HOW WILL SSM HURT MARRIAGE?: Maggie Gallagher replies to Jonathan Rauch

Here's Jonathan's question as I understand it: Since we allow some couples who don't procreate to marry, why can't we allow same-sex couples to do so without interfering with marriage's role in managing procreation?

The question divides into two related ones. 1) Why do I think that allowing same-sex couples to marry interfere with marriage's role as the institution aimed at managing procreation (so that babies are a. born and b. connected to both their mothers and their fathers). And 2) Why do you expect these effects to happen with legally redefining marriage to include same-sex couples, since it hasn't happened by allowing menopausal women to marry?

Let me handle the first question in this post:

How will same-sex marriage harm marriage as a social institution?

Logical necessity. The goal of the same-sex marriage movement is publicly and visbly to assert the legal and moral equality of same-sex and opposite-sex couples. If same-sex marriage is a civil right, this necessarily and intrinsically means that the fact that sex between men and women makes babies is not an important fact, socially or legally. It points away from the child and towards the adult couple relationship as the essence of marriage.

My belief that this is logically so is buttressed by the fact that a. No same-sex marriage advocate I know of is willing to agree with me that "children need mothers and fathers." Instead they say children need love, stability, two parents maybe, but there is nothing important about connecting children to the two people who made them.
b. Every court decision (Goodridge, Baker, Baer) that gets to gay marriage first disconnects marriage from procreation and also from the idea there is any one preferred family structure. This is what you have to do to get to the idea that there are no important differences between same-sex and opposite-sex couples

2. Change the meaning of words. This is really important. Words are the ways ideas are expressed. Ideas, narratives, images, are what culture consists of. Among the changes: there will be no word that means "the coming together of male and female into a one-flesh union that can create new life." This idea will be literally nameless. How do you transmit an idea for which there is no longer any word?

The words "husband" and "wife" will now radically shift in their public meaning. Husband will not longer point to and contain the idea of wife. Wife will not longer point to and contain the idea of husband. The public markers of the idea that male and female are made for each other in some basic way will be eliminated. (This is why many advocates of gay marriage support gay marriage. Because it will eliminate the "norm" of heterosexuality and thereby shift heterosexual identities as well as gay ones.).

Unisex parenting. If I say (as I've done for years), "Children need moms and dads, and marriage is how we get that for kids," I will be immediately rebutted by the laws of the state, which will clearly no longer be dedicated to this goal. Also I believe, if we think that same-sex couples ARE the same as opposite sex couples, the idea that "children need moms and dads" will become a marker of rudeness and probably bigotry in the public square. I don't think mothers will be much effected by the loss of gendered language around parenting, but I think fathers will be. Raising men to be good family men takes an enormous amount of social energy. Don't expect it to happen if the idea that fathers matter to their children is replaced by the idea that "the people who contract for children are the parents" and that "children need love and stability, not necessarily fathers and mothers."

3. Create legal pressures on religious organization to abandon or mute their efforts to transmit their vision of marriage to the next generation.

The law can't create a social institution like marriage. It depends on civil society (families, faith communities) to endow the spare legal structure of marriage with real meaning, of a kind that can change lives. But something like 90 percent of all faith traditions view marriage as powerfully related to generativity and inherently the union of male and female. If you take the Loving v. Virginia analogy serious (SSM as a fundamental civil right), these organizations are going to come under considerable legal pressure to at least mute their faith tradition's vision of marriage and to treat same-sex couples as married. It will not take a very great amount of legal pressure to produce this result, because religious organization are large, and complex with multiple important missions (like saving souls). If the price of say, continuing to minister to the poor, or broadcasting the Bible, is muting their marriage traditions , many faithful people are going to do it. Particularly if the threat is to the tax-exempt status (as Oral Roberts University faced by forbidding interracial dating).

That's what I'm worried about.

posted by Eve at 6:44 PM | link

0 Comments:

Post a Comment

<< Home