Gay Marriage -- and Marriage

Home About Archive Current Issue RSS Nook Kindle Donate I Thee Wed? 02.01.04 - 12:00 AM | by Our Readers Share Print PDF To the Editor: Sam Schulman is right that people have come to see same-sex marriage as inevitable [“Gay Marriage— and Marriage,” November 2003]. In fact, more than two-thirds of Americans now believe gay people will win the freedom to marry, and nationwide polls show that while there is not yet consistent majority support for marriage equality, the majority is ready to accept it. Substantial majorities oppose discriminatory attacks on gay families, including proposals to amend the Constitution to ban gay marriage. Like many others, Mr. Schulman bases most of his arguments against marriage equality on religious principles. But lesbian and gay couples seek the right to civil marriage licenses, not a mandate from the state telling religious communities to perform marriage rites. Churches and members of the clergy should not be compelled to recognize gay unions, just as they do not have to perform the weddings of interfaith couples or divorced people. Mr. Schulman asserts that marriage has been unchanged throughout modern history. But within the lifetimes of many of us, women in fact lost rights when they married, people were denied the right to marry someone of the “wrong” race, couples were not allowed to terminate failed or abusive marriages, and government prevented even married couples from using contraception. Despite opponents of equality who claimed at each turning point that change was against “God’s will” or “the definition of marriage,” we changed the law, and few Americans would argue today that marriage was better before such changes. Mr. Schulman contends that ending the exclusion of same-sex couples from marriage will have a devastating impact on this important and most resilient institution. But the strength of marriage is based not on whom it excludes, but rather on love, commitment, self-sacrifice, responsibility, and the shared pursuit of happiness. If we as a society believe that marriage promotes stability, healthy families, and strong communities, why would this not hold true for same-sex couples as well? Today many same-sex couples are raising children. It makes no sense to punish these children for having the “wrong” kind of parents, or to withhold from their parents the structure of marriage. There is simply no logical or constitutional reason why gay couples should be denied the same freedom to marry that the Supreme Court has said may not be denied to, for example, deadbeat dads or convicted felons. Ending discrimination in marriage is both right and inevitable. Any other solution condemns gay Americans to the status of second-class citizens, separate and unequal. Evan Wolfson Freedom to Marry New York City _____________ To the Editor: Sam Schulman is to be applauded for at least attempting a reasoned argument against gay marriage. In fact, he is uncommonly honest in acknowledging that the idea of same-sex marriage appeals “to our better moral natures as well as to our reason.” But Mr. Schulman’s argument stumbles and falls—as all such arguments ultimately do—because he peddles his subjective perceptions and experiences as essential truths and is unable to articulate any specific injury that would flow directly and necessarily from the institution of same-sex marriage. Mr. Schulman makes a very awkward attempt to argue that gay marriage would victimize women, basing his case on a picture of heterosexual marriage that is both sexist and completely unrecognizable to me. He argues that marriage is “built around female sexuality and female procreativity.” But what about marriages that last well beyond a woman’s childbearing years or indeed beyond a couple’s sexual appetite for one another? Mr. Schulman completes his Victorian image by suggesting that a man’s role in marriage is, at best, functional. He argues that men need not be married to “feel safe and free” in expressing their sexuality, and that male premarital sex is not “essentially incomplete” compared to married sex. One wonders how Mrs. Schulman takes this news, but then surely she must know by now that Mr. Schulman married her only out of a desire for children, or to placate her, or out of fear of losing her. This is not marriage as I have come to know it in my own life or in the lives of my peers. Even if one accepts all of Mr. Schulman’s points about the nature and purpose of marriage, we still have not seen an actual victim of publicly recognizing same-sex marriages. Would women lose some institutionalized protection against rape? Would they be prevented somehow from having their sexuality, as Mr. Schulman puts it, “gathered in”? If same-sex marriage is so very bad, one ought to be able to explain in some detail what terrible things would happen as a result of allowing it. Mr. Schulman gives us a good deal of clucking but displays no pieces of fallen sky. Tim Decker Chicago, Illinois _____________ To the Editor: If a term other than “marriage” were applied, would Sam Schulman support granting to gay couples all of what he calls the “real, tangible benefits” to which any married straight couple—completely irrespective of their ability or intention to create new life, to sustain the species, or to help the woman avoid unhappiness —is automatically entitled? If not, his arguments are nothing more than a veiled endorsement of continued second-class citizenry for gay people. Evan Schwartz New York City _____________ To the Editor: Sam Schulman does the marriage debate a great service with his thoughtful and thought-provoking piece. I agree with him that “the essence of marriage is to sanction and solemnize that connection of opposites which alone creates new life.” I am not sure how he thinks that differs from my own formulation, which he is generous enough to quote: “Most men and women are powerfully drawn to perform a sexual act that can and does generate life. Marriage is our attempt to reconcile and harmonize the erotic, social, sexual, and financial needs of men and women with the needs of their partner and their children.” The difference, I suppose, is that Mr. Schulman champions the idea that marriage is primarily about protecting women. Most good family men feel this way about their marriages, and there would be more good family men if more women encouraged and applauded them for it. Mr. Schulman taps here into some of the profound sources of the marriage idea, including the reality that sex between men and women is a radically unreciprocal act. One of the deep, inarticulate erotic attractions of marriage for men is that it gives new meaning to their otherwise urgent, random, and seemingly futile sexuality. In becoming a husband and father, a man finds a way of experiencing manhood that is not at odds with love—which is a fancy way of agreeing with Mr. Schulman’s view that marriage gives the average man a chance to be the hero. That marriage survives today at all—85 percent of Americans marry despite our ongoing sexual revolution—is a tribute to how deep-seated is the male need to experience masculinity in this way. Nonetheless, it will not do to define the essence of marriage as respecting the freedom of women to choose fathers for their children. I think Mr. Schulman is right that few men and most women feel unprotected in sexual intercourse outside of marriage and that this is one powerful impetus toward marriage. But it is impossible to survey the laws surrounding sexuality and marriage across cultures and still view them as intended to protect women’s freedom of choice or their psychological well-being. Many societies both support marriage and radically degrade women. The fundamental reason for marriage, what Mr. Schulman calls its “essence,” is that every society needs babies and babies need mothers and fathers. Men and women also need each other, but in ways that masculine norms may make it difficult for men to articulate. Maggie Gallagher Institute for Marriage and Public Policy Washington, D.C. _____________ To the Editor: “The Talmud records that God weeps when a man puts aside his first wife.” In fact, the Talmud says (in Tractates Gittin and Sanhedrin) that the altar, not God, weeps. This correction is significant in that the symbolism of the altar’s weeping is meant to express one of the points of Mr. Schulman’s argument. The altar, as focal point of the temple service, is the meeting place, as it were, of two opposites: mortal man and immortal God. The altar therefore cries when marriage, another meeting place of two opposites, is torn asunder. In this sense, the altar’s weeping speaks to the very nature of marriage as a connection between man and woman exclusively. Avraham Alter Brookline, Massachusetts _____________ Sam Schulman writes: Vexingly, Evan Wolf-son repeats arguments in favor of gay marriage that I may have overpraised while ignoring or mischaracterizing the arguments I advanced against it. Thus, he restates the “civil rights” case: when marriage is restricted to heterosexual couples, the good things marriage delivers are unfairly denied to those of different sexuality. But I contended—strenuously—that marriage has nothing to do with delivering such things as commitment, monogamy, stability, or happiness. Instead, it is about protecting female sexuality from male depredation, and ensuring the orderly passing-on of genetic and material inheritance from one generation to the next. Marriage is thus simply not germane to the concerns of couples who do not consist of a woman and a man. What goes for marriage goes for marriage laws: they, too, cannot and do not legislate happiness, monogamy, or stability. Would Mr. Wolfson complain that laws against cockfighting violate the civil rights of children because such laws apply only to chickens? In any case, if the courts succeed in inventing gay marriage, a much larger group of our fellow citizens than gays will still suffer a deprivation of what Mr. Wolfson seems to think of as their civil rights, simply by dint of their inability, for one reason or another, to hold on to the love of another person. Tim Decker, in spite of his generous attempt to follow my way of looking at things, likewise fails to understand my argument. If it is “sexist” to make any distinction between men and women, then he is right to describe me, along with most feminists, as a sexist. My description of the different meanings of marriage for men and women was not meant to be a complete catalog. Nevertheless, at bottom men and women are forced to understand marriage differently because, in perfectly obvious and universal ways, their sexuality has different consequences. I have no doubt that Mr. Decker experiences marriage in a more exalted fashion than I describe. I certainly do. But marriage has its lows as well as its highs—indeed, if lovers had only highs, marriage need not exist. To understand what makes marriage necessary to our humanity, Mr. Decker should close his Dante and contemplate instead the sour-faced father with a shotgun, the harassed mother of a daughter saying to herself, “Were this wild thing wedded, more love should I have, and much less care.” Mr. Decker asks what specific injury would befall existing marriages within, so to speak, a half-mile radius of a lawful gay marriage. It is a good question, if only because some supporters of the traditional definition of marriage make the mistake of insisting on such very specific—yet terribly vague—injuries. But let me answer with another hypothetical question. What injuries would occur if incest were legalized between consenting adults? (This is an important question for me since I believe that marriage exists as an extension of the incest taboo.) To be sure, scientists might predict an increase in the prevalence of birth defects. But such an increase, however precisely calculated, would be trivial compared with the consequences that would follow for our humanity. A question of a different sort is posed by Evan Schwartz: would I be willing to grant all the real, tangible benefits of marriage to gay couples if the arrangement were not called “marriage”? First of all, it seems to me (whose legal training consists of having taken the LSAT exam 30 years ago) that contracts can indeed be devised to replicate those specifically tangible benefits that marriage is expected to deliver. In the Western world—in the Roman and the Jewish traditions, for example—marriage was initiated by forming contracts between two individuals, and nothing does or should prevent two (or more) people from entering into such contracts today. But let me point to a neglected problem with the idea of “civil unions.” Just as marriage does not exist to make two people happy, so, too, the purpose behind the shared material benefits of marriage is not to make a strong and happy relationship. Marriage’s property rights and rights of inheritance developed to protect a family’s wealth, real estate, status, and so forth from one generation to the next, even when— particularly when—there was conflict within marriages and families. The power to pass on to one’s own children one’s accumulated property, and the property of one’s ancestors, is one of those basic needs that define us as human. How does this apply to gay civil unions? A point I have not adequately stressed is that marriage is dangerous. It demands of a man and a woman that they put themselves in one another’s power. This creates the opportunity to perpetrate many a crime in secret: the physically and/or psychologically stronger partner can exert influence on the weaker that is based not on love but on violence and greed. Such things happen between married couples and between parents and children; but in traditional marriage, which takes place within a larger system of kinship, several forces mitigate the danger, including the presence of watchful children and siblings. Gay partnerships have few if any of these natural lines of defense. They are only as strong as are the mutual honor, sincerity, and love of the two partners themselves—rather slender reeds in any relationship, as who among us can fail to attest? I would expect that, within gay-marriage simulacrums, instances of callous exploitation, looting of property, physical violence, and medical murder would be piteously high. It is for others to calculate whether the gains would be worth the suffering of the elderly, ill, weak, and sexually needy at the hands of the strong and ruthless. To the generous and always impressive Maggie Gallagher, I would say that we differ most of all on the question of whether children or women are at the center of marriage’s essence. To me, at any rate, that “essence” is less about respecting women’s freedom to choose fathers than about ensuring women’s ability to exercise any freedom or physical integrity at all—however limited this can be in many societies. In this respect, there is no difference between marriages that include children and those that do not. Praising my character in order to excuse our disagreement, Maggie Gallagher suggests that I make the mistake of other “good family men” who believe that marriage is about protecting women. I think instead that marriage is important because it protects women from bad family men—and from bad men in general. Finally, after being criticized by Evan Wolfson for making a covertly religious argument and damned with faint praise by Tim Decker for making an argument based on reason alone, it is bracing to be so authoritatively corrected by Avraham Alter. His reminder—and eloquent interpretation—of what the Talmud actually says in the passage I imprecisely cited is worth attending to. In tampering so casually with the institution of marriage, we play heedlessly with the wellsprings of what makes us human—and not gods. _____________ About the Author Share Share Share Share More Email Share Print Share Do you want to respond to this article? Click here, to write a letter to the Editor. 

11/21/12 « Gay Marriage—and Marriage Commentary Magazine Home About Archive Current Issue RSS Nook Kindle Donate Gay Marriage—and Marriage Sam Schulman — November 2003 Print The feeling seems to be growing that gay marriage is inevitably coming our way in the U.S., perhaps through a combination of judicial fiat and legislation in individual states. Growing, too, is the sense of a shift in the climate of opinion. The American public seems to be in the process of changing its mind—not actually in favor of gay marriage, but toward a position of slightly revolted tolerance for the idea. Survey results suggest that people have forgotten why they were so opposed to the notion even as recently as a few years ago. It is curious that this has happened so quickly. With honorable exceptions, most of those who are passionately on the side of the traditional understanding of marriage appear to be at a loss for words to justify their passion; as for the rest, many seem to wish gay marriage had never been proposed in the first place, but also to have resigned themselves to whatever happens. In this respect, the gaymarriage debate is very different from the abortion debate, in which few with an opinion on either side have been so disengaged. I think I understand why this is the case: as someone passionately and instinctively opposed to the idea of homosexual marriage, I have found myself disappointed by the arguments I have seen advanced against it. The strongest of these arguments predict measurable harm to the family and to our arrangements for the upbringing and well-being of children. I do not doubt the accuracy of those arguments.1 But they do not seem to get at the heart of the matter. To me, what is at stake in this debate is not only the potential unhappiness of children, grave as that is; it is our ability to maintain the most basic components of our humanity. I believe, in fact, that we are at an “Antigone moment.” Some of our fellow citizens wish to www.commentarymagazine.com/articles/gay-marriage—and-marriage/ 1/8 11/21/12 impose a radically new understanding upon laws and institutions that are both very old and fundamental to our organization as individuals and as a society. As Antigone said to Creon, we are being asked to tamper with “unwritten and unfailing laws, not of now, nor of yesterday; they always live, and no one knows their origin in time.” I suspect, moreover, that everyone knows this is the case, and that, paradoxically, this very awareness of just how much is at stake is what may have induced, in defenders of those same “unwritten and unfailing laws,” a kind of paralysis. Admittedly, it is very difficult to defend that which is both ancient and “unwritten”—the arguments do not resolve themselves into a neat parade of documentary evidence, research results, or citations from the legal literature. Admittedly, too, proponents of this radical new understanding have been uncommonly effective in presenting their program as something that is not radical at all but as requiring merely a slight and painless adjustment in our customary arrangements. Finally, we have all learned to practice a certain deference to the pleas of minorities with a grievance, and in recent years no group has benefited more from this society-wide dispensation than homosexuals. Nevertheless, in the somewhat fragmentary notes that follow, I hope to re-articulate what I am persuaded everyone knows to be the case about marriage, and perhaps thereby encourage others with stronger arguments than mine to help break the general paralysis. _____________ Let us begin by admiring the case for gay marriage. Unlike the case for completely unrestricted abortion, which has come to be something of an embarrassment even to those who advance it, the case for gay marriage enjoys the decided advantage of appealing to our better moral natures as well as to our reason. It deploys two arguments. The first centers on principles of justice and fairness and may be thought of as the civil-rights argument. The second is at once more personal and more utilitarian, emphasizing the degradation and unhappiness attendant upon the denial of gay marriage and, conversely, the human and social happiness that will flow from its legal establishment. Both arguments have been set forth most persuasively by two gifted writers, Bruce Bawer and Andrew Sullivan, each of whom describes himself as a social conservative. In their separate ways, they have been campaigning for gay marriage for over a decade. Bawer’s take on the subject is succinctly summarized in his 1993 book, A Place at the Tab le; Sullivan has held forth on the desirability of legalizing gay marriage in numerous articles, on his website (andrewsullivan.com), and in an influential book, Virtually Normal (1995). The civil-rights argument goes like this. Marriage is a legal state conferring real, tangible benefits on those who participate in it: specifically, tax breaks as well as other advantages when it comes to inheritance, property ownership, and employment benefits. But family law, since it limits marriage to heterosexual couples over the age of consent, clearly discriminates against a segment of the population. It is thus a matter of simple justice that, in Sullivan’s words, “all public (as opposed to private) discrimination against homosexuals be ended and that every right and responsibility that heterosexuals enjoy as public citizens be extended to those who grow up and find themselves emotionally different.” Not to grant such rights, Sullivan maintains, is to impose on homosexuals a civil deprivation akin to that suffered by black Americans under Jim Crow. The utilitarian argument is more subtle; just as the rights argument seems aimed mainly at liberals, this one seems mostly to have in mind the concerns of conservatives. In light of the disruptive, anarchic, violence-prone behavior of many homosexuals (the argument runs), why should we not encourage the formation of stable, long-term, monogamous relationships that will redound to the health of society as a whole? In the apt words of a letter-writer in COMMENTARY in 1996: [H]omosexual marriage . . . preserves and promotes a set of moral values that are essential to civilized society. Like www.commentarymagazine.com/articles/gay-marriage—and-marriage/ 2/8 11/21/12 « Gay Marriage—and Marriage Commentary Magazine heterosexual marriage, it sanctions loyalty, unselfishness, and sexual fidelity; it rejects the promiscuous, the self-serving, the transitory relationship. Given the choice between building family units and preventing them, any conservative should favor the former. Bawer, for his part, has come close to saying that the inability of many male homosexuals to remain faithful in long-term relationships is a consequence of the lack of marriage rights—a burning sign of the more general stigma under which gays labor in our society and which can be redressed by changes in law. As it happens, though, this particular line of argument is already somewhat out of date and is gradually being phased out of the discussion. The toleration of gay styles of life has come about on its own in American society, without the help of legal sanctions, and protecting gay couples from the contempt of bigots is not the emergency Bawer has depicted. Quite the contrary: with increasing numbers of gay partners committing themselves to each other for life, in full and approving view of their families and friends, advocates of gay marriage need no longer call upon the law to light (or force) the way; they need only ask it to ratify a trend. _____________ In brief, legalizing gay marriage would, in Andrew Sullivan’s summary formulation, offer homosexuals the same deal society now offers heterosexuals: general social approval and specific legal advantages in exchange for a deeper and harder-to-extract-yourself-from commitment to another human being. Like straight marriage, it would foster social cohesion, emotional security, and economic prudence. The case is elegant, and it is compelling. But it is not unanswerable. And answers have indeed been forthcoming, even if, as I indicated at the outset, many of them have tended to be couched somewhat defensively. Thus, rather than repudiating the very idea of an abstract “right” to marry, many upholders of the traditional definition of marriage tacitly concede such a right, only going on to suggest that denying it to a minority amounts to a lesser hurt than conferring it would impose on the majority, and especially on children, the weakest members of our society. Others, to be sure, have attacked the Bawer/Sullivan line more forthrightly. In a September 2000 article in COMMENTARY, “What Is Wrong with Gay Marriage,” Stanley Kurtz challenged the central contention that marriage would do for gay men what it does for straights—i.e., “domesticate” their natural male impulse to promiscuity. Citing a number of academic “queer theorists” and radical gays, Kurtz wrote: In contrast to moderates and “conservatives” like Andrew Sullivan, who consistently play down [the] difference [between gays and straights] in order to promote their vision of gays as monogamists-in-the-making, radical gays have argued— more knowledgeably, more powerfully, and more vocally than any opponent of same-sex marriage would dare to do—that homosexuality, and particularly male homosexuality, is by its very nature incompatible with the norms of traditional monogamous marriage. True, Kurtz went on, such radical gays nevertheless support same-sex marriage. But what motivates them is the hope of “eventually undoing the institution [of marriage] altogether,” by delegitimizing age-old understandings of the family and thus (in the words of one such radical) “striking at the heart of the organization of Western culture and societies.” Nor are radical gays the only ones to entertain such destructive ambitions. Queuing up behind them, Kurtz warned, are the proponents of polygamy, polyandry, and polyamorism, all ready to argue that their threesomes, foursomes, and other “nontraditional” arrangements are entitled to the same rights as everyone else’s. In a recent piece in the Weekly Standard, Kurtz has written that the “bottom” of this particular slippery slope is “visible from where we stand”: www.commentarymagazine.com/articles/gay-marriage—and-marriage/ 3/8 11/21/12 « Gay Marriage—and Marriage Commentary Magazine Advocacy of legalized polygamy is growing. A network of grass-roots organizations seeking legal recognition for group marriage already exists. The cause of legalized group marriage is championed by a powerful faction of family-law specialists. Influential legal bodies in both the United States and Canada have presented radical programs of marital reform, . . . [even] the abolition of marriage. The ideas behind this movement have already achieved surprising influence with a prominent American politician [Al Gore]. Like other critics of same-sex marriage, Kurtz has himself been vigorously criticized, especially by Sullivan. But he is almost certainly correct as to political and legal realities. If we grant rights to one group because they have demanded it—which is, practically, how legalized gay marriage will come to pass—we will find it exceedingly awkward to deny similar rights to others ready with their own dossiers of “victimization.” In time, restricting marriage rights to couples, whether straight or gay, can be made to seem no less arbitrary than the practice of restricting marriage rights to one man and one woman. Ultimately, the same must go for incestuous relationships between consenting adults—a theme to which I will return. _____________ A different defense of heterosexual marriage has proceeded by circling the wagons around the institution itself. According to this school of thought, ably represented by the columnist Maggie Gallagher, the essential purpose of that institution is to create stable families: Most men and women are powerfully drawn to perform a sexual act that can and does generate life. Marriage is our attempt to reconcile and harmonize the erotic, social, sexual, and financial needs of men and women with the needs of their partner and their children. Even childless marriages protect this purpose, writes Gallagher, by ensuring that, as long as the marriage exists, neither the childless husband nor the childless wife is likely to father or mother children outside of wedlock. Gallagher is especially strong on the larger, social meaning of heterosexual marriage, which she calls “inherently normative”: The laws of marriage do not create marriage, but in societies ruled by law they help trace the boundaries and sustain the public meanings of marriage. . . . Without this shared, public aspect, perpetuated generation after generation, marriage becomes what its critics say it is: a mere contract, a vessel with no particular content, one of a menu of sexual lifestyles, of no fundamental importance to anyone outside a given relationship. Human relationships are by nature difficult enough, Gallagher reminds us, which is why communities must do all they can to strengthen and not to weaken those institutions that keep us up to a mark we may not be able to achieve through our own efforts. The consequences of not doing so will be an intensification of all the other woes of which we have so far had only a taste in our society and which are reflected in the galloping statistics of illegitimacy, cohabitation, divorce, and fatherlessness. For Gallagher, the modest request of gay-marriage advocates for “a place at the table” is thus profoundly selfish as well as utterly destructive—for gay marriage “would require society at large to gut marriage of its central presumptions about family in order to accommodate a few adults’ desires.” _____________ James Q. Wilson, Maggie Gallagher, Stanley Kurtz, and others—including William J. Bennett in The Broken Hearth (2001)—are right to point to the deleterious private and public consequences of instituting gay marriage. Why, then, do their arguments fail to satisfy www.commentarymagazine.com/articles/gay-marriage—and-marriage/ 4/8 11/21/12 « Gay Marriage—and Marriage Commentary Magazine completely? Partly, no doubt, it is because the damage they describe is largely prospective and to that degree hypothetical; partly, as I remarked early on, the defensive tone that invariably enters into these polemics may rob them of the force they would otherwise have. I hardly mean to deprecate that tone: anyone with homosexual friends or relatives, especially those participating in longstanding romantic relationships, must feel abashed to find himself saying, in effect, “You gentlemen, you ladies, are at one and the same time a fine example of fidelity and mutual attachment—and the thin edge of the wedge.” Nevertheless, in demanding the right to marry, that is exactly what they are. To grasp what is at the other edge of that wedge—that is, what stands to be undone by gay marriage—we have to distinguish marriage itself from a variety of other goods and values with which it is regularly associated by its defenders and its aspirants alike. Those values —love and monogamous sex and establishing a home, fidelity, childbearing and childrearing, stability, inheritance, tax breaks, and all the rest—are not the same as marriage. True, a good marriage generally contains them, a bad marriage is generally deficient in them, and in law, religion, and custom, even under the strictest of moral regimes, their absence can be grounds for ending the union. But the essence of marriage resides elsewhere, and those who seek to arrange a kind of marriage for the inherently unmarriageable are looking for those things in the wrong place. The largest fallacy of all arises from the emphasis on romantic love. In a book published last year, Tipper and Al Gore defined a family as those who are “joined at the heart”—“getting beyond words, legal formalities, and even blood ties.” The distinction the Gores draw in this sentimental and offhand way is crucial, but they utterly misconstrue it. Hearts can indeed love, and stop loving. But what exactly does this have to do with marriage, which can follow, precede, or remain wholly independent of that condition? It is a truism that many married people feel little sexual or romantic attraction to each other—perhaps because they have been married too long, or perhaps, as some men have always claimed, because the death of sexual desire is coincident with the wedding ceremony. (“All comedies are ended by a marriage,” Byron wittily and sadly remarked.) Many people—in ages past, certainly most people—have married for reasons other than sexual or romantic attraction. So what? I could marry a woman I did not love, a woman I did not feel sexually attracted to or want to sleep with, and our marriage would still be a marriage, not just legally but in its essence. The truth is banal, circular, but finally unavoidable: by definition, the essence of marriage is to sanction and solemnize that connection of opposites which alone creates new life. (Whether or not a given married couple does in fact create new life is immaterial.) Men and women can marry only because they belong to different, opposite, sexes. In marriage, they surrender those separate and different sexual allegiances, coming together to form a new entity. Their union is not a formalizing of romantic love but represents a certain idea—a construction, an abstract thought—about how best to formalize the human condition. This thought, embodied in a promise or a contract, is what holds marriage together, and the creation of this idea of marriage marks a key moment in the history of human development, a triumph over the alternative idea, which is concubinage. _____________ Let me try to be more precise. Marriage can only concern my connection to a woman (and not to a man) because, as my reference to concubinage suggests, marriage is an institution that is built around female sexuality and female procreativity. (The very word “marriage” comes from the Latin word for mother, mater.) It exists for the gathering-in of a woman’s sexuality under the protective net of the human or divine order, or both. This was so in the past and it is so even now, in our supposedly liberated times, when a woman who is in a sexual relationship without being married is, and is perceived to be, in a different state of being (not just a different legal state) from a woman who is married. www.commentarymagazine.com/articles/gay-marriage—and-marriage/ 5/8 11/21/12 Circumstances have, admittedly, changed. Thanks to contraception, the decision to marry no longer precedes sexual intercourse as commonly as it did 50 years ago, when, for most people, a fully sexual relationship could begin only with marriage (and, when, as my mother constantly reminds me, one married for sex). Now the decision can come later; but come it almost certainly must. Even with contraception, even with feminism and women’s liberation, the feeling would appear to be nearly as strong as ever that, for a woman, a sexual relationship must either end in marriage, or end. This is surely understandable, for marriage b enefits women, again not just in law but essentially. A woman can control who is the father of her children only insofar as there is a civil and private order that protects her from rape; marriage is the bulwark of that order. The 1960′s feminists had the right idea: the essential thing for a woman is to control her own body. But they were wrong that this is what abortion is for; it is, rather, what marriage is for. It is humanity’s way of enabling a woman to control her own body and to know (if she cares to) who is the father of her children. Yes, marriage tends to regulate or channel the sexual appetite of men, and this is undoubtedly a good thing for women. But it is not the ultimate good. A husband, no matter how unfaithful, cannot introduce a child who is not his wife’s own into a marriage without her knowledge; she alone has the power to do such a thing. For a woman, the fundamental advantage of marriage is thus not to regulate her husband but to empower herself—to regulate who has access to her person, and to marshal the resources of her husband and of the wider community to help her raise her children. Every human relationship can be described as an enslavement, but for women the alternative to marriage is a much worse enslavement —which is why marriage, for women, is often associated as much with sexual freedom as with sexual constraint. In the traditional Roman Catholic cultures of the Mediterranean and South America, where virginity is fiercely protected and adolescent girls are hardly permitted to “date,” marriage gives a woman the double luxury of controlling her sexuality and, if she wishes, extending it. For men, by contrast, the same phenomenon—needing to be married in order to feel safe and free in a sexual relationship—simply does not exist. Men may wish to marry, but for more particular reasons: because they want to have children, or because they want to make a woman they love happy, or because they fear they will otherwise lose the woman they love. But it is rare for a man to feel essentially incomplete, or unprotected, in a sexual relationship that has not been solemnized by marriage. In fact, a man desperate to marry is often considered to have something wrong with him—to be unusually controlling or needy. Because marriage is an arrangement built around female sexuality, because the institution has to do with women far more than it has to do with men, women will be the victims of its destruction. Those analysts who have focused on how children will suffer from the legalization of gay marriage are undoubtedly correct—but this will not be the first time that social developments perceived as advances for one group or another have harmed children. After all, the two most important (if effortless) achievements of the women’s movement of the late 1960′s were the right to abort and the right—in some social classes, the commandment—to join the professional workforce, both manifestly harmful to the interests of children. But with the success of the gay-liberation movement, it is women themselves, all women, who will be hurt. The reason is that gay marriage takes something that belongs essentially to women, is crucial to their very freedom, and empties it of meaning. _____________ Why should I not be able to marry a man? The question addresses a class of human phenomena that can be described in sentences but none theless cannot be. However much I might wish to, I cannot be a father to a pebble—I cannot be a brother to a puppy—I cannot make my horse my consul. Just so, I cannot, and should not be able to, marry a man. If I want to be a brother to a puppy, are you www.commentarymagazine.com/articles/gay-marriage—and-marriage/ 6/8 11/21/12 « Gay Marriage—and Marriage Commentary Magazine abridging my rights by not permitting it? I may say what I please; saying it does not mean that it can be. In a gay marriage, one of two men must play the woman, or one of two women must play the man. “Play” here means travesty— burlesque. Not that their love is a travesty; but their participation in a ceremony that apes the marriage bond, with all that goes into it, is a travesty. Their taking-over of the form of this crucial and fragile connection of opposites is a travesty of marriage’s purpose of protecting, actually and symbolically, the woman who enters into marriage with a man. To burlesque that purpose weakens those protections, and is essentially and profoundly anti-female. Radical feminists were right, to an extent, in insisting that men’s and women’s sexuality is so different as to be inimical. Catharine MacKinnon has proclaimed that in a “patriarchal” society, all sexual intercourse is rape. Repellent as her view is, it is formed around a kernel of truth. There is something inherently violative about sexual intercourse—and there is something dangerous about being a woman in a sexual relationship with a man to whom she is not yet married. Among the now-aging feminists of my generation, no less than among their mothers, such a woman is commonly thought to be a victim. Marriage is a sign that the ever-so-slight violation that is involved in a heterosexual relationship has been sanctioned by some recognized authority. That sanction is also what makes divorce a scandal—for divorce cannot truly undo the sanction of sexual intercourse, which is to say the sanction to create life, with one’s original partner. Even in the Jewish tradition, which regards marriage (but not love) in a completely unsacralized way, divorce, though perfectly legal, does not erase the ontological status of the earlier marriage. (The Talmud records that God weeps when a man puts aside his first wife.) This sanction does not exist for homosexual couples. They are not opposites; they are the same. They live in a world of innocence, and neither their union nor their disunion partakes of the act of creation. This brings us back to the incest ban, with which marriage is intimately and intricately connected. Indeed, marriage exists for the same reason that incest must not: because in our darker, inhuman moments we are driven toward that which is the same as ourselves and away from that which is fundamentally different from ourselves. Therefore we are enjoined from committing incest, negatively, and commanded to join with our opposite, positively—so that humanity may endure. Homosexuals are, of course, free to avoid the latter commandment—and those who choose to do so are assuredly capable of leading rich and satisfying lives. The same goes for all those non-homosexuals who have decided or been advised not to marry in certain circumstances—for example, if they wish to be members of celibate religious communities, or ascetic soldiers in a cause, or geniuses (as Cyril Connolly warned, “there is no more somber enemy of good art than the pram in the hall”). Men and women alike now spend more time as sexually mature adults outside of marriage than ever before, and some number of them live together in unreal or mock marriages of one kind or another. The social status of homosexuals is no better and no worse than that of anyone else who lives in an unmarried condition. _____________ What of simple compassion? What do we owe to our fellow-beings who wish, as they might put it, to achieve a happiness they see we are entitled to but which we deny to them? From those of us who oppose gay marriage, Andrew Sullivan demands some “reference to gay people’s lives or relationships or needs.” But the truth is that many people have many needs that are not provided for by law, by government, or by society at large—and for good reason. Insofar as I care for my homosexual friend as a friend, I am required to say to him that, if a lifelong monogamous relationship is what you want, I wish you that felicity, just as I hope you would wish me the same. But insofar as our lives as citizens are concerned, or even as www.commentarymagazine.com/articles/gay-marriage—and-marriage/ 7/8 11/21/12 human beings, your monogamy and the durability of your relationship are, to be blunt about it, matters of complete indifference. They are of as little concern to our collective life as if you were to smoke cigars or build model railroads in your basement or hang-glide, and of less concern to society than the safety of your property when you leave your house or your right not to be overcharged by the phone company. That is not because you are gay. It is because, in choosing to conduct your life as you have every right to do, you have stepped out of the area of shared social concern—in the same sense as has anyone, of whatever sexuality, who chooses not to marry. There are millions of lonely people, of whom it is safe to say that the majority are in heterosexual marriages. But marriage, though it may help meet the needs of the lonely, does not exist because it is an answer to those needs; it is an arrangement that has to do with empowering women to avoid even greater unhappiness, and with sustaining the future history of the species. Marriage, to say it for the last time, is what connects us with our nature and with our animal origins, with how all of us, heterosexual and homosexual alike, came to be. It exists not because of custom, or because of a conspiracy (whether patriarchal or matriarchal), but because, through marriage, the world exists. Marriage is how we are connected backward in time, through the generations, to our Creator (or, if you insist, to the primal soup), and forward to the future beyond the scope of our own lifespan. It is, to say the least, bigger than two hearts beating as one. Severing this connection by defining it out of existence—cutting it down to size, transforming it into a mere contract between chums— sunders the natural laws that prevent concubinage and incest. Unless we resist, we will find ourselves entering on the path to the abolition of the human. The gods move very fast when they bring ruin on misguided men. _____________ Footnotes 1 For a summary of the scant research on children raised in homes with same-sex parents as of six or seven years ago, see James Q. Wilson, “Against Homosexual Marriage,” in COMMENTARY, March 1996. _____________ About t he Aut hor Sam Schulman reviewed God Is Not Great by Christopher Hitchens in our June issue. He is the publishing director of The American. Email Print Like 0 Share Do you want to respond to this article? Click here, to write a letter to the Editor. www.commentarymagazine.com/articles/gay-marriage—and-marriage/ 8/8