WHAT'S SEX GOT TO DO WITH IT? Maggie Gallagher

Jonathan, your argument presumes that the decline of marriage--high rates of unmarried childbearing, divorce and in particular at least, cohabitation, are being driven by what gays and lesbians do. Because same-sex couples can't legally marry they cohabit. And that is undermining the legitimacy of marriage.

Boy, would I get smacked with the charge of scapegoating gays if I tried to make that argument. And quite rightly. Because really, it is hard to swallow. One minor point: permitting people to live together unmolested is not the same as legitimating anything. It is called freedom, privacy, whatever. It is a private act, not a public one.

Secondly, as Stanley Kurtz quite correctly points out, there is no sign at all the gays and lesbian community will join you in insisitng on marriage as the gold standard. What is being embraced is the right to marry, not the duty to marry. Most advocates of gay marriage are in the family diversity school. They don't believe the state has the right to privilege a particular family form or coerce people into accepting a standardized relationship. This will continue apace after gay marriage (it dominates the family law academy right now) only the arguments against it will be notably weaker. Why exactly does the law insist people love only one other person? Why do you have to sleep with the person you love to get benefits? Why is the government in the business of regulating love anyway?

You will have ripped marriage from its underpinnings, the only ones that makes sense of it as a public, shared institution, important not only to the couple, but to the community.

People cohabit, and have multiple sex partners outside of marriage, and have babies outside of marriage, and divorce, not because they don't believe in romantic love. They do. When I asked unwed white moms why they didn't marry, they responded, essentially, that marriage was about romantic love not babies. They didn't want the father to feel he was obligated to marry them. They wanted to be the object of a great erotic passion. Babies were quite secondary.

What is causing our current crisis is a weakened commitment to the idea: adults have an obligation to conduct their intimate lives so they don't hurt their own children. And the related idea: putting your child, the one to whom you have the greatest duty to love, into an alternative family form without a mom and dad, is ordinarily wrong.

By emphasizing adult desire and adult happiness as the main justification for marriage--as a legal institution--you are unermining what needs to be recovered Jonathan. Marriage is about love, but it does not consist of loving feelings. Feelings, particularly erotic passions, are not their own justification. Decency, if nothing else, requires more of us.







posted by maggie at 10:13 AM | link

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