Okay, So Now Marriage is Racist

Leftists insist that we live in a society that is “systemically racist” and in need of massive reform and restructuring. The only thing lacking from this scenario is any significant evidence of actual racism, and so it has to be invented. The latest addition to the ever-growing list of things people have taken for granted from time immemorial that have now become racist is the venerable institution of marriage — at least according to (you guessed it) a white feminist professor at a leading American university.

The College Fix reported Friday that Bethany Letiecq, a professor at George Mason University, actually went so far as to publish a paper making this ridiculous claim in the Journal of Marriage and Family, which, like Letiecq, should have known better. But the academic world is firmly in the grip of the woke, and so Letiecq’s “scholarly” exploration of how marriage is racist was likely one of the saner publications to come out of George Mason in recent months.

That doesn’t mean, however, that it wasn’t filled with the pseudo-intellectual gobbledygook that passes for academic inquiry these days. “I theorize,” Letiecq announced grandly, “that marriage fundamentalism, like structural racism, is a key structuring element of White heteropatriarchal supremacy.” Wait a minute. Before we explore what “marriage fundamentalism” could possibly be, the question must be asked: why did Letiecq capitalize “white”? Some would see that as evidence that she is racist herself, and since revolutions tend to eat their own, it wouldn’t be in the least surprising if one of her comrades accuses her of just that in the near future.

In the meantime, however, Letiecq did her best to compensate for her own sinful whiteness by claiming that “marriage fundamentalism” was the sin of believing that marriage as it has been understood by every culture and religion everywhere in the world throughout recorded history was superior to the new forms of marriage that have been cooked up over the last decade or two.  Letiecq explained that this “marriage fundamentalism” could be 
 “understood as an ideological and cultural phenomenon, where adherents espouse the superiority of the two-parent married family.”

Wait a minute again. Letiecq goes on to excoriate the “structural oppression and unequal power relations” that supposedly characterize “white heteropatriarchal nuclear families,” but the racial aspect of her case appears to be stuck on to the rest of her case, simply in order to conform with today’s woke fads. It doesn’t really have anything to do with believing in the “superiority of the two-parent married family.” There have been two-parent married families since the beginning of human history, and a great many of them have been non-white.

There is absolutely nothing intrinsically white about two-parent married families. There are more intact white families than black ones in America today because ever since the advent of Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society, the welfare system has incentivized irresponsibility and the breakup of families. For Letiecq now to be attempting to give this breakdown an academic veneer and stigmatize intact families is something even worse than irresponsible.

Letiecq, on the other hand, claims just the opposite, making the fantasy-based claim that the government has forced people to “enter into an institution built upon White heteropatriarchal supremacy.” Where has the government ever forced people to get married?

Letiecq says that “marriage as an institution has allowed white heterosexual couples ‘to gain access to benefits, rights, and protections.’” Letiecq “concludes,” says the Fix, “that only white heterosexual couples reap the social and financial benefits of marriage subsidized by the government while minority Americans do not gain any such benefits.”

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That's just a lie. Exactly which benefits, rights, and protections, Ms. Letiecq, are available to white heterosexual married couples but not to non-white couples, and for that matter not to gay couples ever since the legalization of gay marriage?

Of all the risible claims that leftists have made over the past few years, this is one of the most ridiculous, as well as one of the most potentially destructive. The stigmatization of marriage, which Letiecq is actively abetting, could lead to more children being abandoned by their fathers, and to an intensification of all the myriad social and cultural ills that flow from that. Bethany Letiecq’s pseudo-intellectual garbage is not just silly; it’s toxic. And in that, it’s emblematic of the entire academic world in America today.