One Marriage Under God: The Campaign to Promote Marriage in America

Notes

| 205 Notes Preface 1. Griffith 1997; quoted in Lindsay 2007:xiii. 2. Fineman 2004. Introduction 1. Popenoe 1999:30. 2. Blankenhorn 2007:8. 3. Blankenhorn 2007:8; Browning 2003:189. 4. Institute for American Values 2004. 5. Dion 2006; Ooms, Bouchet, and Parke 2004. 6. Coalition for Marriage, Family, and Couples Education et al. 2000:7. 7. Olson 2005. 8. Ooms, Bouchet, and Parke 2004. 9. Roberts 2006. 10. Commission on Marriage and Family Support Initiatives 2008. 11. Fetner 2008:110. The term “religious right” has been debated, especially because the organizations this term is meant to describe would not embrace it. Similar to Fetner, I employ this term to capture the connections between the activist organizations of the Christian right and the broad “pro-family” movement, which includes other conservative religious traditions. Thus, the term points to the fact that, in addition to Christians, there are conservative Jews and other religions active in a broad coalition. In Oklahoma, the religious right is predominantly Christian. 12. Coontz (2005) shows that ancient Greeks worried about deteriorating morals of wives, Romans fretted about divorce rates, and European settlers to America decried the decline of family. Likewise, marital and sexual arrangements, which for many seem unprecedented, can be found in other societies. For example, few Americans are aware of ritualized same-sex relations sanctioned in other cultures that were prototypes to and precursors of same-sex marriage. 13. Coontz 2005:5. 14. Browning 2003:188. 15. Fine and Sandstrom 1993; Hays 1996; Ghaziani and Fine 2008. Michèle Lamont (2000) uses the idea of cultural repertoires in her comparative research on working-class values and identities between the United States and France to challenge the standard framework for studying national cultural differences. Instead of viewing cultural dif- 206 | Notes to the Introduction ferences as “essentialized individual or nationalized characteristics,” she views them “as cultural structures, that is, institutionalized cultural repertoires or publicly available categorization systems” (2000:243). Although this research is not comparative, it demonstrates the contingent and nonessential ways that Americans construct their identities based on marriage ideology. 16. Gillis 1996:xv. 17. Burawoy (1998:xv) theorizes the importance of ethnographic approaches as constituting four types of extensions: “the extension of the observer into the lives of the participants under study; the extension of observations over time and space; the extension from microprocesses to macroforces; and, finally and most importantly, the extension of theory.” I view this research as an extended case study and as a technique to understand the responses of individuals and organizations to massive processes of change. 18. Stacey 1996:3. 19. Cherlin 1992; DaVanzo and Rahman 1993; Hull 2006a. 20. U.S. National Center for Health Statistics 1982. 21. U.S. National Center for Health Statistics 2003. 22. Cherlin 2004; Kiernan 2002. 23. Smock 2000. 24. Hull 2006a:4; U.S. Census Bureau 2001. 25. Freedman 2002. 26. Reese 2005. 27. Moynihan 1965. The “culture of poverty” model of Oscar Lewis (1959) argued that entrenched poverty created cultural values, attitudes, and practices that perpetuated themselves over time, even in the face of social changes in structural conditions. Moynihan (1965) viewed the black family as caught in a tangle of pathology as a result of the cumulative effects of slavery and the subsequent structural conditions of poverty for many African Americans. Scholars who theorized a culture of poverty were charged with “blaming the victims” for their problems, especially as conservatives used these theories to imply that people might cease to be poor if they just changed their culture. See O’Connor (2002) on how concepts like the “culture of poverty” and the “underclass” emerged from trends within the social sciences and from the central preoccupations of twentieth-century American liberalism as part of American identity. In addition, see Small, Harding, and Lamont (2010) for a good discussion of the reemergence of scholarship in cultural sociology that seeks to move beyond theorizing a model of a culture of poverty. 28. Fetner 2008. 29. Stacey 1996:54. 30. Blankenhorn 1995. 31. Stacey 1996. See also Cherlin (2009) for a discussion of how most researchers draw on their personal values for the categories to use and the questions to ask. He argues that this does not mean that all data are suspect or that all interpretations of data are equally valid. 32. Heath 2011. According to Knorr Cetina (2005:67), “Epistemic cultures are cultures of creating and warranting knowledge.” Within science studies, Knorr Cetina examines how new orders of knowledge occur as...