Jennifer Roback Morse, Ph.D. is the founder and President of the Ruth Institute — a project of the National Organization for Marriage — which seeks to promote life-long married love to college students by creating an intellectual and social climate favorable to marriage.
She is also the Senior Research Fellow in Economics at the Acton Institute for the Study of Religion and Liberty.
She is the author of Smart Sex: Finding Life-long Love in a Hook-up World, (2005) and Love and Economics: Why the Laissez-Faire Family Doesn’t Work (2001), recently reissued in paperback, as Love and Economics: It Takes a Family to Raise a Village.
Dr. Morse served as a Research Fellow for Stanford University’s Hoover Institution from 1997-2005. She received her Ph.D. in economics from the University of Rochester in 1980 and spent a postdoctoral year at the University of Chicago during 1979-80. She taught economics at Yale University and George Mason University for 15 years.
The study of economics is anti-postmodern – there is objective truth independent of what people think
The study of economics believes in fixed principles of human nature
Economics studies the allocation of scarce resources that have alternative uses
Economics studies how people exchange resources
How both people who engage in a voluntary trade always believe that they will be better off
How both people who engage in a voluntary trade both benefit from the exchange
How incentives motivate people to act
Understanding supply and demand
Understanding how “free” government services are rationed
Understanding opportunity costs
How prices signal producers to produce more or less, and consumers to buy or not buy
Market-driven prices versus price controls
The role of substitution
The necessity of allowing failure in a free market
The requirements of economic growth:
private property
contracts
the profit motive
competition
free trade
entrepreneurship, creativity and innovation
the rule of law
If you want to learn more about basic economics, I recommend picking up a book or two by Thomas Sowell – the first book I usually give away is “Intellectuals and Society”, and then next “Basic Economics”.
Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse defends marriage at Columbia University in this short hour-long exchange. This is your chance to hear how anti-child advocates of same-sex marriage really are. And Dr. J links SSM to unilateral divorce at the end of the Q&A, too. Awesome! This debate really needed to go for twice the time, and I look forward to hearing MORE debates from Dr. J.
Details:
Columbia University’s Federalist Society hosts a debate between Dr J and Professor Katherine Franke based on the question “Is Marriage Equality Possible?” About an hour of audio includes opening position (Dr J), arguments (Prof. Franke), and rebuttal (Dr J), as well as a brief question-and-answer period.
1) same-sex marriage is not the equivalent of traditional marriage
2) if we legislate that they are equal, then we are really redefining marriage by changing the essential purpose of marriage
A case study from Ireland:
a known sperm donor for a lesbian couple was excluded from having a relationship with the child he conceived
after the child was born, the sperm donor wanted regular contact with the child, but the women opposed giving him access
same-sex marriage requires that courts are able to assign parental rights instead of having rights assigned biologically, as with traditional marriage
That is why SSM is different from TM
What is the purpose of marriage?
Marriage is about attaching mothers and fathers to children, and mothers and fathers to one another
Children are born helpless from two opposite-sex parents and they need parental guidance and care during development
In TM, there is no third party needed in order to have a child
In TM, the biological parents have rights and responsibilities for the child
TM is about providing the child with justice
Every child is entitled a relationship to both biological parents, and is entitled to care, protection and nourishment from both parents, and every child is entitled to a stable family environment
the problem is that children don’t have standing to sue for these rights in court
so the purpose of marriage is that we have a social construct to provide these rights to children naturally, without the state having to intervene
The purpose of marriage according to SSM?
In SSM, the essential child-centered purpose marriage is replaced with new purposes like pooling resources and having same-sex couples recognized by society
SSM redefines marriage in four ways:
it diminishes the entitlement of children to a relationship with both biological parents
it diminishes the identification of parental roles with biology
it requires the state to determine parental relationships, instead of recognizing biological parents
it enshrines the idea that mothers and fathers are interchangeable, that children don’t really need mothers AND fathers
Dr. Franke’s opening speech (20 min.)
Hard cases make bad law 1: the presumption of paternity
consider the case where a mother is married and has an affair resulting in a child
the Supreme Court has ruled that the father of the child has no right of contact
this is a case where marriage gets in the way of biological parents having a relationship with the child
so it can be the case where marriage is in conflict with the relationships to biological parents
Hard cases make bad law 2: the purpose of marriage can be changed
marriages was used to keep peace between families and communities
marriage used to be about trading and trafficking of women
so the concern for offspring was not always the greatest concern
TM and SSM are both equally able to create stability for children:
same-sex unions are just as stable for children as TM marriages
Same-sex unions do provide justice for the child:
giving the adults in same-sex couples the social recognition that opposite sex married couples have is good for children
Children can sue in court
children can use guardians to sue their parents in court to get their rights
Opposing SSM is racism
opposing same-sex marriage is equivalent to racism
we could abolish marriage completely and let individuals form private contracts, then the state would really be neutral on marriage
Dr. J’s rebuttal speech (5 min.)
The state cannot be neutral on marriage
what the deinstutionalization of marriage means is that the private contracts are made by adults and children will have no consideration in those contracts
Regarding the adultery case
the presumption of paternity is there to protect the marriage
such borderline cases almost never happen with TM, whereas in SSM these third party problems occur in 100% of the cases
Children are not happy being separated from their biological parents
adults do not have a right to exclude a child’s biological parents from having a relationship with them, and children are often not happy being excluded from their biological parents
Here’s a quick bio of the person who is in the image above:
Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse, Senior Fellow in Economics at the Acton Institute and regular contributor toNational Review Online and The National Catholic Register, received her Ph.D. in economics from the University of Rochester. Until recently, she was a Research Fellow at the Hoover Institution. She has been on the faculty of Yale University and George Mason University, and is the author of Love and Economics: Why the Laissez-Faire Family doesn’t work.
And here are two lectures from the great Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse. One of my favorite scholars to listen to, and a great debater, as well.
Lecture one: Love and Economics
(June 13, 2014) Dr J traveled to Phoenix to participate in Alliance Defending Freedom’s Blackstone Legal Fellowship, where she gave two talks. This is the first one, “Love and Economics,” on what marriage is and why we need it–stay tuned for the next one!
(June 13, 2014) Dr J traveled to Phoenix to participate in Alliance Defending Freedom’s Blackstone Legal Fellowship, where she gave two talks. This is the second one, “Defending Marriage,” on why marriage matters and what has happened and will happen as it gets more and more redefined by the progress of the sexual revolution.
I was listening to these late at night, and when she said “you know Catholics aren’t good with Bible verses” at the beginning of lecture two, I howled with laughter. I’m sure the property manager is going to let me know not to howl with laughter after midnight. Oh well – it was hilarious. She is Catholic. I howled again when made a comment about chaste people over the age of 30, like me. It’s just FUN to listen to, but these are serious subjects.
By the way, she debates on these issues as well. And she’s really good at it.
Or something to read?
For those who prefer to read something, here is an article by marriage-defender Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse about how divorce courts challenge marriage.
Excerpt:
Easy divorce opens the door for an unprecedented amount of government intrusion into ordinary people’s lives. This unacknowledged reality is the subject of Taken Into Custody, by Stephen Baskerville. With penetrating insight, the political scientist exposes the truly breathtaking consequences of no-fault divorce for the expansion of state power and the decline of personal autonomy.
First, no-fault divorce frequently means unilateral divorce: one party wants a divorce against the wishes of the other, who wants to stay married. Kim Basinger dumped Baldwin for no particular reason, unleashed the power of the Los Angeles Family Court system to inflict pain on him and, in the process, inflicted untold damage on their child. Second, the fact that one party wants to remain married means that the divorce has to be enforced. Baldwin wanted to stay married and to continue to be a husband and father. Yet, the coercive and intrusive machinery of the state must be wheeled into action to separate the reluctantly divorced party from the joint assets of the marriage, typically the home and the children.
Third, enforcing the divorce means an unprecedented blurring of the boundaries between public and private life. People under the jurisdiction of family courts can have virtually all of their private lives subject to its scrutiny. If the courts are influenced by feminist ideology, that ideology can extend its reach into every bedroom and kitchen in America. Baldwin ran the gauntlet of divorce industry professionals who have been deeply influenced by the feminist presumptions that the man is always at fault and the woman is always a victim. Thus, the social experiment of no-fault divorce, which most Americans thought was supposed to increase personal liberty, has had the consequence of empowering the state.
Some might think the legacy of no-fault divorce is an example of the law of unintended consequences in operation. That assumes its architects did not intend for unilateral divorce to result in the expansion of the state. But Baskerville makes the case in this book—as well as his 2008 monograph, “The Dangerous Rise of Sexual Politics,” in The Family in America—that at least some of the advocates of changes in family law certainly have intended to expand the power of the state over the private lives of law-abiding citizens.
It’s important for people to understand the real reasons why people are not getting married, so that we can do something to encourage them to marry that really fixes the problem. If you don’t understand the threats that men are seeing with respect to marriage, it might be a good idea to take a look at this essay by Stephen Baskerville, hosted by the Christian Touchstone magazine. It’s a summary of the book that Dr. Morse reviewed. I consider that book “Taken Into Custody” to be a must-read for anyone contemplating marriage.
WINTERY KNIGHT 