Politics and marriage (first part)

In the early years of this century, my wife, my oldest daughter and I lived in a tony neighborhood in Center City Philadelphia near a little city park called Fitler Square. It was not very diverse economically. Almost all of the people who lived in the area were "upper middle-class" (or as we used to say back in my hometown of Taber, Alberta, "wealthy"). Even those who weren't, like my wife and I (MD and future PhD respectively), were probable future members of the club. But it was diverse in other ways--ways that might seem pretty predictable if you know much about educated, well-to-do East Coast Americans in the 21st century. Almost every day my wife would take one-year-old, Zoe, to Fitler, or the small playground about two blocks to the west, right next to the Schuylkill. Her best friends were Margaret, a little girl from Kingston, Ontario, Canada, whose parents were living in Philadelphia for year while the father was on sabbatical; a little girl from Japan whose name I have forgotten, if I ever knew it; and Spencer, who had two dads. I didn't really know much about any of the parents because it was generally Jane and not me who took Zoe to the park, but from what I could tell from her conversations with them they all seemed like normal, more or less well-adjusted folk. One day, when my Dad was visiting from Canada, I mentioned something about Spencer, and he said that he didn't think that gay parents were the best thing for a child (Dad is pretty conservative). At the time, Jane was working as a child psychiatrist in a clinic in West Philly, and also doing some work in a juvenile offenders "home" (ie., prison) near the art museum. Many of her patients, unsurprisingly, came from broken households: parents who were drug addicts, and/or drunks, and/or prostitutes, and/or criminals. One five year-old had been stabbed by his Mom a week after she was released from prison; another was dealing with a father who was undergoing a sex-change. At the age of 14, she had already been raped once. I compared their lot to that of Spencer's, a young man being raised by two sane adults who loved him and had enough money to make sure, at least, that he would have some stability at home, and likely a decent education. I told my Dad that I didn't really think the sexuality of one's parents was the decisive element in the upbringing of a child in the modern world.

All of this is in the way of a bit of throat-clearing for what I am about to say about the current debate over gay marriage. In fact, I have no strong feelings about gay marriage one way or another. On the one hand, I don't think that giving gay couples the legal status of marriage will destroy the institution, or even really change the way we think about it. Modern society has already radically redefined what marriage means, and it is in fact this redefinition that has allowed the debate over gay marriage to surface in the first place. But on the other hand, the inability of gay men and women to legally wed one another also doesn't strike me as a human tragedy of the first order. I think that we ought to change our laws so that gay couples have the same sorts of rights as straight married ones, in terms of hospital visitations, the ability to receive health benefits, and so forth. But that could obviously be done without having them be formally be considered "married."

What does bother me is the way that the debate has been framed, especially in terms of legal rights, which moves it out of the legislative realm and into the judicial one. I don't think that gay people have a legal right to marry one another. It's not in the constitution, nor is it an element in any of the other notable documents about human rights that have become part of our political tradition in the past 200 years: the Rights of Man doesn't mention it, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights doesn't mention it. I think that there is a good reason why this is the case.

The argument for gay marriage, as I understand it, runs as follows. Although there is no specific clause declaring that marriage should be allowed to all members of a society regardless of sexual orientation, there is very definitely language that forbids the state from treating citizens in an unequal manner, unless such behavior can be justified as preventing some larger ill. We wouldn't be able to pass a law forbidding people with blonde hair to drive cars on the highway, but we can pass laws forbidding people under a certain age to drive cars. The reason for the latter law is that having children drive cars would be dangerous for everyone on the road, children included. You can't really make that argument for blonde people, as a group. So, in order to ban gay men and women from participating in the same social institution that straight people get to participate in, you would have to show that gay marriage harms other people, or harms society as a whole. But most studies don't seem to support this: there is no convincing empirical evidence that gay people are worse parents than straight people; rather the opposite, as I understand the studies (which is, admittedly, not too much). If there is no good reason for restrictions, then the government is constitutionally obliged to allow gay men and women to get married to same-sex partners.

This argument for striking down laws forbidding same-sex marriage seems pretty clear. On its own terms it is also pretty convincing, at least to me. I should add, since I have read a number of recent blog positions by moderate conservatives recounting their personal narratives, and their movement from opposition to support of gay marriage, that when I first heard about the idea of gay marriage, about fifteen years ago, I thought it was a good idea. It would bring gay people into the mainstream of American society, and maybe serve as a counterweight to some of the self-destructive, sexually promiscuous behavior that I saw in the male gay community at the time. I couldn't see much of a down-side. I knew that most people in my parents' generation wouldn't go for it, but chalked that up to their simple discomfort about homosexuality in general. And I remember being distinctly surprised, and disappointed, when I learned that the late left-wing Democratic senator from Minnesota, Paul Wellstone, had voted for the Defense of Marriage Act. I admired Senator Wellstone and thought that here he was simply giving in to bigotry, against his better instincts.

My opinion started to change a little when I read a New Yorker Talk of the Town piece about seven or eight years ago, concerning an important change in the New York Times' "Society" section. The Times was starting to publish announcements of gay partners' domestic partnerships on its wedding page. Rather than taking the predictable tack of celebrating the advance of liberal open-mindedness over the dark bonds of tradition, the writer instead, more interestingly, pegged the change to a wider social evolution in how Americans now understood marriage. At one time, and certainly among members of the East Coast elite class, marriage was seen as something other than union of two souls in love with one another. It was a family affair: it knit together social networks and businesses, and therefore was not simply the decision of the two married people themselves. Because other people would be affected by this decision, they naturally felt that they had a say in who their children married. But this understanding of marriage has largely disappeared, at least among this class. Increasingly, marriage came to be seen as a decision mainly concerning the bride and groom: it was a celebration of the couple themselves, of their love for one another, of their life-long partnership. (I can't remember if the writer mentioned it or not, but the invention of the pill clearly has something to do with this change.) In this context, the question of whether the partners in question were of the same or different sexes shrank into irrelevance. What was important was that they loved one another.

This is where I started to feel a little uncomfortable. Not about gay partnerships (on or off the Times' society page) but the way that, this narrative suggested, we were starting to think about these sorts of social institutions. I'm not going to argue that we need to bring back the idea of a dowry or anything, but I happen not to be a big fan of what I think of as the modern liberal celebration of the unchained individual, freed from any obligation to other people, accountable only to herself for her actions. I think that we actually do owe something to the social world of which we are a part, in large degree because we wouldn't be who we are without that world. And then there was just the nasty suspicion that my generation was doing with marriage what it did with everything it touched: that is, using it to celebrate our own, wonderful selves. So much more wonderful, of course, than anything that had ever come before in the history of humankind. The changing attitudes toward marriage, in other words, seemed to me to have a lot more to do with egoism than a humane desire for inclusion.

This unease was furthered a few months later when I heard an argument by Maggie Gallagher on the radio. Whatever else you may make of Gallagher, and especially her dubious journalistic ethics, the argument she made about marriage appealed to me, precisely because it attacked this self-centered attitude head-on. What our generation (that is, mine and Gallagher's) had forgotten was that marriage is not and ought not to be primarily about the bride and groom. Nor is it, as the New Yorker piece might suggest, about the parents of the bride and groom. Marriage is primarily about the children which it produces. Marriage is meant to provide a stable home environment and a dependable source of food and shelter for children, particularly by forcing men to stay with their families. If it weren't for children, Gallagher's argument suggests, we wouldn't need marriage at all. Not for straight people or for gay people.