By Walter Russell Mead
In case you hadn’t heard, the Supreme Court this week is entertaining
two gay marriage cases. On Tuesday, the Justices heard oral arguments
about Proposition 8, the California ballot proposition that mandated
that only marriage between a man and a woman is valid or recognized in
California. On Wednesday they hear arguments about the Defense of
Marriage Act (DOMA), a federal law that defines marriage as between one
man and one woman for federal purposes. The decisions on the cases won’t
be handed down until June, but virtually the entire commentariat has
been jumping in. On homosexuality as well as on marriage, everyone is an
expert.
We’re no exceptions here at Via Meadia. WRM’s Twitter
profile states our corporate motto. “Opinions are like love; the more
you give away, the more you have.” And like everybody else in the United
States, we have opinions about gay marriage.
But before getting into the marriage question, there’s one thing that
needs to be said very clearly. You can be for gay marriage or you can
be against it, but the hating and the bullying must end. The climate of
bigotry, brutality and violence that so many gay people have had to live
with in the past was clearly an evil. It’s a terrible thing when
teenagers are driven to suicide by fears that their own families will
reject them over homosexuality. Gay bashing and discrimination have no
place in a civilized polity. The emerging American consensus to put all
this behind us is a step into the light. Those who want to attack gay
marriage and complain about the destruction of traditional morality need
to reflect on how evil the old ways sometimes were and remember that
some traditions need to be smashed.
Now when it comes to gay marriage, our point of departure is that,
whether you like it or not, it’s coming. As a democracy, America is
basically a common sense country. That is, the laws of the land must
reflect the common sense of the people. It’s increasingly clear that in
the past few years the country has been taking a hard look at the
question of gay marriage. And the more people have looked, the more they
have come to the conclusion that it should be allowed. We’ve reached a
tipping point where gay marriage is becoming more and more widely
accepted in society, and therefore sooner or later it will be accepted
in law. There are legitimate arguments to be made about how the question
should be settled. Should the Supreme Court rule that “marriage
equality” is a fundamental right and that state and federal laws against
it have no standing? Should legislators make the call, and if so,
should they do it at the state or the federal level? Our general
preference is for questions like these to be settled by legislators or
by the public directly, and for state rather than federal action. We
wish abortion had been handled this way, and we think in the end this
approach is both less contentious and more likely to produce a result
that reflects the settled will of the people. The tide has set in favor
of gay marriage and as more and more states recognize it, the pressure
will rise on the holdouts—from, among others, businesses who will want
their employees treated consistently from state to state.
One way or another, it’s coming. The question, now, is what
difference it will make. Opponents fear that recognizing gay marriage
will undermine the vanilla kind and weaken the importance of the family
as the basic building block of human society. Perhaps it will, but the
great experiment has begun, and we will just have to wait and see. The
family has been in decline for some time in the United States. The
precipitous decline of traditional family arrangements in lower income
levels tends to perpetuate and intensify social inequality and for that
reason among others, we at Via Meadia view it with concern.
It is, however, hard to draw a causal connection between the growing
public acceptance of homosexuality and the decline of lifetime
heterosexual monogamy as a social and personal ideal. The timelines
don’t match, for one thing: greater acceptance of divorce, remarriage,
heterosexual cohabitation and unmarried parenthood preceded public
acceptance of gay marriage. Overall it seems to us that the weakening of
the family and the acceptance of homosexuality and gay marriage both
reflect the growing individualism of our culture. Americans are becoming
more libertarian and are less patient with social pressure to conform
and with legal restraints on their freedom of action. That is pretty
much what has been happening since the colonial era, and we don’t see it
ending anytime soon. That trend in some ways is positive and
liberating; in others it creates some serious problems. Either way we
can’t see gay marriage as some kind of independent variable driving the
country over the cliff or into utopia.
In any case, a number of people make an interesting counter-argument
to the case that gay marriage undermines the old fashioned kind. They
claim that gay marriage could bolster marriage as a social institution. At The Daily Beast, Megan McArdle argues that the new popularity of gay marriage signals the end of the sexual revolution:
This
is a landmark victory for the forces of staid, bourgeois sexual morality.
Once gays can marry, they’ll be expected to marry….
When
traditional marriage, with its expectations of monogamy and longevity, no
longer means excluding gays, expect it to get more popular among affluent
urbanites.
To
be sure, it’s already popular—affluent urbanites are now quite conservative in
their personal marital habits. They’ve just been reluctant to shame those
who don’t follow suit. But with marriage freed from the culture-war
baggage, we now have an opening for change….
The
neo-Victorian morality will protect who you want to marry—male or female, or
maybe even something in between. But the wider open marriage is, the less
necessary it becomes to defend the right to carefree sex—or children—outside of
marriage.
We don’t take a position on whether gay marriage is a victory for sexual traditionalism or its final defeat. But it’s certainly remarkable to see how bourgeois homosexuality has become. We are old enough to remember when John Rechy’s angry book of gay protest, The Sexual Outlaw, shocked the nation. The Sexual In-Law will probably be less controversial, and Naked Lunch will be less disturbing when repackaged as an elegant brunch. Domesticity with cats in Rittenhouse Square is probably not what either John Rechy or William S. Burroughs had in mind as the homosexual ideal, but it’s exactly what many of today’s gay activists want. Try as we may, it’s hard for Via Meadia to see middle aged couples redecorating townhouses as a threat to the Republic, and we can see McArdle’s point that enlisting a formerly alienated sexual minority on the side of bourgeois domesticity may stabilize rather than undermine the structures of American life.
On the assumption that whatever the Court does this year we are
headed for gay marriage in the not so distant future, there are two
policy issues that need to be addressed. (We see a flourishing market
for gay prenups, gay wedding planners, and gay divorce lawyers, but
that’s not going to raise too many policy issues.) The first is
something we need to do anyway, and progress on this front will help
reconcile opponents of gay marriage to the new status quo.
The family, however we define it, needs support. By support we don’t
primarily mean government checks, though there are certainly
circumstances when those matter. A society that isn’t nurturing its kids
and preparing the next generation to live wisely and well is a failure
no matter what else it is doing. We need to think much harder about what
we can do to make it easier for young people to establish families and
raise kids. The very large majority of children will emerge from
households where the alternatives are either heterosexual marriage or
single parenthood; recognizing homosexual marriage as legal does not end
the need for our society to help the next generation establish the
90-plus percent of marriages that will be the old fashioned kind.
Let’s hope gay couples will join the Marriage Lobby now that they
have a float in the parade. But whether or not that happens, Americans
need to do more to ensure that the next generation gets the start it
needs in life. Fordist society is not very favorable to strong families;
as the country moves toward a new social model, we need to think about
how new work, education and career patterns can strengthen the elemental
bonds between human beings.
The other policy question we face is the question of what to do about
the substantial minority of Americans who continue to think gay
marriage is a bad idea. The Roman Catholic Church and many evangelical
churches, as well as many Jewish, Islamic, Buddhist, and Hindu groups
aren’t going to change their historical doctrines just because the
secular Zeitgeist has changed. The American people is not a flock of
starlings who sweep in unison around the sky, all changing direction at
just the same moment. If the laws recognize gay marriage, many religious
groups will dissent against these laws, refuse to recognize the
religious validity of these marriages, and continue to discourage the
practice of homosexuality by their members.
Some gay rights advocates will believe that society needs to punish
and repress these beliefs. Just as we don’t let segregated schools enjoy
tax benefits and deny racists the “right” to discriminate in hiring and
promoting, shouldn’t we hand out the same treatment to those backward
bigots who refuse to move with the times?
At Via Meadia, we think that’s wrong. The distinction we
would draw is between those who promote violence and bullying, and those
who dissent from the new laws on moral grounds.
Think of divorce. Many churches and religious groups, for example, don’t believe in divorce and they believe that when divorced people remarry they are committing a serious sin. The civil laws recognize these unions as valid marriages but leave each religious group the right to define valid marriages within the group. If you are divorced and want to remarry, without an annulment you can’t get married in the Catholic Church. That’s not a violation of your civil rights, and the Church’s objection to your marriage has nothing to do with the legal position of the couple.
Think of divorce. Many churches and religious groups, for example, don’t believe in divorce and they believe that when divorced people remarry they are committing a serious sin. The civil laws recognize these unions as valid marriages but leave each religious group the right to define valid marriages within the group. If you are divorced and want to remarry, without an annulment you can’t get married in the Catholic Church. That’s not a violation of your civil rights, and the Church’s objection to your marriage has nothing to do with the legal position of the couple.
It gets a little more complicated when it comes to questions of
employment. Can divorced and remarried people teach in a Catholic
school? Can a religious (or secular) organization opposed to
homosexuality refuse to hire a gay man or a lesbian woman? It’s not cut
and dried. One might recognize the right of a bishop to refuse to
appoint a gay priest to lead a congregation, but can the church refuse
to hire a gay man as a bingo caller? Or can a church charity that
receives money from the government refuse to hire or promote a lesbian
social worker?
There will also be arguments over hate speech. It is certainly hate
speech to say “Kill the faggots!” Is it hate speech to say that 2,000
years of Christian teaching rooted in the letters of the Apostle Paul
assert that homosexual behavior is immoral and that no living person has
the authority to overturn this long-established doctrine? To condemn
the call for violence is easy; to condemn the second statement is to
criminalize the practice of a substantial number of important religious
traditions.
There are going to be a lot of issues of this kind, and we predict a
bright future for discrimination and First Amendment attorneys. But it
seems to us overall that the best way to handle these issues is to go
slow and to leave room for reflection and compromise. America,
thankfully, is a pluralistic society in which many people have different
points of view. It’s more important that we find a way to get along
than that we reach a consensus on every divisive social issue. In
recognizing and protecting the rights of sexual minorities, we should
not forget to honor and respect the rights of religious dissenters as
well.
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