THE WORTH OF GAY RELATIONSHIPS: Dale responds

Maggie and Dan, I care about marriage as an institution, including its underlying purposes and its future. This is why I have written publicly against those on the gay left who would like to abolish it. We need to debate this issue carefully, point-by-point, not avoid it with a back-of-the-hand to lawyers or "legal casuistry." Part of debating, as you well know, is trying to understand whether your opponent is defending a coherent idea and in a consistent way. That means if someone tells you, "marriage is for procreation and is not reducible to mere love," you have every right to ask whether, in practice and normatively, that is so. And if there are literally millions of non-procreative marriages already out there, you need a convincing answer for why this small additional increment of non-procreative unions will bring a plague of locusts upon the land.

Here's a hypothesis, which I cannot prove. I suspect the opposition to gay marriages has little actually to do with protecting heterosexual marriages. The threatened harms from this tiny number of gay marriages are just too implausible. This is why, I think, gay-marriage opponent John Derbyshire recently wrote in NR that it's best not to "think too much" about marriage because the arguments for keeping gays out aren't very persuasive to others. Very revealing.

Instead, many who oppose gay marriage seem to do so mainly because they think marriage is a beautiful and noble and socially productive thing, which it is, but they see nothing beautiful or noble or socially productive about an intimate relationship between two people of the same sex. Is it your view, Maggie, that there's nothing very noble or socially productive in gay relationships? Did it ever occur to you, Dan, that gay couples might have something valuable to contribute to a positive "vision of social goods"?

Every day in this country gay people are raising the unwanted and discarded fruits of heterosexual ecology. They sacrifice for each other and their communities. They seek another person to share an intimate life with, and are disappointed. They love deeply and suffer loss. When my partner was in the hospital, near death, he was so stricken by high fever that I put my body around his to keep him warm so he could sleep. When his mother was brain-dead and they were about to cut off her life support, I pulled him from her bedside and held him and felt a pain so deep inside me it has never left. When I was out of job, he supported me. When I felt unworthy or dumb, he made me feel like a god in his arms. If some advocates of gay marriage have little understanding or appreciation for the richness and depth of marriage, as Dan suggests, it's also true that some opponents of gay marriage have little understanding or appreciation for the richness and depth of gay life.

Instead, we get offered a cartoonish view of gay couples as hyper-promiscuous, disco-era selfish, incapable of real commitment, unfit to raise children. Many gay-marriage opponents seem to think of gays as beings on a separate continent, screwing themselves into extinction. This defamatory view would be humorous if its consequences were not so harsh. And gays get all this criticism simply for wanting to make a civilized public commitment to each other. I wonder what they would be saying about gays if we weren't pressing for the right to marry.


posted by maggie at 1:38 PM VOTE

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