Politics and marriage (third part)

When I argue that the debate over gay marriage is a political question, what I mean to say is that our arguments about marriage need to be centered on how we think we ought to live, and how we ought to use our public resources to promote those ways of life (to any liberal reading this: I understand that you think that the genius of the modern liberal state is precisely that it keeps those kinds of questions outside of public debate. You're wrong about that. To explain why is going to take another, much different, post.) I can point to at least four different arguments about gay marriage that seem persuasive, or at least, reasonable, to me. Two would argue for gay marriage, two would argue against. Two I would classify as progressive, two as conservative.

[Note that for the purposes of the following I am going to ignore the question of the morality of homosexuality. This is for a number of reasons, the simplest being that I don't think that homosexual behavior as such is immoral.]

The conservative argument for gay marriage derives from the claim that marriage creates a different kind of relationship with another human being: a deeper, more difficult but in the end more rewarding relationship. To quote the priest who counseled my wife and me before we got married, "it is an adventure in becoming an adult." This way of thinking about oneself and other people runs counter to much of the information we receive from modern consumer society, which focuses on personal and immediate gratifications. If a life as a married person is in fact this sort of long-running moral education, then surely we would want to expand it to a many people in our society as possible. I am all for having more adults and fewer 45-year-old children running things. The argument gets even stronger if the couple in question has children, since the current literature seems to support, pretty clearly, the idea that stable, two parent households are better for children than single parent families.

The progressive political argument for gay marriage, which I also briefly mentioned in an earlier post, is that it would substantially change the way in which gay people were understood within the wider culture. By allowing gay men and women to participate in this most conventional of institutions, modern society would essentially be saying that gay behavior is no big deal, that our gay neighbors and friends and family members are the same as the rest of us. They may act in morally reprehensible ways, but these would be the same kinds of sins the rest of us commit, like cheating on your taxes or bullying underlings at work or beating your kid. This attitude has already begun to move through much of modern society, but the act of legalizing same-sex marriage could help speed it up. And if that happened, maybe in turn we would have fewer confused teenagers hanging themselves in bedroom closets or jumping off of bridges.

The conservative case against gay marriage would go back to the idea of what words mean, and how they mean anything at all. From this perspective, the word "marriage" has a meaning precisely because it labels a human relationship that differs from being friends, or lovers, or life partners. It may involve one or even in some cases all of these other elements, but it cannot be equated to them. If it could, we wouldn't need the idea of marriage in the first place. Like redefining God or justice or democracy, expanding the concept of marriage might like a good idea at first, because it is more inclusive. But as with these other terms, if you expand the word so that it includes everything, in the end it means nothing. And this could happen, arguably, with the idea of marriage. We could make it so inclusive that within several generations no one would bother with it.

The progressive argument against gay marriage is probably better made by people like Michael Bronski or Michael Warner, but my take on it is that by using gay marriage as a method of bringing gay people into the mainstream of American society, the whole gay rights movement is essentially ceding a great deal of political territory that it may eventually regret having given up. Was a time, folks, when the fight for gay rights was linked to much bigger, even revolutionary goals, like: fundamentally changing how western society thought about not just sexuality but desire, human relationships, our position within a market economy, etc. The reason that someone like Harvey Milk was not in favor of gay marriage is that he wanted to build an alternative to that monogamous, state-sponsored ideal of love. Now, I've already gone on record here as saying that I think that for many people, including myself, the marriage model is a worthy ideal. That's not the same as saying that it needs to be the ideal for everyone. This universalistic, cookie-cutter approach to human politics, in which we all pretend that underneath, we're all the same, and everyone really wants the same things: love and peace and food and shelter. I'll go on record as saying I pretty much hate that conception of the human condition. There are a lot of people, both gay and straight, who are quite a bit different from me, thank God. A gay relationship is fundamentally different from a straight one. Not better or worse, just different. I don't know that we need to force all the various configurations of love into one model. And sure, you can say, yes, but all gay people are asking for is the right to get married. No one is saying that they have to. But once marriage is part of the gay community it will almost certainly become the norm, and the expected outcome of any serious romantic relationship, as has happened with the straight community.

We are all God's children. We are all blessed in his sight, and equally loved. The diversity of human personalities is what makes us so fascinating: it is proof of the divine spark that we carry within us. A variety of different human institutions celebrating that diversity is what we truly need, not some phony-baloney attempt at conjuring up a kind of bland, uninteresting sameness that could never be achieved in any case.

All right. That's it. I'm done with this subject for a good long while.