Sitcom Marriage

The so-called traditional marriage that rightwingers thump their bibles over is largely absent in biblical text. Man-woman marriage is there certainly, but so are man and brother’s widow, rapist and victim, man and multiple wives (with a few concubines thrown in), and so on. The “Christian” right traditional marriage actually is a sitcom staple from mid-20th century, the same era that gave us the corporate ad-gimmick God of “In God We Trust” (see the previous post, “God, Inc.”).

Some readers will be old enough to remember early television sitcoms that helped embed the “traditional marriage” notion in our collective consciousness: “I Love Lucy,” “Father Knows Best,” “Leave It to Beaver,” “The Dick Van Dyke Show,” and others. The sitcom family consisted of a working father (often the comic foil), a non-working but wise mother, and usually one or two children, good kids with a streak of mischief.

The traditional family sitcoms of the Fifties and Sixties idealized a dominant, though hardly universal, reality. According to Pew Research, the percentage of children living with two married parents in their first marriage in 1960 was 73%. As of 2013, that figure had dropped to 46%. Today a majority of children live in other, “nontraditional” families: 15% live with two married parents, one or both remarried; 34% live with a single parent; and 5% have no parent at home. So-called traditional marriage has been in decline for the past half century.

In fact, the vast majority of adults simply live together before or instead of marrying. According to a 2013 Centers for Disease Control and Prevention study, only 23% of “first unions” (couples sharing the same address) were marriages. “Cohabitation is a common part of family formation in the United States, and serves both as a step toward marriage and as an alternative to marriage,” the study said.

While the radical right consistently fails to deal with reality, that should be no excuse for the rest of us when it comes to validating successful family configurations—marriages—of all sorts, including non-marriages, such as single-parent families and couples living together without being legally married. The notion of marriage equality is anathema to the so-called religious right because it does not conform to the sitcom marriage ideal of the past. But it’s a mistake to cite the Bible as the source when “traditional marriage” actually comes from Fifties television.