Congratulations on being pregnant. Some of us are looking forward to the inevitable “Madonna With Child” video, not to mention watching “Evita” breast-feed live at next year’s Oscars. That would be you, Madonna: always peering over the hype horizon, pushing the edge of the predictable. The world’s pop provocateur.
But I’m writing out of concern that you’re losing your touch. You told the press last week that you and the father of your baby, the now noted personal trainer Carlos Leon, won’t be getting married. How conventional! How predictable! How uncool! You’ve now joined celebrities like Farrah Fawcett, not to mention nearly a third of the rest of the country. (Twenty-two percent of white babies are born to unwed mothers; 69 percent of African-American babies.) You call this getting ahead of the curve? Mariah Carey’s married. She’s also at the top of the charts. A coincidence? I don’t think so.
If not Carlos, maybe you could marry a woman. Strike a blow against the right-wingers. They keep pushing family values but condemn gay marriage, which is inconsistent. If they believe that commitment is better than promiscuity, they need to back gay unions. Gay, straight – the important thing is to just get married.
Yes, we all understand your reluctance. When asked about marriage, you had a cogent two-word answer: Sean Penn. Been there, done that. Marriage is especially complicated for you: any prenuptial agreement with Carlos would weigh more than his barbells. And people seem so shortsighted, don’t they? Years spent living with Carlos under the same roof without being married would be better for the child than if a forced wedding gave way to a predictably messy Hollywood divorce.
But will Carlos be under the same roof? It’s not entirely clear. You’ve implied that you are prepared to raise your baby alone. Part of your message seems to be that you don’t need men, except for sex, reproduction and maybe an occasional stroll in the park with the kid. Again, this puts you sadly in the bourgeois mainstream. This is now an extraordinarily common view, and it’s substantiated by a long and sordid record of mistreatment of women by men. The problem is that it’s also an extraordinarily destructive view.
A confession here, Madonna. I’m married and the father of three. Married people want others in the pool with them. But this papa will try not to preach, except to say that you should read. You know that already. You fancy yourself a bit of an intellectual. So why haven’t you absorbed more about the causes of American social pathology? The research is quite definitive, actually. A little quiz: the most accurate predictor for whether a child will drop out of school, face unemployment and commit crime is . . . what? Poverty? No. Race? No. Neighborhood? Nope. The answer is growing up in a single-parent family. It’s the only killer correlation.
Obviously there are millions of exceptions, and your child – born with plenty of advantages–may be one of them. Material Girls can provide. But what’s “freedom” for the rich like you can spell disaster for the disadvantaged. When you’re Madonna, you have to take account of your influence on them. You’ve said you want your art to touch people. Your life is a large part of your art. Ergo, your choices–and the messages they send–have consequences that you can’t in good conscience ignore. How about all of those teenagers who even today want to dress like you, sing like you, be like you? What are you signaling to them?
It’s one thing to advise teenagers, as you do in your music, to keep their babies if they want. But now you seem to be go- ing further, conveying that the marriage contract itself is not important for raising kids. This is apparently also the view of Susan Sarandon, Tim Robbins, Kurt Russell, Goldie Hawn and other unmarried celebrity parents.
But, again, the research–and the point telegraphed to younger people–is unambiguous. For all its flaws, marriage continues to be the pathway to responsible fatherhood. Married men, as David Blankenhorn, author of “Fatherless America,” puts it, are “less likely to do bad, and more likely to do good, in any area you measure,” from supporting their children to holding a job. We’re talking here about taming men, Madonna, socializing them so they don’t wreck the culture. If you can’t manage to get married yourself, the least you can do is speak up for the idea, the way you speak up for tolerance, sexual freedom and artistic expression.
Being in show business, you understand the significance of contracts. They impose reciprocal responsibilities that make completing a project (be it cutting an album or raising a child) easier. The contract must sometimes be broken, obviously, and there’s a hot debate going on now about whether divorce should be made harder to obtain as a way to strengthen marriage. But the bond itself is more than a piece of paper. It’s a measure of the commitment necessary to properly shepherd children toward adulthood.
The fact that any of this has to be explained is a sign of how much American values have changed since the day when Ingrid Bergman’s career was almost ruined because she had a baby out of wedlock. I’m not advocating a return to those days, though a little stigma directed at errant role models wouldn’t hurt. What I’m suggesting is that artists like you who claim to be interested in divining the future of American culture need to readjust your vision. The next wave is restoring the family, and with it, the country itself. Ride it, Madonna.
