Ed Miliband and Justine Thornton

KATHERYN GALLANT writes:

Your post “Marriage Continues Its Downward Slide” has an interesting echo in current events in Britain. The new leader of the Labour Party, Ed Miliband, is 40 years old and the father of a 15-month-old son, but is not married to the child’s mother, a barrister named Justine Thornton, who is expecting another child in November. Mr. Miliband is not a practicing Christian (he was brought up in a secular Jewish home: his father was a noted Marxist scholar) and considers himself an atheist (see the Wikipedia entry on him), and seems to consider “getting around to marriage” with his long-time partner perfectly all right. When “asked whether the state should promote marriage, [Miliband] admitted that given that he had not married, he could hardly tell other people to do so.” 

The article from The Guardian continues: 

Nor does it quite wash for a politician to use the usual sort of retort – that it’s just a piece of paper. That is premised on a vision of privatisation of personal life that sits very oddly with a man whose life is framed around a belief in the collective – that we make our lives in constant interaction with others and that the role of the state is fundamental in ordering this. The fact is that Miliband cares little for the public symbolism of collective recognition of private decisions. Yet he will be expected to show proper appreciation of the ceremonies of national symbolism – at the Cenotaph, for example, on Remembrance Day. Can you do one without a bit of the other?

Laura writes:

Madeleine Bunting of The Guardian does a nice job of getting at Miliband’s snobbery and hypocrisy. She writes that it may hurt him politically:

What’s really at stake here is not a few details about his family life but an accumulation of characteristics that speak to the cliche of a metropolitan liberal elite. It’s part of why the Blairs came to be so distrusted and Miliband will have to work hard to head off the damage that some of these associations could generate.

It takes stubborn obliviousness for a major politican in Britain, with its rapid devolution into a land of social chaos, to express such scorn for the convention of marriage. Miliband either lives in a bubble or actually wishes more chaos on his country, perhaps because he finds it exciting. America is not as far along. (Fifty percent of British children are born out of wedlock.) It would be difficult for a major political figure in this country to get away with this now, but we’re getting there and this is no longer unimaginable. It really is a turning point when unmarried couples appear at the top and even if, among the elite, most couples are married, the phenomenon is extremely significant. The impact is felt mostly at the bottom.

                                                     — Comments —

Mark writes:

Kathryn provided the following quote from the Guardian piece: 

Nor does it quite wash for a politician to use the usual sort of retort – that it’s just a piece of paper. That is premised on a vision of privatisation of personal life that sits very oddly with a man whose life is framed around a belief in the collective – that we make our lives in constant interaction with others and that the role of the state is fundamental in ordering this. 

Exactly! Why isn’t this clear hypocrisy pointed out more often? 

I remember 10 years ago having a discussion with a female law student, a feminist, and somehow the conversation came around to “common-law marriage” — the Canadian term for shackin’ up, without that meddlesome “piece of paper.” Now I don’t know about the law in the U.S., but in Canada you are pretty much recognized by the state as married even if you haven’t gone through the legal ceremony and obtained appropriate documentation. You qualify for the same tax credits as a married couple would, that is, you can declare jointly, etc. So, for those of us who are married (in the traditional sense), our little “piece of paper” means nothing in the eyes of the state. 

So, I asked the future lawyer the following hypothetical question. Say a common-law couple has children and property together. Then, one day, they decide to split up. No marriage, so no divorce, right? But wait, life aint that simple. What if neither wants to give up the children? Or what if there is a dispute over the property? Would the state then be expected to step in and adjudicate between them? 

She replied, “Of course, why not?” 

To which I pointed out the absurdity of these people demanding to have it both ways. In refusing to sign a piece of paper, they show contempt for the idea of any sort of legal covenant — without which all social arrangements are doomed. And yet, when things fall apart, the same state that they’ve said has no business dictating anything to them regarding their living arrangements is expected to come in and make everything nice and legal, establish boundaries, render judgments, and generally ensure that everything is nicely delineated on what is, after all, “just a piece of paper.” 

Needless to say, the law-school lassie didn’t see my point.

Michael S. writes:

Those two people don’t look like “elite” anything.

Brittany writes:

I am not against marriage and more couples need to marry but at least this man is there for his woman and child. Who knows, maybe one day they will marry. This couple is not married but to me there is a difference between an unmarried couple that are both there for the kid and someone like P Diddy who has six kids by five different women.

Phantom Blogger writes:

Brittany writes, This couple is not married but to me there is a difference between an umarried couple that are both there for the kid and someone like P Diddy who has six kids by five different women.”

 Obviously there is a difference between the two, but this doesn’t mean that we have to compliment either of them. The fact that one is better than (or should I say not as bad as) the other, doesn’t imply that the least morally grievous one deserves credit for something that should be his obvious societal duty to do in the first place. The mentality of seeing the good in peoples vices, just because there are worse vices they could be committing, is a dangerous phenomenon, that breeds yet more amorality.

Laura writes:

Excellent point. The same skewed logic was at work when Bristol Palin was hailed because she did not get an abortion. It’s true that an abortion would have been much worse, but she should have been married and, if she was not, her mother should have declined to place her in the limelight. The Palins have made single motherhood more glamorous just as Ed Miliband will do for the permanently unwed.

Brittany writes:

Maybe I am not as judgmental when it comes to cohabitating couples because my parents cohabitated the first few years of my life and it didn’t mess me up.

Laura writes:

You are not less judgmental; you are simply making different judgments.

Some people smoke two packs a cigarettes a day and never get cancer. That doesn’t prove that cigarette smoking is healthy. Similarly, the fact that some people stay together and raise decent families while (or after) cohabitating doesn’t lessen the disastrous effects for many children of the decline in monogamy. Numerous studies show that unwed unions are less stable.

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