As appeared in “The Public Square”
Richard John Neuhaus
First Things | October 1998

You may not have heard of the "per se" argument, but it is discussed in a most enlightening manner in a new quarterly publication. Propositions, put out by the Institute for American Values, which is headed by the formidable David Blankenhorn. The institute sponsors a twenty-member Council on Families, a group of scholars who have had an impressive influence in reshaping public debates about family, marriage, children, and divorce. Worried about that influence, another group of academics and writers has put together a Council on Contemporary Families in order to counter it. Here is where the "per se" argument comes in, according to Propositions: "Another strategy is the 'per se' argument. Whatever you want to denigrate or downplay - marriage, fatherhood, the two-parent home - simply describe it as not very important 'per se.' Here is contemporary-council member Carolyn P. Cowan describing the new council's conceptual framework: It's not the family structure per se, it's the quality of the relationships between adults and children.' This formulation works for almost any topic. It's not marriage per se, it's commitment in relationships. It's not fatherhood per se, it's another caring adult to help raise the child. Or this slight variation: The problem for children is not divorce per se, it's parental conflict. The purpose of the 'per se' argument is always disassembly: to break something down into its constituent parts, so that the effects of one part can be said to override the effects of another. Consider this example: Regarding who gets lung cancer, what matters is not 'smoking per se,' but lifestyle habits. The statement is obviously absurd. One cannot logically separate smoking from lifestyle, much less suggest that the health consequences of lifestyle somehow invalidate the health consequences of smoking. Similarly, it is absurd for Carolyn Cowan to suggest that good relationships matter, but that who lives in the home ('family structure per se') does not, as if we must choose between the two, oblivious to the fact that they are inextricably connected. If a father is separated from the mother and living far away, doesn't that typically impinge on the 'quality' of the father-child relationship? One more example: the common claim that the main problem for children is not 'father-absence per se,' but rather the effects of living in poverty. See how it works? Like a magic wand, this formulation turns any evidence that poverty harms children into evidence that father-absence does not harm children, or at least does not harm children as much as poverty does. What gets lost in the sophistry is that fatherlessness and child poverty are not opposed to one another; they are causally linked. Which helps to explain why children in mother-only homes are five times more likely to be poor than the children in married-couple homes, and why approximately 60 percent of all poor children in the U.S. today live in homes characterized by 'father-absence per se.'"

(Propositions is available from the Institute for American Values, 1841 Broadway, Suite 211, New York, NY 10023).