America Was Refounded in 1969
Why the redefinition of marriage in 1969 explains today’s gender voting gap
New York City’s Mayor-elect, Zohran Mamdani, is a Muslim Democratic Socialist. Over 80% of women in New York City under 30 voted for Mamdani. Similar results played out in Virginia and New Jersey:
“About 8 in 10 women under 30 supported Sherrill in New Jersey, compared to just over half of men under 30. That was similar in Virginia, where roughly 8 in 10 women under 30 voted for Spanberger and about 6 in 10 men under 30 did.”
How did we get here? Why are women becoming more and more liberal, voting overwhelmingly for expansive government and socialist policies? Why is the gender gap in voting widening so dramatically? How is driving them to embrace rule by Muslims?
The Origin Point: No-Fault Divorce
We must look back. The American nation we all know and love was basically refounded in 1969 with the passage of no-fault divorce by Ronald Reagan in California. That precedent spread quickly to other states, reaching New York in 2010.
With the passage of no-fault divorce, marriage as previously understood, a covenant before God, was radically redefined. Now a woman or a man could leave a marriage for any reason whatsoever. God was no longer sovereign over marriage. Happiness was.
This wasn’t just a theological shift. Because marriage is the basic political entity, this was a transfer of ultimate authority and it has profound political implications.
Understanding marriage as an institution ordained by God, a covenant before him, carries certain obligations and loyalties. There are duties each person in the covenant must fulfill and eternal standards by which they will be judged.
But when happiness functions as the god of marriage, chaos unfolds because people are fickle and they do not even understand what happiness entails many times.
The God of Happiness
When happiness becomes the god of marriages, the most fundamental of political institutions, then personal happiness becomes the highest authority in all political arrangements.
And of course, our conceptual framework of what the “pursuit of happiness” means has been radically altered from what our forefathers meant. They understood the “pursuit of happiness” to mean the pursuit of virtue, the well-lived life, and the flourishing within relationships of duty and obligation.
Yet today, we are sold a fake bill of goods and are told that happiness means anything and everything that gives me a vague feeling of pleasantness.
As marriages were reconstituted, so was the nation reconstituted. The America you live in under no-fault divorce is almost entirely different from the one that existed before it. Or to say it more provocatively: America as America no longer exists.
Downstream Consequences
Of course, no-fault divorce was a culmination of many other social ills and rotten fruit born out in the sexual revolution and feminism. But with no-fault divorce, the game radically changed.
Obergefell is downstream of no-fault divorce, because once you redefine the terms from a covenant before God to something else entirely, into little more than a contractual agreement on paper, then everything and anything else follows.
Think of the marriage advice: “happy wife, happy life.”
Now any good man wants his wife to be happy. No man wants to live with a bitter, scornful woman. This is biblical wisdom (Prov. 21:9). Before no-fault divorce, though, this was not the prevailing wisdom one received in marriage.
After the passage of no-fault divorce, “happy wife, happy life” became the law, because if your wife became insufficiently happy, she could take your kids and your money.
None of this is to excuse any lack of virtue or nobility among husbands. It is simply to say that being a husband post-1969 is radically different than being a husband prior to 1969.
And if we believe, which we should, that marriage is the fundamental political institution, then it completely makes sense that as we define marriage, so we define the nation.
Why This Affects Women Differently
Here’s the crucial point: no-fault divorce didn’t just change marriage. It changed marriage asymmetrically for men and women.
Throughout history, marriage served as a basic building block for civilizations. Men provided material security and protection. Women provided domestic labor, childbearing, and nurture. The covenant bond ensured both parties would fulfill their obligations across a lifetime.
When that covenant dissolved into a contract terminable at will, women lost their guarantee of provision and men lost their guarantee of domestic partnership and fatherhood. But the economic implications fell differently.
Women still needed food, shelter, and protection. After all, biological and economic realities don’t change with legal reforms. They could no longer count on a husband bound by covenant. Enter the state.
The Dissolution of Family and Rise of the State
When marriage became dissolvable at will, the state had to manage the economic and custodial fallout. Whereas once the family unit (husband, wife, and children) was the basic political entity, now the state, having usurped its role and dissolved marriage qua marriage, began to operate like a husband.
It provides both material benefits (government aid, welfare programs, subsidized housing) and legal protection (custody arrangements, court orders, child support enforcement).
For women, especially single mothers, the state became the provider that covenant marriage once guaranteed. And unlike a husband, the state never demands submission, headship, or sacrifice. It only promises provision in exchange for votes.
The Misdirection of Maternal Instinct
This also explains why the left is so intransigent on discipling children in government schools. When you dissolve the marriage, you dissolve the family, and now we are seeing the rise of single childless women.
Women have maternal instincts. They want to care and nurture in ways that are unique to their sex. Because they still have an instinct to nurture children, they obsess about public education and demand that public education be a government version of the family.
Without children of their own, they crave institutional power over other people’s children, not necessarily out of malice but because the basic maternal instinct demands to be put to use.
By capturing public education, they are able to raise children who then live into their lonely and fruitless future. The future for these children is one of conflict avoidance, safe spaces, and isolation rather than family bonds and flourishing.
This same misdirected maternal instinct explains why women dominate the vocations of HR and therapy. They are looking for an outlet for their maternal instincts. They want to nurture, correct, and shape others in quasi-maternal roles, but without the permanent bond and stakes of real motherhood. And as Helen Andrews has demonstrated, as women enter workplaces, they inevitably feminize them.
From Marriage to the Ballot Box
So when a socialist politician promises care, provision, security, and emotional affirmation (itself a replacement for religious instruction), the things women should find in marriage, women recognize the offer instinctively.
They’re not so much voting for socialism as they are voting for something that looks like a husband who will never leave them, never demand anything difficult from them, and to whom they owe no obligations of submission or sacrifice. They see socialism and think, “that’s a good husband.”
The state-as-provider is the logical endpoint of marriage-as-happiness-contract. Once marriage ceased to be a binding covenant with duties on both sides, women needed security from somewhere else. The voting patterns we see today are simply women acting rationally within the system that was created in 1969.
This is why young women vote overwhelmingly for big government progressives while young men are much more skeptical. Men don’t need the state to be their provider and protector. Women, cut loose from covenant marriage, do.
Living in Post-1969 America
What we should do in the face of America’s refounding in 1969 remains an open question. But it is despicable that many conservatives live under the illusion that we do not live in a fundamentally different nation.
This nation has different structures, penalties, laws, all of which are beholden to how we have defined marriage, or better, redefined it.
And so we must get creative about how to operate as Christians in this kind of arrangement. We may yearn to return, which is very good. We may have nostalgic instincts for marriage and family, but understand that the entire legal system is set up against you.
Social pressures and the law are enemies of your vision. Even if you were to repeal Obergefell, if we do not repeal no-fault divorce, we are simply resetting the clock to 1969.
The Christian Husband’s Dilemma
Now this brings up an important question: how is a Christian husband to thrive in marriage, especially if their Christian wife has been incubated under the auspices of “happy wife, happy life”?
Hopefully he marries a woman that has not bought into the 1969 dystopia, but those are very hard to find.
Marriage is a covenant before God. But many Christian men are in the unenviable position of wanting to better themselves, lead their wives and children, and operate as head of home, yet find themselves constantly navigating wives who have entertained all manner of false beliefs about what kind of union they are in. These wives use their happiness (or lack thereof) as leverage in their marriage to get their way, knowing the legal system empowers them to do so.
This is the water we swim in. The legal structure creates the incentives. The incentives shape the behavior which then shape the culture.
The Way Forward
When we redefined marriage to mean a piece of paper that was basically a business contract, Obergefell was inevitable. So was the gender voting gap. So was the rise of the therapeutic state.
But that doesn’t mean we have to settle for this version of America.
We need strong families that constitute strong churches raising virtuous, God-fearing people for our nation to thrive.
Things are not looking rosy right now. That’s fine. We’re playing the long game.
And 56 years is not all that long.