GIVE CREDIT WHERE IT'S DUE, opponents of gay equality can be creative in desperation. Lately, they have been finding ingenious ways to use the Catholic priest scandal to criticize the entire gay civil rights project. The essence of their argument is that gays are incurably promiscuous, that this promiscuity is a kind of moral disease, and that it threatens to lay low every traditional institution it infects.
Stanley Kurtz, writing recently in the influential conservative magazine National Review, has applied this argument to same-sex marriage. The argument must be rebutted, and it can be.
Kurtz, a writer of considerable intelligence and subtlety, has specialized in arguing against the conservative case for gay marriage. That case has rested in part on a prediction (and a hope) that gay marriage would reduce gay promiscuity. This would improve the lives of gays and benefit society by, for example, increasing social stability and reducing the incidence of sexually transmitted diseases. Let's call it the "domestication effect."
Using the crisis in the Catholic Church as an example, Kurtz questions the likelihood of a domestication effect. Kurtz argues that gays go into the priesthood promising to meet the strictures of the institution (celibacy), perhaps sincerely believing they will, but soon fall prey to their profligacy. Similarly, in Kurtz' view, gays would go into marriage promising to meet the strictures of the institution (fidelity), perhaps sincerely believing they will, but would soon fall prey to their profligacy. If gay priests can't keep their vows of celibacy, it's unlikely gay spouses will keep their vows of monogamy.
In fact, Kurtz argues, it's worse than that: "The priesthood scandal is a stunningly clear case in which the opening of an institution to large numbers of homosexuals, far from strengthening norms of sexual restraint, has instead resulted in the conscious and successful subversion of the norms themselves." That is, gays will not only fail to benefit from marriage, they will hurt it. As a conservative who believes traditional institutions like marriage are valuable, I take this charge very seriously.
There are many ways to respond to Kurtz's analogy. One would be to question the comparison of an institution that allows some sexual outlet to participants (marriage) to another that completely forbids it (the Catholic priesthood). Human nature may simply be better equipped to deal with restricted sexual access than with none at all.
Yet another response would be to note that Kurtz's argument has no apparent application to gay women, who can't even become Catholic priests.
But I want to attack Kurtz's conclusion that gay men will somehow destabilize marriage. First, let's make a concession to Kurtz for the sake of argument: suppose the magnitude of the domestication effect is indeed very small. We can doubt gay male promiscuity is simply an artifact of repressive laws that will wither away when those laws are gone. Of course, we cannot know for sure because no other regime has been available to gay men. But even if we concede that many gay men will not be changed much by marriage, will gay male marriage change marriage?
Surely even Kurtz would agree that at least some gay male couples in marriage would remain monogamous, just as many gay priests have remained celibate. And surely at least some, however small, domestication effect would take hold. This domestication effect will provide at least small benefits to gay men and to society, benefits that all principled conservatives should welcome. In a cost-benefits analysis, that's a point for gay marriage.
Then what's the cost? Though Kurtz never explicitly spells it out, he appears to fear that straight couples will see gay spouses living it up sexually and do the same (that is, to a greater degree than they already do).
But this genuinely conservative nightmare sounds fanciful to me for two reasons. First, women will always be present in straight marriages and women will for the most part demand fidelity, as they always have. That won't change because they hear a few married gay men have open arrangements.
Second, even assuming gay men are uncontrollably promiscuous and that access to the social support marriage provides will not change that, it borders on paranoia to think they will manage to subvert marriage itself.
To see why, let's do some math. Conservative critics of gay equality like to say that homosexuals are no more than three percent of the population. I'd bet gays will get married at a lower rate than the general population, so gay married couples will likely represent less than three percent of all marriages.
Gay male married couples will be even rarer at first. The experience of Vermont civil unions shows that twice as many lesbian couples as gay male couples get hitched. Two-thirds of homosexual unions would probably be female pairings, which will be largely sexually closed (perhaps more so than straight couples).
The potentially problematic gay couples - the gay men - will represent perhaps one percent of all marriages. Some of them will manage to be faithful all or most of the time, so the truly troublesome unfaithful gay male couples will represent less than one percent of all marriages.
These paltry numbers will undermine the institution of marriage? Undermine it more than the large percentage of married people who already acknowledge in studies they have been unfaithful? To state the proposition is to refute it. Perhaps gay conservatives have more faith in the institution of marriage than its traditionalist defenders do.