Once Again, Not the Ceiling Everyone Is Focused On
Four years ago, as our country realized the barrier of a woman becoming President hadn’t been broken, I wrote A Glass Ceiling Was Shattered on Election Day, wherein I reminded us we had in fact crossed into uncharted waters, just not the one everyone was focused on. We’d elected the second ever divorced president and the first president on his third marriage. We officially normalized divorce! This wasn’t news to me. In my book, Without A Chair, I’d already written, “Divorce, along with the blended families created in its wake, has been interwoven into our culture as an accepted standard; a dysfunction viewed as ‘normal’ in the timeline of life.”
So, as we turn our attention to whether we will have the first ever African American Female Vice President, I implore you to wonder if in Kamala Harris we will have the second ever Stepparent as Vice President, the first having been Nelson Rockefeller. Are we going to officially normalize stepparents? The term probably goes unnoticed because in 2020 the word stepparent, or for that matter the phrases mom’s boyfriend, dad’s girlfriend, and / or a myriad of other combinations all roll off our tongue as easily as we say good morning.
In previous posts, I’ve expressed how discouraged I am that our President is someone with five kids from three marriages. That’s not to say I don’t understand the reasons many had in voting for him, however, its long past the time for our nation to realize that the breakdown of the family is our number one problem. Donald Trump has done nothing to address this. Maybe if he had, his son would not have recently followed in his footsteps and the President wouldn’t now have five grandchildren of divorce, extending this legacy into the next generation. By the way, Don Jr. is now with the ex-wife of California’s Governor. Thousands of miles are between their child’s parents.
Joe Biden doesn’t seem to care or care enough about this issue either. Andrew Yang was the only candidate to address it during the primaries when he promoted the idea of free marriage counseling for all. At least the former Vice-President’s in his forty-fourth year of marriage to Dr. Jill Biden. He’s actually in his fiftieth year of marriage all together. Bravo, Joe! Jill, in sharing the story of why it took her two years to finally say yes to Joe’s fifth marriage proposal admirably states her reasons had something to do with the pain of her divorce, but for the most part were about her concern that his children never experience a divorce because they’d already been traumatized enough.
Senator Kamala Harris, whose parents divorced when she was seven, married six years ago at age forty-eight. I don’t doubt her love for her husband, so excuse my cynicism, however, it does rattle around in my brain that as she set out for a more national prominence she acquired the requisite family to parade on stage and accept a nomination, virtual as it is this year. The Senator appears to have a nice stepfamily with her husband’s kids, however, in some regard, therein lie the problem. The more we glamorize stepfamilies, the more we lower the bar future generations have for resolving marital issues, because they won’t see divorce as having a bad outcome. For multi-million-dollar income celebrities like Candidate Harris and her husband there is a far greater likelihood of these so-called good outcomes. For the rest of us, there are far too many bad ones.
Which brings us to Mike Pence, in his thirty-fifth year of marriage, and the only of the four on the major party tickets to not have their marital life directly touched by divorce. As for the angst some have about the Vice-President’s values, consider this. The seventy, eighty, and ninety-year old’s who pass on over the next thirty years take with them the last remnants of traditional family values. While not every aspect of this lifestyle is something we might want to hold on to, there are plenty of wonderful parts that we should, and each new generation is being pushed farther and farther and farther away such that eventually nothing will remain.
All this to say, please pause. I’m not asking you to judge the candidates or their spouses. There are so many layers to these people’s stories, far more than we know or can be adequately addressed in this short piece. I’m asking you to please think about the damage the divorce culture of the past fifty years has done. You can embrace or demur gay marriage and have the breakdown of the family be your number one concern. You can be for or against taxing the rich and have it be number one. You can support or oppose abortion rights and have it be number one. And so on. So, why isn’t confronting the breakdown of the family Donald Trump’s or Joe Biden’s or your number one priority?
I’m not afraid to say in the strongest way possible that KIDS LIVES MATTER. All kids deserve to be under one roof with both their parents! Senator Harris speaks of “that little girl…” Well, there are still far too many little boys and girls, and older ones as well, who suffer the horrors of divorce which can have everlasting effects. Until we fix this, it doesn’t matter who’s in the oval office. That said, I’m asking you to please take a few minutes and watch a short video of press coverage about The Marriage Education Act, legislation I created years ago. It’s not perfect, however, it’s a step in the right direction and at least puts the issue on our collective radar. Additionally, as Election Day draws near, the next time you speak negatively about the candidate you’re against, please take a moment to also spread the word about what we can all agree on, and do something about, less children of divorce.
