Harris with husband Doug and stepchildren
Team News Riveting
Of all the issues for which the American election 2020 will be remembered in the history books, the declining stigma about divorce will find the top slot.
The election is being held amidst pandemic. But what is emerging more important is that a divorced politician (or politician’s wife) with a blended family no longer holds the insurmountable stigma it once did in America.
The first and second families in the country have been held up as paragons of virtue, exemplars of the flawed notion that a nuclear family with a mother, father, and 2 or more biological children is by definition a moral one.
The Kennedys, the Bushes, and the Obamas notably all fit into the template. For the majority of the State’s 244 years history, there was no room for divorce on the Presidential ballot while a failed marriage was often a disqualifying factor.
But evolving notions about relationships, monogamy, and the role marriage plays in society have slowly trickled up from the electorate to the political class, and this election cycle, it is coming to fruition.
When Donald Trump came, he became only the second divorced President in American history. Ronald Reagan was notably the first. Trump’s VP Mike Pence Married to a divorced woman.
No matter who wins in November, there will be a stepparent in the White House.
Both Biden and Harris’s children stole the show at Democratic National Convention last week. Harris’s step-daughter Ella—the daughter of Harris’s husband Doug Emhoff and his first wife Kerstin Mackin—introduced her “Momala” by calling her “the World’s Greatest Stepmom.”
And, later, in describing her mother, Harris offered a definition of family that includes not only “the family you’re born into” but also “the family you choose.”
Biden’s own family’s origin story is central to his political story. Grief over the death of his wife and young daughter, who tragically died in a car crash in 1972, has clearly shaped his life and work. For a time, he was a single father to his sons Beau and Hunter, and he says with frequency that it was his second wife Jill, a divorcée herself, who “put us back together.”
