First published August 2, 2003, in the New York Post. Republished courtesy of Scripps Howard News Service.
Husbands and wives have less to fear from gay marriage than Southern whites did from the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
Mississippi's 478,000 registered white voters, for instance, must have been shocked and awed to see the number of registered black voters in the Magnolia State blossom from 22,000 in 1960 to 175,000 in 1966, the year after President Lyndon Baines Johnson signed that landmark federal poll-access bill. While the Census Bureau found one black Mississippi voter for every 21 white electors in 1960, six years later, that ratio had withered to one black registrant for every 2.7 enrolled whites.
Mississippi's whites, like those elsewhere in the South, certainly could complain that their proportion of the total electorate had waned, as had their collective claim on the attention of anyone they elected. Their concerns obviously paled in comparison to the deliberate political exclusion blacks endured. Thus, extending voting rights to blacks was correct and long overdue.
If black enfranchisement meant the dilution of Caucasian suffrage, whites just had to get over it. And apparently they did. Rather than abandon politics, they kept voting, and do so today.
When it comes to an analogous expansion of marriage to include same-sex spouses, straight couples have less to fret about than did Dixie's white voters four decades ago. Jack and Jill's marriage would not be diluted by letting Bill and Ted wed. There is no reason why Jack and Jill should love each other any less, 'til death do them part, just because Bill and Ted want the same level of commitment for themselves.
If marriage were a zero-sum game in which every gay wedding yielded a straight divorce, the opponents of gay nuptials would wield a mighty powerful argument. However, this worry has all the weight of a handful of airborne rice.
Indeed, the arguments of gay-marriage critics increasingly oscillate between the overblown and the hysterical.
Conservative commentator Steve Sailer contends that gay weddings will cause straight grooms -- already spooked by seating charts and floral arrangements -- to throw up their arms and head for the hills.
"It wouldn't take much to get the average young man to turn even more against participating in an arduous process that seems alien and hostile to him already," Sailer recently wrote. "If some of the most enthusiastic participants [in weddings] become gays, then his aversion will grow even more."
What, then? Will young men stop getting on bended knees to ask their sweethearts for their hands in matrimony?
Meanwhile, columnist Maggie Gallagher has concluded that "polygamy is not worse than gay marriage, it is better." As she explained in the July 14 National Review Online, "At least polygamy, for all its ugly defects, is an attempt to secure stable mother-father families for children." Perhaps Gallagher meant "mothers-father families." What could be more stable than that?
Libertarian author David Boaz points to the exit from this growing mess. He wonders: Why do either Jack or Jill or Bill and Ted need government's permission to marry or its blessing once they have done so? The state should extract itself from the marriage-license business. Two people who wish to marry should find a minister, rabbi or, say, a Rotary Club president to grace their union. Americans then can withdraw this debate from Washington, D.C. and their state capitols and instead decide in their own churches, synagogues and civic associations which couples do and do not deserve their approval.
For now, gay-marriage critics should admit that heterosexuals pose the biggest risks to straight marriage. Adultery is now sufficiently rampant that websites such as Chatcheaters.com and InfidelityCheck.org troll cyberspace for extramarital e-mail and chatroom liaisons. Divorce, of course, threatens matrimony, as do "marriage lite" arrangements such as domestic partnerships that taste great, but are less filling than actual marriage. If couples can enjoy the benefits of matrimony without pledging mutual fealty before God and family, why not just shack up?
These practices weaken straight matrimony far more than would watching Bill and Ted drive off to Niagara Falls with a "Just Married" sign pinned to their Bronco. Alas, raising the bar for heterosexuals is much more work and much less fun than ranting about homosexuals.
Republished courtesy of Scripps Howard News Service.