By E.J. Graff
The right wing gets it: Same-sex marriage is a breathtakingly subversive idea. So it's weirdly dissonant when gay neocons and feminist lesbians publicly insist -- the former with enthusiasm, the latter with distaste -- that same-sex marriage would be a conservative move, confining sexual free radicals inside some legal cellblock. It's almost as odd (although more understandable) when pro-marriage liberals ply the rhetoric of fairness and love, as if no one will notice that for thousands of years marriage has meant Boy+Girl=Babies. But same-sex marriage seems fair only if you accept a philosophy of marriage that, although it's gained ground in the past several centuries, still strikes many as radical: the idea that marriage (and therefore sex) is justified not by reproduction but by love.
Sound like old news? Not if you're the Christian Coalition, the Pope or the Orthodox rabbinate, or if you simply live in one of many pre-industrial countries. Same-sex marriage will be a direct hit against the religious right's goal of re-enshrining biology as destiny. Marriage is an institution that towers on our social horizon, defining how we think about one another, formalizing contact with our families, neighborhoods, employers, insurers, hospitals, governments. Allowing two people of the same sex to marry shifts that institution's message.
That's why the family-values crowd has trained its guns on us, from a new hate video called The Ultimate Target of the Gay Agenda: Same Sex Marriages to the apocalyptically named Defense of Marriage Act. The right wing would much rather see outré urban queers throwing drunken kisses off bar floats than have two nice married girls move in next door, with or without papoose, demonstrating to every neighborhood kid that a good marriage is defined from the inside out, that sodomy is a sin only in the mind of the beholder.
Chilled by that coming shift, antimarriage conservatives have also been disingenuous in their arguments, which basically come down to crying "tradition!" like a Tevye chorus. Even a quick glance at social history shows what conservatives pretend isn't so: Very little about marriage is historically consistent enough to be "traditional." That it involves two people? Then forget the patriarch Jacob, whose two wives and two concubines produced the heads of the twelve tribes. That it involves a religious blessing? Not early Christian marriages, before marriage was a sacrament. That it is recognized by law? Forget centuries of European prole "marriages" conducted outside the law, in which no property was involved. That it's about love, not money? So much for centuries of negotiation about medieval estates, bride-price, morning gift and dowry (not to mention bride-burnings in today's India). Those who tsk away such variety, insisting that everyone knows what marriage really is, miss the point. Marriage is -- marriage always has been -- variations on a theme. Each era's marriage institutionalizes the sexual bond in a way that makes sense for that society, that economy, that class.
So what makes sense in ours? Or, to put it another way, what is contemporary marriage for? That's the question underlying the debate as right-wing and gay activists prepare for Hawaii's aftermath. Its answer has to fit our economic lives. In a G.N.P. based on how well each of us plumbs our talents and desires in deciding what to make, buy or sell, we can hardly instruct those same innards to shut up about our sexual lives -- as people could in a pre-industrial society where job, home and religion were all dictated by history. The right wants it both ways: Adam Smith's economy and feudal sexual codes. If same-sex marriage becomes legal, that venerable institution will ever after stand for sexual choice, for cutting the link between sex and diapers.
Ah, but it already does. Formally, U.S. marriage hasn't been justified solely by reproduction since 1965, when the Supreme Court batted down the last laws forbidding birth control's sale to married couples. In Margaret Sanger's era, contraception was charged with "perversion of natural functions," "immorality" and "fostering egotism and enervating self-indulgence." Dire diseases were predicted for those who indulged. Those are, almost word for word, the charges hurled by every critic of homosexuality -- and for the same reasons. Once their ideologies are economically outdated, what can conservatives invoke except the threat of divine judgment?
All of which is why same-sex marriage is being considered in every postindustrial country, and why it seems simply "fair" to so many, including Hawaii's Supreme Court. That sense of fairness also draws on the liberal idea that a pluralist democracy's institutions should be capacious, that civic marriage should be one-size-fits-all. But same-sex marriage does more than just fit; it announces that marriage has changed shape.
As with any social change, there will be more consequences, which look pretty progressive to me. There are practical benefits: the ability to share insurance and pension benefits, care for our ill partners, inherit automatically, protect our children from desperate custody battles. And marriage will end a negative: Our sexual lives can no longer be considered felonious, which stings us in fights ranging from child custody to civil rights.
A more notable progressive shift is that, since same-sex couples will enter the existing institution, not some back-of-the-bus version called "domestic partnership" or "queer marriage," marriage law will have to become gender-blind. Once we can marry, jurists will have to decide every marriage, divorce and custody question (theoretically at least) for equal partners, neither having more historical authority. Our entrance might thus rock marriage more toward its egalitarian shore.
Some progressives, feminists and queer nationalists nevertheless complain that instead of demanding access to the institution as it is, we should be dismantling marriage entirely. But lasting social change evolves within and alters society's existing institutions. No one will force same-sex couples to darken the institution's doors; we'll merely gain the choices available to heterosexual pairs. None of this will alter a hard fact of contemporary life: Every commitment -- to job, spouse, community, religion -- must be invented from the inside out. Making lesbians and gay men more visible legally will insist that there is no traditional escape: that our society survives not by rote but by heart.
E.J. Graff is working on a book, What Is Marriage For?
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