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his latest
contribution to our exchange on gay marriage, Jonathan Rauch
portrays me as coldly saying to gays, "You can't handle marriage,
and shouldn't even get the chance to prove yourselves. Sorry, gay
people, but that's life."
I see the matter
differently. If I bring something new to the debate over gay marriage,
it is chiefly the fact that I have respectfully read and attended
to the arguments about marriage offered by gay people themselves
— not just "conservative" advocates of gay marriage like
Jonathan Rauch and Andrew Sullivan, but the many gays who see marriage
as an essentially oppressive institution, and who wish to either
abolish it directly, or to subvert it from within. These gays —
and there are many of them — are saying, "Just wait till we
get a hold of marriage, purge it of it's demands for fidelity and
monogamy, and turn it to the task of promoting androgyny instead
of sexual complementarity." So it's not so much that I am telling
something to the gay community as that I am listening attentively
to what it says.
Reading Rauch,
one would never know that the gay community has been, and still
is, deeply divided on the subject of marriage. Initially, the drive
for gay marriage provoked intense debate among gays, with many arguing
that it was a terrible mistake to join so oppressive an institution
as marriage. That argument wasn't so much "won" as it
was set aside. In pursuit of social acceptance, gays now give near
universal assent to the idea that they ought to have the right
to marry one another, yet gays are still deeply divided about whether
they ought to marry or, if so, whether they ought to conform to
traditional notions of what marriage means. The truth is, Rauch's
conservative argument for gay marriage puts him on the far end of
the spectrum in this debate, and Rauch has done a poor job of either
acknowledging or coming to terms with the existence of diverse views
on the marriage question within the gay community itself.
Rauch is affronted
by my point that gay sexuality, because it is detached from reproduction,
stands as a critical symbol of the contemporary ethos of sexual
self-fulfillment. But I drew this point from Michael Bronski, a
gay writer whose important book, The
Pleasure Principle, I linked, and recommended in my
last reply to Rauch. It's Bronski who argues, with insight and
energy, that the collapse of the imperative to "reproductive
heterosexuality" embodied in traditional marriage will provoke
an end to monogamy and the traditional family. Bronski supports
gay marriage, if with limited enthusiasm, because he sees it as
a means to that end.
Or consider
E. J. Graff, a important advocate of gay marriage who openly argues
that conservatives are absolutely right to see gay marriage as a
"breathtakingly subversive idea." Graff welcomes gay marriage
precisely because she sees that it detaches marriage from heterosexuality
and reproduction, and will therefore bring about a legal structure
and a social ethos that presume androgyny. When I say that detaching
marriage from heterosexuality will have deep-lying cultural consequences,
Rauch treats my statement as a transparent debaters point designed
solely for the purpose of excluding homosexuals. Bronski and Graff
know better.
Marriage works
through a sort of "enchantment" of heterosexual relationship.
It lends a feeling of "meant to be" to the union of a
man and a woman, and to the conventions of respect, responsibility,
and fidelity associated with marriage and courtship. Of course many
favor gay marriage precisely because they wish to remove the sense
that it is only heterosexual relationships that are somehow "meant
to be." But the end result will not be, as Rauch hopes, to
spread the enchantment around. Instead, once the enchantment of
heterosexuality is broken, marriage will be transformed from something
that seems written in the world into just another contract, as flexible
and breakable as any other, and therefore a contract that might
easily include numerous partners and an open sexual code. The "subversive"
proponents of gay marriage understand this very well.
Of course Rauch
is correct to say that marriage is not only about the complementarity
of the sexes, but also mutual love and loyalty. But the point is
that marriage works by yoking several elements together — the ethos
and etiquette of heterosexuality, parenthood, and long term love
and friendship. Again, gay proponents of the "subversive"
effects of gay marriage look forward to breaking apart these united
elements, precisely in order to achieve their cultural goals of
promoting androgyny and increased sexual "openness."
But I don't
want to imply that it's only radical gays who make such arguments.
The truth is, even so-called conservative advocates of gay marriage
concede that gay marriage will work a profound transformation within
the pattern of monogamy, parenthood, and fidelity that has heretofore
characterized the institution of marriage. In a piece in the September
2000 issue of Commentary,
I showed how even the "conservative" gay-marriage advocate
William Eskridge looked forward to gay marriage for the novel family
configurations it would bring about. And with David Crosby's donation
of sperm to Melissa Etheridge and Julie Cypher, haven't we already
seen the beginnings of a three-parent system? Be assured that there
will be suits for the legal recognition of such triple unions. And
as I showed in my earlier piece "Code of Honor," in his
book, Virtually
Normal, Andrew Sullivan has advertised "the greater
understanding of the need for extramarital outlets" as a positive
transformation that gay marriage would work on the institution of
marriage itself (pp. 202-203). So instead of chastising me for my
supposedly jaundiced portrait of the effects of gay marriage, Rauch
ought to address himself to both his opponents and allies within
the gay community.
Rauch's portrait
of the depth of love, service, and friendship between many gay couples
is both true and important. I can well understand why he seeks the
recognition of marriage for these alliances. As I've said before,
this debate has an inescapable element of tragedy about it. We are,
I believe, arguing about how best to balance competing goods. If
someone were to say to me, "Even if gay marriage further weakens
marriage itself — maybe even substantially so — it's still worth
it. The practical and emotional costs of the failure to recognize
gay partnerships are just too great for us not to make the change,"
I would take that to be a very powerful argument (and far more accurate
than the claim that gay marriage will actually strengthen marriage).
In reply, I
would say that, at one level, it's a judgement call, with no clear
answer. We have here an exceedingly painful case in which the interests
of approximately 3 percent of the population cut against the interests
of the other 97 percent, and in a way that matters tremendously
to both groups. Yet I also believe that marriage won't really work
the wonders for the gay community that Rauch thinks it will, but
will instead simply end up losing its power as an institution for
all segments of society. And the real source of gay alienation will
not disappear. It is the experience of growing up gay in a world
in which 97 percent of those around you are heterosexual that creates
the alienation — even if no-one ever had a harsh word to say. Gay
marriage is a false solution to the problem of gay alienation.
Rauch is indignant
that I would even think to withhold "the right to marry"
based on a judgement about how sexually well-behaved gay couples
will or won't be. This takes us to a core contradiction within Rauch's
case for gay marriage. On the one hand, Rauch makes an argument
for gay marriage grounded in the claim that the change will domesticate
gay couples. He suggests careful experimentation in just a few states,
leaving society itself the option of deciding that the experiment
has failed.
Yet challenge
the basis of Rauch's own "conservative" case for gay marriage
— his claims about its domesticating effects — and he indignantly
condemns you for even bringing up the issue, instead of treating
same-sex marriage as a "right" to begin with. In my earlier
piece on gay marriage in Commentary, I pointed out the same
contradiction in Andrew Sullivan's arguments for gay marriage, which
began as a "conservative" claim for a domestication effect,
yet quickly veered into a rights-based case under challenge.
The trouble
with the rights-based side of Rauch's argument is that it cannot
help but lead to the dissolution of marriage and its replacement
by an infinitely flexible series of relationship contracts between
persons of any number or gender. Be assured that groups of three,
four, and more will come before the public and the courts — with
arguments that equal Rauch's in passion — demanding recognition
for their "equal right" to a loving collective marriage.
But as I showed in my piece in Commentary, the end result
of such group marriages will be a serious rise in marital instability,
and chaos for the children of these multiple households.
There's another
problem with Rauch's resort to a rights-based argument; it makes
it very difficult to take his case for federalism seriously. Rauch
says he wants us to launch a careful experiment with gay marriage
in just a few states, and then carefully judge the empirical results.
But it now looks as though any attempt to roll things back based
on poor results will be met with impassioned claims that this is
a matter of rights, after all, and not of empirical behavior. Rauch
calls me an extremist for denying gays the chance to prove me wrong,
but he clearly makes it impossible to imagine a scenario in which
he would acknowledge that the experiment had failed. And even setting
his rights-based argument aside, since Rauch claims that a whole
new generation will have to grow up and play out their lives under
the new scheme for its effects to be evident, he will clearly oppose
a rollback, on principle, anytime before the next 50 years.
Although Rauch
says that he can imagine and bear the chaos created by travel restrictions
under a state-by-state patchwork arrangement, the important point
is that no one else will accept it. Here is another point at which
Rauch's distance from the gay community as a whole becomes important.
A veritable army of gay advocates are prepared to litigate a national
imposition of gay marriage on grounds of "portability,"
and as I showed in "The
Right Balance," they have an excellent case.
I did not,
by the way, greet Rauch's proposal for a constitutional DOMA with
silence. What I said is that a constitutional DOMA would do nothing
to prevent the undemocratic imposition on gay marriage on states
by judges who have long ago disregarded the principles of judicial
restraint and substituted their own cultural preferences for the
law.
Finally, Rauch
seems to think that my views on gay marriage "sit crosswise
with liberalism." Certainly the framers of our Constitution
and the great theorists of liberalism would be puzzled by that remark.
Liberalism has never been incompatible with our traditional family
structure. On the contrary, liberalism depends upon it. But if liberalism
now means that society can no longer offer special support and encouragement
to the traditional family, then I assure you that marriage will
be abolished, and a system of strictly private contracts set up
in its place. Any argument Rauch might choose to make against legal
polygamy or group marriage (and perhaps even incest as well) will
necessarily fall every bit as far outside of what he now defines
as liberalism as my own arguments against gay marriage. And be assured,
this is where we are headed. With the advent of gay marriage — already
mandated in Vermont on right-based grounds (rather than on Rauch's
"conservative" grounds) — we face legalized polygamy,
group marriage, and the eventual legal abolition of marriage itself
and its replacement by an infinitely flexible contractual system.
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