Listening Attentively
Ideas have consequences.

Mr. Kurtz is also a fellow at the Hudson Institute
August 8, 2001 8:55 a.m.

n 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.