WHAT NEEDS DOES MARRIAGE UNIQUELY FULFILL?: Eve

These are the needs marriage uniquely fulfills for people who sleep with members of the opposite sex. Perhaps this explains why even many cultures that found an honorable or normal place for at least some forms of homosexual relationships did not consider these relationships to be marriages. Marriage was a separate institution that did other things. (There are a lot of more specific ways you can cash out my very general "you need to have babies and raise 'em right" point above: managing succession, legitimacy, and distribution of property are some specific examples of the general point.)

So I think it's worth asking, What needs does marriage uniquely fulfill for gay people in the one place where "gay marriage" has been sought--the post-industrial West?

There are a lot of possible answers to that question. (Government benefits, though, is the wrong answer. To know why, think about whether advocates of gay marriage would be satisfied with federal-level civil unions. In general, it's a sign of American faith in laws and lawmakers that we hear so much about government benefits in the discussion of gay marriage, since the primary ways in which marriage benefits both the couple and any children of their union are cultural, social, and perhaps biological [i.e. remarriages are not nearly as good for kids as the marriages of their own moms and dads--there's something about an intact family, a child's own married mother and father, that does much more than a family with marriage but not biological kinship]. Anyway, that's a digression.)

I think--and this is probably the most tentative part of this series of posts--that the primary benefit gay marriage provides to gays is a sense of existential acceptance. Gay marriage tells people who have suffered greatly from the belief that they are "not one of us" that in fact they are. Gay marriage is the answer to childhood alienation, to rejection from parents or religious authorities, to societal disapproval. Here's Andrew Sullivan saying so (and again here); and I think this quite poignant column from Jonathan Rauch has the same idea as one of its most important subtexts.

Kind of obviously, I find this desire very moving. I wrote a bit here about the ways in which an existential sense of alienation, definitely linked to my sexual orientation, shaped my childhood. (More, much less marriage-related, here.) It sucks, dude. It really does.

But notice a few things about this particular benefit of marriage: First off, in order for gay people to attain it, nobody actually has to get married. (That's especially true in the long run. In the short run, for gay marriage to do its work of existential acceptance, there need to be many beautiful and moving gay weddings.) Second, when the primary benefit of marriage is its relief of your own existential suffering or its promotion of your own well-being and sense of self, it is very hard to know why you should stay in your marriage when it begins to cause its own variety of deep personal suffering. A parallel misunderstanding of the primary benefits and purposes of marriage is, I think, part of what's damaging the general marriage culture now--when marriage is primarily about how wonderful it is that y'all are happy and in love, what happens when you're not? Third, the more acceptance homosexuality wins from the culture at large, the less necessary this benefit will feel. And fourth--I find this point powerful, though I know it's more suggestive than dispositive--this is a benefit of marriage that is both new and distinctively gay. It is only tenuously related to the rewards marriage has provided for millennia. (The tenuous relationship does exist--marriage is a marker of adulthood, and in that respect there's a definite sense that gay marriage marks the time when the individual gay person, and the gay community generally, has "grown up.")
posted by Eve at 12:24 AM | Link |

1 Comments:

At 10/24/2005 9:11 AM, Jesurgislac said...

So I think it's worth asking, What needs does marriage uniquely fulfill for gay people in the one place where "gay marriage" has been sought--the post-industrial West?

The same needs that marriage uniquely fulfills for straight people in the post-industrial West. Next question?

To know why, think about whether advocates of gay marriage would be satisfied with federal-level civil unions.

Um... depends where you live. In Virginia, for example, where it is illegal for a woman to leave her house to her same-sex partner in her will; or in Massachusetts, where she could get legally married?

In the US, many people have strong political feelings about "separate but equal", which is what is being advocated here. And in practice, homophobia is so powerful in US politics, that even were federal-level civil unions offered, there would be individual states who would resist them and homophobes who would claim that even civil unions were wrong.

In other countries, offering same-sex civil unions has worked well as a halfway house - removing the unacceptable inequality in the law, while not using the word "marriage". The Netherlands, Belgium, and Canada all went by this route: Spain went directly to same-sex marriage.

Offering federal-level civil unions would certainly not end the argument about whether or not same-sex couples should be allowed to marry. But it would certainly be the right thing to do, whether or not it ended the argument.

that the primary benefit gay marriage provides to gays is a sense of existential acceptance.

To a certain extent, that's the case for those of us who don't have anyone in particular we want to get married to. Which I don't.

But it's certainly not the case for people who very much want to get married, and have been legally banned from doing so.

Nor does it cover the feeling I have when I see friends and acquaintances suffering directly and sometimes horrifyingly, because while they have made a committment to their partner that has lasted for decades, to the law that relationship is invisible.

It's as if (analogy warning) you were a white person in the slavery days writing movingly about how the real reason slavery sucked is because it means black people don't have a sense of existential acceptance. That it wasn't really necessary to abolish slavery: all that was really necessary was to give black people a sense of self-worth and pride in themselves, because then they wouldn't actually mind about being slaves.

 

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