LOVE SUPREME: GAY NUPTIALS AND THE MAKING OF MODERN MARRIAGE: Adam Haslett

...Such great expectations of marital happiness belong to a larger history of the Western emphasis on the self. The philosopher Charles Taylor, in an examination of how our attitude toward interior life has changed over the past five hundred years, argues that the trend line runs in one direction: from a self-understanding gained from our place in larger entities--such as a chain of being or divine order--toward purpose discovered from within, through what we consider to be authentic self-expression. This is the distance Western culture has travelled from the church confessional to the therapist's couch. In turn, the choice of whom to marry has become less about satisfying the demands of family and community than about satisfying oneself. When you add the contraceptive and reproductive technologies that have separated sex from procreation, what you have is a model of heterosexual marriage that is grounded in and almost entirely sustained on individual preference. This is a historically peculiar state of affairs, one that would be alien to our ancestors and to most traditional cultures today. And it makes the push for gay marriage inevitable. ...

Owing to the reforms of the past forty years, men and women now enter the married state with more legal parity than ever before. Under the old doctrine of coverture, a man owned not only his wife's property but her body as well. Today, in nearly every state, men's and women's rights and obligations in alimony, child custody, child support, and property division in divorce have been made formally gender-neutral. Arrests and prosecutions for domestic abuse, rare thirty years ago, are now routine. As recently as 1984, a man could not be prosecuted for raping his own wife; today, it's a crime in all fifty states. ...

What effect will allowing men to marry men and women to marry women have on our peculiarly modern venture of marriage? Proponents typically say that it will have hardly any--that there is no shortage of marriage licenses, and all that will happen is that more citizens and their children will have the benefits of existing family law. The opposition argues that one of the organizing institutions of our society will be imperilled.

History suggests that neither view is quite accurate. Despite comparisons to the repeal of miscegenation laws, no other expansion of the marriage franchise--to the sterile, to slaves, or to interracial couples--has required an alteration in the basic definition of the term: the union of a man and woman as husband and wife. To discount this as mere semantics misses what the definition points up: that marriage, through all its incarnations, has been a procedure that assigns people a new identity based on their gender. For centuries, it has been the ceremony that makes males into husbands and females into wives. Until very recently, this meant a lifetime commitment to both the security and the constriction of a well-defined social role. The symbolic danger that gay marriage poses to such an arrangement is obvious. It alters the public meaning of the word by further draining it of its power to reinforce traditional expectations of behavior. What does it mean to be a husband in a world where a man could have one of his own? This is up to each individual couple, one is tempted to say. Fair enough; but the words we use to describe our relationships are shared cultural property. There is no private language. In this sense, granting the word "marriage" to gay couples will eventually affect everyone.

The mistake is to consider the change in meaning particularly drastic. After all, undoing customary expectations for how a husband and wife behave toward each other has been one of the goals of the women’s movement since its inception. Rather than an abrupt departure, same-sex marriage is the culmination of a larger and ultimately more consequential change in the nature of marital relations between men and women.

Which is one of the reasons that the opposition to it is so fierce. It has come to symbolize what is, historically speaking, radical about contemporary marriage: the decline of the patriarchal legal structure and the rise of the goal of self-fulfillment. Gay marriage is unsettling, to many, not because it departs from modern meanings of matrimony but because it embodies them.

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posted by Eve at 11:47 PM | link

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