By order of its state Supreme Court, California began legally
marrying same-sex couples this week. The first to be wed in San
Francisco were Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon, pioneering gay-rights
activists who have been a couple for more than 50 years.
More ceremonies will follow, at least until November, when gay
marriage will go before California's voters. They should choose to
keep it. To understand why, imagine your life without marriage.
Meaning, not merely your life if you didn't happen to get married.
What I am asking you to imagine is life without even the
possibility of marriage.
Re-enter your childhood, but imagine your first crush, first
kiss, first date and first sexual encounter, all bereft of any hope
of marriage as a destination for your feelings. Re-enter your first
serious relationship, but think about it knowing that marrying the
person is out of the question.
Imagine that in the law's eyes you and your soul mate will never
be more than acquaintances. And now add even more strangeness.
Imagine coming of age into a whole community, a whole culture,
without marriage and the bonds of mutuality and kinship that go
with it.
What is this weird world like? It has more sex and less
commitment than a world with marriage. It is a world of fragile
families living on the shadowy outskirts of the law; a world marked
by heightened fear of loneliness or abandonment in crisis or old
age; a world in some respects not even civilized, because marriage
is the foundation of civilization.
This was the world I grew up in. The AIDS quilt is its
monument.
Few heterosexuals can imagine living in such an upside-down
world, where love separates you from marriage instead of connecting
you with it. Many don't bother to try. Instead, they say same-sex
couples can get the equivalent of a marriage by going to a lawyer
and drawing up paperwork - as if heterosexual couples would settle
for anything of the sort.
Even a moment's reflection shows the fatuousness of "Let them
eat contracts." No private transaction excuses you from testifying
in court against your partner, or entitles you to Social Security
survivor benefits, or authorizes joint tax filing, or secures U.S.
residency for your partner if he or she is a foreigner. I could go
on and on.
Marriage, remember, is not just a contract between two people.
It is a contract that two people make, as a couple, with their
community - which is why there is always a witness. Two people
can't go into a room by themselves and come out legally married.
The partners agree to take care of each other so the community
doesn't have to. In exchange, the community deems them a family,
binding them to each other and to society with a host of legal and
social ties.
This is a fantastically fruitful bargain. Marriage makes you, on
average, healthier, happier and wealthier. If you are a couple
raising kids, marrying is likely to make them healthier, happier
and wealthier, too. Marriage is our first and best line of defense
against financial, medical and emotional meltdown. It provides
domesticity and a safe harbor for sex. It stabilizes communities by
formalizing responsibilities and creating kin networks. And its
absence can be calamitous, whether in inner cities or gay
ghettos.
In 2008, denying gay Americans the opportunity to marry is not
only inhumane, it is unsustainable. History has turned a corner:
Gay couples - including gay parents - live openly and for the most
part comfortably in mainstream life. This will not change,
ever.
Because parents want happy children, communities want
responsible neighbors, employers want productive workers, and
governments want smaller welfare caseloads, society has a powerful
interest in recognizing and supporting same-sex couples. It will
either fold them into marriage or create alternatives to marriage,
such as publicly recognized and subsidized cohabitation.
Conservatives often say same-sex marriage should be prohibited
because it does not exemplify the ideal form of family. They should
consider how much less ideal an example gay couples will set by
building families and raising children out of wedlock.
Nowadays, even opponents of same-sex marriage generally concede
it would be good for gay people. What they worry about are the
possible secondary effects it could have as it ramifies through law
and society. What if gay marriage becomes a vehicle for polygamists
who want to marry multiple partners, egalitarians who want to
radically rewrite family law, or secularists who want to suppress
religious objections to homosexuality?
Space doesn't permit me to treat those and other objections in
detail, beyond noting that same-sex marriage no more leads
logically to polygamy than giving women one vote leads to giving
men two; that gay marriage requires only few and modest changes to
existing family law; and that the Constitution provides robust
protections for religious freedom.
I'll also note, in passing, that these arguments conscript
homosexuals into marriagelessness in order to stop heterosexuals
from making bad decisions, a deal to which we gay folks say,
"Thanks, but no thanks." We wonder how many heterosexuals would
give up their own marriage, or for that matter their own divorce,
to discourage other people from making poor policy choices. Any
volunteers?
Honest advocacy requires acknowledging that same-sex marriage is
a significant social change and, as such, is not risk-free. I
believe the risks are modest, manageable, and likely to be
outweighed by the benefits. Still, it's wise to guard against
unintended consequences by trying gay marriage in one or two states
and seeing what happens, which is exactly what the country is
doing.
By the same token, however, honest opposition requires
acknowledging that there are risks and unforeseen consequences on
both sides of the equation. Some of the unforeseen consequences of
allowing same-sex marriage will be good, not bad. And barring gay
marriage is risky in its own right.
America needs more marriages, not fewer, and the best way to
encourage marriage is to encourage marriage, which is what society
does by bringing gay couples inside the tent. A good way to
discourage marriage, on the other hand, is to tarnish it as
discriminatory in the minds of millions of young Americans.
Conservatives who object to redefining marriage risk redefining it
themselves, as a civil-rights violation.
There are two ways to see the legal marriage of Del Martin and
Phyllis Lyon. One is as the start of something radical: an
experiment that jeopardizes millennia of accumulated social
patrimony. The other is as the end of something radical:
an experiment in which gay people were told that they could have
all the sex and love they could find, but they could not even think
about marriage. If I take the second view, it is on the
conservative - in fact, traditional - grounds that gay souls and
straight society are healthiest when sex, love and marriage all
walk in step.