Married parents are simply better than unmarried parents, or so David Cameron believes. It’s true that the number of married parents has dropped in the last decade from 68% to 62% and the rhetoric about saving the institution is particularly easy to churn out: few of us would say we didn’t “value commitment.” It’s also possible to find statistics that suggest children of co-habiting parents are more likely to end up in undesirable situations such as single-parent families, but we mustn’t be lead into the old trap of mistaking correlation for causation. Commitment and love are vital ingredients in a lasting family dynamic, and faithful couples often marry. Some co-habiting couples may remain unmarried because they lack this commitment, but this skews such statistics against the co-habiting couples that are dedicated and loving. A co-habiting couple may well be even more committed than married parents; they’ve simply chosen not to express it in the traditional manner.
We are all fully and painfully aware that a marriage bond is far from being a certain method of ensuring familial harmony. The state imposing this traditional model on co-habiting parents that have proven to have created a successful family dynamic (and may not agree with the contract or its host of connotations) would be at best pointless, and at worst potentially damaging. In short, if it ain’t broken Britain, don’t fix it. If, on the other hand, a co-habiting parent family is dysfunctional, it seems that cementing unsuitable partners in a more permanent fashion could simply exacerbate problems.
Marriage confers legal rights on property and childcare provisions, and in some cases these may safeguard vulnerable family members in the sad case of a divorce. In others, however, it could impede a couple’s ability to live on their own terms. Nick Clegg is a dangerously unpopular figure to invoke in an argument, but he hit the nail on the head when he argued that the government had no right to “encourage a particular family form.”
The decision to enter into a marriage bond should be made because of mutual love and respect. Cameron’s proposal to introduce a financial incentive is a moral corruption that lowers the institution he is endorsing to mercenary motives. His standpoint comes from the conservative idea that Britain’s social problems have arisen from degradation of the value of marriage – what could be more degrading than adding money to the equation? The Telegraph, too, aims to support the tax breaks by claiming rising divorce rates cost the UK £1bn each year, but this makes the idea to encourage more couples to rush prematurely into marriage seem rather self-defeating.
Loathe as I am to add an argument of cold, hard pragmatism to the debate, to extend these tax breaks to all married couples could cost the government an unaffordable £3.2 billion per year. Giving this money back to one sector of society is particularly unfair when others, such as the single parent families that would of course be exempt from the proposed breaks, are struggling to cope with cuts to tax credits and childcare support.
The right to get married is already an issue entangled in discrimination, and choosing to bestow benefits according to marital status simply exacerbates this inequity. Someone who subscribes to a religion that prohibits them from marrying or re-marrying would be barred from these tax breaks, and while these restrictions are not legally binding, the state-imposed ban on same-sex marriages is. Refusing a co-habiting homosexual couple’s right to marry, and then giving money to equally committed heterosexual couples is simple, outrageous, discrimination.
It is the strength of the relationships in any family that create a positive environment for nurturing a child, and these relationships can be loving and lasting regardless of whether a couple is married or co-habiting. One standard formula will not work for all families, and so demonising or rejecting other dynamics whilst corrupting the marriage bond with mercenary incentives is far beyond the government’s rights and fundamentally unfair.
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