aTypical Joe: a gay New Yorker living in the rural South

Monday, May 30, 2005

Gay marriage strengthens all marriage

Jonathan Rauch in The New Republic (subscription only, see extended entry for extended excerpts):

Advocates who say that gay marriage is just a matter of civil rights are wrong. It certainly is a civil rights issue, just as it is a moral issue; but it is not only a civil rights or moral issue. It is also a family policy issue--the most important family policy issue now facing the country. Gay marriage is not a civil right worth having if it will wreck straight marriage or leave millions of children bereft. But it won’t. In fact, gay marriage’s denial, not its recognition, poses the greater risk to American kids.

This is the argument that I want gay advocacy groups to make, and I think all Americans should understand:

Getting people to marry is hard. Just having sex is more fun. Just shacking up, as it was once called, is easier. Marriage is under threat, all right. The threat, however, comes not from gay couples who want to get married but from straight couples who either do not get married or do not stay married. A third of American children are born to unmarried parents. The divorce rate has doubled since 1960, and the marriage rate fell 40 percent from 1970 to 2000. Cohabitation rose 72 percent in the 1990s. Twenty-eight percent of young couples aged 18-29 are unmarried. “The future of marriage may depend,” as an analysis of that last figure by the Gallup Organization remarks, “on whether young people simply delay marriage or sidestep it altogether.” Society generally and children especially have an interest in encouraging these couples to get and stay married.

One way to do that is to signal, legally and culturally, that marriage is not just one of many interchangeable “lifestyles,” but the gold standard for committed relationships. For generations, both law and culture signaled that marriage is the ultimate commitment, uniquely binding and uniquely honored; that everyone could and should aspire to marry; and that marriage is especially important for couples with children. Same-sex marriage may be the first opportunity the country has had in decades to climb back up the slippery slope and say, quite dramatically, that marriage--not co-habitation, not partnership, not civil union, but marriage--is society’s first choice. An American gay couple in their eighties got married in Canada in 2003 after 58 years together. Asked why they bothered, one of them replied, “The maximum is getting married.” That is a good pro-marriage signal to send.

Emphasis mine. Rauch goes on to explain how banning gay marriage will weaken the institution of marriage.

The converse is also true: the fewer the marriages, the weaker the institution. If marriage is not universally available, it cannot be universally expected. Which brings us to the potential negative externalities of not having same-sex marriage. If, say, the Constitution were amended to forbid same-sex marriage, three things would happen--none of them good for marriage.

First: Both law and custom would busy themselves setting up new nonmarital structures to accommodate same-sex couples. The innovations would range from full-blown Vermont-style civil unions (marriage in all but name) to halfway-house programs like California’s domestic partner program to patchwork corporate “partner benefits.” Many existing domestic partner programs, corporate and governmental, are already open to heterosexual couples. Insofar as that pattern continues, we will have set up a whole new structure of non-marriage for heterosexuals.

Even if partner programs could be restricted to gay couples, they would still signal culturally that marriage is just one of many choices on a menu of lifestyle options. Children would grow up learning that some people have marriages, some civil unions, some partnerships, and so on. It is hard to see how that could do marriage any good.

Blocking both same-sex marriage and alternatives like civil unions--as some states are now doing--is even worse, because it will ensure the legal and cultural recognition of co-habitation as the equivalent of marriage. Courts, and eventually politicians, will look at same-sex couples who have been together for ten or 20 years and say, “This couple looks and acts married. They talk the talk and walk the walk. We don’t let them marry, but we also surely can’t pretend they’re just unrelated individuals in the eyes of the law.” On the cultural side, every happily unmarried gay couple will be a walking billboard for the joys of co-habitation. And, even in principle, there is no way to exclude heterosexual couples from co-habitation. Over time, the lines between co-habitation and partnership and marriage will become impossible to defend--or even to discern.

Second: By definition, banning same-sex marriage would ensure that all same-sex couples with children raise their kids out of wedlock. Obviously, that is no way to reconnect marriage with child-rearing. Just the opposite: Every parenting gay couple will be an advertisement for the expendability of marriage. After all, how important can marriage be for children if some children’s parents are forbidden to marry?

Third, and not least: To most Americans over age 65 or so, same-sex marriage is a contradiction or an abomination; but among Americans under 30, many or most (depending on which poll you consult) see the ban on same-sex marriage as discrimination. For members of this younger generation, nondiscrimination is the polestar in the firmament of values. They do not want to be associated with what they perceive as anti-gay discrimination any more than their parents do with sexism or racism. To brand marriage as the discriminatory lifestyle choice risks condemning it to cultural obsolescence. That may seem far-fetched now, but, only a few decades ago, it seemed far-fetched to say that men would shun clubs that exclude women. Indeed, San Francisco’s decision last year to grant same-sex marriage licenses was an anti-discrimination protest. Ditto for the granting of licenses in New Paltz, New York. Benton County, Oregon, stopped issuing marriage licenses altogether in March 2004, saying it did not want to be associated with a discriminatory institution.

Here, then, is the problem with the Gold Seal for Heterosexuals argument: not that it is discriminatory, but that it rests on the wrong kind of discrimination. Marriage’s health depends far less on society’s preference for heterosexuality over homosexuality than on society’s preference for marriage over non-marriage, and we must now choose between those two preferences. Because marriage is a unique commitment, society has a powerful stake in preferring it to alternative family arrangements; but discriminating in favor of marriage will not continue to seem fair if millions of American couples are forbidden to marry. And so marital discrimination in favor of heterosexual couples will erode or even end society’s ability to discriminate in favor of marriage itself. Textbooks will talk about “unions,” and anniversaries will become celebrations of “partnerships.” Same-sex marriage opponents who worry about losing our unique word for “male-female union” ought to worry at least as much about losing our unique word for “family.”