February 27, 2004, 9:20 a.m.
The Bells Are Ringing . . .
Marriage, marriage, everywhere.

EDITOR'S NOTE: This article appears in the March 8, 2004, issue of National Review.

As same-sex couples from neighboring jurisdictions and even states besiege San Francisco's city offices clamoring to be wed, one is half-tempted to grant them what they say they want — the stability of lifelong marriage. Suppose same-sex marriages were introduced by legislation that also made divorce much harder to obtain: How many same-sex couples would then be rushing to join San Francisco's wedding carnival? My suspicion is that lesbians would heavily outnumber gay men and that there would be a great many grooms left waiting at the municipal altar. It is not lifelong commitment that the couples are seeking (except in moments of romantic fantasy), but the revolving door of modern marriage with no-fault divorce. And it tells us a great deal that legislation to make marriage both gender-free and permanent would have no chance whatsoever of passing — while gay marriage is almost upon us.

Whatever its conservative advocates may argue, gay marriage would be not a move toward greater stability in homosexual relationships, but just another domino falling in the slow-motion collapse of marriage in the Western world. Radical advocates of gay marriage support it for that very reason. As Stanley Kurtz has persuasively demonstrated, the end result of this trend is visible in Scandinavia — where marriage is gradually dying away, replaced by cohabitation, family dissolution, and child-rearing by the welfare state. Gay marriage in Scandinavia has done nothing to halt these trends. Indeed, they have accelerated in the period since gay marriages and civil unions were legalized.

Yet unless an amendment to the U.S. Constitution is passed, same-sex marriage is likely to become a reality in America. The Massachusetts supreme court has effectively ordered the legislature to allow gay couples to marry. Even before that, the Canadian supreme court's discovery of a right to same-sex marriage — though hotly contested in Ottawa — was presented in the U.S. media as an indicator of where the U.S. is heading on the grounds that, well, Canada is a more progressive version of America. And Justice Sandra Day O'Connor laid the groundwork for direct legal influence when she argued in favor of citing the decisions of overseas courts as precedents in U.S. court decisions. Judges will naturally pick and choose among these decisions, generally preferring to cite Scandinavia over Saudi Arabia, so that individual judicial decisions will become quite arbitrary while their overall drift is in a left-progressive direction. Such easygoing arbitrariness seems to be catching. In San Francisco, even the mayor is legislating — though the courts may well rebuff this challenge to their monopoly.

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