerks to you about any pain you have in your life, because people are very messed-up. But I don't think you can assuage that pain by rawly asserting that all family forms and situations are equally good.

[I don't think this letter-writer is advocating that--I get the impression she's just thinking out loud, presenting a problem, not advocating a particular stance. But I don't think there's a solution to the problem she presents. Even if all us family-policy-interested people did rawly assert that all family forms are equally good, kids would still be little monsters and semi-well-meaning Lady Bountifuls would still make insensitive comments. And now I'll shut my yap.]
posted by Eve at 10:49 PM VOTE

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