Preparing Battle: The Case for Gay Marriage

[bluedawg12]

This is a bit long and these are but excerpts from Jonathan Rauch’s article, linked below.

He is, like Andrew Sullivan, an openly gay conservative. But, there is some merit in having a con argue the gay issue in a way that should nullifies the rw’s own BS.

It’s hard to think of going back into the fray again, after the elation over the hard fought battle for the top of the ticket only to have our hopes shattered at the bottom of the ticket.

But it ain’t over folks, we’re here and we are going to keep fighting the ongoing battle for civil rights for all...not just the majority.

Check out his series of articles on gay marriage at the link below.
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http://www.jonathanrauch.com/jrauch_articles/gay_marriage_1_the_case_for_marriage/

For Better or Worse? The Case for Gay (and Straight) Marriage
The New Republic, May 6, 1996
Jonathan Rauch

Call it a Hayekian argument, after the great libertarian economist F.A. Hayek, who developed this line of thinking in his book The Fatal Conceit.

So the Hayekian view argues strongly against gay marriage.

It says that the current rules may not be best and may even be unfair. But they are all we have, and, once you say that marriage need not be male-female, soon marriage will stop being anything at all.

However, there are problems with the Hayekian position.

Indeed, no laws should be passed, because they interfere with the natural evolution of social mores. How could Hayekians abolish slavery?

If the ban on gay marriage were only mildly unfair, and if the costs of changing it were certain to be enormous, then the ban could stand on Hayekian grounds.

But, if there is any social policy today that has a fair claim to be scaldingly inhumane, it is the ban on gay marriage.

As conservatives tirelessly and rightly point out, marriage is society's most fundamental institution.

To bar any class of people from marrying as they choose is an extraordinary deprivation.

...it seems doubtful that extending marriage to, say, another 3 or 5 percent of the population would have anything like the effects that no-fault divorce has had, to say nothing of contraception.

Surely it is unfair to say that marriage may be reformed for the sake of anyone and everyone except homosexuals, who must respect the dictates of tradition.

SO we turn to what has become the standard view of marriage's purpose. Its proponents would probably like to call it a child-centered view, but it is actually an anti-gay view, as will become clear.

But there are problems. The first, obviously, is that gay couples may have children, whether through adoption, prior marriage or (for lesbians) artificial insemination.

Leaving aside the thorny issue of gay adoption, the point is that if the mere presence of children is the test, then homosexual relationships can certainly pass it.
Understanding this, conservatives often make an interesting move. In seeking to justify the state's interest in marriage, they shift from the actual presence of children to the anatomical possibility of making them.

Hadley Arkes, a political science professor and prominent opponent of homosexual marriage, makes the case this way:

“The traditional understanding of marriage is grounded in the 'natural teleology of the body'--in the inescapable fact that only a man and a woman, and only two people, not three, can generate a child.”

What he seems to be saying is that, where the possibility of natural children is nil, the meaning of marriage is nil.

If marriage is allowed between members of the same sex, then the concept of marriage has been emptied of content except to ask whether the parties love each other. Then anything goes, including polygamy. This reasoning presumably is what those opposed to gay marriage have in mind when they claim that, once gay marriage is legal, marriage to pets will follow close behind.

The deeper problem, apparent right away, is the issue of sterile heterosexual couples... a woman without a uterus has no more potential for giving birth than a man without a vagina.

It may sound like carping to stress the case of barren heterosexual marriage...There are far more sterile heterosexual unions in America than homosexual ones.

The "anatomical possibility" crowd cannot have it both ways. If the possibility of children is what gives meaning to marriage, then a post-menopausal woman who applies for a marriage license should be turned away at the courthouse door...

People at the Family Research Council or Concerned Women for America should point at her and say, "If she can marry, why not polygamy?" ...Obviously, the "anatomical" conservatives do not say this, because they are sane.

They instead flail around, saying that sterile men and women were at least born with the right-shaped parts for making children, and so on.

Their position is really a nonposition.

It says that the "natural children" rationale defines marriage when homosexuals are involved but not when heterosexuals are involved.

When the parties to union are sterile heterosexuals, the justification for marriage must be something else. But what?

Now arises the oddest part of the "anatomical" argument. Look at proposition (2) above. It says that, absent the anatomical justification for marriage, anything goes.

In other words, it dismisses the idea that there might be other good reasons for society to sanctify marriage above other kinds of relationships.

Why would anybody make this move?

I'll hazard a guess: to exclude homosexuals.

Any rationale that justifies sterile heterosexual marriages can also apply to homosexual ones. For instance, marriage makes women more financially secure. Very nice, say the conservatives. But that rationale could be applied to lesbians, so it's definitely out.

The end result of this stratagem is perverse to the point of being funny.

The attempt to ground marriage in children (or the anatomical possibility thereof) falls flat.

But, having lost that reason for marriage, the anti-gay people can offer no other.

In their fixation on excluding homosexuals, they leave themselves no consistent justification for the privileged status of heterosexual marriage. They thus tear away any coherent foundation that secular marriage might have, which is precisely the opposite of what they claim they want to do. If they have to undercut marriage to save it from homosexuals, so be it!

FOR the record, I would be the last to deny that children are one central reason for the privileged status of marriage ...they just cannot be the only reason.


What are the others? It seems to me that the two strongest candidates are these: domesticating men and providing reliable caregivers.

Civilizing young males is one of any society's biggest problems.

For taming men, marriage is unmatched. "Of all the institutions through which men may pass--schools, factories, the military--marriage has the largest effect,"

A second enormous problem for society is what to do when someone is beset by some sort of burdensome contingency. It could be cancer, a broken back, unemployment or depression; it could be exhaustion from work or stress under pressure.

If marriage has any meaning at all, it is that, when you collapse from a stroke, there will be at least one other person whose "job" is to drop everything and come to your aid; or that when you come home after being fired by the postal service there will be someone to persuade you not to kill the supervisor.

Obviously, both rationales--the need to settle males and the need to have people looked after--apply to sterile people as well as fertile ones, and apply to childless couples as well as to ones with children.

The first explains why everybody feels relieved when the town delinquent gets married, and the second explains why everybody feels happy when an aging widow takes a second husband.

From a social point of view, it seems to me, both rationales are far more compelling as justifications of marriage's special status than, say, love. And both of them apply to homosexuals as well as to heterosexuals.

One of the main benefits of publicly recognized marriage is that it binds couples together not only in their own eyes but also in the eyes of society at large. Around the partners is woven a web of expectations that they will spend nights together, go to parties together, take out mortgages together, buy furniture at Ikea together, and so on--all of which helps tie them together and keep them off the streets and at home.

The other benefit of marriage--caretaking--clearly applies to homosexuals.

One of the first things many people worry about when coming to terms with their homosexuality is: Who will take care of me when I'm ailing or old? Society needs to care about this, too...Surely society's interest in kin-creation is strongest of all for people who are unlikely to be supported by children in old age and who may well be rejected by their own parents in youth.

Gay marriage, then, is far from being a mere exercise in political point- making or rights- it serves two of the three social purposes that make marriage so indispensable and irreplaceable for heterosexuals. Two out of three may not be the whole ball of wax, but it is more than enough to give society a compelling interest in marrying off homosexuals.


There is no substitute. Marriage is the only institution that adequately serves these purposes. The power of marriage is not just legal but social. It seals its promise with the smiles and tears of family, friends and neighbors. It shrewdly exploits ceremony (big, public weddings) and money (expensive gifts, dowries) to deter casual commitment and to make bailing out embarrassing. Stag parties and bridal showers signal that what is beginning is not just a legal arrangement but a whole new stage of life. "Domestic partner" laws do none of these things.


I'll go further: far from being a substitute for the real thing, marriage- lite may undermine it. Marriage is a deal between a couple and society, not just between two people: society recognizes the sanctity and autonomy of the pair-bond, and in exchange each spouse commits to being the other's nurse, social worker and policeman of first resort. Each marriage is its own little society within society. Any step that weakens the deal by granting the legal benefits of marriage without also requiring the public commitment is begging for trouble.


If it is good for society to have people attached, then it is not enough just to make marriage available. Marriage should also be expected.

This, too, is just as true for homosexuals as for heterosexuals.

So, if homosexuals are justified in expecting access to marriage, society is equally justified in expecting them to use it.

I'm not saying that out-of-wedlock sex should be scandalous or that people should be coerced into marrying. The mechanisms of expectation are more subtle...echoed in a thousand ways throughout society and that produces subtle but important pressure to form and sustain unions.

This is a good and necessary thing, and it will be as necessary for homosexuals as heterosexuals. If gay marriage is recognized, single gay people over a certain age should not be surprised when they are disapproved of or pitied. That is a vital part of what makes marriage work.