Demosophia

More on Marriage

I started to post a reply to comments by Dan and Ben below, but it grew larger than a mere comment. Dan will get me going, with this:

However, and I suspect that my own biases are coming into play here, both in this case and the earlier one involving Judge Moore, both men are basically shooting their respective causes in the foot through these types of antics.

Absolutely! It's as though he's making an attempt to turn marriage into Mardi Gras, or something.

I can't imagine anything that ought to raise conservative concerns more, even those conservatives who are in favor of gay marriage. About the last thing they want is for marriage to buy into the whole "personal fulfillment" paradigm any more than it already has. Marriage fulfills a vital role in society, binding parents during critical years of child rearing. David J. Armor has even demonstrated that the home environment provided by stable couples is critical to the development of IQ! Others, like James Q. Wilson and Frank Fukuyama have argued that the dissolution of the family has precipitated the disruption of society.

The conviction within the gay community in S.F. seems to be that what conservatives are worried about is that gay marriages will work out fine, and that gays will have lives as happy and productive as those of straight couples. But if you ask religious conservatives why they're opposed to gay marriage they'll tell you that it's because they're afraid it will undermine or weaken an institution that's already in deep trouble. (Or some version of that, couched in religious terms.) And I personally see no reason to disbelieve them. The very idea that they're really just intent on selfishly withholding the "goodies" of happy personal fulfillment strikes me as an excellent example of what concerns conservatives, and what ought to concern all of us. The personal fulfillment paradigm is part of the set of social value changes that threatens marriage in the first place. The implication of such an ethic is that as soon as a marriage becomes "unfulfilling," it's ready for the chopping block. The institution then just becomes an impediment, and the "good" becomes divorce.

So if the message that gays are sending is that they feel they're being denied self-fulfillment, and this is the primary reason they want to "indulge" in marriage, I think the religious conservatives may have a point. There are, however, other conservatives who think that gay marriage will stabilize gay relationships and that this will have a salutary effect on marriage and on the society. And that, too, could happen. But lets be clear, although marriage may become an important institution for gays, that's ancillary.

I tend to think that, on average, gay men won't stay married any longer than heterosexuals, and probably less. Gay women will probably stay married for eons (which reminds me of an old joke about what a lesbian drives to her second date: a moving van). But that doesn't really help the social situation, because that whole mess that Fukuyama and Wilson are talking about has mainly to do with the role and behavior of heterosexual men (and to a lesser extent the behavior of a very small cadre of self-indulgent, well-heeled, women). What concerns me is that once the experiment begins, it can't be halted or reversed even if it proves disastrous, because the values that promoted it in the first place are fundamentally self-indulgent, and have little to do with marriage as a basic social institution.

Well, that's what I fear. But I don't fear it enough to oppose allowing a social experiment to proceed. At least, not yet...

Posted by Demosophist at February 20, 2004 12:59 AM | TrackBack