 Well, good afternoon. Welcome to this inaugural event in our family forum series. It's a privilege to see all of you here. Thank you very much for coming. My name is John Whitty. I serve as director of the Center for the Interdisciplinary Study of Religion, the sponsor of today's event. The Center is established to sponsor advanced research and publications and public discussion of cutting-edge themes in law, religion, society, and politics. This year we have embarked on a major three-year project on the study of children and religion, and one feature of this project is this family forum series for blue ribbon lectures and panel discussions with some of the world's best experts on cutting-edge themes of law, religion, and society involving children. The leader of our family forum series is Professor Martin E. Marty, the Robert W. Woodruff visiting professor of interdisciplinary religious studies at Emory University and co-director with me of our project on children. It is always a very humbling experience to read Professor Marty's resume. He is the Fairfax M. Cohn Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus at the University of Chicago. He is the author of 50-plus books, the editor of 20-plus books, the author of several thousand scholarly articles short and long. He is a leader of a variety of different fields, but a public intellectual par excellence. He has served as president of the American Academy of Religion, president of the American Society of Church History, president of the American Catholic Association. He has received some 75 honorary doctorates. He has received thousands of scholarly citations and awards from learned societies, universities, and colleges throughout the world. He has won the National Humanities Medal, the National Book Award, and many other distinguished citations. Time Magazine calls Martin Marty the leading interpreter of religion in our time, and we could not find a better person to lead us in our family forum series on religion and children, and to moderate and introduce today's panel discussion. Would you please join me with a robust round of applause welcoming Professor Martin Marty. Thank you, John Whitty. Thank you. And we could not possibly have found two better people to lead us off in this first of the family forum series, and I'm going to get off stage as quickly as possible because all this ends at 1.19 and 59 seconds. First we will hear from Professor Martha Feynman, who will be joining the faculty here as the Robert W. Woodruff Professor of Law. Emory Law School already has bragging rights to you. There's a nice little booklet saying you're coming. Professor Feynman will be here in January on a permanent basis from Cornell Law School where she's taught for the last several years in the first endowed chair in feminist jurisprudence in the U.S. She's taught at the University of Wisconsin, briefly at the University of Northwestern and at Columbia before the Cornell and of course the climax of her career coming up at Emory. Her books have inspired a great deal of revision in the study of family and marriage and now forthcoming on the child. A title of a anthology in which she's contributing pretty well poses the kind of field we're on today. Anita Bernstein is doing it here. It's called For and Against Marriage, Strategies to Critique, Defend, Reform, and Apprise a Venerable Legal Category. And the other titles of her major books are The Illusion of Equality, The Rhetoric and Reality of Divorce Reform, The Nutered Mother, The Sexual Family, and Other 20th Century Tragedies, and The Autonomy Myth, A Theory of Dependency. Don Browning is the Alexander Campbell Distinguished Service Professor of Religious Ethics and Social Sciences Emeritus as am I at the University of Chicago. He retired in 2002 from there and has put most of his energies into projects including one on the marriage, sexuality, and the family theme here at this place. He taught at the University of Chicago most of those 40 years and his career took a kind of interesting turn around the 1990s when he got a large grant started to do religion, culture, and the family. When Don Browning does the project it ends up with dozens of books and that's exactly what has come out of that project. And one television program called Marriage is a Just a Piece of Paper. Perhaps his most substantial work recognized across the disciplines is a book called a Fundamental Practical Theology. Checking his bibliography I noticed that 10 books have come out in one series on Marriage and the Family and five in another. And almost everything he's written since 1991 and that's a great deal as do with marriage and the family and that is going to be his part of the contribution this afternoon. Professor Feynman please greet her. Well I want to thank you. I'm really pleased to be here and very pleased to be joining the Emory faculty in January. I can't wait. What I want to talk to you about today is families and particularly families in regard to the care of children. We depend on families to care for children in our society. In America families are the way that we privatize dependency and historically the term family at least in the common law was assumed to be synonymous with the traditional unit husband and wife and their biological children that constituted the family. Defined initially through religious precepts in ecclesiastical courts in England this traditional family had certain characteristics. It was based on the primary connection of marriage the legal jointer of man with wife. It was presumed to be a lifelong commitment and the sexes had distinct and well defined gendered roles to play. Husbands were economic providers, disciplinarians and the heads of families. Wives were nurturers, caretakers and subservient to their husbands. This version of the family is in decline in all but political and religious rhetoric. Reshaped by three significant and I contend irreversible revolutions that shook traditional American society during the 20th century the family has been reformed. The no fault divorce revolution had an impact on the idea of family as a lifelong marriage as a lifelong commitment. The gender equality revolution changed the way that we think about women's roles in and outside of the family and the sexual revolution decoupled sex from marriage. Married couples living with their biological children represented less than a quarter of the family units described in the most recent census data. It seems we are surrounded by new different types of family, many of them raising children. And how have our politicians and policy makers responded to these challenges that the new family forms present? How have they acted to ensure that the needs of our nation's children are adequately met regardless of the form of their families? The answer of course is that our politicians and policy makers have responded mostly with cynical and doomed to be ineffective appeals for the resurrection of the traditional family. Marriage is our primary family policy in the United States. Beginning with an insistence that the marriage of their parents will cure most if not all the disadvantages children suffer and pandering to a conservative view of things, politicians resort to the traditional family as the panacea. From poverty to school attendance, from crime to teen pregnancy, the culprit is assumed to be the crisis in the family, the crisis defined by never married motherhood and single married a single motherhood as the result of divorce. The projected needs and well-being of children are the rhetorical engines that drive much of this rhetoric. Children represent the future and we are told that the marital family is essential to that future. The marital family is a foundational institution, the cradle of civilization, that which teaches children standards of personal conduct that cannot be reinforced by law but which are indispensable traits for democratic citizenship. Now critics of the current situation in regard to families need, it seems to me, to be reminded that the term family is susceptible to a variety of definitions, not just the one that's historically preferred by one legal tradition. The very use of the term breakdown to epitomize changes in family structures indicates that what we're talking about here is an ideologically driven analysis. In fact, the critics of current family forms could choose another less loaded word such as transformation or evolution to talk about changes in family form. Using breakdown to describe changes in patterns of intimate behavior is manipulative. It generates in the minds of the listeners a sense that there is in fact a societal crisis. In this way, critics take demographic information and transform this information into a societal problem, a problem that's inherent in the very language that they use to discuss it. It seems to me, for those concerned with children in today's world, that the question should not be how we can resuscitate marriage and thus save society and the family, but how we can support all individuals who create intimate family relationships regardless of the form. Of particular importance, of course, is the caretaking tasks that we expect families to perform. Children are being cared for in the elderly and ill are also being sustained and nurtured within a variety of family forms. Changes in family form might present some problems for these dependents. And what we should be asking is not how we reestablish marriage, but what institutional and other adjustments are necessary in order to help existing families address their needs. Excessive focus on marriage and deviant family form ignores such questions. In fact, an emphasis on the decline of two-parent families has operated to eclipse concern about societal and economic forces that are truly destructive to families and to children within those families. A focus on marriage narrows our attention to and fosters the belief that marriage is unique, essential to the success and future of the family. It does so without a discussion of some of the problems inherent in that position, inherent in privileging marriage as an institution. For example, resort to marriage as a universal cure-all fails to confront the fact that marriage is and always has been an exclusionary institution. Until the Civil War, after the Civil War, African Americans were enslaved and were not allowed to marry. Until well into the second half of the 20th century, white Americans were prohibited from marrying members of a different race in many states. In spite of some court and legislative victories that confer some of the same rights and benefits on them, gay men and lesbians are still precluded from marrying partners of the same sex in all states and federal law. Attention to marriage is also narrowing in that it focuses us on individuals and individual lack of moral direction as the source of the problems we and our children face. There is little hospitable space then left for claims that society is complicit in the problems associated with the decline of marriage, child poverty, crime, and so on. There's little space left for the idea that there should be a collective responsibility for children in our society. Nor is there much attention to how changes in non-family institutions, particularly the market and global capitalism, have affected the family or civic health in general. Families may be viewed as independent of the state and market, and we often view them that way, but it cannot be said that they are unaffected by the state and by the market. This should be a significant insight that the family is influenced by the institutions around it, but it seems to be mostly ignored, perhaps because such an insight is actually threatening to our existing patterns of privilege. What would be the implications for our system if we were to recognize that the policies and practices of both the state and the market actually shape the possibilities of many families and parents, that it's far more than the marital status of the parents that determines the material circumstance and well-being of families? What do we have to do if we came to terms with the fact that it is the moral state of the family and individuals within the family that reflect and profoundly are affected by the moral state of the nation and its institutions? I want to come back to that question, but before I do, I want to term briefly to examine the work of William Galston, who was a very influential policy advisor to both President Clinton and Vice President Gore, and continues to be an important theoretician in regard to families. I want to look at Galston's work to begin to untangle individual moral objections to the non-nuclear family form from arguments asserting that there are harmful consequences to children that are raised in non-marital families. Galston made a liberal democratic case for the two-parent family in a widely quoted article in the response of community, and he has a book that appeared subsequent to this. He begins his arguments by positing that the family is in fact a moral unit that makes a quote, irreplaceable contribution to the creation of citizens, possessing the virtues necessary for a liberal democracy, so the marital family becomes, again, the foundation of society. He ties together morality and family, and this is followed by a reference to a Washington Post article reporting on a nationwide inquiry into the public mood. Now, William Galston is of course a secularist, and he doesn't use religious imagery as the basis of his arguments for morality, although they might be in the background. So he turns instead to public opinion on this is the acceptable way to measure morality in a democracy to show what he wants to assert as moral decline. And he uses poll data then to conclude that the public believes that America is in the grip of moral decay. That's his term. Further, he reports a consensus that this moral decay is related to the quote breakdown of the family. Galston then cites statistics on divorce and nonmarital motherhood, and he offers this as hard evidence for these public perceptions about the decline in morality. Now, in looking at this, the connection between opinion data and conclusions about the moral state of America, I note initially that it seems there's something counterintuitive and perhaps even confusing about this, a Galston argument. If divorce and single motherhood are evidences of moral decline, and it is also true, as it is, that the divorce rate continues to hover around 50% and never married motherhood is on the rise, then a significant number of those that were responding to this and to other polls about the state of America's moral health must be agreeing that their own behavior is an indication of moral decline, that they themselves or at least their behavior is immoral. Now, aside from that observation, which I think complicates Galston's position, there are other problems, of course, with poll data. Ambiguity, the problems associated with self-reporting, and one might observe that data, that's poll should not be used to definitively suggest anything about morality and public opinion. The map of the public mind is too uncharted to support this kind of construction of the moral family. There's another problem with morality, using morality, however, for the basis for the kinds of reforms that Galston suggests, and as a liberal political theorist, Galston also notes this. So he doesn't rest his arguments for increased regulation of the family to favor marriage on public definitions of morality alone, rather recognizing that there is in a liberal democracy, like the United States, dedication to a wide sphere of individual freedom that would stand against public morality. He concludes that state action must be justified in the light of widely shared public purposes and that we have to vigilantly guard the line between personal moral preferences and public purposes. So he has to find some public basis for support of marriage as an institution. What he does then is to find the arguments, the secular non-moral arguments for marriage and support for the marital family in the consequences, both monetary and non-monetary consequences, non-economic consequences of single parenting. In other words, he turns to the harm to children when they are raised in single-parent homes. The economic effects, of course, of being raised in the single-parent home are well documented. Single parent families are generally poorer than two parent families, but it does not follow, as Galston suggests, that it is no exaggeration to say that the best anti-poverty programs for children are a stable, intact family. That's his conclusion. One must wonder if he is unaware of the many poor working two-parent families in the United States. While having two parents may increase the likelihood that a child will not starve, it certainly does not guarantee it. Therefore, to label the intact family as, quote, the best program to prevent childhood poverty seems glib and also insignificant and insufficient without considering how that family must be supplemented. Of course, if the problems confronting children were only economic, one response to Galston would be obvious. Transfer monetary resources to the child-rearing unit from one parent to the other or from the state to the care-taking parent. This way we take care of the economic problems. But Galston identifies other consequences for children living in one parent homes that are less susceptible to economic remedies, at least in his analysis. He asserts that there are other emerging consensus that the non-economic consequences of divorce are also harmful to children. And here he says there's a mountain of scientific evidence showing that when families disintegrate, children often end up with intellectual, physical and emotional scars that persist for life. We talk about the drug crisis, the education crisis, the problem of team pregnancy, juvenile crime, all these ills trace back predominantly to one source, broken families. According to Galston, children need authoritative rules and stable schedules, which harried single parents have a hard time supplying. Galston writes, one of the things we found is that children who had regular bedtimes and less TV hobbies and after-school activities, children who are in households that are orderly and predictable, do better than children who are not. I don't think we can escape the conclusion that children need structure and oftentimes the divorced household is a chaotic scene. Galston explicitly recognizes in this work that his general preference for an intact two-parent family does not mean that this is always preferable or that single parent families are always dysfunctional. I presume he would also recognize that quite often two-parent families are chaotic. Nonetheless, Galston labels as abuses parental behavior such as the failure to marry or the rush to divorce, and these he posits have had a negative, harmful effect on children. To combat this, he advocates changes in law and policy, including a breaking mechanism on divorce, so he wants to reintroduce some type of fault divorce, serious efforts at the collection of child support and in some instances a privileging of the marital family in contrast to the non-marital family. So for example, denial perhaps of public housing and other kinds of benefits to non-marital families. The removal and he doesn't suggest this, but others do the removal of children from never married single-parent homes. Now in Galston's rendition, family form is not only a predictor of economic well-being, but unmarried motherhood is a proxy for poor organizational skills. And of course the conclusions that he reached have been challenged by many other commentators, and in the interest of time I don't want to go into these. I'll just mention briefly the work done by Professor Judith Stacey, a recent study by Cornell University indicating that single motherhood does not in fact compromise preparedness or performance in school. A large study by Mavis Heatherington that indicates that the long-range negative effects of divorce on children have been grossly overstated, and she finds in fact that if you look, take a longer time frame, the majority of children from divorced homes look a lot like their contemporaries from non-divorced homes and a lot of other information that indicates that many of the problems that we see with single-parent families are in fact related to this first concern, the lack of economic resources and not the family form itself. And of course feminists raise additional points of contention, looking at the historic role of marriage in the subordination of women. So marriage is an institution that has historically done this, and that is the basis for a lot of feminist disagreement. And I do not disagree with these criticisms, but what I want to do is to look beyond that, to go beyond these criticisms and say that there is something else that we're not considering and have not considered in this particular debate that I want to call our attention to. And that is the fact that single-parenthood in the United States occurs in a specific social and economic context, a social and economic context that is not found in other industrialized democracies. So single-parenthood in the United States is unique in this regard. Rather than going through the insights already presented, I want to ask questions about the effects of other societal institutions on the family. And my objective here is to have those of us who are concerned with the well-being and health of children focus on the pressures that are placed on the institution of the family, however we define it, by significant changes and trends in non-family institutions. In particular, the pressures that are generated by uncontrolled market institutions, I argue, are at least as relevant to the health and well-being of children and families as our uncontrolled mothers and fathers. The irresponsibility of the state is in not regulating or mediating the excesses of market activity is at least as devastating to the child as the irresponsibility of any unwed or divorced parent. We must count the cost to the family and hence to the children of increased income disparity, wage stagnation for middle and lower income wage earners and the persistent impoverishment for too many of our nation's families. If we measure the likelihood of family success in light of poverty statistics and relative wealth inequality, it seems clear that many families are incapacitated in trying to fulfill their socially assigned tasks for caring for dependency. Many caretakers and their dependents find themselves impoverished or severely economically compromised even if they are operating within the context of a traditional marital family. In addition for many currently comfortable households, divorce or the death of a primary wage earner can prompt an economic freefall into poverty. Another related observation, even families that can form in that they are both intact marital families and economically self-sufficient, are suffering another kind of crisis, a crisis in caretaking and the competition with caretaking and work demands. Most two parents households must send both parents into the workforce today in order to make ends meet. All of the costs of quality time spent with their children, so they lose the quality time with the children in order to increase their work participation. In some two parent households, the child care or after-school care is designated to one parent and then the other parent spends less time with the children, whatever the thing there's a cost here to parent care. It is economic policy and a lack of a social welfare policy on the part of the state that in fact is responsible for many of the problems that are seen in today's families. The United States has about a one in five persistent child poverty rate which is almost double the rate found in Western Europe. In one study the authors attribute this phenomenon to the relative lack of government tax and money transfer benefits to families below the poverty line in the United States. For example, in Europe there is a guaranteed minimum level of child support to single parents when the absent parent cannot or will not pay child support. Meager attempts to relieve child poverty in the United States have failed. The recent four hundred dollar per child tax credit does little to aid families who have no federal income tax liability and even those who do it's not all that much money. The authors of this study suggest that two solutions should be thought of in the United States guaranteed child support and child allowances for every family and if we put those both of those things in place it would produce better results in fighting poverty, child poverty in the United States. Far from doing this however the past few decades of the 20th century have shown us a withdrawal of the government at the same time that we see a general decline in wages for many Americans so we have the contraction of responsibility for the provision of basic social goods on the part of employers. Things like health insurance are in decline as you may be aware or becoming much more expensive. We also see a withdrawal of the federal government's safety net with the welfare reform which in fact ends entitlement to welfare benefits. These changes and others have increased the economic inequality and made our families more in a more precarious position. Inequalities that are arguably significant more significant than the decline of a certain kind of family form. If we look at this and we ask what happens to families whose economic well-being is threatened in the way that American families have been threatened in the past year. We see families entering poverty and larger rates and I have documentation here for that but I'll skip that again in the interest of time. What we see are that even in families well above the poverty line filling economic fortunes create a scramble to stay ahead. Certain wage and job instability produces stress in families. Encourages longer hours and necessitates the participation of more families in the workplace. In this regard it's interesting that although families are entering poverty at increasing rates more married women with young children are also entering the labor force. Again the need for additional participation. In 1987 57 percent of married women with young children were in the labor force and that number has continued to increase. A study by Ellen Galanski of Family and Work Institute indicates that children's interactions with their parents are affected by job related stress. Further economic necessity meaning that both parents are working longer hours reduces the time that children get to spend with their families. Over the last two decades American fathers increased their work time by 3.1 hours per week. Mothers added 5.2 hours per week to their work day work week. Employed fathers with children younger than 18 now work an average of 50.9 hours per week and working mothers average 41.4 hours per week. Americans surpass every other industrialized nation in time spent on the job putting in the equivalent of two weeks more per year than the Japanese. In addition to having negative effects on parent-child interaction this increase in hours and stress generates that it generates affects the marriage relationship and leaves little time or energy for indulgence in voluntary civic activities. Perhaps the real danger to our civic society and to our children is the runaway nature of American contemporary American capitalism and the inequalities that it has generated. Stagnant wages or income are a major factor then in contributing to a diminished American dream and prohibiting this for being a reality for many children. The inexperience of inequality certainly contributes to suspicion and mistrust among us. Inability to provide for one's children even minimal goods and services can lead to frustration and despair. Our series of articles by Sarah Reamer in the New York Times investigated the effects of the downsizing of America on community life and she found people too busy and exhausted to participate in their communities or effectively interact with their children. All of this again is to the detriment of children and families. So for me the real danger of a narrow fact focus on family form on the marital family is that this will deflect attention away from the more serious problems that current political and economic context present for our families. Many different types of families succeed very well at their assigned societal tasks even without the support of the larger society. But it seems clear that a certain level of resources is necessary to accomplish those family tasks. And in recent years these resources have become less available to many families. This is not the fault of those families but the result of changes in attitudes and in the scope of governmental safeguards and market practices. How should we as a society respond to those changes. Focusing on family form will not lead us to the right questions and make coherent policy for our families. To consider what appropriate family policy might be I would start with the following questions. Given the uncertainty of the status of marriage in this society where the divorce rate remains around 50% and women are expected to be wage earners as well as wives and mothers. How can we continue to have a traditional model of the family offered by politicians as the solution for poverty. Shouldn't the richest country in the history of the world have a family policy that goes beyond marriage as the solution for dependency and to guarantee the well-being of children. Specifically doesn't the family as it exists today require substantial assistance from other societal institutions both the market and the state that's not forthcoming. And finally and of particular relevance to the study that we're undertaking what should be the role of religions in shaping this debate about families in American society. Shouldn't the religious community focus on questions on the question of the morality of our other institutions on current global market economy driven as it seems to be by greed selfishness materialism and individualism. These are the questions which I would urge those who are concerned with the welfare of children to turn their attention. The problem with society is not that marriage is in trouble. The real crisis is that we expect marriage to be able to compensate for the inequality created by and when within our other societal institutions. Thank you. Thank you we've been hearing something on the economic context of the dyad of the caregiver and the dependent which is a kind of a theme on which professor Feynman has a patent and professor Browning's patent is on critical familism and I think we'll hear some of that detailed in his parallel paper. Professor Browning please. Thank you Marty and I too am very pleased to be here. I want to take a little bit of credit for the fact that Martha Feynman is joining the Emory community when Emory was courting her. The chair whose name will be not mentioned of the committee asked me to email her because he knew I was going to be meeting her at a forthcoming conference to tell her all the good things about Emory which I did. Wonderful place a lot of fun good colleagues I also mentioned that Atlanta was a great place for restaurants. And I must report that that really got her attention. You've heard part of the title of my presentation critical family is kind of hard to say and then I've also been asked to respond a bit to the legal theories of Martha Feynman critical family is the name my co-authors and I attached to our family theory in the book from culture wars to common ground into subsequent books I've expanded the concept although the idea of critical family is primarily a proposal to guide the socialization goals of the institutions of civil society it does have implications for law and public policy. Critical family is concerned to promote and protect families is built around the ideal and the means to achieve the ideal of the equal regard mother father marriage. It is interested in equal regard it aims to achieve what the religious and legal tradition has called the unit of our affectional satisfactions of marriage but it is equally interested in safeguarding the other essential goods of marriage especially the best possible environment for the good of children. Critical family is the ethnic of equal regard to both the internal life of families and to the structures of the social order. It is generally critical in that it attempts to analyze and cover and critique pockets of power and self-interest that prevent both women and men mothers and fathers from having equal access to the privileges and responsibilities of both the public and the private realms. Because it brings the ethic of equal regard into the public as well as the private spheres it puts forth a number of proposals for social reform that are revolutionary. There is a radical edge to critical family that distinguishes it from conservative family that will seek to strengthen families without dramatic social change at several different levels. Critical family sees the twin forces of cultural individualism and the spread of technical rationality and market and bureaucracy as the major worldwide threats to contemporary families. These cultural and social systemic trends are undermining the economic and interpersonal dependencies which often in the past held marriages together. But because these same interacting forces also have helped open the public world of employment and politics to women and mothers these modernizing trends constitute opportunities for the deeper realization in history of certain ancient visions of the equal regard family and marriage. My colleagues and I wrote about the equal regard covenant. This is the idea that in marriage a couple should publicly, legally and perhaps religiously commit themselves to treating each other as ends and never as means alone. But not only are they committed to a covenant of equal respect they should dedicate themselves to actively work for each other's good both in the private public spheres of their lives. Love as equal regard is what philosophers would call a mixed the ontological concept. If you don't know what it means don't worry about it. It draws on the golden rule principle of neighbor love and cons second formulation of the category comparative and viewing genuine love as fully reversible respect for both other and self. It follows also what William Franklin, Louis Jonson's Paul Recur, Martha Nussbaum and John Finnis and a host of contemporary theological feminists believe that equal regard must go beyond simple respect and actively work for the concrete good of both other and self and to do so both in private and public realms of life. This especially applies to the central although not exclusive marital good of children proclaiming this ideal and preparing individuals to accomplish it are primarily the task of the institutions of civil society culture making institutions such as voluntary organizations religion media and of course families of origin but both law and public policy should be partners in this cultural work at least by doing nothing to undermine it. The sources of the equal regard marriage are old and multiple. It is not a modern invention although as more complete realization may be possible because of certain conditions the modern society's offer. The equal regard marriage is built on Jewish and Christian ideals of neighbor love applied to the interior life of families. It is also though however built on Aristotelian understandings of the virtue of friendship. First applied to close relations between men but gradually to the husband wife relationship itself. Finally it assumes various modern understandings of justice. Calls of these multiple forces marriage built on the equal regard covenant can find public justification from both philosophy as well as from certain religious sources. It is not a narrowly religious or confessional ideal. However law and public policy should show respect for the religious background concepts that often make marriage as equal regard actually work. The theology of creation found in the religion to the book the Abrahamic religions are marriage as an ontological gift certified by the most determinative reality of the universe. The image of God is told of both male and female in their shared creation story is seen by many as the most enduring ground for the equal treatment of male and female required for the equal regard marriage. The images of God as a caring father admittedly subject to much patriarchal distortion has at the same time been a model requiring care for children by finite fathers as well as mothers and the New Testament image of the servant father also susceptible to much distortion has indeed function to integrate fathers more deeply into the mother infant diet. Law and public policy must respect such religious cultural images and evaluate them. In terms of the total range of moral and non moral values that the organized these symbols and narratives must not be dismissed simply because they present themselves in the form of explicitly religious claims. This is especially true since quasi religious assumptions and metaphors often implicitly surround legal and moral policies in a variety of allegedly secular context as I will later show. Now some comments on the thought of Martha Feynman and in making these comments I must confess I'm probably going to go a little bit beyond her excellent presentation here and make some references to other aspects of her thought that she didn't highlight so much in this presentation. There is much to admire in the feminist legal theories of Martha Feynman in addition to her riveting prose and powerful arguments there are substantive ideas that I can affirm. For example Feynman was a leader in rightly pointing out that liberal feminist theories of justice as simple equality fail to attend to the full range of vulnerabilities experienced by women and mothers and thereby function to their disadvantage most specifically at the time of divorce. She is also right in holding that the primordial family is indeed the mother child dyad. This is true of all mammals including humans and both ancient sages and modern evolutionary psychologists have given various accounts of this insight. Feynman is correct to claim that there are centers of care in addition to what she calls the sexual family. Single mothers for instance caring for their children those caring for dependent elderly and friends who have bonded to care for one another they deserve certain social and legal acknowledgments and supports. However in presenting her view of just what supports are required and how they should be implemented Feynman takes steps that would not be fruitful for either law, culture or civil society. Feynman's central proposal not so much highlighted in this presentation but which runs throughout all of her writings or at least more recent writings is to delegalize marriage. Remove marriage as a legal category and status not only for men and women but all unions based on sexual relationships. The sexual couple or family and so far as it sometimes might benefit from legal protections should turn to individually negotiated contracts and existing corporate and business laws governing contracts and property. Legal protections and government should shift she argues from the sexual family to individuals and groups providing actual care for dependents. Be these dependents infants, children that disadvantaged, the ill or the elderly. However just how law and public policy would institutionalize supports for these various social pockets of care is at least to this reader not always clear in Feynman's writings to date. To facilitate this move Feynman wants to dismantle the influence of religion over the field of family law. It is her belief that the present shape of family law is in adequacies and the primary obstacles to its change all come from the age old influence of religion especially Protestant and Catholic Christianity. Critical family has the following concerns about Feynman's proposals. First Feynman would expand significantly the reach of law over sexuality, children, parenting and caring. In fact law would end in having far too much power over these arenas of human existence. This is surprising in view of another Feynman teaching. Time and again she wisely points out the laws never neutral always functions within the context of social and cultural traditions and is in fact a very blunt instrument for social change but in my reading of Feynman she nevertheless ends in making law the chief if not the exclusive agent of social change. In the process not only would she de-legalize marriage but she would disconnect the law from a variety of cultural and religious cultural traditions thereby further marginalizing them in American life. Furthermore she presents her arguments for reform with little attention to the cultural, social and economic forces that are with some success reconstructing and fine tuning marriage in order to cope with the twin forces of modernity that I mentioned earlier. Second Feynman would greatly reduce the role of men and fathers and families and childcare. Her proposals would have this result by removing the channeling functions of law which in cooperation with other cultural symbol systems provide social patterns leading men to marry and thereby join the mother infant dyad. The human male joining the mother infant dyad has been recognized by Aristotle, Aquinas, Locke, Rousseau and contemporary evolutionary psychologists as one of the great cultural achievements of humankind. It is a characteristic that distinguishes humans from most of the other mammals. The marital bond has been fundamental to the development of paternal responsibility and care at the human level. Recent research agrees with the weight of tradition and seeing the married mother-father partnership as on average, you always have to add on average the best environment for raising children. However, new large scale demographic research in Sweden demonstrates this is true even in that country where single parents receive economic supports superior to all other countries in the world. This puts into question the thesis that children from single parent families do on average worse because they have fewer financial resources. Finest proposal would give most sanctions and supports of law and public policy to the mother-child dyad and analogies to it as the principal centers of care for dependents. I contend this gesture would lead law and public policy to capitulate to and indeed reinforce the individualizing and rationalizing trends of modernization by further undercutting marital dependencies. In the name of primarily supporting one kind of dependency, law would undercut a wide range of other dependencies best met by the married couple i.e. the intergenerational care of both young children and the elderly. Third, Fineman's proposal to de-legalize marriage and to contractualize all marriage-like relationships would break from the fundamental principles of most marriage laws in advanced societies. This is the idea that those who procreate, be they male or female, should have the prima facie obligation to care for their offspring. It is always easier to assign procreate responsibility to mothers than fathers. As a result, male responsibility for their children has been far more difficult to establish and to stabilize than it is the case with maternal responsibility. Hence, societies have developed elaborate religious symbols, cultural reinforcements, and legal sanctions to compensate for the difficulties in assigning responsibility for procreation and care to males. Law is indeed a blunt instrument for altering the behavior of men, but if culture and civil society wish to value responsible fatherhood, law should not go overboard in rewarding and institutionalizing the mother-infant relationship and analogies to it or in sanctioning a disconnection between male procreation and the care for offspring. This gives her basic diet a sacred tone almost equal to Madonna and child. Furthermore, she gives the modalities of care and nurtures so much rhetorical emphasis that they gain a near sacred weight in contrast to other modalities important for child development such as justice, play, discipline, cognitive stimulation, and limit setting. Feynman is fully aware that conceptual thought rests on a network of background metaphors, but she does not acknowledge that this can function to give allegedly secular thought, even legal thought, and aura of religiosity that puts it on the same logical plane as explicitly religious thought. If this is true, it is prejudicial to rule out the contributions of explicitly religious thinking while uncritically accepting the quasi-religious quality of much of so-called secular thought. Finally, there are alternatives to Feynman's strategies for compensating the burdens of motherhood. Women and mothers can be protected by a variety of means. For instance, by new cultural reconstructive efforts to deepen the public understanding and skills needed for more stable, equal-regard marriages. Furthermore, these reconstructive efforts can be made more effective if the powerful new marriage education methods were to be more systematically used in schools, churches, and other institutions. The legal and policy measures, other than those recommended by Feynman, are also available. In other words, the point of it is it's not marriage versus all of the other proposals. It's marriage and a variety of public proposals. In my writings, I have investigated such majors as drastic increase in both child tax exemptions and child tax credits. I have looked at the social systemic inducements for a combined 60-hour work week for fathers and mothers who both work in the wage economy, but also get overwhelmed by the wage economy in ways that Martha Feynman described. I have looked with some favor on some of the child's first divorce reforms. And finally, I think we should consider a bill of rights for employed parents who drop out of the workforce to care for children, but later need jobs, retraining, and other compensations when they reenter employment. Some of these recommendations are universal and would apply to both the children of married and unmarried parents. There are many more such proposals to consider. Mothers and women and their children need protection, but I'm not certain that Martha Feynman's powerfully stated proposals are indeed the best way to proceed. But we'll talk about this. Thank you. Those of you who are watching him and the table may have noticed that at one point my ear was whispered into, may I respond to that? And indeed, of course, that's how we plan. We have about 20 minutes to go, and at least the first part of this, we'd like to hear your response and maybe your response to response. And if there's time remaining, some questions from the audience. Please, Martha Feynman. Can I do it from here? Can you hear me? Yeah. Well, first of all, my theories are very complex. And I think that there might have been several areas where, at least as I heard them, they were misstated. So I'm just going to go over a few things and make a final statement. When I talk about the laws that will regulate sexual affiliation, it's not only contract, although that certainly is one obvious area where people who are sexually connected with each other might turn to define their obligations and responsibilities vis-a-vis each other. But also, marriage does a lot of work in our society by saying that it's a special status, which means that the laws that apply to strangers in society do not govern marital couples. So tort law, property law, criminal law, equity law, so forth and so on, are not applied to marital couples. And what I argue is that by saying marriage should have no special status, in other words, it shouldn't carry with it a whole set of special rules governing that relationship. It brings in all the other rules that we use to govern our relationships with each other outside of the marriage context or family context. Now, would putting all these sexual affiliates, right, formerly known as husbands and wives, into contract law, into tort law, into equity law, would that change how we think about contract tort inequity? I hope so. And I think that would be totally appropriate. But I just want to be clear of that. Also, on the role of religion, I do not really disparage at all any religious tradition or religious view of marriage. And in fact, when I argue for the abolition of marriage as a legal category, what I state explicitly in that context is that that would leave marriage to be regulated by religious nor other normative and symbolic systems. And people could go undergo religious marriage and that would have whatever meaning that means for them. What I'm really interested in doing, however, is making intimate connection, making sexual expression unregulated by law. So unless if we don't have marriage as the kind of preferred sexual connection, then what that means or would mean is, in fact, the state would have no interest in developing whole series of rules that punish or prohibit relationships, sexual relationships that are not marital relationships. So taking the state out of marriage then really leaves it free for further development. So it would be voluntary and in the voluntary religious, symbolic kind of sphere rather than in the coercive state sphere that we would locate sexual affiliations. And I don't think it's possible to do that, to kind of have other equally significant relationships and allow marriage to continue to exist as the primary or privileged state connection, sexual affiliation. As long as marriage is there, it's going to be what other things are measured against and we see that all the time. I am not interested in reducing father's roles and it's always interesting to me, in fact, I'm interested in increasing father's roles in regard to their children and it's interesting to me that quite often the arguments against my position are termed in as I think Don's were to some extent that we need law and marriage in particular to kind of channel men's energies towards their children and their wives. I think that's an empirical question. I do not believe that men do not value intimacy and connection with their children in the same way or to the same degree that women do or can. I think that it's that we have a society that is structured on this notion of interdependent families where men have to provide economically and women nurture and that that in fact drives men away from their children. It structures men's participation in the family in such a way that they do not become nurturers. What I hope to do is encourage men to become nurturers. I think our civilization depends on it. So I don't want men to kind of join into the mother child dyad. I want them to become part of the mother child dyad I want them to become mothers which explains why I capitalize mothers. I'm using it as a metaphor not a religious metaphor but a metaphor for care taking. It's a caretaker dependent the same way the child can be a stand in for others who are dependent in society. So I guess that my major purpose in undertaking this project which is a complicated project is to really say let's step back from all this argument about families and look at marriage and families and look instead at the role of the family in the larger society. What are legitimate demands that the family whatever its form should be able to make on the market on the state. What are those demands and how can we restructure those other kinds of societal institutions so as to give more support to our families again marital and not marital. Yeah just a couple of things because we want to bring you people in. I think I did have a clause in there that indicated that she that Martha Feynman does in addition to a contractualization procedures and laws have a place for other laws functioning with regard to marriage there. What I found interesting about this is she wants to apply as default backup laws not the laws specially designed for the particular kind of institution marriage has been thought to be but the default laws that come from property and come from corporation law. I think all the more rendering marriage analogous to business contracts and business affairs which led me to believe there's a subtle way of which this position capitulates to the forces of modernization and the market which we both agree are dangerous forces but I think this particular position gets closer to reinforcing them. Secondly yes her position would de-legalize marriage and theoretically that would mean all your religious people can go off and have the kind of marriage you want to have and you won't have to worry about the state. But it does preclude religious traditions of having something intelligent and powerful to say in the public square about what the public meaning of marriage should have and I was arguing for the right to do that but they need to be evaluated the same way all other arguments do depending upon how their metaphors and their frameworks organize other publicly recognizable moral and premoral goods. That's enough. Just one minor question. It is another Martha. It is Martha Ertman who argues that we use business contracts and business analogies. Not me. I never argue that. It's that's Martha Ertman not Martha Finers. Get close to it. We call her Marty for short. So let me add my little thing in there. This is kind of an eerie event because anyone conditioned to Fox, MSNBCC and all the other things finds that if there are profound disagreements you have to shout at each other. And we have a model of civility here that I don't think disguises the fact we have some wonderfully profound disagreements that I hope are stimulating some questions from the floor. I'll leave you have to ask the comparative question Professor Browning at the door because our cherry turns to a pumpkin at 120 and Professor Whitty is back and we thank you for the hospitality and the occasion and we thank both of you for these wonderful presentations. I think a round of applause is in order. Two swords sharpen each other the good scripture says and I think we've had a wonderful illustration of that today with some wonderful civil fencing between two giants in the field of family studies. I hope you will rush to your bookstores and purchase a couple of their major titles. I would recommend on Professor Feynman's part the illusion of equality a 1991 University of Chicago press title which in many ways has redefined the field of feminization of poverty and the issue of equality between husbands and wives and then ex-spouses and also her book the neutered mother which I would commend heartily Don Browning I think you should pick up is from culture wars to common ground co-authored with Robert Franklin our colleague and a few others and his most recent book marriage and modernization both all those books from the bookstore I commend them heartily to you. I commend you to look also at your program you will see in that program a little gold card. May I ask you just to take 10 seconds to look at that card and to check off that place where you heard about this event so that we can be more effective in our advertising of these events to invite you back and to invite your colleagues back outside the door though you'll see a table you'll see a couple of my colleagues and I ask you to hand the card to them or to just bring it to the suite across the hall here Gambrill Hall 310. Also I hope you will come back on October 14 at 2 p.m. where we have preeminent leadership of church and state Professor Martin Marty and President Jimmy Carter who will be back discussing issues of sex marriage and family and the issues of children and a range of issues will be on the floor for conversation between those two and between them and you. I thank you very much for coming to this forum today. I want to thank April Bogle, Eliza Ellison, Amy Wheeler and Janice Wiggins for all their hard work in putting this together and I think a round of applause for our panel would be a very fine send-off for them.