At 5:01 p.m local time, California will issue its first legally
binding marriage licenses to same-sex couples. County clerks will
stay open extra hours to accommodate the state supreme court’s
decision
to redefine marriage along these lines. The media will be filled
with stories of wedding bells and pictures of happy newlyweds.
If recent experience is any guide, the number of gay couples
marching to the altar will taper off in a few months even if voters
uphold the California supremes’ decision in November. In
Massachusetts, 1,635 such couples obtained marriage licenses in May
2004, the first month of judicially imposed same-sex nuptials. That
figure, only 300 less than the number of traditional marriages in
the commonwealth during the same time period, tumbled to just 148
in the first two months of 2005. Nearly 60 percent of Bay State
same-sex marriages occurred in the first six months.
In Ontario, a Canadian province of nearly 12.7 million people
with Massachusetts-style marriage laws, zero marriage licenses were issued to same-sex
couples in the second half of 2007.
However few in number, same-sex marriage advocates will make
these couples their poster children in the fall campaign against
the California Marriage Protection Act. Supporters of the
marriage amendment might be tempted to do so as well, showing
pictures of bearded men kissing or campy commitment ceremonies in
an attempt to use (declining) public revulsion against
homosexuality to their benefit.
THIS TACTIC, if tried, will almost certainly backfire. Sympathy for
same-sex couples and a reluctance to take benefits away from people
who already enjoy them seem to outweigh any backlash against
judicial activism or disapproval of homosexuality. A Boston
Globe poll found that just 40 percent of Massachusetts
residents favored same-sex matrimony in the spring of 2004, shortly
before the supreme judicial court’s gay marriage ruling took
effect. By the following March, that number had jumped 16 points to
56 percent.
After a few months of ceremony in San Francisco’s gay
neighborhoods, marital traditionalists may not be able to count on
the full 61.4 percent of Californians who voted against same-sex
marriage in 2000.
Instead they will have to do the necessary work of proactively
defending traditional marriage: explaining why it is necessary to
have an institution specifically intended for the union of men and
women. They must argue that the heterosexual nature of marriage is
not arbitrary and not rooted in discrimination against homosexuals
or anyone else, any more than limiting marriage to couples is
rooted in prejudice against people from societies that practice
polygamy.
Social conservatives and their allies must make this case while
their opponents ask if
the sky has fallen since same-sex couples began having their
domestic partnerships called marriages. And they must argue
forcefully that even without falling skies, redefining marriage has
consequences. “Extending marriage to same-sex couples would leave
no other institution to promote the ideal that every parent
promises to care for his child,” as Margaret Liu McConnell put it in a recent insightful essay.
How can that be when we are so frequently reminded that many
same-sex couples care for children? Because it still takes one man
and one woman to create a child. Same-sex marriage will either
expand multiple parenting arrangements, leading eventually to a
modernized version of polygamy, or allow at least one natural
parent to give up their child — through the “miracles” of modern
reproductive technology, often by design.
EVEN AS WE recognize that life is complicated and children will be
raised in many environments, ideally children should be cared for
by both biological parents and abandoned by neither.
Hypersensitive state bureaucrats, dutifully deleting from
government documents references to “husband,” “wife,” “father,” and
“mother” and replacing them with gender-neutral terminology, will
only add to the damage that same-sex marriage does to this
ideal.
California has already attempted to offer tangible benefits to
same-sex couples and meet their needs. Reducing marriage to
indeterminate couplehood without biological parenthood, for the
benefit of a small number of people, would not fulfill the wider
community’s needs. That’s why the judgment of California’s voters
eight years ago — for tolerance but against redefining marriage —
was fundamentally correct.
Such an argument may not be able to compete with the initial
euphoric rush on local clerks’ offices, especially in the heat of a
culturally polarizing election year. But those who would reverse
the California supreme court’s activist same-sex marriage decision
have no choice but to make it.
