By Teri Hu

Oscar: So, what’s a bastard?

Norah: It just means your mom wasn’t married when she had you. You know, in a couple of years, you’re going to find that it’s a free pass to cool, right? Probably start a band called Bastard Son, use it to impress the chicks.

The thing about this scene that gets me is that Sunshine Cleaning came out in 2009. "In a couple of years?" Does anyone still care if a kid’s a bastard now?

I don’t know if the screenwriter’s inspiration was based on any real-life, retro red-state stigma you’d find in Albuquerque (yes, I know New Mexico went for Obama…but they also voted for Bush in 2004), but growing up in the Bay Area, my two lil' bastards haven’t encountered any prejudice as non-marital children. I know because I’ve asked them.

There’s always been kind of a sliding scale stigma applied to "illegitimacy," even in the uptight Eisenhower era. If you were conceived before marriage but your parents got hitched as soon as possible, society often turned a blind eye to the initial breach of protocol, pretending not to count the months between wedding and birth. Even with post-partum marriages, it was bad manners to bring up the discrepancy between the child’s birthdate and a couple’s anniversary. The idea seemed to be that as long as the family was intact, it was in poor taste to give them a hard time about the order in which events occurred.

Some folks would call that hypocrisy, I suppose, but I see the logic. If marriage was expected to establish a stable family structure in which to raise children, it shouldn’t matter when the wedding took place. What mattered was the home in which the kids grew up, right? Two loving parents, enough food on the table, a warm, safe place to sleep. Every kid deserves at least that much…who can argue with that?

But the logical continuation of that idea would lead to downgrading a child’s legal status when his parents divorced. If intact married families are the ideal—and the stigma of "illegitimacy" was society’s way of pressuring people to conform to that ideal or give their babies away to properly married couples—the children of divorce are essentially also "illegitimate". To be totally fair, when a marriage dissolved, you’d have to take kids away from their parents.

Therein lay the hypocrisy. You can’t punish people for not getting married if you don’t expect the married ones to stay married anyway. And it’s a lot harder to tell already-born kids that you’re going to strip them of legal privileges because their parents couldn’t work out their problems than it is to tell an unmarried pregnant woman that her baby would be better off with a "real" family.

When divorce was equally stigmatized, the stigma of "illegitimacy" balanced the scales. Couples needed to stick it out, even if it was an unwilling shotgun wedding followed by a lifetime of misery. Whatever the cost. 'Til death do they part. For the kids.

In the 1970s, there were enough swinging divorcees, enough single parents, enough kids shuttling between two houses that you no longer felt freakish having your family life disrupted in this way. Whether that was a good thing or not, I couldn’t say. As a child of divorce myself, I don’t have the necessary distance to judge how my parents’ divorce affected me. I do know, however, that the only thing that made the dissolution of our family bearable was knowing that we weren’t alone in this upheaval. Every one of my childhood friends came from a broken home. I didn’t meet anyone whose parents were still married until ninth grade, when I transferred to a Catholic high school.

Around the same time, I also met my first "illegitimate" classmate, a girl whose mother never married her father. Her parents were 60s hippies who lived together in San Francisco, she was born in 1970, and they broke up a few years later. Then her dad found a job in Colorado, and she visited him during the summers but lived with her mom. What struck me was that her parents skipping the entire step of marriage didn’t make my friend’s life any different from the rest of us divorce babies. She did all the same things, dealt with more or less the same problems, had the same complaints about her family. Her very existence proved that marriage was a negligible institution.

This was quite a revelation. Marriage ultimately meant nothing if the bastard child of two free-spirited hippies socialized easily with the "legitimate", baptized children of respectable Catholic families. We attended the same schools, slept over at each others’ homes, went to the movies together. We really were equal, and that was a wonderfully liberating thought. Getting married hadn’t helped keep my parents together, it hadn’t protected our family from the fluctuating vicissitudes of modern life, so what was the point? It seemed there was none, so I didn’t do it.

Twenty years, two kids and a whopping fat jumbo mortgage later, I honestly believe not getting married was the smartest decision I ever made, for one simple reason: it forced me—at the naïve and clueless age of 15—to formulate and articulate a worldview based on practical real-life considerations and consequences instead of the social customs and traditions that informed my parents’ decisions.

It helped, of course, that among the groundbreaking legislation passed in the civil rights era were two 1968 Supreme Court cases—Levy v. Louisiana and Glona v. American Guarantee & Liability Insurance Company—that recognized the full citizenship rights of "illegitimate" children. Without these two decisions, my friend’s parents probably would’ve married (and divorced), and I, too, would’ve been forced to walk down the aisle to protect my children from social ostracism.

Once I turned my back on the monstrous white elephant of marriage, it was easy to reject convention in other aspects of life. Choosing an "impractical" major in a field I loved, rather than becoming the doctor my mom always wanted. Keeping my son, even though I was only 20 years old and still in college rather than having the "logical" abortion. Moving back to the city with two school-age children in tow rather than sticking it out for ten more years in the safe and stifling suburbs. And the greatest irony is, through it all, I'm still with the man I decided not to marry even before I met him. Go figure.

Teri Hu lives in San Francisco, and would like to add that the Supremes released "Love Child" in 1968 as well. It hit #1, knocking "Hey Jude" from the top spot. Thus, a song about the pain of illegitimacy overrides a song comforting a child of divorce. There's a lesson in that, somewhere.