The idea that children are best raised in a household with a married mother and father marginalizes racial minorities and LGBTQ people and should be eradicated, says Bethany L. Letiecq, associate professor at George Mason University’s College of Education and Human Development.

In fact, asserts Letiecq, advocacy for marriage amounts to “structural oppression” because marriage advantages “White heteropatriarchal nuclear families” and the men who lead those families and put their wives into “subjugation.”

“[M]arriage fundamentalism, like structural racism, is a key structuring element of White heteropatriarchal supremacy,” writes Letiecq. She explains that “marriage fundamentalism” is the idea that the two-parent married family is superior.

Letiecq made these assertions in an article published last month in the Journal of Marriage and Family.

Letiecq argues that support for the idea that children are best raised in a home with married parents has “undergirded” the “perpetual marginalization” of black and immigrant families because society and the state have used coercive means to encourage black people to get married and blamed black people who don’t get married. For example, the government has only given certain advantages, such as tax breaks, to those who are married. In order to “justify” the exclusion of the nonmarried from such benefits, she asserts, the state “has propagated racialized and gendered narratives of deviance and immorality, blaming Black single mothers or queer or cohabitating couples rearing children (among others) for causing family instability and poor child outcomes and casting them as threats to the social order.” For this reason, Letiecq asserts that all privileges and rights given to married couples should be eliminated.

Black married couples might take offense at the assertion that their marital union — and their belief that it is the best way to raise their children — is a “structuring element” of white supremacy, but Letiecq assures that “access to social security, family and medical leave, health insurance, and laws of intestacy” for married couples contributes to “the structural disadvantaging of Black, Indigenous, immigrant, and other families of color.” Marriage fundamentalism, she asserts, has its “roots” in “mass colonial brutality.” She explains: “As historical scholars have documented, White European colonizers used force and lethal violence to not only colonize people and control the land and its resources but also violently reconfigure ‘sex, gender, sexuality, kin relations, and reproduction among Indigenous and African-descended peoples and others’ to dominate them.”

Black Americans and other minorities should watch out, asserts Letiecq, because the “power” of white men is “rooted” in “heterosexual, monogamous relationships.” She explains: “White, heterosexual, cisgender men’s power—their dominance—is rooted in the enforcement of heterosexual, monogamous relationships and the [White heteropatriarchal nuclear family] ideological code.”

If you don’t want to be a racist, Bethany L. Letiecq argues, you must oppose the idea that marriage is the ideal way to raise a family.

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Letiecq’s assertions are extremely dangerous on a number of levels. First, she casts marriage — the fundamental unit of society across cultures and history — as a tool used to further white supremacy and colonial oppression. Second, she portrays marriage as an institution used to advance male power and to subjugate women — when, in reality, marriage advantages women by encouraging faithfulness in men. Third, she seeks to destroy the demonstrably best structure for raising children by claiming that advocacy for marriage as the ideal is just a racist scheme to advance white men.

We know that children who are raised by their married mother and father experience numerous advantages — and that children who are raised outside of this structure experience deleterious consequences. White children who are raised by a single parent experience poverty at a rate of 33 percent; this falls to 5 percent when they are raised by their married parents. For black children, 46 percent who are raised by a single parent experience poverty; this falls to 13 percent when they are raised by their married parents. Children who are not raised by both of their biological parents are about twice as likely to have behavioral problems and to not graduate from high school. Further, children raised outside of marriage are more likely to have a child as a teen and to experience health problems. Importantly, children in cohabitating families or who have divorced parents face negative outcomes on these same metrics. Other negative consequences for children who live away from one or both of their biological parents include their being half as likely to graduate from college, twice as likely to go to prison, and seven times as likely to have witnessed parental violence. In addition, there is also the reality that children who live with a non-relative male are 11 times more likely to be sexually or physically abused.

Far from being a tool to advance the cisheteropatriarchy, as Letiecq claims, marriage is the best structure for children’s well-being.

Perhaps Letiecq is motivated to argue that the prioritization of marriage is pernicious and racist because it reflects negatively on her own family structure. “As a White, cisgender woman, I am currently living with my partner and co-raising our children in a committed heterosexual union outside the institution of marriage,” she explains in the article.

Regardless, her arguments are, on their face, absurd given that marriage is not only a Western institution but can be found in all societies across the world. (Except, perhaps, in the society of nihilistic far-left radicals in the United States.)

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