Obama finally comes out as pro gay marriage
05-14-2012, 06:15 PM
The problem with the gay marriage debate, and the reason both sides seem to talk past each other, is that marriage exists on two levels: the legal level and the social/anthropological level.
The legal level constitutes the rights and benefits granted to a couple through marriage, such as tax status, visitation rights, health care benefits, etc. As other commentators have noted, it is unfair to deny these rights to gay couples. The problem with this line of argument, though, is that these rights and benefits do not constitute the essence of marriage. To use philosophical terminology, they are "accidents" - they are not what make a marriage a marriage. The rights and benefits associated with marriage vary from state to state, and from country to country, and are almost an afterthought in anyone's definition of marriage. Moreover, all these benefits are available through civil unions. (And contra the "separate but equal" analogy, in many jurisdictions civil unions are available to heterosexuals as well).
More fundamentally, marriage is an organic social institution that is independent of whatever legal recognition it receives. If the government ceased to recognize marriage at all, and granted no special benefits to those who called themselves married, would people still get married? Most certainly, yes. But in this case, marriage depends on a collective social recognition of what marriage is, which is not so simple as just signing a piece of paper, or having a court uphold your rights. It depends on a minimum consensus from the community as a whole as to what marriage is about.
The problem with the tactics currently pursued by gay marriage activists is that they aim to gain access to the social recognition of marriage by way of the legal arguments. It's a bait and switch move. They argue that they should have access to the same rights as everybody else, but when they were offered civil unions as a solution, they rejected that. Why? Because what they really covet is the social cachet that marriage enjoys. However, this is not the government's to give, and legalizing gay marriage does not alter people's intuitive sense of what marriage is about. As I mentioned, marriage is an organic institution, and carries with it the accumulated associations, intuitions, and myths of thousands of years of human civilization, and these are not altered so easily as the tax forms.
So what is this intuitive understanding of marriage, and why are homosexuals excluded from it?
First off, let's take a step back and simply absorb how uncanny it is that marriage is a nearly universal institution. Every society has come up with its own form of marriage, and they have done so more or less independently of one another. How is such a thing possible? How do so many different societies converge at the same idea? If we compare marriage with other rituals that are similarly universal (for example, most cultures have some sort of rite by which newborn babies are initiated into the community), it becomes clear that these rituals are cued to the biological rhythms of human life, and the major life changes. In this way, marriage is one of the natural superstitions of the human race; it gives meaning to and sanctifies a biological development, in the same way that a puberty initiation rite gives tangible expression to the onset of sexual maturity.
So what is the biological development that marriage ritualizes? It is the transformation of the unrealized potential of virgin sexuality into the fertile sexuality of adulthood. Or to put it more prosaically, the central event of marriage is the girl's deflowering. As we all know, the most valuable thing for a civilization is a woman's womb (men are expendable, women are perishable, and all that), and so naturally the moment when that womb begins to take up its reproductive role is of the utmost sanctity.
In order to underscore the value of this womb, and ensure that a woman's fertility is not squandered incubating the random spawn of numerous wastrels and lowlifes (and to restrain woman's natural hypergamy), traditional societies took every measure to make the line between married and unmarried life as black and white as possible. Hence, no sex before marriage for women; for men, only children they had within marriage would be legitimate. The only sexual relationship that was legitimate in the eyes of society was within the bounds of wedlock; it was the only sexual relationship that could be avowed in public and recognized by the community. All other sexual relationships were confined to the margins of society, and were either shamed (fornication, adultery) or tolerated only in secret (prostitution, homosexuality). Why? Because they are either detrimental to marriage's implicit goal -- i.e., ensuring that wombs are used in the best possible way -- or they are irrelevant to that aim (as is homosexuality).
This is the origin of the sense that marriage conveys "legitimacy" to a sexual relationship. And it is precisely this legitimacy which homosexuals are trying to usurp through their attempts to legalize gay marriage (and not content themselves with civil unions). The problem is, however, that gay relationships by their very nature are irrelevant to this system of legitimacy. Gay men, insofar as they are men, are expendable to society: they don't have wombs that are going to waste. And since they are not impregnating women, there is no womb to tie them down to as provider husbands. Whether or not they are in committed relationships with each other is irrelevant to society. With lesbians, again, commitment is irrelevant to society when barren sexual acts are involved. In a lesbian relationship, no womb is going to be impregnated by the wrong man, there is little need to hold female hypergamy in check, and there is no male provider to tie down. The whole concept of "legitimacy" in marriage depends on something being at stake for society, but in gay marriage that is not the case. Moreover, legitimacy depends on the existence of its opposite, illegitimacy, and the stigma associated with that. Under heterosexual marriage, sexual relationships that take place outside of marriage are considered illegitimate. Are homosexuals ready to adopt that system as well? I don't think so.
Of course, some will say that this traditional form of marriage that I have described is on the way out, and that fewer and fewer people are adhering to the behavioral code implicit in this model. I agree. But people do continue to get married, and aspire to marriage, and when they do, where do they derive their idea of marriage? From this whole traditional mythology. The bride still wears virginal white (even if she's not a virgin), people prefer to get married in a church rather than city hall (even if they're not religious), there is still the expectation of "till death do us part," and so on. Traditional marriage still enjoys this cachet because marriage as it existed is one of our natural superstitions, it is the optimal and inevitable sexual arrangement given certain unchangeable features of our biology. Technological and social developments have upset this arrangement, for sure, but we still have the need to sanctify and mythologize our biological existence. It is this need to which marriage responds, and it is this profoundly rooted imagination that cannot so easily be overturned by court rulings.