Here are some commonplace arguments against gay marriage: Marriage is an ancient institution that has always been defined as the union of one man and one woman, and we meddle with that definition at our peril. Lifelong heterosexual monogamy is natural; gay relationships are not. The nuclear family is the universal, time-tested path to forming families and raising children.… These arguments have lost because they’re wrong.
So far so good… waiting to hear the catch.
What we think of as “traditional marriage” is not universal. The default family arrangement in many cultures, modern as well as ancient, has been polygamy, not monogamy. The default mode of child-rearing is often communal, rather than two parents nurturing their biological children.
Really? But the Bible says that marriage has always been between one man and one woman! Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve! Jacob and Leah, not Jacob and Leah, Rachel, Bilhah and Zilpah!
Nor is lifelong heterosexual monogamy obviously natural in the way that most Americans understand the term. If “natural” is defined to mean “congruent with our biological instincts,” it’s arguably one of the more unnatural arrangements imaginable. In crudely Darwinian terms, it cuts against both the male impulse toward promiscuity and the female interest in mating with the highest-status male available.
And, according to that crude version of Darwin, gay people naturally don't exist. Problem solved.
So what are gay marriage’s opponents really defending, if not some universal, biologically inevitable institution? It’s a particular vision of marriage, rooted in a particular tradition, that establishes a particular sexual ideal.
News flash: Judge Walker's decision doesn't outlaw anyone's vision of marriage.
This ideal holds up the commitment to lifelong fidelity and support by two sexually different human beings — a commitment that involves the mutual surrender, arguably, of their reproductive self-interest — as a uniquely admirable kind of relationship. It holds up the domestic life that can be created only by such unions, in which children grow up in intimate contact with both of their biological parents, as a uniquely admirable approach to child-rearing. And recognizing the difficulty of achieving these goals, it surrounds wedlock with a distinctive set of rituals, sanctions and taboos.
Like tax benefits and visitation rights.
The point of this ideal is not that other relationships have no value, or that only nuclear families can rear children successfully.
"It's not that they have no value, it's just that they have less value."
Rather, it’s that lifelong heterosexual monogamy at its best can offer something distinctive and remarkable — a microcosm of civilization, and an organic connection between human generations — that makes it worthy of distinctive recognition and support.
Every time I look at the history of Western civilization, I'm struck by the way that it's just a macrocosm of a husband, a wife, and 2.3 children. The fall of the Roman Empire is just like that time when Mr. Cleaver had a bad day at work.
Again, this is not how many cultures approach marriage.
For example, ours.
It’s a particularly Western understanding, derived from Jewish and Christian beliefs about the order of creation, and supplemented by later ideas about romantic love, the rights of children, and the equality of the sexes.
God created the fish and the birds on the fifth day, but waited until the sixth day to create land animals. Hence no gay marriage. QED. (And you have to love how little things like "rights" and "equality" are merely secondary concerns, i.e. until recently they were never part of the ideal of marriage at all. It's interesting that this is the ideal Mr. Douthat is so anxious to preserve.)
Or at least, it was the Western understanding. Lately, it has come to co-exist with a less idealistic, more accommodating approach, defined by no-fault divorce, frequent out-of-wedlock births, and serial monogamy.
Interesting. Some would say that the more recent approach is actually more idealistic: an ideal of people choosing to stay in a marriage rather than being trapped by legal restrictions, an ideal of treating the act of bringing new life into the world as sacred whatever the circumstances may be, an ideal of respecting people as individuals and as humans rather than as role-players in some prearranged drama. You'd probably just call them dumb fags though.
In this landscape, gay-marriage critics who fret about a slippery slope to polygamy miss the point.
They aren't the only ones, Ross.
If this newer order completely vanquishes the older marital ideal, then gay marriage will become not only acceptable but morally necessary. The lifelong commitment of a gay couple is more impressive than the serial monogamy of straights.
Yes, that's why we should celebrate relationships, because they're impressive. I have an idea: let's ban all marriages that aren't between Olympic athletes.
And a culture in which weddings are optional celebrations of romantic love, only tangentially connected to procreation, has no business discriminating against the love of homosexuals.
Thank goodness we don't live in that kind of culture, the kind that lets people marry each other even if they use birth control or aren't even fertile.
But if we just accept this shift, we’re giving up on one of the great ideas of Western civilization: the celebration of lifelong heterosexual monogamy as a unique and indispensable estate. That ideal is still worth honoring, and still worth striving to preserve.
The great ideas of Western civilization: human rights, the scientific method, and outlawing gay marriage.
And preserving it ultimately requires some public acknowledgment that heterosexual unions and gay relationships are different: similar in emotional commitment, but distinct both in their challenges and their potential fruit.
One might even say that they're separate but equal. Well, except for the equal part. We can't let those potential fruits have the same rights we do!
But based on Judge Walker’s logic — which suggests that any such distinction is bigoted and un-American — I don’t think a society that declares gay marriage to be a fundamental right will be capable of even entertaining this idea.
Okay, let's entertain this idea. Let's give voters a choice. Option A: recognize gay marriages. Option B: entertain this ideal version of marriage by outlawing, for starters, gay marriage, divorce, marriage between non-virgins, marriage between non-fertile individuals, remarriage for widows and widowers, marriage between non-Judeo-Christians, birth control, adoption, foster care, babysitting, TV shows about polygamy, and the whole idea of equal protection under the law. For such a profound and meaningful ideal as this, it would be ridiculous to stop merely at outlawing only the first of these.
Right?
