TODAY'S GAY WISDOM
Adam and Steve--Together at Last
Kate Pollit
Will someone
please explain to me how permitting Gays and Lesbians to marry threatens
the institution of marriage? Now that the Massachusetts Supreme Court
has declared Gay marriage a Constitutional right, opponents really have
to get their arguments in line. The most popular theory, advanced by
David Blankenhorn, Jean Bethke Elshtain and other social conservatives
is that under the tulle and orange blossom, marriage is all about
procreation. There's some truth to this as a practical matter — couples
often live together and tie the knot only when baby's on the way. But
whether or not marriage is the best framework for child-rearing, having
children isn't a marital requirement. As many have pointed out, the law
permits marriage to the infertile, the elderly, the impotent and those
with no wish to procreate; it allows married couples to use birth
control, to get sterilized, to be celibate. There's something creepily
authoritarian and insulting about reducing marriage to procreation, as
if intimacy mattered less than biological fitness. It's not a view that
anyone outside a right-wing think tank, a Catholic marriage tribunal or
an ultra-Orthodox rabbi's court is likely to find persuasive.
So scratch
procreation. How about: Marriage is the way women domesticate men. This
theory, a favorite of right-wing writer George Gilder, has some
statistical support — married men are much less likely than singles to
kill people, crash the car, take drugs, commit suicide — although it
overlooks such husbandly failings as domestic violence, child abuse,
infidelity and abandonment. If a man rapes his wife instead of his date,
it probably won't show up on a police blotter, but has civilization
moved forward? Of course, this view of marriage as a barbarian-adoption
program doesn't explain why women should undertake it — as is obvious
from the state of the world, they haven't been too successful at it,
anyway. (Maybe men should civilize men — bring on the Fab Five!) Nor
does it explain why marriage should be restricted to heterosexual
couples. The Gay men and Lesbians who want to marry don't impinge on the
male-improvement project one way or the other. Surely not even Gilder
believes that a heterosexual pothead with plans for murder and suicide
would be reformed by marrying a Lesbian?
What about the
argument from history? According to this, marriage has been around
forever and has stood the test of time. Actually, though, marriage as we
understand it — voluntary, monogamous, legally egalitarian, based on
love, involving adults only — is a pretty recent phenomenon. For much of
human history, polygyny was the rule--read your Old Testament — and in
much of Africa and the Muslim world, it still is. Arranged marriages,
forced marriages, child marriages, marriages predicated on the
subjugation of women — Gay marriage is like a fairy tale romance
compared with most chapters of the history of wedlock.
The trouble with
these and other arguments against Gay marriage is that they overlook how
loose, flexible, individualized and easily dissolved the bonds of
marriage already are. Virtually any man and woman can marry, no matter
how ill assorted or little acquainted. An 80-year-old can marry an
18-year-old; a john can marry a prostitute; two terminally ill patients
can marry each other from their hospital beds. You can get married by
proxy, like medieval royalty, and not see each other in the flesh for
years. Whatever may have been the case in the past, what undergirds
marriage in most people's minds today is not some socio-biological
theory about reproduction or male socialization. Nor is it the enormous
bundle of privileges society awards to married people. It's love,
commitment, stability. Speaking just for myself, I don't like marriage. I
prefer the old-fashioned ideal of monogamous free love, not that it
worked out particularly well in my case. As a social mechanism,
moreover, marriage seems to me a deeply unfair way of distributing
social goods like health insurance and retirement checks, things
everyone needs. Why should one's marital status determine how much you
pay the doctor, or whether you eat cat food in old age, or whether a
child gets a government check if a parent dies? It's outrageous that,
for example, a working wife who pays Social Security all her life gets
no more back from the system than if she had married a male worker
earning the same amount and stayed home. Still, as long as marriage is
here, how can it be right to deny it to those who want it? In fact, you
would think that, given how many heterosexuals are happy to live in sin,
social conservatives would welcome maritally minded Gays with open
arms. Gays already have the baby — they can adopt in many states, and
Lesbians can give birth in all of them — so why deprive them of the
marital bathwater?
At bottom, the
objections to Gay marriage are based on religious prejudice: The
marriage of man and woman is "sacred" and opening it to same-sexers
violates its sacral nature. That is why so many people can live with
civil unions but draw the line at marriage--spiritual union. In fact,
polls show a striking correlation of religiosity, especially evangelical
Protestantism, with opposition to Gay marriage and with belief in
homosexuality as a choice, the famous "Gay lifestyle." For these people
Gay marriage is wrong because it lets Gays and Lesbians avoid turning
themselves into the straights God wants them to be. As a matter of law,
however, marriage is not about Adam and Eve versus Adam and Steve. It's
not about what God blesses, it's about what the government permits.
People may think "marriage" is a word wholly owned by religion, but
actually it's wholly owned by the state. No matter how big your church
wedding, you still have to get a marriage license from City Hall. And
just as divorced people can marry even if the Catholic Church considers
it bigamy, and Muslim and Mormon men can only marry one woman even if
their holy books tell them they can wed all the girls in Apartment 3G,
two men or two women should be able to marry, even if religions oppose
it and it makes some heterosexuals, raised in those religions,
uncomfortable.
Gay marriage — it's not about sex, it's about separation of church and state.
