New York Times columnist Ross Douthat has written a
good and quite temperate
piece about how “gay marriage” threatens the institution of
marriage.
Douthat notes that to secure popular approval for “gay
marriage,” gay journalists such as Jonathan Rauch argue that it
will be a “force for martial conservatism, among gays and straights
alike.” But not all gay activists and gay literati agree.
So-called liberationists, for instance, “hope that gay marriage
will help knock marriage off its cultural pedestal altogether,”
Douthat writes. The “liberationists” want marriage to be one of
many equally viable “lifestyle choices,” none of which enjoy a
privileged social, legal and cultural status.
Douthat points out that the liberationists have lost the
political and public relations battle. Gay activists long ago
realized that saying they want to subvert the institution of
marriage is no way to get straights to endorse same sex
“marriage.”
But what Douthat doesn’t quite say, but clearly spells out
nonetheless, is how, even with the best of intentions, relatively
conservative gay men can still seriously undermine the institution
of marriage. They undermine the institution of marriage when they
seek to redefine the rules and meaning of marriage to better
accommodate promiscuous and polyamorous relationships.
Unfortunately, this is not some far-fetched fear or concern.
Monogamy, after all, has never been a hallmark of gay culture or
gay relationships. Douthat cites “the prolific author, activist and
sex columnist,” Dan Savage.
Savage is strongly pro-marriage, but he thinks the institution
is weighed down by unrealistic cultural expectations about
monogamy. Better, he suggests, to define marriage simply as a pact
of mutual love and care, and leave all the other rules to be
negotiated depending on the couple.
In “The Commitment,” his memoir about wedding his longtime
boyfriend, Savage described the way his own union has successfully
made room for occasional infidelity.
“Far from undermining the stable home we’ve built for our
child,” he writes, “the controlled way in which we manage our
desire for outside sexual contact has made our home more
stable.”
The trouble is that straight culture already experimented with
exactly this kind of model, with disastrous results.
Forty years ago, Savage’s perspective temporarily took
upper-middle-class America by storm. In the mid-1970s, only 51
percent of well-educated Americans agreed that adultery was always
wrong. But far from being strengthened by this outbreak of realism,
their marriages went on to dissolve in record numbers.
“A successful marital culture,” Douthat keenly observes,
“depends not only on a general ideal of love and commitment, but on
specific promises, exclusions and taboos. And the less specific and
more inclusive an institution becomes, the more likely people are
to approach it casually, if they enter it at all.”
