Beyond Marriage: Maggie Gallagher Joins the Fray

Robby George argues the "Beyond Marriage" statement confirms that you can’t exclude polygamy 'in principle' as a form of marriage if you accept gay marriage. Jon Rauch responds that may be true, but why isn’t it good enough just to oppose polygamy in practice? Besides, Jon says 'children need a mom and a dad' doesn’t exclude polygamy anyway, in principle.

I think Jon is right here: polygamy is not currently excluded 'in principle' from our marriage system in the same way that, until about five minutes ago, everyone understood that two men simply could not marry. Whatever two guys (or gals) did together, it could not be marriage. Yet almost everyone recognized that polygamous marriages were a form of marriage, even if they felt they were a degraded and undesirable form, for a variety of reasons (some of which Jon lays out). Polygamy was banned, while gay marriage was impossible.

If this is true, what are the implications for the current question: will SSM lead to polygamy?

First, while I believe Jon and Dale are firmly opposed to polygamy, and that it is quite possible logically to support gay marriage and oppose polygamy, I think they overestimate the importance of this fact for the above question. First, it is clear that many of the same people and forces that are pushing for gay marriage support family diversity as their key value and yes, often covertly precisely because they think arguments made by people who think like Jon and Dale are more helpful at this point in history.

Here e.g. is how one legal eagle pushing for SSM put it to the July 27, 2006 San Francisco Chronicle, when asked about the Beyond Marriage statement:

". . .Legal Director Shannon Minter at San Francisco's National Center for Lesbian Rights, one organization behind the same-sex marriage push, said the statement was "very poorly timed" because equality of marriage rights must come before other forms of relationship recognition.

"Gay legal groups already agree with them and are doing the things they recommend for the most part," Minter said. "We would be in a much stronger position to support all families if we are treated equally."

This lawyer pushing for SSM sees gay marriage as a step in this evolution, and says it's not helpful to point that out at the current time. Here’s how another gay marriage supporter sees it:

Legitimizing gay and lesbian marriages would promote a democratic, pluralist expansion of the meaning, practice, and politics of family life in the United States, helping to supplant the destructive sanctity of The Family with respect for diverse and vibrant families. . . . If we begin to value the meaning and quality of intimate bonds over their customary forms, people might devise marriage and kinship patterns to serve diverse needs. . . . Two friends might decide to “marry” without basing their bond on erotic or romantic attachment. . . . Or, more radical still, perhaps some might dare to question the dyadic limitations of Western marriage and seek some of the benefits of extended family life through small group marriages arranged to share resources, nurturance, and labor.

Judith Stacey, Gay and Lesbian Families: Queer Like Us, in All Our Families: New Policies for a New Century 117, 128-29 (Mary Ann Mason, Arlene Skolnick & Stephen D. Sugarman eds., Oxford U. Press 1998).

Now of course Judith Stacey and Sharon Minter and Robby George may all be wrong, but their case is more powerful than either Jon or Dale acknowledge--In part because neither Jon or Dale acknowledge (or perhaps I should say 'see') how enormously radical the move to gay marriage is for that institution.

Marriage has taken many different forms in history and across cultures. But until, about five minutes ago, the one virtually inviolable rule was 'the rule of opposites': To make a marriage you need (at least one each) husband and wife. The 'rule of two (and only two)' (as David Blankenhorn has pointed out), by contrast is much more the product of specific culture, more rare, and presumably much more easily ignored. A marriage system that reoccurs frequently in widely divers and disconnected cultures probably does so for some reason. Polygamy is a chronic human temptation.

Yet, as David Blankenhorn has put it, Jon and Dale are in the position of maintaining that you can overturn the one clear rule about marriage in our own and virtually all of human history 'the rule of opposites' and yet the 'rule of two' will mostly likely remain firm and unviolate.

Once you move to gay marriage, anything can happen: why strain at a gnat when you’ve swallowed a camel? (Okay, maybe “why strain at a German Shepherd when you’ve swallowed a camel, would be more appropriate).

As I listen to the teens defend their polygamous families (and the fact that its kids they are putting forward for the cameras) at next week’s pro-polygamy rally in Utah, it's hard to deny the gay marriage debate is responsible for the new way in which polygamy is being defended. Just as its quite astonishing to me, though Jon seems to find it old hat, to find that Cornel West and Rabbi Michael Lerner (of Tikkun) are now endorsing polygamy. This is quite new and quite extraordinary, and in various ways a result of the destabilizing effects of the gay marriage debate.

I’ve explained my own reasons for doubting SSM will lead to polygamy—I think it will lead instead to the 'separation of marriage and state' as the strong constituency for marriage in our society (mostly religious folk) join forces with the Left, which has always wanted to abolish marriage, to get the government out of the marriage business.

But that gay marriage has put polygamy into new play seems to be visibly true. I've debated marriage a long time without ever seeing one visible public defender of polygamy. Now we have a major statement, signed by mainstream liberal thinkers, suggesting this is now the Left’s consolidated position. This may well be an unintended consequence, and one that gay people, in their quest for equality, shouldnt be expected to let stop them, for reasons' Jon so passionately articulates.

But how I don't understand how you can propose the most radical possible change in the underlying rules of a key social institution (radical in the sense of being the most new in human history) and then appear shocked, shocked when people suggest this may have destabilizing consequences for the institution as a whole.

On the Web:

Beyond Marriage statement: Beyondmarriage.org

Robby George's first post: www.firstthings.com/onthesquare/?p=330

Jon Rauch's first reply: www.indegayforum.org/blog/show/31025.html

Robby George's second post: www.firstthings.com/onthesquare/?p=373

Jon Rauch second reply: www.marriagedebate.com/2006/08/not-so-fast-mr.htm

Dale Carpenter's comments: volokh.com/archives/archive_2006_08_13-2006_08_19.shtml#1155831813
posted by maggie at 3:25 PM | link

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