I’m a conservative concerning the issue of gay marriage. I think homosexuals should get married and adopt girls from China just like the rest of us. Opponents of gay marriage, on the other hand, like to lump homosexual matrimony in with other allegedly crazy liberal schemes like universal health insurance and balanced budgets, but I think they misunderstand the issue. Gay marriage is a conservative idea, not a liberal one.
You see, marriage is an inherently conservative institution. We “tie the knot” in marriage. This idiom reveals that the essence of marriage is not conceiving children. Rather, it is an institution that promotes social control over unbridled sexuality. If we didn’t become tied to one person our desires for sexual gratification would run more rampant, denying us the opportunity to develop the virtues that come from a life-long committed relationship.
I always smile condescendingly when people say they can be committed without marriage. It’s like single parenthood. Sure it is possible, but I wouldn’t recommend it.
Marriage helps you develop virtues that are good for yourself and society (like patience, magnanimity, and continence) by conferring benefits on the married and costs on the divorced. Divorce means more than you have to move your stuff off the sidewalk. In your wedding, you promise the state, probably God, parents, friends, and each other that you will stay married “till death do you part”. Breaking up means you must break that solemn promise, and you have to pay a lawyer big-time in order to do it. You also will lose tax breaks, possibly your health insurance, custody of half your CD collection, and you may have to pay alimony. Now, I’d like to think I would stay faithful to my wife even if we weren’t married, but let’s be honest, it must help.
So the question is: why do we refuse the conservative institution of marriage to gays? Even if gay marriage opponents’ overblown stereotypes of the “homosexual lifestyle” as promiscuous were correct, isn’t the correct antidote to promiscuity the promotion of monogamy in marriage? Indeed, folks who claim gay marriage promotes the “homosexual lifestyle” seem to ignore that we are talking about extending the rights and responsibilities of family, (hospital visitation rights and responsibility for spousal debts, for instance) and not government-run drag-queen parades.
It seems to me much of the controversy rests in the definition of marriage. Marriage to many people is a sacrament, ordained by God exclusively to bless the union of men and women for the production of children. This is undoubtedly the case for some, if we define marriage as a religious institution.
But no one is talking about requiring churches to marry same-sex couples. What we are talking about is allowing homosexuals to make civil contracts binding themselves to other homosexuals, with all the rights and responsibilities accorded to married heterosexuals. Thus, arguments against gay marriage rest on a religious understanding of marriage that undermines the very idea of legal civil marriage.
But our pluralist society absolutely requires marriage to be a secular, legal institution. All marriages are really civil unions, with some being separately recognized as a marriage by a church. We do it this way because it makes no more sense to have government sanction a religious institution of marriage than for government to sanction baptism or salvation. If we allowed faith communities to define marriage, then we’d have to fight about which religions and denominations get to conduct marriages. And what would we do about people who don’t want to get married in a church?
To solve these problems, we’ve created the institution of civil marriage, by which the government certifies who is married, leaving it to faith communities to make their own rules about marriage that operate separately. We set it up this way, again, because marriage promotes the development of virtues in individuals and families, and so we don’t have to fight about which marriages conducted by which churches are real. Thank goodness we don’t have to fight about who is really married the way we have to fight about who is really going to Heaven.
But we are left to fight about gay marriage. But if Baptists and Catholics can accept each other’s marriages and the couple wed by a justice-of-the-peace on a roller coaster, why can’t we accept gay marriage?
Some think a compromise would be to say that marriage is between a man and a woman and gay marriage is something else, say, a “civil union”. Perhaps this is a step in the right direction, but the benefits of marriage accrue not only because of its legal definition but also to its traditional meanings: the mythos and romance surrounding marriage. I’m not sure a new relationship ghetto, the civil union, can do the same to create the virtues as marriage.
I’m certainly not willing to refer to myself as “civil-unionized” just because some think my marriage doesn’t meet their standard. The extension of civil marriage to homosexuals is the only just and rational option.