IGF CultureWatch

Ross Douthat tries a new(ish) argument against gay marriage. John Corvino takes it apart. Same problem as always (sigh). Just saying marriage is good for this or that straight need doesn’t show it can’t accommodate gays as well.

Look, guys. Let’s say it’s a given that shirts were designed for people with two arms. Great! So does that mean one-armed people should be forbidden to wear shirts? That one-armed shirt-wearers will somehow wreck the ideal of shirtiness, and we’ll lose the very concept of the shirt?

Let’s say mouths were invented for eating. If not for eating, there would be no mouths. Great! So should we forbid the use of mouths for talking, lest everyone get too confused about what mouths are really for?

That kind of argumentation wouldn’t get past a high-school logic teacher. Yet it remains a commonplace in the gay-marriage debate. Sometimes I wonder whether SSM opponents would have anything left to say without it.

Corvino puts it well (but read the whole thing):

In order to make his position plausible, Douthat would need to show that the stakes are so radically different for gays or lesbians that any form of marriage that includes this small minority can no longer do the requisite work for (fertile) heterosexuals.

But at this crucial point Douthat’s argument becomes hopelessly vague. He simply asserts that extending marriage to same-sex couples would weaken its ability to address the thick “interplay of fertility, reproductive impulses and gender differences in heterosexual relationships,” but he never explains why or how this would happen.

This is not an argument: this is a panic.

I obviously disagree with Ross Douthat’s conclusion that homosexuals should not be allowed to marry one another. He is responding to Andrew Sullivan on this point, and unfortunately published the first part of his argument while Andrew is incommunicado, on a spousally-imposed break from blogging. Gay marriage really does have some of the same downsides as straight marriage . . . .

But Andrew will certainly be back, and in the interim I want to make a non-obvious point. Twenty-five years ago when I first began working on the rights of same-sex couples, it was virtually impossible to find a heterosexual – and particularly a heterosexual male – who would so much as engage the conversation, much less take the time to write thoughtfully and publicly about it. There were a few (mostly very liberal) politicians who would uncomfortably express support, maybe shake my hand, and then hurry off to attend to some other very important matter. Trying to get conservatives to exchange views was pretty much impossible.

Today, Douthat is only one of the many conservatives who are now quite comfortable giving their time and attention to this issue – one of the thousands of issues available for writers to address – and sharing his thinking.

It’s easy for those of us who have been working on this issue nonstop for decades (i.e., lesbians and gay men, to whom it is of enormous if not transcendent importance) to find obvious flaws in the reasoning of people who are only recently coming to the discussion. Douthat proposes a long-discredited approach to recognizing same-sex couples, which requires not recognizing them as homosexual couples – we would be entitled to relationship rights by categorizing us with elderly sisters and good friends and anyone else who can’t get married but wants some government benefit or another.

Over the years, both Andrew and Jonathan Rauch have explained the serious problems to marriage that this kind of “marriage lite” causes. Dale Carpenter, John Corvino, David Boaz and hundreds of other gay writers, academics and backseat drivers like myself have also had a thought or two to contribute over time. This supposedly non-discriminatory status is not a new idea. I’m sure Douthat does not mean to be condescending to same-sex couples in offering it, but it is a condescending notion all the same.

Still, he is wrestling with the issue of equality openly and in good faith. I would like to see if he believes his position stands up to the existing criticisms of it, and perhaps he will engage that debate. If he has new responses to Rauch and others, that would be welcome.

In the end, though, I think it is Peter Suderman among conservatives who has it right. What underlies opposition to same-sex marriage is an intuition, and ultimately nothing more. It is a powerful intuition, but in America, our laws have to be based on something more tangible. Suderman looked behind the intuition, tested it against the arguments offered against it, and concluded that the arguments for equality were more persuasive than the intimations and fears against it.

I hope that is where Douthat is able to come to some day as well. I think, in the end, it is the right, just and moral conclusion. But wherever Douthat winds up, he deserves our thanks for trying, with an open mind (I believe) to understand what it is we are saying.

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