Close Relationship Theory

By Russell Shaw
Herald Columnist
(From the issue of 9/8/05)

If you aren't worrying about close relationship theory, it may be time to start. Although not widely known outside academe, this movement in a remarkably short time has become the intellectual dynamo driving the campaign to legitimize same-sex relationships and cohabitation at the expense of marriage. Evidence of its inroads is everywhere visible in the media and the legal sector.

The shocking impact of this little-known academic school is a central finding of an illuminating new study, The Future of Family Law, whose "principal investigator" was Dr. Dan Cere of McGill University in Montreal. It was produced by Cere's Council on Family Law with the support of three other pro-family groups—the Institute for American Values, the Institute for Marriage and Public Policy and the Institute for the Study of Marriage, Law and Culture.

(For information: The Institute for American Values, 1841 Broadway, Suite 211, New York, NY 10023; info@americanvalues.org.)

Explaining how "close relationship" thinking has become a serious competitor to traditional thinking about marriage, Cere writes:

"In this new view, marriage is seen primarily as a private relationship between two people, the primary purpose of which is to satisfy the adults who enter into it. Marriage is about the couple. If children arise from the union, that may be nice, but marriage and children are not really connected."

Cere doesn't mention it, and it's outside the scope of his study anyway, but this movement away from a child-centered view of marriage to a couple-centered view has been at work for years in the efforts of some theologians and theological propagandists to unseat procreation as the primary purpose of marriage and replace it with "love."

As a secular academic discipline, close relationship theory arose in the 1980s, mainly among some psychologists and sociologists. It has spawned a couple of professional associations and two major journals as well as books and articles. As everyone familiar with current media treatments of marriage will have observed, it also has influenced popular discourse on the subject.

But it's in the area of law that this thinking is having its chief impact, as in recent U.S. and Canadian court rulings—followed, in Canada, by disastrous national legislation. Earlier, influential reports published in 2002 and 2001 respectively by the American Law Institute and the Law Commission of Canada embody the new vision of marriage.

As matters stand, Cere contends, family law now is headed in one or more of four troubling directions: the legal "equivalence" of marriage and cohabitation; the redefinition of marriage as a "couple-centered bond" in order to oblige same-sex couples; "disestablishment"—a hands-off approach by government that disavows its traditional interest in the protection of children; and a move away from recognizing only two-person relationships as marriages.

"What is missing in new proposals in family law," Cere writes, "is any real understanding of the central role of marriage as a social institution in protecting the well-being of children....Further fragmentation of parenthood means further fragmented lives for a new generation of children who will be jostled around by increasingly complex adult claims."

Exaggerated emphasis on individual rights, central to the ideology of secularized liberal democracy for many years, now supplies the context for these developments. What is astonishing nevertheless is the rapidity with which close relationship theorists, capitalizing on this situation, have pressed their views as the conceptual matrix for transforming family law from a protector of marriage to, in Cere's words, "something close to its antagonist." The message to society is clear: Hurry up and slow down before it's too late.

Copyright ©2005 Arlington Catholic Herald.  All rights reserved.