"Traditional Family Law: Connecting Marriage with Children" by Helen Alvaré

"...[T]he path of divorcing marriage from children—a path taken to its logical end by same-sex marriage—not only disadvantages children, but is already helping to effect troubling social divisions between the more and less privileged in the United States. The persistence of such divisions could begin to suggest, falsely, that the well-off and the poor, the more educated and the less educated, the majority and various minorities, do not share the same fundamental nature where marriage and parenting are concerned. Second, such a strategy would highlight the relatively recent willingness among scholars and lawmakers to come to grips with the fallout of “disestablishing” the interrelated goods of marriage and effective parenting, and to begin proposing reforms. This is not the time, therefore, to ignore or deny the robust empirical foundations of such reform efforts, via legally redefining “marriage” to exclude its intrinsic orientation to children. A brief look at our Supreme Court’s longstanding positions on the meaning of marriage (in this first of a two-part series), followed by a look at the whirlwind of family law developments from the 1970s to today (in the second part), will suffice to sketch the argument I am proposing."

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Hey, whaddayaknow? It's my 500th Post!!! Thank you. Really; You're too kind. ;)