What's really at stake in the SSM fight

[avram]

You’ve almost certainly heard about the hullabulloo over same-sex marriage going on in this country. If you’ve got me on your LJ friends list, I’m guessing you probably support SSM. But maybe some of you don’t. Maybe some of you think this has to do with dictionary words, or legal technicalities. Maybe you think this can be solved by separating the religious and legal concepts of marriage (perhaps with a magic ring, or a scroll of wishes). Maybe you think this just affects the small percentage of Americans who happen to be gay or bisexual.

The top hit on Memeorandum today was an OpinionJournal piece by Donald Sensing, It’s got the usual sorts of intellectual dishonesty you expect from the Wall Street Journal’s editorial pages. Check out this bait-and-switch in the opening paragraphs:

Marriage is primarily a social institution, not a religious one. That is, marriage is a universal phenomenon of human cultures in all times and places, regardless of the religion of the people concerned, and has taken the same basic form in all those cultures. Marriage existed long before Abraham, Jesus or any other religious figure. The institution of marriage is literally prehistoric.

The three monotheistic faiths (Judaism, Christianity and Islam) actually recognize this explicitly in their holy writings. The book of Genesis ascribes the foundation of marriage in the very acts of God himself in the creation of the world: "It is not good that man should be alone; I will make him a helper comparable to him. . . . A man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and they shall become one flesh" (Genesis 2:18, 24).

The three great religions base their definition of marriage on these verses and others that echo them. In Christian theological terms, the definition of marriage is part of the natural law of the creation; therefore, the definition may not be changed by human will except in peril to the health of human community.

He starts out by using “marriage” as a universal term, covering all of the ways societies have for formalizing family-building, but then shifts over into the particular form of marriage he imagines the three Abrahamic religions share (as if he were unaware of Islamic and ancient Jewish polygamy), and goes on further to claim that the definition of marriage has remained the same under Christianity since its inception.

In actual fact, various cultures have marriage practices that would horrify members of other cultures. Most modern westerners would be disturbed not only by such practices as Hmong “catch-hand” marriages (in which the girl is captured by the groom and his friends, sometimes without her consent) or the pre-modern English-common-law conception of marriage, under which the husband and wife were legally a single person, with the wife therefore having no legal rights apart from her husband. (Note that this English legal notion, called coverture, is based on the very theological premise that Sensing invokes by quoting Genesis, though I suspect that Sensing would not support coverture himself.)

Another sure sign of a cultural conservative in trouble — invoking science:

Psychobiologists argue that marriage evolved as a way of mediating the conflicting reproductive interests of men and women. It was the means by which a woman could guarantee to a specific man that the children she bore were his. In biological terms, men can sire hundreds of children in their lives, but this biological ability is limited by the fact that no one woman can keep pace.

By “psychobiologists” I’m pretty sure Sensing means sociobiologists, which is pretty funny, since cultural conservatives used to hate sociobiology.

Anyway, here’s the valuable part of the essay, where Sensing draws aside the curtains and shows us what the right really wants when it talks about marriage:

Today, though, sexual intercourse is delinked from procreation. Since the invention of the Pill some 40 years ago, human beings have for the first time been able to control reproduction with a very high degree of assurance. That led to what our grandparents would have called rampant promiscuity. The causal relationships between sex, pregnancy and marriage were severed in a fundamental way. The impulse toward premarital chastity for women was always the fear of bearing a child alone. The Pill removed this fear. Along with it went the need of men to commit themselves exclusively to one woman in order to enjoy sexual relations at all. Over the past four decades, women have trained men that marriage is no longer necessary for sex. But women have also sadly discovered that they can't reliably gain men's sexual and emotional commitment to them by giving them sex before marriage. Nationwide, the marriage rate has plunged 43% since 1960. Instead of getting married, men and women are just living together, cohabitation having increased tenfold in the same period. According to a University of Chicago study, cohabitation has become the norm. More than half the men and women who do get married have already lived together. The widespread social acceptance of these changes is impelling the move toward homosexual marriage. Men and women living together and having sexual relations "without benefit of clergy," as the old phrasing goes, became not merely an accepted lifestyle, but the dominant lifestyle in the under-30 demographic within the past few years. Because they are able to control their reproductive abilities--that is, have sex without sex's results--the arguments against homosexual consanguinity began to wilt. When society decided--and we have decided, this fight is over--that society would no longer decide the legitimacy of sexual relations between particular men and women, weddings became basically symbolic rather than substantive, and have come for most couples the shortcut way to make the legal compact regarding property rights, inheritance and certain other regulatory benefits. But what weddings do not do any longer is give to a man and a woman society's permission to have sex and procreate.

I emphasized that last sentence, because it’s really what the whole thing boils down to. The right wants to return to the days when your neighbors had a say in your sex life. The days when landlords and respectable hotels wouldn’t rent to unmarried, unrelated opposite-sex couples. The days when a young woman could get carried away one night and ruin her reputation (young men, of course, could do what they wished, as long as it was with women whose reputations the men’s peers didn’t care about). The days when you couldn’t be left alone with a friend of the opposite sex, because everyone would assume you were screwing. The days when marriage was for life, no matter how often he beat you.

But don’t believe me. Take a look at these comments in a weblog that linked (approvingly) to Sensing’s piece:

“If you can figure out a way to make cohabitation outside of marriage and unwed motherhood go back to the way it was before the invention of the pill, do it. Blaming the homos for it isn't going to change anything.”

“In the civil marriage fight, as in all other political struggles victory begets victory and defeat begets defeat. The existence of all these other challenges is probably the best argument there is for starting with the small challenge of gay marriage and moving to the larger challenges of the disasters created by easy divorce and cohabitation.”

And you’ve probably already seen Orson Scott Card’s recent essay opposing same-sex marriage, but have you seen his earlier piece (this is the third time this year I’m linking to it) “The Hypocrites of Homosexuality”, from 1990? He wrote:

Laws against homosexual behavior should remain on the books, not to be indiscriminately enforced against anyone who happens to be caught violating them, but to be used when necessary to send a clear message that those who flagrantly violate society's regulation of sexual behavior cannot be permitted to remain as acceptable, equal citizens within that society.

The goal of the polity is not to put homosexuals in jail. The goal is to discourage people from engaging in homosexual practices in the first place, and, when they nevertheless proceed in their homosexual behavior, to encourage them to do so discreetly, so as not to shake the confidence of the community in the polity's ability to provide rules for safe, stable, dependable marriage and family relationships.

And the rest of us, too. Joanna Russ once remarked to Patrick Nielsen Hayden, “Homophobia isn’t there to keep homosexuals in line. Homophobia is there to keep everyone else in line.”