GAY MARRIAGE VS. AMERICAN MARRIAGE: Kay S. Hymowitz

These days everyone has a strong opinion about marriage, but no one seems to be sure what it is, exactly. Is it a sacramental union? Is it a public recognition of a committed love relationship? Is it a state scheme for distributing health insurance and tax breaks? Or given what two eminent anthropologists writing recently in support of gay marriage in the Washington Post describe as a "startling diversity of socially approved forms of marriage," is the institution too varied to fit into a single, dictionary-neat meaning?

The anthropologists are right about one thing: human beings have come up with almost as many ways of getting hitched as they have languages to tell mother-in-law jokes. ...

But beneath all the diversity, marriage has always had a fundamental, universal core that makes gay marriage a non sequitur: it has always governed property and inheritance rights; it has always been the means of establishing paternity, legitimacy, and the rights and responsibilities of parenthood; and because these goals involve bearing and raising children, it has always involved (at least one) man and woman. What's more, among the "startling diversity" of variations that different cultures have elaborated on this fundamental core, our own culture has produced a specifically American ideal of marriage that is inseparable from our vision of free citizenship and is deeply embedded in our history, politics, economics, and culture. Advocates for gay marriage cite the historical evolution of that ideal--which we might call republican marriage--to bolster their case, arguing that gay unions are a natural extension of America's dedication to civil rights and to individual freedom. But a look at that history is enough to cast serious doubt on the advocates' case.

Strange as it seems, America's founding thinkers were as interested in the subject of marriage as any of Fox TV's bachelorettes. Given the political experiment that they were designing, they had good reason, for they understood the basic sociological truth that familial relations both echo and shape the political order. "To the institution of marriage the true origin of society must be traced," James Wilson, a member of the Continental Congress and later a Supreme Court justice, wrote in 1790. Before the Revolutionary War, legal philosophers and statesmen like Wilson filled magazines and speeches with discussions of what kind of marriage would best live up to the principles of the new country. It's not surprising that they zeroed in on one quality in particular: self-government.

...Given that marriage was originally a religious sacrament, the Founders understood that the institution retained, even in their secular republic, an element of spirituality, an assertion that man is something higher than the beasts and more than a merely material being. The ceremony confers a special, human dignity upon our relations. In addition, they understood that marriage is a contract, regulated by the laws and ultimately enforceable by the state, that spells out property relations between the spouses, as well as their inheritance rights and those of their children. Therefore, marriage is intrinsically a government concern.

In addition to these time-honored beliefs, the Founders brought a more modern idea to the matrimonial drafting table. Like many of their educated contemporaries in Western Europe, they had come to think of marriage in a way congruent with emerging ideals of individual liberty and democratic equality. In the old world, marriage was originally a matter of caste, class, or clan. Courtship was closer in spirit to bartering than romance; young people were to be traded off by elders intent on solidifying family ties and merging family fortunes and acres.

By the late eighteenth century, however, Western Europeans were increasingly emphasizing marriage as a love-match between two self-determining individuals. Young people were free to choose for themselves with whom to spend their lives, and love could transcend class barriers to recognize the intrinsic personal worth of the beloved. ...

Most important, republican marriage provided the edifice in which couples would care for and socialize their children to meet the demands of the new political order. If republican marriage celebrated self-government, it also had to pass down its principles to the young; it was supposed to perpetuate as well as to embody the habits of freedom. So whereas in all Western societies, the state concerns itself with fostering the institution of the family because it is the mechanism by which the society reproduces itself, in America that state concern takes on a special urgency, because of child rearing's unique momentousness to the national project. ...

..."Throughout the history of Massachusetts, marriage has been in a state of change," a group of historians of marriage, family, and the law asserted in an amicus brief in the case that legalized gay marriage in [Massachusetts]. Gay marriage "represents the logical next step in this court's long tradition of reforming marriage to fit the evolving nature of committed intimate relationships and the rights of the individuals in those relationships." But detaching the "tradition of reforming marriage" from the multifaceted tradition of republican marriage not only starts history around 1968, but it also presents a seriously distorted picture of why the American government is in the marriage business at all. ...

In fact, gay-marriage proponents generally treat children as a distraction from the state's interest in marriage rather than crucial to it. They impatiently insist that history has settled the matter: it has definitively separated child rearing and marriage, demonstrating conclusively that marriage is a changing and elastic institution that can easily accommodate homosexuals. "When a third of children are born out of wedlock, when contraception and abortion are available on demand, when you have single-parent adoption legal in every state," Jonathan Rauch, the author of the recent Gay Marriage, has opined, "the debate is over about detaching marriage from parenthood--indeed was over years ago." Andrew Sullivan, along with Rauch one of the most thoughtful and eloquent advocates writing today, agrees: the argument that marriage has anything to do with children, he says, "fails socially and culturally because in our culture at this time, procreation is not understood to be an essential part of what it is to be married."

But it's worth considering just how recently--and how haphazardly--Americans closed "the debate . . . about detaching marriage from parenthood." For most of American history, republican marriage remained the reigning paradigm: a self-reliant and child-centered couple, who had freely chosen each other in a spirit of equality and mutual affection and who would pass on to their young not just property but also the qualities needed to live in freedom. That reign only came to an end in the late 1960s as divorce laws loosened and Americans began pulling off their wedding rings at record rates.

Divorce is such a conundrum for the nation because it follows directly from American principles even while threatening to subvert them. During the Revolutionary era, marriage theorists understood that a nation that loves liberty had to tolerate some divorce; if it was a matter of principle that you chose to enter into wedlock, it was also a matter of principle that you had to have some way of choosing to get out, at least under some circumstances. A number of early writers--including Thomas Paine, whose problems with Mrs. Paine gave him a personal stake in the issue--urged Americans to take a tolerant approach toward the practice. Still, even though divorce was more accepted in this country than in many parts of the world, it remained rare, a last resort and one that worried people deeply. That was no longer the case by the late 1960s, when squeamishness on the subject evaporated, the marital exit door flew open, and not only the battered and the miserable but also the merely unfulfilled came pouring out.

...The soaring rates of divorce signaled a fundamental transformation in the American idea of marriage. As Americans crowded into the divorce courts, they were casting aside the complex--and demanding--vision of the Founders. Marriage was becoming a minimalist institution; people now thought of it as an intimate relationship between two adults, having little to do with children and nothing to do with propagating the political and moral culture. ...

So what are we to make of the fact that these mom-and-apple-pie young people tend to be more in favor of gay marriage than their parents and grandparents are? The great irony is that their traditionalism enlarges their sympathy for gays' hunger for 'til-death-do-us-part commitment; after all, that's what's they want, too. Odd as it sounds, gays and the children who grew up in single-parent homes share the experience of standing outside and looking longingly through the window at the peaceful, Norman Rockwell family reading or playing Scrabble in front of the fireplace. Rauch and Sullivan, in particular, have written touchingly of marriage as a solemn, even spiritual, union, a momentous public vow to another person that comes with profound responsibilities and aspires to transcendence. If you add together young people's earnest devotion to marriage and their interest in the civil rights movement (insofar as they have studied any American history at all, it's likely to begin with Rosa Parks and end with Martin Luther King), you have a generation for which gay marriage seems merely commonsensical.

But what the young neo-traditionalists have trouble understanding is that their embrace of the next civil rights revolution, as many of them are inclined to see the fight for gay marriage, is actually at war with their longing for a more stable domestic life. Gay marriage gives an enfeebled institution another injection of the toxin that got it sick in the first place: it reinforces the definition of marriage as a loving, self-determining couple engaging in an ordinary civil contract that has nothing to do with children. That's no way for marriage to get its gravitas back. It is marriage's dedication to child rearing, to a future that projects far beyond the passing feelings of a couple, that has the potential to discipline adult passion. "The gravity of marriage as an institution comes from its demand that love be negotiated through these larger responsibilities [surrounding procreation]," Shelby Steele has written in response to Andrew Sullivan. Ignore those responsibilities and you get, well, you get the marital meltdown that this generation was hoping to transform.

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