CULTURAL CONFIDENCE AND THE MEANING OF MARRIAGE: Eve

One of the things I really liked in Jonathan Rauch's Gay Marriage: Why It Is Good for Gays, Good for Straights, and Good for America is Rauch's focus on the social, public nature of marriage. He shows how legal obligations, legal privileges, cultural expectations, and social pressures combine to either create or uphold (depending on your philosophical stance) the meaning of marriage. In case this is too vague, here are two of his examples: The privilege of refusing to testify against one's spouse reflects and upholds our belief that spouses should be able to speak entirely freely with one another. And the common, casual question, "So, how's your wife?" or "How's your husband?" expresses and reinforces our belief that spouses should be taking care of each other and concerned about one another's wellbeing.

In order to make statements about the nature of marriage, you need a degree of confidence that marriage has a nature, and that we know what it is, and that everybody ought to respect that nature. You need even more confidence to make marriage something demanding--something that requires personal sacrifice, something that rules out actions we might at some point want.

So you need a robust level of cultural confidence to be able to make statements like, Adultery is always wrong--the wedding band signals a no-fly zone; or, Children do best when they're raised within marriage; or, Don't have sex outside of wedlock; or, Marriage is the ideal for sexual relationships, and everything else falls short.

And I have to say that I do not see that kind of cultural confidence in the gay community. I see support for marriage as One Choice Among Others, as Nice If You Like That Sort of Thing, and as very much a do-it-yourself project where the rules can be made up if you know how. There's a lot more cultural support for "open marriages," for "family diversity," and a lot more disdain for social pressure to marry or to restrict sex to marriage.

You can posit that same-sex marriage would change that. You can point out that there are other American subgroups who also lack cultural confidence in these aspects of marriage: at a guess, maybe twentysomething urban professionals, or holders of graduate degrees. Okay. I'm in no way proposing that this lack of cultural confidence is a dispositive point against same-sex marriage. But I do think it's worth talking about--maybe especially worth talking about among those who do accept "the conservative case for gay marriage," as articulated by e.g. Rauch or David Brooks.

Do y'all think my assessment of what marriage means to most people in the gay community is basically accurate, or totally off-base, or what? If I'm right, is it a problem? If it's a problem, what would be needed to fix it?

posted by Eve at 4:52 PM | link

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