Adapted from: Same Sex Marriage: Pro and Con, ed. Andrew Sullivan (Vintage, 1997).
I'M NOT SURPRISED - who could be? - by the furor over homosexual marriage, which Hawaii's courts may (or may not) legalize. What does surprise me is the line that opponents are taking. When the fuss about gay marriage began, I assumed the main case against it would revolve around adoption rights. In fact, the main objection has turned out to be, essentially, this: If homosexuals can get married because they love each other, why not polygamy? Why not incest? A man may love several women, after all, or his mother.
People who use this line of attack seem to regard it as a trump card, a devastating objection. In Time magazine, Charles Krauthammer declared that marriage is two-sex for the same reasons - tradition, religion, utility, morality - that it is two-person. "Not good enough reasons, say the gay activists," he gloated. "No? Then show me yours for opposing polygamy and incest." Ha!
All right, I'll show him, and it isn't difficult.
The hidden assumption of the argument which brackets gay marriage with polygamous or incestuous marriage is that homosexuals want the right to marry anybody they love. But, of course, heterosexuals are currently denied that right. They can not marry their immediate family or all their sex partners. What homosexuals are asking for is the right to marry, not anybody they love, but somebody they love, which is not at all the same thing.
Heterosexuals can now marry any of millions of people; even if they can't marry their parents or siblings, they have plenty of choice. Homosexuals want the same freedom, subject to the same restrictions. Currently, however, they have zero marital choice (unless, of course, they try to fool heterosexuals into marrying them - a bad idea for a lot of reasons). To ask for a comparably, but not infinitely, broad choice of partners is not unreasonable.
Do homosexuals actually exist? I think so, and today even the Vatican accepts that some people are constitutively attracted only to members of the same sex. By contrast, no serious person claims there are people constitutively attracted only to relatives, or only to groups rather than individuals. Anyone who can love two women can also love one of them. People who insist on marrying their mother or several lovers want an additional (and weird) marital option. Homosexuals currently have no marital option at all. A demand for polygamous or incestuous marriage is thus frivolous in a way that the demand for gay marriage is not.
Suppose, though, that someone insists that he can't be happy without several spouses, and that this is a basic constitutive need for him. Or suppose he says he can't be happy unless he marries a close relative. For argument's sake, let's say we believe him. Shouldn't at least this person be allowed to marry two people, or his father?
No. The reason is that, from society's point of view, the main purpose of marriage is not, and never has been, to sanctify love. If the point of marriage were to let everybody seek his ultimate amorous fulfillment, then adultery would be a standard part of the marital package. In fact, society doesn't much care whether spouses love each other, as long as they meet their marital obligations. The purpose of secular marriage, rather, is to bond as many people as possible into committed, stable relationships. Such little societies-within-society not only provide the best environment for raising children, they also domesticate men and ensure that most people have someone whose "job" is to look after them.
Polygamy radically undermines this goal, because if one man has two wives, it follows that some other man has no wife. As Robert Wright notes in his book The Moral Animal, the result is that many low-status males end up unable to wed and dangerously restless. Over time, a society can sanction polygamy only if it is prepared to use harsh measures to repress a menacing underclass of spouseless men. It is no coincidence that no liberal countries have been polygamous, and no polygamous countries have been liberal. In that respect, the one-partner-each rule stands at the very core of a liberal society, by making marriage a goal that everyone can aspire to. Gay marriage, note, is fully in keeping with liberalism's inclusive aspirations. Polygamy absolutely is not.
Incest, of course, may produce impaired children. But incestuous marriage is a horrible idea for a much bigger reason than that. Imagine a society where parents and children viewed each other as potential mates. Just for a start, every child would grow up wondering whether his parents had sexual designs on him, or were "grooming" him as a future spouse. Holding open the prospect of incestuous marriage would devastate family life by, effectively, legitimizing sexual predation within it.
The rather peculiar idea underlying the "If gay marriage, then polygamy" argument is that, at bottom, there really is no very good reason to be against polygamy other than tradition - you just have to be blindly against it, and ditto for gay marriage. But there are ample grounds to oppose polygamous and incestuous marriage, grounds that have nothing to do with whether gay people will be allowed to partake of society's most stabilizing, civilizing institution. I don't ask to break the rules that we all depend on. I just want to be allowed to follow them.