First published Summer 2004 in The Public Interest. Adapted
from a talk given at the American Enterprise Institute, April 15,
2004.
The official topic of today's discussion is: "Should
conservatives support same-sex marriage?" The unofficial subtitle,
at least of my talk, is: "Everything I Know About Gay Marriage, I
Learned at the American Enterprise Institute." Though I'm now at
the Brookings Institution, my first think tank appointment was at
AEI. It was here as a guest scholar that I learned so much from so
many of the leading lights of conservatism, and I'd like to think
that many of my arguments for gay marriage are, in fact,
conservative arguments.
Too many people on the Right are panicking instead of thinking
when it comes to same-sex marriage. The president of the United
States, unfortunately, is someone I put in that category. But it
seems to me that if you apply the kinds of principles that I first
learned at AEI, and which folks like AEI's president Christopher
DeMuth have done so much to advance over the last 20 years, I think
you reach two conclusions, or at least I do. The first is that
same-sex marriage is an idea that conservatives ought to support.
The second is that even if you still reject gay marriage in
principle, a national ban on same-sex marriage, which is what the
president and many other conservatives are advocating nowadays, is
a very unconservative approach.
Winning the Trifecta
My book Gay Marriage: Why It Is Good for Gays, Good for
Straights, and Good for America is largely about why same-sex
marriage is what I call the "trifecta of modern American social
policy ": a win, a win, and a win - good for gays, good for
communities around them (that is to say, the straight world), and,
above all, good for the institution of marriage as a whole. If gay
marriage is enacted, gay couples will get the legal protections of
marriage, but that's hardly the most of it. They also get a more
profound love, a destination for love that enriches their lives
whether they ultimately get married or not - the knowledge that
romantic attachment properly points toward something larger than
itself.
They also get the enormous personal benefits that marriage alone
conveys: Married people are healthier, happier, more prosperous,
and more secure. They suffer from less incidence of drug addiction
and criminal behavior. They even live longer. Those are things to
which gay citizens ought to have access, and in all of these ways,
gay Americans will benefit from integration into the culture of
marriage.
The straight world gets another irreplaceable benefit: the
stability that comes from knitting people into families. Indeed,
that is what marriage uniquely does: It creates family. I have a
cousin right now who is 60 years old, married, and suffering from
cancer. Her husband is caring for her throughout the difficult
experience of chemotherapy, not just physically but emotionally.
Without her husband, I doubt she would be alive. There is simply no
substitute for the love and care of a spouse. Even though my
cousin's marriage is nonprocreative, I do not think anyone can
reasonably say that society has no stake in their union. Since her
husband is caring for her, the rest of society does not have
to.
Above all, the institution of marriage itself is a likely
beneficiary of same-sex marriage. This is an opportunity to bolster
the ethic and the culture of marriage at a time when society has
been abandoning these things. The fundamental principle for all
Americans, straight or gay, ought to be that sex, love, and
marriage go together, automatically. If you're a straight family
with kids, and if a gay couple lives next door, you should want to
see them upholding the ideal of marriage. That's good for your
kids. (It's also good for their kids, if they have any.) At a time
when heterosexuals are increasingly treating marriage as purely
optional, this is a rare opportunity to arrest our slide down the
slippery slope away from marriage and to recommit ourselves to
marriage.
The problem today is not gay couples wanting to get married.
That is not the threat to marriage. The threat to marriage is
straight couples not wanting to get married or straight couples not
staying married. Same-sex marriage is potentially a dramatic
statement that marriage as such - not cohabitation, not
partnership, not anything else - is the gold standard and the model
to which all Americans should aspire. Everybody should be expected
to make marriage their aim. That doesn't mean they necessarily have
to marry, but that it is the noble and right thing to do.
Every Individual Counts
Here is an important point conservatives should be able to
understand and, in fact, do understand in many other contexts: We
live in a world of great uncertainty and unintended consequences.
We lack a lot of information. The wisest person or committee in the
world cannot get everything right and will often make unintended
mistakes. How do we make policy in such an uncertain and often
surprising world? Modern conservatism has developed some important
principles for how to do so, and I'll discuss three of them.
The first principle is that individuals count. Conservatives
often remind us never to lose sight of the individual. That doesn't
mean you consider only individual welfare, but you must consider
it, and you must reject a crude utilitarianism that simply sees
individuals as means to an end rather than as ends in themselves.
Conservatives are generally the first to object to those
collectivist policies that relegate individuals to the status of
mere human bricks or timber. If you would not confiscate someone's
income for the common good, for example, why confiscate their
marriage? How many of you would give up your marriage to make
someone else's family stronger? And if you're not married, how many
of you would give up the opportunity to get married to make someone
else's family stronger?
Maggie Gallagher, the president of the Institute for Marriage
and Public Policy, has written as follows: "Will same-sex marriage
strengthen or weaken marriage as a social institution? If the
answer is that it will weaken marriage at all, we should
not do it" (emphasis added). What's missing in this calculus are
the enormous benefits that marriage can bring to 10 or 15 million
homosexual Americans who are now locked out of the culture of
marriage, which makes individuals happier, wealthier, and more
secure in life. Being deprived of marriage, or even the prospect of
marriage, is thus a severe hardship for gays.
Now, it is true that we must balance social costs against
individual benefits. I don't deny that for a moment. That's why we
have, for example, securities laws. People will do things that are
good for themselves but bad for society. What I am arguing is that
Gallagher's way of looking at the problem, which is all too common
among conservatives on this one issue, cannot be the correct (or
truly conservative) approach. It cannot be right to say that all of
the good that is accomplished for 10 to 15 million gay people
doesn't count against any harm incurred by society. That, it seems
to me, is not recognizing the value of gay lives. It's sacrificing
their rights and interests for a collective good.
It's the Outcome, Stupid
The second conservative principle I learned at AEI is respect
for market forces. How many times have I heard conservatives
criticize liberals for mistaking the intention for the deed?
Conservatives rightly remind us that tighter regulation of campaign
finance, gun ownership, or energy prices does not stop social
change. Rather, it distorts the channels through which change runs,
often causing adverse unintended consequences. Just saying that you
want to make something scarcer, for example, doesn't make
regulating or banning it the right answer.
Exactly the same thing applies to same-sex marriage, though here
the forces at issue are social market forces - arrangements that
people are making in their personal lives, in their social lives.
These forces can be managed - and should be managed - by society,
but they cannot simply be stopped. The fact is that same-sex
unions, of one sort or another, are here for good. They're not
simply going to disappear. Societal recognition of some kind will
increasingly follow these committed relationships. Given these new
social facts, American society has a strong interest in recognizing
the nobility of the commitment these couples are making. And
marriage is the best institution we have to accomplish that.
The ban on gay marriage favored by many conservatives won't stop
societal recognition from flowing to these couples eventually. What
it will do is shut marriage out of a new social market. It will
effectively convey that this new market, this new demand for
recognition, can have anything except marriage. And, of course, if
that demand cannot be met by marriage, it will be met by something
else.
Blocking Change Is Dangerous,
Too
This leads me to the third principle I learned at the American
Enterprise Institute, which is the importance of managing risk
rationally. Suppose it is argued, as many on the Left do, that
welfare reform or education and Medicare vouchers are terrible and
dangerous policy ideas - so dangerous in fact that they should
never, ever be tried, even on the smallest scale. The extreme
opposition of liberals to such sensible reforms is akin to the
"precautionary principle" favored by some environmentalists, which
opposes any change that is not proven in advance to be safe. Well,
the precautionary principle turns out not to be conservative at
all. It is, in fact, radical, because it looks only at the risks of
change and not at the risks of blocking change, which are often
greater. We should keep this in mind when thinking about the pros
and cons of same-sex marriage.
There is a significant downside potential of denying same-sex
marriage, something the American conservative movement has not
fully recognized. The first kind of risk - which is actually closer
to a certainty than a mere risk - lies in creating and subsidizing
alternatives to marriage: "civil unions," as they're called, or
various forms of "domestic partnerships." Absent gay marriage,
these various forms of nonmarriages will become legally and
socially sanctioned in the years ahead. They will offer halfway
houses between marriage and nonmarriage, which will, in many cases,
depending on how they're designed, offer the benefits of marriage
without the responsibilities, the rights without the
obligations.
Politics in a democratic society being what it is, many of these
nonmarriage arrangements will be open to heterosexuals over time if
not immediately. In fact, the majority of domestic partnership
programs already in place in this country - under the auspices of
corporations and state and local governments - are already open to
opposite-sex couples. Often, opposite-sex couples are the majority
to take advantage of them. And even if these alternatives to
marriage were not eventually made available to heterosexuals, their
very existence would validate the impression that marriage is just
one relationship life style among many others. Such alternative
arrangements will inevitably erode the special status that marriage
still enjoys.
So perhaps, as is often argued by some conservatives, the only
choice is to reject even such halfway houses to marriage as civil
unions - no gay marriage, no civil unions, no nothing. This would
be even worse, because it would mean that the vessel into which gay
commitment will flow will be cohabitation. Every gay couple will
become a potential advertisement for the possibilities of life
outside of marriage. Over time, judges, legislators and society as
a whole will accommodate gay couples by conferring marriage rights
and social recognition upon cohabitants. And, of course, there is
nothing that can prevent straight people from cohabiting as
well.
A second important downside risk to be considered is that
nondiscrimination, for better or worse, has become a sacred
principle in American public life. It has become part of the
nation's civic religion. By banning gay marriage outright - saying
not here, not anywhere, not ever - marriage as such may come to be
viewed in the public's mind as a discriminatory institution. It
once seemed farfetched to say that men would shun elite clubs that
discriminated against women, and thus a lot of clubs continued to
discriminate against women. Well, of course, nowadays, men-only
clubs are rare. They're increasingly marginal in society, and most
men wouldn't join one. This is the last thing we would want to see
happen to the institution of marriage. Just recently, Benton
County, Oregon, stopped issuing marriage licenses, on the grounds
that it wanted no part of a discriminatory institution. Over time,
as the national consensus moves toward equality for homosexuals,
there is a serious risk that marriage will be stigmatized and
marginalized if it is legally demarcated as a discriminatory
institution.
A Truly Conservative
Solution
So what's a truly conservative approach to the social challenge
of gay marriage? We're fortunate that we live in a country that is
ideally suited to tackle this kind of problem. In the United
States, with its federalist system, marriage traditionally falls
within the boundaries of state law. It seems clear that the
conservative solution to this issue is to try same-sex marriage in
a state or a couple of states that are ready to have it. Let's find
out how it works, and see what happens. It is unlikely that the
world will end. In fact, the experiment may prove successful and
spread for that reason. By taking the federalist approach, the
public will get a real sense of what it is doing - without,
importantly, imposing a single policy on the whole country.
Same-sex marriage should be viewed as an opportunity to shore up
the institution of marriage. Flatly banning it cannot possibly be
the conservative answer. Thus it is regrettable that, on the issue
of gay marriage, some of my conservative friends sound very much
like the National Education Association on the subject of school
vouchers - unwilling to concede any need for any change, averting
their eyes from the plight of the unserved and the misserved,
asserting that reform can entail only hazards and no benefits,
insisting that even one experiment anywhere ever is one too many,
and unwilling to offer alternatives other than wishing the whole
issue would go away. My challenge to conservatives today is to stop
making gay marriage the exception to their conservative
principles.