MARRIED WITH CHILDREN: Shelby Steele replies to Andrew Sullivan

I thank Andrew Sullivan for his considered response in TNR Online to my recent Wall Street Journal article on gay marriage. ...

Sullivan then compares the old arguments against interracial marriage to my argument against gay marriage. And this points to an important theme of my argument: Racial difference is an innocuous human difference that in no way redefines the heterosexual nature of marriage or effects its procreative function. Interracial marriage has no effect on the institution of marriage. But when marriage is redefined to include homosexuality, it ends the heterosexual definition of marriage and moves marriage farther away from its grounding in procreation. It effectively makes marriage an institution more purely devoted to romantic love and adult fulfillment than to the heavier and more selfless responsibilities surrounding procreation. Of course, adult love and the responsibilities surrounding procreation are not mutually exclusive, but the gravity of marriage as an institution comes from its demand that love be negotiated through these larger responsibilities.

To be sure, there are childless heterosexual couples and homosexual couples with children. But to define an institution as important to society as marriage by exceptions to the norms of both sexual orientations--rather than by the norms themselves--makes little sense. It could be argued that marriage is quite literally an outgrowth of heterosexuality itself, an institution that follows from nature's requirement that men and women sexually merge to perpetuate the human species.

Sullivan argues that marriage encourages "stability, fidelity, and family among homosexuals." I don't know. It is certainly doing less and less of this among heterosexuals. But, in any case, the stabilizing features of marriage have evolved over the millennia to protect children and procreation from the vicissitudes of adult love. How many 50's style marriages found stability only for "the sake of the children"? How many 70's, 80's, and 90's marriages ended because children and procreation became secondary to adult fulfillment? The point is that marriage offers the features Sullivan wants for homosexuals only when it is very narrowly--often repressively--grounded in heterosexuality, procreation, and the socialization of children. When it is defined, as Sullivan says he would have it be, around "the unifying experience of love," it becomes nearly as fickle as love itself--a nasty fight, a single betrayal away from dissolution. Marriage brings "stability" to love by humbling it, by making it often less important than the responsibilities to family and community.

When love and fulfillment are of first importance, marriage weakens as an institution, as the high divorce rates of recent decades illustrate. Homosexual unions are, by nature's grace, naturally less burdened by the very responsibilities that heterosexuals have been running from in marriage for decades now. The truth is that heterosexuals have been moving marriage toward the more exclusively adult-focused relationships that gays have always had--relationships that turn more narrowly on love, attraction, and fulfillment. Cohabitation is now virtually a norm among young heterosexuals, and adult happiness is more the test of marriages today than family stability. So the conundrum for the gay marriage movement is that marriage has already declined from its more selfless and stable era into something very much like what gays already have.

So what, then, is the big deal? Why not gay marriages if society has already moved to a place where romantic unions--of all kinds--are now first of all about adult love? One answer is that marriage, despite its decline, will always be the basis of the single most important institution in the human condition--the family. This is the institution that socializes human beings, prepares them (or fails to) for all other human activities. Just because marriage has now declined is no reason to push it even further toward the self-preoccupations of adult love and away from its family focus.

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posted by Eve at 4:12 PM | link

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