IGF CultureWatch

First published on May 4, 2004, in the Rutland Herald.

The challenge for supporters of same-sex marriage is much greater than obtaining access to civil marriage for gay Americans. Supporters must help all Americans distinguish between marriage and a marriage ceremony. And the way to do this is to ensure that the civil certification of marriage looks radically different than the ceremonial celebration of marriage.

I recall a former ministerial colleague's pithy words about the role a pastor plays in the life of a church member. The minister is there when a person is hatched, matched and dispatched. People turn to religion, he was telling me, in order to mark births, marriages and deaths. The state, as it happens, is also present at each of those moments. But what the state does is quite different from what the church does.

Consider what happens when a person is hatched. There was a time when churches provided the sole record of a child's birth. In places where those records are incomplete or lost, we are left to conjecture when people from past centuries were born. If people didn't go to church at all, their births could go unrecorded. The state took over this bookkeeping function from the church in order to keep track of people (likely for tax purposes) and has never looked back.

But the church has not ceased to celebrate births just because the state issues birth certificates. Rather, there is the infant dedication or baptism (or, in the case of Jewish male infants, the bris), where the newborn is brought into the faith community. There is no competition between church and state, because we accept the bookkeeping function of the state as independent from the ceremonial life of the faithful.

The same distinction happens when a person is dispatched. The coroner expedites the paperwork for a death certificate, and the funeral director secures a burial license. Once again, these are bookkeeping tasks that the state has assumed from the church, whose bookkeeping was spotty. But the state's role does not supersede the work of the fait+hful. There is no state requirement that a family sit shiva for the departed; death certificates do not require funeral or memorial services in order to make them valid. The faith community marks death with its own distinct set of rituals. And most of us would revolt if the state dictated what our rituals should look like.

Here is where marriage runs afoul of both church and state. In Vermont, the law requires that a marriage be solemnized in order to validate a marriage. While there is no specification of what constitutes an acceptable solemnization, the language is clear: The state requires a marriage ceremony in order for a marriage to have legal force.

There are many good reasons to have a marriage ceremony. It allows the couple to share their joy and love with us. It allows us to show our support for the couple. It even provides an opportunity, if we take our responsibility seriously, to express our concerns and tell the couple we think they're making a terrible mistake ("speak now or forever hold your peace"). It turns a marriage into a communal event.

This would all be well and good if the law held the community accountable for a marriage. But the law does not. When a marriage ends, the community usually does not gather before the magistrate (unless it's a celebrity divorce). This is because marriage gives two individuals rights and responsibilities and obligations.

This would also be well and good if the marriage ceremony had no religious connotations. But with all the talk about the sanctity of marriage and its status as a sacred institution, it is obvious that a great number of Americans fail to distinguish between the marriage ceremony and marriage.

Thus, there ought to be a sharper line between the two. If the state wishes to retain the requirement of solemnization, the state, not the church, should do the solemnizing. Couples who want to marry should be required to retain the services of a public official, who will certify the marriage. If there is concern that marriages may be contracted in haste, the state can institute a waiting period or require proof of pre-marital counseling. But the larger point is: Legally speaking, the couple should be married by the state, separate from whatever marriage ceremony the couple may also choose to have, either before or after the legal certification of marriage by public officials.

As we debate same-sex marriage in America, the issue should not be whether gay men and lesbians will redefine marriage as we know it. The issue should be whether we are willing to redefine the certification of marriage. The separation of the marriage certificate from the marriage ceremony parallels the separation of the birth certificate from infant baptism and the separation of the death certificate from the funeral service. This is the direction we should take when two individuals are matched, and the proponents of same-sex marriage need to lead the way.

Will gay marriage lead to polygamy? "If we take the step of allowing gay marriages," we are told, "we will slide down a slippery slope to polygamy." For the most part, gay-marriage advocates have been flustered trying to respond to this argument. Often, we respond with something dismissive like, "Don't be ridiculous!" Slippery-slope arguments must be scrutinized with care because the public often believes them and because they divert attention from the core issue: whether gay marriage itself would be a good or bad thing. While the polygamy argument has some superficial appeal, it ultimately doesn't work.

Slippery-slope arguments take the following form: "Proposal X contains within it a principle. That principle not only supports Proposal X but would also support Proposal Y. An honest person supporting Proposal X must therefore also support Proposal Y. While Proposal X may or may not be bad in itself, Proposal Y would surely be very bad. So to avoid adopting Proposal Y, we must not adopt Proposal X."

Substitute "gay marriage" for Proposal X and "polygamous marriage" for Proposal Y and you have a slippery-slope argument against gay marriage.

There are three possible stock responses to every slippery-slope argument. First, one might argue that the supposedly horrible destination(s) down at the bottom of the slope are not so bad, so we need not fear the slide. Second, one could argue that the slope may slide both ways, so that if we do not take the step proposed we may be in danger of sliding down the other side of the policy hill, which would be bad. Third, one could argue that we will not slide down the slippery slope if we take the step proposed because there is a principled stopping point preventing us from reaching the bottom.

In the gay marriage debate, the first stock response would involve arguing that polygamy is unobjectionable. That's an unattractive reply for reasons I'll explain below in connection with response three. The second stock response would involve claiming that if we repress gay marriage, there is nothing to stop us from prohibiting other marriages, like those involving people of different races or infertile people. This second response is the kind of argument lawyers love to make, but is not likely to impress many people as a reason to support same-sex marriage.

It's the third response - that there is a principled stopping point preventing the slide toward polygamy - that best refutes the slippery-slope argument. The argument for gay marriage is indeed an argument for a liberalization of marriage rules. But it is not a call to open marriage to anyone and everyone, any more than the fight against anti-miscegenation laws was a call to open marriage to anyone and everyone.

So, formulating the principled stopping-point, we should ask why the recognition of a new form of monogamous marriage would lead to the revival of polygamous marriage, which has been rejected in most societies that once practiced it? What is "the principle" supporting gay marriage that will lead us to accept multi-partner marriage?

One possible principle uniting the two is that gay marriage, like polygamous marriage, extends marriage beyond partners who may procreate as partners. But that doesn't work because procreation is already not a requirement of marriage. Sterile opposite-sex couples have already taken that step down the slope for us.

A second possible principle uniting gay marriage and polygamous marriage is that both exalt adult love and needs as the basis for marriage. Yet this step down the slope has also already been taken by straight couples. Marriage for the past century or so in the West has become companionate, based on love and commitment. Among straight (and gay) couples, children are a common but not necessary element of the arrangement. So even if gay marriage were justified solely by the love same-sex partners have for one another, recognizing such relationships would be more analogous to taking a step to one side on a slope already partially descended, not an additional step down the slope.

Still, how do we avoid polygamy? Here is where many advocates of gay marriage run into trouble. If we claim that gay couples must be allowed to marry simply because they love each other, there is indeed no principled reason to reject multi-partner marriages. Multiple partners in a relationship are capable of loving each other.

But satisfying individual needs is not "the principle" supporting gay marriage. Instead, gay-marriage advocates should argue that any proposal for the expansion of marriage must be good both (1) for the individuals involved and (2) for the society in which they live. Gay marriage meets both of these criteria. The case for polygamous marriage is distinguishable (and weaker) on both counts, especially the second.

On the first issue - the effect of recognition on the individuals involved - the deprivation to gays of the gay marriage ban is greater than the deprivation to polygamists of the polygamy ban. A polygamist may still marry someone if we ban polygamy; he simply may not marry many someones. The deprivation to the polygamist is large, especially if polygamy involves the exercise of his religious faith, but not total. The gay person, however, has no realistic choice of a mate available under a gay-marriage ban. The deprivation is total.

Further, there is no "polygamous orientation" causing a person to need the close companionship of multiple partners (though some people may prefer it). There is, however, a homosexual orientation, causing a person to need the close companionship of a same-sex partner. The ban on polygamous marriage is the denial of a preference, perhaps a strong one; the ban on gay marriage is the denial of personhood itself.

On the second issue - the effect of recognition on society - the differences between gay marriage and polygamous marriage are more pronounced. There is ample evidence that people who live in stable, committed couples are healthier, happier, and wealthier than those who are single. Gay marriage is a good idea because it will benefit not only the gay couple but their families, friends, neighbors, and taxpayers whose burdens to care for the gay partners singly would be greater.

While multi-partner marriages might benefit the partners involved, the much greater potential for jealousy and rivalry among the partners make for a volatile arrangement, reducing the expected benefits to them and to everyone else. In a multi-partner marriage, it may be unclear who has primary caretaking responsibility if a partner becomes sick or injured; there is no such uncertainty in a two-person marriage. While we have some evidence that children do well when raised by same-sex couples, we have no evidence they do well when raised in communal living arrangements. Since multi-partner marriages will almost always take the form of one man having many wives, they present special risks of exploitation and subordination of women, which is inconsistent with our society's commitment to sex equality.

Perhaps none of these considerations is a decisive argument against polygamous marriages. But at the very least they suggest that gay marriage and polygamous marriage present very different issues. Each should be evaluated on its own merits, not treated as if one is a necessary extension of the other.

First published on April 28, 2004, in the Chicago Free Press.

Two questions often asked about the gay community are: How many gays are there, and Where are they? The answer to the first question remains as controverted as ever, but for the first time we are beginning to obtain some approximation of the answer to the second.

In a fascinating new book, The Gay & Lesbian Atlas, Gary Gates and Jason Ost of Washington, D.C.'s Urban Institute used 2000 census data from the 600,000 same-sex couples who designated themselves "unmarried partners" to plot the location patterns of those gay couples across the U.S.

The handsomely produced, 230-page Atlas contains about 60 pages of methodology, analysis and description. But the heart of the book is the colored maps of each state and 25 major cities showing where gay and lesbian couples live, displayed by county as well as census tract (an area with 2000 people in it). The maps also show the relative concentration of gay couples - low (forest green), moderate (yellow), high (tan) and very high (burnt umber).

The best place to start is the national map on p.61 showing gay couple densities displayed by county. The map shows that gay and lesbian couples have higher concentrations in New England and downstate New York, along the California coast and in southern Florida. There is also a scattering through the southwest and southeast U.S.

Not surprisingly California, our most populous state, has the largest number of gay and lesbian couples, followed by New York, Texas, Florida, Illinois, and Pennsylvania. But it turns out that Vermont has the highest concentration (as a percentage of total households) of gay couples - and considerably more lesbian than gay male couples.

Also, interestingly, all the counties that have the greatest concentration of gay men contain major cities, while more than half of the counties with the highest concentration levels of lesbian couples contain smaller cities and towns, particularly college towns, and rural areas.

But counties hardly tell the whole story. For instance, Cook County, Ill. (Chicago) shows up as "high" concentration on the national map. But the map of Chicago itself (p.178), broken down by individual census tracts, shows that same-sex couples are clustered mainly on the north side toward lakefront.

More precisely, the separate Chicago maps for gays and lesbians show that gay male couples are more concentrated in the densely populated lakefront tracts while lesbian couples are a little more likely to live away from the lake and are more widely dispersed throughout the city - and the suburbs.

The same pattern holds for most other large cities: Gay men are densely clustered in a few areas, often near the center of the city, while lesbians are somewhat clustered and a little more widely dispersed. In a few cities the gay and lesbian clustering areas are markedly divergent.

The Atlas also tell us for each state and the 25 cities what percentage of same-sex households have children, what percentage are in various age brackets, and what percentage have a black, white, or Hispanic householder (the person who completed the census form).

Two questions arise. How can data about only a portion of gays tell us much about where all gays live? And what is that information good for anyway?

Even if only a small portion of same-sex couples identified themselves (and I think the Gates and Ost significantly overestimate the percentage who did), their location and density patterns fit roughly with our observations about where gays live for areas we know well.

As additional support, a Florida epidemiologist who compared the gay male couples data with location patterns of gay and bisexual men with HIV/AIDS, which would include single men as well as men in couples, found a high correlation between the two.

Even without specific numbers, gay residential patterns are useful for people who want to reach the gay community with public service information - e.g., AIDS or breast cancer education - or who want to provide social services to gays. Firms marketing products to gays can concentrate their efforts on areas where gays and/or lesbians actually live.

Gay concentration data should be particularly interesting to gays themselves when they are thinking about where they want to move to look for a job or retire and where in a particular city they want to live in order to find gay friends and social acceptance.

And finally, concentration data and even minimum numbers can let unwary politicians know they have gays and lesbians in their districts. Told that (at least) 55 gay couples lived in his town, one state senator blurted out, "Surely you jest. Wow, I have never met any of these people." (Whose fault is it if he has never met any gay couples who are constituents? I'm just asking, that's all.)

But most of all, the Atlas is just plain fun. Most of us like to read about ourselves and the Atlas offers a lot of interesting information in a visually appealing form.