Marriage for All
A simple request.

By Jonathan Rauch, a columnist for National Journal, vice president of the Independent Gay Forum & a writer in residence at the Brookings Institution
August 10, 2001 11:05 a.m.

read Stanley Kurtz's latest contribution to our gay-marriage discussion several times, and I came away concluding that his position really does, as I said last time, essentially boil down to: "I don't believe homosexuals can handle marriage responsibly. And they should never be allowed a chance to prove me wrong. Sorry, gay people, but that's life."

Although I do think it's wrong to demand that homosexuals who want to marry prove they'll meet sexual-behavior standards that are never applied to heterosexuals, I don't believe that homosexuals have an absolute right to marriage, and I've been careful, pace Kurtz, not to rest my case on rights. (When I talk casually about, for example, "denying homosexuals the right to marry," I mean 'right' only in the weaker sense of statutory entitlement.) If I thought that legalizing same-sex marriage would destroy or seriously damage marriage for everyone, then I would oppose same-sex marriage as a self-defeating entitlement. My argument is one about presumption. If there is significant doubt about the effects of same-sex marriage — and of course neither Kurtz nor I nor anybody else really knows what would happen, and in truth many good and bad and indifferent things would happen — then the presumption ought to be that everyone should have a chance to participate in society's most important civic institution. At a bare minimum, if the claim is that homosexuals will wreck marriage, we should not be forever denied any hope of showing that we won't wreck marriage.

It means a lot to me to hear Kurtz say that there is an "inescapable element of tragedy" in having to deny marriage to homosexuals in order to preserve it for everybody else. Many conservatives, probably almost all until very recently, have viewed gay lives and loves as a more or less inconsequential factor in the debate over gay marriage. Their attitude has been, "Why do these homosexuals insist on wrecking marriage? Why don't they just go away and leave well enough alone? So what if they can't marry? Pass the potato chips." Kurtz will have none of that. I thank him.

But "so sorry" only gets Kurtz so far if the tragedy is of his own making. If he really believes that denying marriage to homosexuals is tragic, he should seek to avoid rather than perpetuate the tragedy. If there is any reasonable possibility that the alleged tragic trade-off between gay and straight marriage is imaginary — that same-sex and opposite-sex marriage could happily coexist — he should look for and embrace a reasonable option that could test that possibility. One such option is to let our federalist system run its course, letting individual states try same-sex marriage if and when they please. Then we'll see what happens. Yet it is Kurtz who seeks to foreclose this option, with a constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage. He would thus rule tragedy into being: tragedy in the form of perpetual homosexual alienation from the social institution that's most important for a happy and healthy life. For all that I appreciate Kurtz's stated solicitousness of gay lives and loves — and believe me, I do — it may be that the old-fashioned conservative "We don't care" was in some ways more honest.

How would we know if gay marriage works? Kurtz charges that it would be very hard ever to persuade me that a state gay-marriage experiment failed, and that I "will clearly oppose a rollback, on principle, anytime before the next 50 years." Here, I think, Kurtz again misapprehends federalist (and democratic) principle. The question isn't what Jonathan Rauch or Stanley Kurtz or any other pointy-head thinks of a state's experience with gay marriage; the question is what the people of that state and of other states think. The whole point of a federalist approach is that it lets the voters of the states decide what sort of arrangement counts as a social-policy success. I will accept their judgment. Why won't he?

Well, on that subject I think Kurtz and I have reached the point of repeating ourselves. Anyway, I've reached that point. So I'll leave the arguments before the reader and pass on to a couple of other threads. Kurtz says that I'm at the conservative end of the gay intelligentsia on marriage, and that a lot of gay radicals and intellectuals think I'm wrong. That's certainly true, but I don't see why it's important. Gay radicals and intellectuals think all sorts of things but are no more likely than anyone else to be right; it's the argument and evidence, not the source, that counts. I think the gay left-winger who says gay matrimony will undermine the norms of marriage is just as wrong as the conservative right-winger who says it. What else can I say?

In any case, the gay intelligentsia are all over the map on marriage. Not long ago, in an article in Reason magazine, I dissected a book by Michael Warner, a prominent and very smart gay radical who argues that sexual norms of any kind are oppressive. He loathes the idea of same-sex marriage precisely because "the effect would be to reinforce the material privileges and cultural normativity of marriage," which would reduce the amount of sexual experimentation going on, which he thinks would be awful. As I'm sure Kurtz knows, there are a lot of gay radicals who share Warner's fear that marriage will change gay culture in appallingly bourgeois ways. Does that show I'm right? Really, I don't think brandishing gay intellectuals gets us anywhere.

It may be more productive to focus on an odd convergence of interests between the world's Michael Warners and Stanley Kurtzes. Warner and his ilk dislike gay marriage, but they can't be against it because they think homosexuals should have equal rights, including the right to marry. So how do they get out of this box? By arguing for a multiplicity of alternatives to marriage, thus eroding marriage's unique prestige.

Don't get me wrong; if I can't get gay marriage, I'll reluctantly take partnership programs, which would do at least something to recognize and nourish stable gay relationships. But from a social point of view, a partnership program — indeed, anything that competes with marriage — is a poor second choice. Most gay-marriage opponents just say, "Fine, then homosexuals should get nothing." But a few more compassionate and far-sighted opponents — people like Kurtz — understand that telling homosexuals to go fly a kite is not an option. Americans really believe in the Golden Rule, equal opportunity to pursue happiness, and all that. They're going to want to do something for homosexuals, a desire that will increase as more sons and daughters and siblings and friends come out.

Something really new, without historical precedent, is happening in America. Today, for the first time, a majority is coming to realize that homosexuals actually exist: that we're not just heterosexuals who need treatment or jail. This realization will, must, and should drive change in a society whose institutions are premised on the notion that homosexuals do not actually exist. The question is whether marriage or something else should be the template. If there's one social regularity I can think of, it's that marriage — the commitment to care for another person for life — has good effects on human populations, and that its denial has bad effects, and that the alternatives are worse. But if Kurtz absolutely cannot accept that this might be true in the case of same-sex unions, then he had better start planning for a nation full of Vermonts, with all kinds of sort-of-marriage programs.

Note that, once partnership programs are set up, heterosexuals who don't want to get married invariably clamor to get in. "How come only the gays get this? No special rights!" As of 1998, all three of the states and all but a handful of the municipalities that offered domestic-partner programs for their workers included opposite-sex couples; so did the large majority of corporate programs. I grant that to some extent "marriage lite" will spread anyway, because some states that bar gay marriage will offer alternatives. But a constitutional ban on gay marriage will force all states that want to do anything for homosexuals to create alternatives to marriage. Employers, too, will create multifarious partnership programs that would be unnecessary if homosexuals could just get married. Is all this good for marriage? Kurtz worries about "the dissolution of marriage and its replacement by an infinitely flexible series of relationship contracts." But that is exactly what he guarantees by withholding the template of marriage!

Polygamy, which rears its ugly head in Kurtz's last paragraph and in his argument against Andrew Sullivan, merits a discussion of its own; here, just a few words. On grounds of both equality and social policy, gay marriage is completely consonant with liberal principles, and polygamy just as completely isn't — and the distinction is not hard to understand and sustain. Homosexuals are not asking for the legal right to marry anybody or everybody we love. We are asking for precisely and only the same legal right that heterosexuals enjoy, namely the right to marry somebody we love: one person, as opposed to no one at all. Liberalism holds that similarly situated people should be similarly treated by law. Americans increasingly understand that a gay man who is allowed to marry a woman is not situated similarly to a straight man who is allowed to marry a woman. Nor is a gay man who wants to marry a man situated similarly to a straight man who wants to marry three women or a man who wants to marry his dog or his Volkswagen; he is situated similarly to a heterosexual man who wants to marry one woman. Saying that gay marriage leads to polygamy is no more logically coherent than saying that if blacks (say) demand and are given one vote, whites (say) will inevitably demand and be given two.

Moreover, a liberal regime has a strong social-policy interest in making marriage universal. There's a reason why no polygamous countries are liberal: if some men — usually high-status men — get multiple wives, then by definition other men — usually low-status men — get no wives. The result is a restless and destabilizing sexual underclass that must be subdued by some form of repression. Not coincidentally, gay culture, in its own way, for many years had some characteristics of a restless and destabilizing sexual underclass, and it was subdued to some extent by repression. That all began to change when open gay relationships started becoming socially acceptable. Gay marriage is, obviously, completely consonant with liberal aspirations to make marriage something that everyone can aspire to. In fact, it fulfills those aspirations.