Family Attorney

California voters recently passed Proposition 22, which says that only marriages between men and women are officially recognized, and yet the state legislature already extends some benefits to domestic partnerships. In December, the Vermont Supreme Court ruled pretty much the same thing: gay couples cannot be deprived of the legal benefits enjoyed by married heterosexuals. In both cases, the usual brigade of talking heads bobbed across my television screen screaming that these cases constituted an assault on marriage.

I’ll say. This is what marriage has come to? A bunch of pension rollover deferments, tax loopholes and health-care portability abatements? Now, I’m a straight first-time husband with two legitimate kids, and according to America’s family-values czar, the thrice-married Representative Bob Barr of Georgia, my love-laced nest is the source of all that is good and true in this world (where are my royalties?) and is now under siege. I happen to think Barr is right. But it’s not gay folks I’m worried about; it’s Adam Smith. Increasingly, marriage is being recast as just another budget item in everyone’s personal finance portfolio.

The House just passed a bill reducing the ‘’marriage tax penalty.'’ Prenuptial agreements were once optional instruments for multimillionaires; now legal Web sites instruct us that ‘’every couple should and must have a prenuptial agreement or marriage contract.'’

In our pop culture, the wife or husband as economic object is now a routine Hollywood plot device. Ever since ‘’Indecent Proposal,'’ that consumerist reworking of the fabled droit du seigneur, and all the way up to the recent ‘’The Bachelor'’ (Chris O’Donnell must marry somebody by a certain date or lose the big inheritance), the message is clear: next to money, romance is second-rate bunk. Must I mention Rick Rockwell and ‘’Who Wants to Marry a Multimillionaire?'’ At one point the show’s proposed host was none other than Marla Maples.

Increasingly, marriage is being converted into a neo-feudal property arrangement for the Nasdaq gentry. Even dating these days is understood as little more than the discovery period before the big merger. WB’s new dating show, ‘’Change of Heart,'’ arranges for a boy or girl who is going out with someone to date someone else and then come on the show to discuss the two before deciding between them. You may recognize this process. It’s called comparison shopping.

What is happening to marriage is the culmination of the market’s radical reshaping of the culture at large. The invisible hand is tearing away the ideals that once held together most of our institutions. Hospitals used to operate under some unwritten notion of altruism. Now patients are ‘’health care consumers'’ told to shop among various doctors or ‘’gatekeepers'’ whose new duties include monitoring the flow of gross costs.

Schools are also undergoing a similar metaphorical shift with a customer-clerk relationship replacing the old student-teacher one. The Dewey principle of public education for all? Let ‘em eat vouchers. Even churches have hired market consultants, and now the surging congregations out West gather in huge warehouse temples selling spirituality the way Home Depot moves precut lumber. It makes sense that love would go the same way – just another failed ideology, like communism, collapsing in the path of the market’s indiscriminate force to lay bare the economic decision at the core.

According to the academics, this is where marriage began. Feudal dads chose their children’s spouses to upwardly mobilize themselves. Romantic passion is said to be a cultural construction that dates from the 12th-century poetic tradition of courtly love and developed into a new ideal of romance in the court of Eleanor of Aquitaine. Then, the story goes, the growing humanism of the Renaissance and the Industrial Age emancipated men and women to become wild romantic honeys – like Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald or Nick and Nora Charles.

I’ve never bought this stuff. Maybe that’s how it developed for some Burgundian merchant class. But I spent four college years with my face in a Lewis & Short dictionary translating Latin. Horace’s Pyrrha, Catullus’s Lesbia. Trust me, romantic love predated the French

Source : query.nytimes.com