Same-Sex Marriage
I’ve been out of pocket. Last night I saw the entire run of Yacht Rock, including the new 11th episode, which covered the secret origin of the song “Footloose.” As a result, I missed Andrew’s post on same-sex marriage.
First, I’ll note that Noah is right to note that I favor civil marriage rights for same-sex couples. Noah poses a question at the end of his very insightful post, and I’ll try to tackle it by addressing Andrew’s thoughts.
The second assumption is that same-sex marriage is, in Reihan’s words, a “socially liberal measure”, and therefore legitimately opposed by social conservatives.
I actually don’t think this “therefore” is right, but we’ll bracket that for now.
But why is it “socially liberal” to encourage mutual responsibility, caring, fidelity, economic prudence, and an institution that fosters self-esteem, family integration and social responsibility? In a society where gay people exist, why is it a socially conservative position to ensure that they are discouraged from mutual caring and responsibility and encouraged – by stigma and marginalization and legal discrimination – to engage in all those activities that the depressed, alienated and despised often do: drug use, alcoholism, sexual irresponsibility, instability, and social isolation?
Why is it not socially liberal
to encourage mutual responsibility, caring, fidelity, economic prudence, and an institution that fosters self-esteem, family integration and social responsibility?
Correct me if I’m wrong, but I tend to think social liberals try to encourage these and other values. I mean, of course there is an aspect of liberalism, a neutralist political liberalism, that in theory doesn’t aim to encourage any civic virtues at all. But in practice my sense is that most social liberals are Millians, who do favor certain social outcomes. The notion that social conservatives have a monopoly on endorsing mutual responsibility and caring strikes me as giving them rather more credit than they deserve. I don’t think that “social conservatism” equals good and that “social liberalism” equals bad, which is one of the reasons I find Andrew’s characterization of my views surprising and disappointing. Social liberals, lest we forget, made the case against segregation, caste, and enslavement. That’s a pretty good record.
I tend not to think of social conservatism as an abstraction, a set of ideas that yields determinate conclusions on social questions, but rather as a mostly reactive or situational ideology. Perhaps social conservatives should, in some sense, endorse the radical remaking of the human genome so that a new race of neohumans will be more socially responsible. Yet I nevertheless think that Leon Kass would object, right or wrong. My guess is that Andrew would as well.
Of course, social conservatism is more than just “irritable mental gestures.” But social conservatism will always be at a disadvantage in our “culture of freedom,” as Peter Berkowitz argued in a brilliant essay in 2005.
And yet opponents of same-sex marriage must reckon with the fact that over the past 40 years the very meaning of marriage has undergone a substantial change. The sexual and cultural revolutions of the 1960s have pushed the bearing and rearing of children from the core of marriage’s social meaning. Ask twentysomethings and thirtysomethings what they hope for from marriage. They will, of course, tell you that they want love and that they definitely want companionship — indeed, that they expect their spouse to be their best friend. And obviously they want to share the pleasures of sex. Then ask them about children. Many will pause and say well, yes, certainly, they are thinking about children, and eventually, somewhere down the line, they expect to have one or two. But children, once at the center of marriage, have now become negotiable, and what used to be negotiable — love, companionship, sex — has moved to the center. Under these circumstances, legal recognition of same-sex marriage will not represent a change in the meaning of a venerable social institution through law, but rather an adaptation of law to a profound change in social meaning.
So perhaps social conservatives ought to embrace this new social meaning, and perhaps there should be no push and pull over same-sex marriage as all Americans of all generations and moral and religious sensibilities immediately recognize its undeniable virtues. But I tend to think, as a matter of intellectual history, that it falls on social liberals to advance the case of adapting law to profound changes in social meaning, particularly because conservatives, by definition, tend to resist profound changes in social meaning.
The trouble is, social conservatives have a decent case to make that many of these profound changes, which go far beyond the fight for gay and lesbian rights as Andrew explained in his brilliant “We’re All Sodomites Now,” which is amazingly and unconscionably not available on the web, have had decidedly mixed results, particularly for members of the so-called lower-middle.
My own view is that this is unresponsive to the important questions when it comes to same-sex marriage: sure, the birth control pill has led to some severe social dislocation. But does that mean we should stigmatize same-sex couples at this late date?
Unlike Andrew, I tend to think the legalization of same-sex marriage will have a pretty limited impact on the culture. The transformative impact he describes has more to do with child-rearing, which a large minority of same-sex couples has enthusiastically embraced. Relatedly, I think the fact that child-rearing is no longer at the center of marriage among non-gays is the main reason marriage has become a radically different and in some respects very vulnerable institution. To use Berkowitz’s framework, love, companionship, and sex are and always will be “negotiable.” So I tend to think both sides of the debate advance arguments that are pretty unconvincing, but that’s neither here nor there.
Andrew asks,
In a society where gay people exist, why is it a socially conservative position to ensure that they are discouraged from mutual caring and responsibility and encouraged – by stigma and marginalization and legal discrimination – to engage in all those activities that the depressed, alienated and despised often do: drug use, alcoholism, sexual irresponsibility, instability, and social isolation?
Social conservatives also tend to oppose the legalization of pornography, despite the strong evidence that easy access to pornography reduces the incidence of sexual assault. Why is that? There are many reasons, which tend to fall outside of my broadly utilitarian framework. I understand and sympathize with some of them, including the idea that the defense of our moral ecology demands that the state take up certain totemic stands against, for example, the degradation of women. Much the same can be said of the death penalty or abortion or euthanasia. Like most Americans, Andrew finds this kind of thinking extremely distasteful. Though I don’t always agree with it, I think this idea of the importance of taboos has a valuable place in the intellectual conversation.
I’m thus left with a position that is easy to caricature and difficult to characterize. As a “brie-eating Harvard-educated God-denier,” I think of myself both as an enthusiastic participant in American life and also as an observer, at a slight tangent. In a quirk of biography, I have close friends who are ardent liberals and ardent conservatives, which could be why I’m un-eager to demonize or even dismiss arguments others consider beyond the pale. Because I don’t think Americans are all that different from, and certainly not superior to, Kazakhs or Poles or Senegalese or Frenchmen, I don’t share Andrew’s high expectations. Narrowness and chauvinism and some level of bigotry is to be expected. Given how dramatically and how fast this country has changed in its mores and demographic composition, a subject Andrew addressed in “Goodbye to All That,” I tend to think, “Wow, Americans have handled this remarkably well!” rather than “Goddamnit, prejudice still exists in the hearts of men! Something must be done!” I mean, of course something must be done. One thing that must be done is the steady, decentralized establishment of equal marriage rights. But as 2007 draws to a close, and as my birthday rapidly approaches, I suppose I’m pretty optimistic about our capacity for decency and mutual understanding.
There is also the little matter of whether social conservatives need to accept all of the changes of the 60’s even with regard to heterosexuality. We should never accept the one way ratchet on social mores. Because we believe that a continuation of the leftist view of marriage (and indeed toward sex and homosexuality) is part and parcel of a weltanschuang (sp) that means death demographically, culturally and spiritually we are loathe to concede the law adopt any portion of that view of marriage. The worst part of judicially imposed same-sex marriage, or sodomy right or the rest is that those who want change should have to win it legislatively where the worst of the Jacobin assault can at least be meliorated even if they prevail in the main. Why should the status quo be changed by a minority on the Courts? I am not a great constitutional fan of Justice Holmes but he offered to allow the people to go to hell in a hand basket if they so chose. His heirs insist on placing them in the basket themselves.
Further, the same “social progressives” who told us abortion on demand would make “every child a wanted child;” that no-fault divorce would make marriage stronger; that birth control would not weaken the institution of marriage, and that early sex education would eliminate teen pregnancy, and that constitutional rulings on criminal sodomy laws would not lead to same-sex marriage, now tell us that men and women are not different so same-sex marriage is the same as marriage and so any denial of it is invidious discrimination. Not exactly the folks whose predictive (or observational) powers I trust, even men whose good faith I do not doubt like Jonathan Rauch.
Every socially liberal change to bedrock institutions inflicted by the Left in the last 40 years has damaged those institutions and drained social capital for almost no gain and positive harm to those least able to absorb it. Why anyone calls this nonsense “progressive” any more is beyond me. Maybe it’ll be explained in Jonah Goldberg’s new book.
— jjv · Dec 28, 11:15 PM · #
Very interesting post. I have to get some sleep, mull it over and decide what I think about it.
(This is a compliment, by the way.)
— PEG · Dec 29, 01:15 AM · #
jjv says,
“Every socially liberal change to bedrock institutions inflicted by the Left in the last 40 years has damaged those institutions and drained social capital for almost no gain and positive harm to those least able to absorb it.”
So true. Just take for example the elimination of Jim Crow.[/sarcasm]
— keatssycamore · Dec 29, 01:18 AM · #
keatssycamore, 40 years ago was December 1967, by which time Jim Crow was, if not eliminated, at least broken and ramshackle. Nearly all the work of discrediting racial segregation was done in the two decades before then. Can you name something a Left movement, calling itself that, has given the world since Martin Luther King was killed, that has done more good than harm?
— Michael Brazier · Dec 29, 06:47 AM · #
<i>Can you name something a Left movement, calling itself that, has given the world since Martin Luther King was killed, that has done more good than harm?</i>
To pick one small example, it is now possible for someone to be openly living as a gay man in a small rural town in the conservative heart of America and not constantly fear for their life.
— Freddie · Dec 29, 01:05 PM · #
Freddie: the same tolerance for … unusual sexual behaviors which removed the risk of physical injury gay men once ran in rural America, were also (as I understand) the main contributing factor in the spread of AIDS among gay men. I’m quite sure that AIDS has killed more gay men than redneck bigots ever did.
You have to consider all the consequences of Leftist reforms; you don’t get to count the good ones and ignore the bad …
— Michael Brazier · Dec 29, 01:47 PM · #
This is implicit in what Reihan is saying here, and closer to explicit in the Berkowitz essay he cites, but anyway: for me the chief problem with Andrew’s arguments is that they assume an understanding of what marriage is and then attempt to extend that understanding to gays and lesbians. But if there is anything that is abundantly clear about America today, it is that there is simply no shared understanding of what marriage is or what it is for. This is why Andrew can’t do more than gesture vaguely towards abstractions like “mutual caring” and “responsibility,” without ever defining those terms, explaining what interest the state has in supporting them, or considering what other values might be compromised by the state support of those values. (And I’m not referring just to this one post by Andrew — I’ve read a lot of what he has to say on this subject, though perhaps no living being has read everything Andrew has to say on this subject.) I just don’t think there can be a productive public-sphere conversation about gay marriage until we have a productive public-sphere conversation about marriage in general and what has happened to it in the past fifty or so years.
— Alan Jacobs · Dec 29, 04:22 PM · #
Michael, you think that kind of utilitarian logic will lead you to a conservative paradise? Leaving aside how many more gays would be alive today if murdering them was less unacceptable.
jenny
— jenny · Dec 29, 07:06 PM · #
Ok Reihan, so your point is — correct me if I’m mistaken — basically to acknowledge (unlike many proponents of same-sex marriage (hereinafter SSM)) that SSM is a redefining of marriage, but to say “Hey, people have already privately redefined marriage since the Sixties, so we might as well go with the flow!”
It’s an excellent point but I think it’s basically a value judgement (which is not to say it’s wrong). It depends on what you think is the merit of an institutional view of marriage (as opposed to a contractual view, which SSM would consecrate). You acknowledge in your post the already disastrous social effects that the disintegration of the institutional aspects of marriage has had.
I would wager that we are looking at a slippery slope and that the slope needs to stop somewhere. There have been many steps along the road of the weakening of the marital bonds. Since marriage-lite civil unions have been introduced in France (this is the lawyer-apprentice speaking), the laws on actual marriage have only moved closer to those on civil unions (by the way, a vindication of conservatives’ point that SSM would weaken traditional marriage). Divorce is made easier and more painless — as the grim joke goes, it’ll soon be easier to end a marriage than a labor contract.
If you think, as I do and as has been widely assumed since Aristotle, that the strength of the social fabric depends on the strength of that elementary institution, the family, then you must also think that the law must promote an institutional view of marriage. None of this is very original, but I guess that’s why I’m a conservative.
Of course some will say, sure, let’s have an institutional view of marriage, but redefine the institution around mutual consent. Ok then. And we can have polyamorous marriages that you can enter and leave with only a notarized letter. By the time we get to these I’m sure there’ll be the technology for a clonotron in every household, that way everyone can have his own pet baby. But I think that would basically disintegrate most citizens’ social moorings and pave the way for a nice dystopia of unattached, uncommittable, evanescent (post)humans.
Now, there are no simple answers. There are going to be divorces, there are going to be gays, there are going to be surrogate mothers (and soon, clones, even if you have to fly to Singapore to buy them). 19th century marriage, for better or for worse (almost certainly for the better), is dead. Does that mean we have to switch to a whole new (and potentially disastrous) paradigm? I think we ought to be very careful.
— PEG · Dec 29, 07:54 PM · #
“Social conservatives also tend to oppose the legalization of pornography, despite the strong evidence that easy access to pornography reduces the incidence of sexual assault.”
Is the evidence really that strong?
http://isteve.blogspot.com/2006/10/economists-gone-wild.html
— Thursday · Dec 29, 09:46 PM · #
Two responses to some comments on my post. First, I do not think Truman Capote or Tennessee Williams feared for their lives in small towns in the South. I also don’t think they felt free to go up to some rural heterosexual and tell him their feelings for him. That does not bother me. Second, I chose 40 years precisely because of Jim Crow, but I will point out that Jim Crow was opposed by whole swaths of people who were not liberal. If not for Southern filibusters federal lynching laws and civil rights bills would have passed as early as the 1930-40’s. Also, the supporters of Jim Crow such as William Fulbright, Senator Robert Byrd, Sam Ervin and the first Senator Gore were and are all considered liberals and are liberal heroes. Compare their treatment by the Left to that of anti-seg Senator Prescot Bush for example.
I also want to thank the commentors here of all stripes who are a lot more polite than on other sites.
— jjv · Dec 30, 01:37 AM · #
I wrote a long response and it got eaten… so it prompts the first TAS emoticon: :(
— Freddie · Dec 30, 06:04 PM · #
Reihan,
Thanks for the great post. I agree with your point that “the legalization of same-sex marriage will have a pretty limited impact on the culture.” It won’t have much impact at all. It will, however bring about what religious/social conservatives refer to as the “normalization of homosexuality”, and that’s not a bad thing. As you and Andrew both point out, there are many normative same-sex couples who live a perfectly happy conservative married lifestyle. There is no rational reason for government to intentionally harm these couples.
There are, however, irrational reasons. What same-sex marriage will do is to discredit the argument – based on a smattering of Scripture (Genesis and Romans) – that it is the duty of government to regulate human sexuality. That’s the slippery slope. If human sexuality can’t be legislated, then all manner of higher-level behaviors will be left to reason, analysis and individual determinations of morality and conscience. In a society bent on war, domination and exclusion, reason conscience can be dangerous.
— Jonathan · Dec 30, 11:48 PM · #