In the current argument over the question of gay marriage, both
sides focus on their respective moral and even constitutional
claims. But when the battle is pitched on those rather elevated
and abstract grounds, the pro-heterosexual factions are at a big
disadvantage, drowned out by the gay cohorts, who claim, not
without justice, that their constitutional rights, for equal
protection under the law, are being violated by any ban on
same-sex marriage. But more than the civil rights of a deviant
minority may be at stake: not only the matter of gay marriage,
but the larger matter of marriage itself, and its place in the
human scheme of things.
Heterosexual marriage is, after all, one of the most
universal and enduring human institutions; it would not have
spread so far nor endured so long had it not made an important
contribution to societal and species survival. Thus far, these
contributions and the fate of the marital institution itself
under a gay regime have hardly been addressed. Before we warp
marriage further, it is high time that they were.
Marriage serves many well-documented purposes. A
less-studied function, but one that bears directly on the
question of gay marriage, is this: heterosexual marriage helps to
keep the fragile but necessary peace between men and women. There
is no denying that a major fault line in human society has to do
with the chronic and universal tensions between the males and
females of our species. This breach has been documented,
deplored, and even celebrated over the ages from the Athenian
Lysistrata to Thurber’s “The War Between Men and Women.” It is
the standard stuff of domestic comic strips, satires, and the
explosive theme of contra-patriarchal feminist rhetoric and
activism.
The inter-gender breach is ubiquitous across human
societies as well as across human history. After all, boys and
girls mature towards adulthood apart from each other, usually
under guidance from peers and seniors of their own sex. They
develop according to different guidelines, towards quite
different outcomes, and towards the pursuit of quite different
goals.
Given their druthers, men and women tend to look for
sociability and even emotional intimacy within their own sex,
rather than the other. This bias is most evident in
pre-adolescents, before they are hit by the flood tide of sexual
desire in the pubertal years. Before the heterosexual imperatives
mash them together, boys and girls tend to be sublimated
homo-erotics: they generally keep to their own gender, and they
may develop crushes on same-sex play-mates, while openly
belittling the opposite team.
This gap between men and women is also under-written by
striking differences in the reproductive furnishings of the male
and female body, in the hormonal endowments that accompany these
structural differences and in the appetites, emotions and
preferences that flow from these disparate chemistries. As a very
rough generalization we can say that the female body and
associated nature is designed to give and sustain life, while the
male body and nature are formed to take life from prey, from
enemy and even from sexual rivals. Women are from Venus, men are
indeed from Mars.
But inter-sexual antipathy fades out, at least temporarily,
during young adulthood, when men and women, now eagerly seeking
mates and erotic partners, discover that the distinctive,
defining features of the opposite sex, the same characteristics
that once even repelled them, are in reality potent stimulants to
passion: “Vive La Difference !!” What once repulsed them, now,
under the sway of surgent Eros, joins the sexes.
But once mates are chosen, and after the phasing out of the
honeymoon period, sexual activity tends to become routinized, and
may lose some of its power to overcome intersexual tensions and
breaches. Men talk sports with their buddies; women talk about
kids with theirs. Some young couples might even separate at that
point, and look for new partners to restimulate their sexual
appetites. But usually, when the somatically inspired sexual bond
weakens, the socially sponsored marital bond takes over to hold
the heterosexual couple together. Marriage is after all a solemn
contract, sworn to publicly before the Gods, before
representatives of society, and before the extended families of
the bride and groom. Confirmed with exchanges of property as well
as sacred vows, the marriage contact is hard to break.
Most importantly, marriage is the usual setting for
child-bearing and rearing, and the Parental Imperative brings
another set of powerful bonding motives into play for both
fathers and mothers, as well as powerful reasons, independent of
sexual passion, for preserving their marriage. The parenting
couple’s original sexual bond is reinforced by their shared love
for and concern for the children who, in a most concrete way,
replicate and personify, in their bodies, the parent’s physical
union. Thus Parenthood, which mingles the maternal and paternal
genetic inheritance in the child’s very flesh, transmutes the
divisive aspects of gender, and once again bridging over the gulf
between men and women, turns disparities into unities.
In short, heterosexual marriage acts to bring and hold the
sexes together, despite the centrifugal forces that would (and
often do) pull them apart — the same forces that would split
society into chronically hostile, gendered camps.
But despite any superficial resemblances, in ritual and
contractual language, to heterosexual unions, homosexual
marriages have the opposite effect: they function to confirm,
deepen and even celebrate the gender split, and import it from
childhood into adulthood. Gay marriage perpetuates into later
life the homoeroticism of the pre-pubertal boy and girl: men
marry men; women marry women, and — except at Lesbi-Gay street
demonstrations — rarely if ever the twain shall meet.
No life-way that splits men from women, and celebrates
their separation, should be granted equal dignity with
heterosexual marriage, which brings and binds them
together.
So Let homosexuals have their special unions, and the civil
rights that properly go with them; but we should not grant those
unions the title and sacramental status of Marriage. The
institution of marriage is already in enough trouble as it is,
and — as indicated by falling birth-rates, single parenthood,
and welfare dependency — it is weakest in those enlightened
societies which also accredit gay marriage. We should not — in
order to please a minority — mix a social pathogen and its
antagonist into the same medicine, and continue to call it a
cure. Americans are voting, across our states, and with good
reason, to keep the two forms of association separate.
