ARE ALL COUPLES ALIKE?: Maggie responds to Ben and Dale

Dear, dear Ben. Of course I know you did not call marriage a crutch. I called it a crutch. If you consider sex difference a vice to be overcome, then marriage is the vehicle (or crutch) for overcoming it. One of the persistent undercurrents I would like to bring out is the perfectly understandable, but false assumption on your part and many others that in saying marriage should be reserved for heterosexuals (actually cross-gender couples, since at least some gays and lesbians do marry, however deviant that is considered in the gay community) I am implying that heterosexuals, as a class, are morally superior to homosexuals.

In fact being heterosexual is no virtue. The vices and shortcoming of heterosexuals are arguably the most dangerous to the community because they persistently break up families, or create fatherless children. You can consider marriage a remedial institution, if you like, for people prone to this particular set of sexual failures and sins. It would not be untrue. I can really see it that way.

This is why, for years, I simply refused to enter the gay marriage debate. I was afraid that conservatives and other Americans of good will would rally against gay marriage (which I then considered unlikely in the extreme) and meanwhile we would lose marriage itself. It is the sins and shortcomings of heterosexuals that are creating so much sorrow, suffering, expense and that threaten the future of this key institution.

Then, like a lot of people, I woke up to find that unisex marriage is here, while all the best marriage minds have been avoiding the implications of taking what is for me a trully radical redefinition of marriage that will have lasting consequences.

Dale, I really think one of the problems with this debate is (please pardon me, I mean no offense) it has been left largely to lawyers, who use a particular form of intellectual reasoning: take a class, discuss whether it is under or overinclusive for the goals, etc. You can miss a lot of forests for the trees here. This is not a matter of sticking rigidly to a definition that makes no sense. It is a matter of looking at the underlying social institution, understanding its purposes, and grasping how the law can help or hurt these purposes.

I do not think anyone but a highly intelligent and well-trained lawyer could fail to grasp that saying, in essence, gender does not matter, could fail to to be a real transformation in an institution that is in its nature a sexual one.

I know you think that you can decide that unisex marriage will not have these effects. If you and me and Andrew and Jonathan could get in a room and make a gentleman's agreement about what this means for marriage, hey, you would be right. But there is an underlying logic to making this move which will have ramifications long after you and I are dead. Here is another way to put it: In a sense Andrew is right. If we adopt unisex marriage, it will be true that, faced between reforming marriage in a way that strengthens its role in managing sex difference so that adults do not hurt the children their own bodies produce, and changing the law so as to accomodate the interests of adults in personal intimacy, we will have chosen the latter. It is a big decision. Ideas have consequences, remember?


posted by maggie at 10:25 AM | link

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