“Marriage is an inherently negligent activity. It’s like owning a lion. The likelihood of someone getting hurt is very, very high.”
Those are some cynical words of wisdom from James Sexton, a divorce attorney who appears on an episode of “Soft White Underbelly,” a YouTube channel that’s otherwise devoted to chilling interviews with pimps, prostitutes, drug addicts, and other victims of abuse. Sexton explains his perspective of the sacred institution, colored by his front-row view of divorce, where he sees people at their worst, where husband and wife are “weaponized against each other,” and where the majority of marriages end in divorce. Love, in his view, has nothing to do with marriage, and it’s a failed, outdated technology.
Contrast that dark view with the new book by Conn Carroll, Sex and the Citizen: How the Assault on Marriage Is Destroying Democracy, which makes the case for why marriage is the singular foundation of Western civilization, how U.S. public policy (and society, writ large) has eroded it, the consequences that resulted, and what America can do to restore its place in society.
“The assault on marriage has been a disaster for the United States,” Carroll writes. “As a direct result of falling marriage rates, America is now more unequal, less socially mobile, more violent, more isolated, more polarized, and less able to project our way of life into the future. The very future of democracy is at stake.”
Carroll begins his book by tracing the emergence of marriage across three sexual
