WHY DON'T POST-MENOPAUSAL WOMEN DO THE SAME THING?: Maggie Gallagher replies to Mark Miller

Mark, trust me here. I may well be wrong--anyone can be wrong--but I'm being as honest and as little disingenous as I can. For me the question of what SSM will do to marriage is primary. Advocates of gay marriage tend to secretly or openly believe that opponents are motivated primarily by opposition to homosexuality. Andrew Sullivan's arguments increasingly now consist of attempting to unmask such "secret" or "disingenous" motivations, to reduce the gay marriage debate to a debate about homosexuality. (This is not to say the gay debate is somehow illegitimate or unimportant, but its not exactly the same debate: one cannot be reduced to the other.).

I am on record as saying that polygamy is "better" than gay marriage, precisely for the reasons you suggest (polygamous marriage systems are still oriented towards generativity and getting fathers for children). (See my NRO piece last year). I also think polygamy is a pretty wretched family system, much inferior to our own marriage tradition, for reasons involving everything from inherently lowering the status of mothers to reducing paternal investment in children (relative to monogamy), to intensifying male competition for wives in ways that tend to be inconsistent with democratic forms of government. (If only 10 percent of men get 4 wives, 40 percent of men at the bottom get no wife, barring importation of wives from outside the society)

I don't see marriage as a "right." I see it as a "norm" and a social institution, which means it has to have substantive content. So being opposed to both gay marriage and to polygamy makes sense. We have several thousand years of experience with both systems. I think the verdict in favor of our own marriage norms is pretty persuasive.

posted by Eve at 5:41 PM | link

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