Homosexuals seem to want to have it both ways — if you’ll
pardon the expression — about the McGreevey affair. In the
Washington Post, José Antonio Vargas writes about married men who are closeted gays
having affairs, usually with other married men, as a recognized
feature of the homosexual subculture. “Whether they call themselves
gay or bisexual,” Vargas writes, “McGreeveys are everywhere: in Red
America and Blue America, in suburbs and cities, in corporate
offices and city halls (and the governor’s mansion).…
Regardless of their race, these men are living double lives,
talking in doublespeak. ‘I’m gay,’ one says, ‘but I like to call
myself bi.’ ‘I’m married,’ another says, ‘and I only play around
with other married guys.’”
In such cases, marriage is apparently regarded as a mere
impediment to self-realization. This is how McGreevey himself
regarded it when he spoke of the need “to look deeply into the
mirror of one’s soul and decide one’s unique truth in the world.”
In the face of such “truth” — a word which originally, as in its
cognate troth, meant faithfulness — his marriage vows
were a mere triviality, an obstacle in the way of being himself.
Yet at the same time Jonathan Rauch, one of the most prominent
public advocates of gay marriage and someone with whom I agree on
almost every subject but this one, argues in the New York Times that this same
roadblock on the way to happiness and self-fulfillment is really
the means to the same, and that “alienation from marriage
twists and damages gay souls. Gay men like McGreevey would simply,
if marriage to another man were available to them, choose that and
with it the high road to happiness instead of the sham marriage
which they actually did choose and that now stands in the way of
that happiness.
But hang on. What is it that those twisted and damaged gay souls
are alienated from? Marriage is the vows that Governor
McGreevey willingly took and then, like many others both gay and
straight, chose to defy for the sake of his unique and individual
“truth.” If he found that outside of his marriage, why can’t other
gay men? And why is it a condition of their not being twisted and
damaged that they should be free to burden themselves with
precisely the obstacle to self-fulfillment that McGreevey had to
free himself from? Is it one kind of marriage or two that the gay
marriage advocates are asking for? If self-realization trumps the
formal vows of Marriage I, why are we to suppose that the vows of
Marriage II will suddenly become a fulfillment in themselves? Do
gay people not grow and change and find their true selves in new
places irrespective of whether they first contracted to a member of
their own sex or the opposite?
The point is that heterosexual marriage is already imperiled by
exactly this doubleness: people want to go on promising to love and
honor until death do them part while at the same time reserving to
themselves the right to disregard all such promises when it becomes
a question of self-realization. Why do gay people think that this
chance of being forsworn is some kind of great privilege? “Many gay
husbands begin by denying and end by deceiving,” says Mr. Rauch,
but the same is true of straight husbands: they deny that they seek
an exemption from the plain meaning of the words they willingly
swear to and then they go ahead and seek it anyway. What is that if
not deception? If McGreevey had been ditching his wife for another
woman would he have had the face to justify it on the grounds of
his own “unique truth”? And would anyone else have seen his doing
so as an argument for “the culture of marriage and all the
blessings it brings” — to use Mr. Rauch’s words —rather than yet
another indication of what a hollow mockery marriage has
become?
“The greatest promise of same-sex marriage is not the tangible
improvement it may bring to today’s committed gay couples, but its
potential to reinforce the message that marriage is the gold
standard for human relationships,” Mr. Rauch concludes. Yet so long
as all of us, gay and straight alike, seek the privilege claimed by
Governor McGreevey to subordinate all other relationships to the
right to seek a merely personal and individual happiness, marriage
can be no such thing. It is merely a sentimental vestige, an excuse
for dressing up and having a party while hiding from ourselves
until we need it the truth (to coin an expression) that it
means nothing at all — or nothing beyond the willingness to submit
oneself to a certain amount of legal and financial wrangling in
order to get out of it. The Governor’s is obviously not the only
way in which people can deceive themselves.
