THE TIES THAT BIND

How quickly in a free society controversy becomes consensus only to become controversy again when the new conventional wisdom jells. Take the national debate about divorce. In 1992 Vice President Dan Quayle made his infamous Murphy Brown speech railing against single motherhood and was ridiculed by almost every social observer to the left of Pat Robertson. Less than a year later, social historian Barbara Dafoe Whitehead published an essay in the Atlantic Monthly titled "Dan Quayle Was Right." Citing studies that tracked the development of children raised by single parents, she identified broken families as Public Enemy No. 1, responsible for a generation of sad and angry, underachieving youngsters. In a flash, Whitehead's point of view won converts no less influential--and liberal--than Donna Shalala and Hillary Clinton, who in her book It Takes a Village wrote of feeling "ambivalent about no-fault divorce when children are involved."

It seemed that 1990s America was growing as disillusioned with divorce as 1960s America had grown with marriage. As the backlash against divorce progressed, state legislatures across the country, in an as yet unsuccessful attempt to reduce what was still the world's highest divorce rate, called for a rollback of no-fault divorce laws and even for premarital waiting periods. Last week, in a melodramatic flourish, a North Carolina jury added to the simmering debate by taking the side of an abandoned wife, ordering the "other woman" to pay her $1 million (see following story). Though the decision was based on an antique "alienation of affection" law, it still sent chills through the country's Second Wives Club--and its associated husbands.

Nevertheless, the worm has already begun to turn again. Last winter, Whitehead expanded her essay into a book, The Divorce Culture, and all hell broke loose. A New York Times reviewer dubbed Whitehead's treatise a "self-blame book" and mocked its scholarship. Esquire magazine ran the bold-face cover line DIVORCE IS GOOD FOR YOU. In the New York Times, essayist Katha Pollitt took on the new Louisiana law that created "covenant marriage," a more binding vow that can be ended only because of extreme circumstances. "You don't have to be abused or betrayed," Pollitt declared, "to have a bad marriage." Earlier Pollitt had baldly asserted, "Divorce is an American value." Thus, in a double backflip, the backlash against the backlash against divorce is under way.