I DO?: Kay S. Hymowitz reviews Jonathan Rauch's Gay Marriage

...Rauch opens by asking, "What is marriage for?" Perhaps surprisingly, he rejects the view, widely held by other supporters of same-sex unions, that marriage can be defined simply as a committed love relationship, since "married couples are married whether they love each other or not." Nor, he argues, are children the sine qua non, since society still recognizes an infertile couple as married. Marriage, he concludes, has two central social purposes: "settling the young, particularly young men, and providing reliable caregivers." ...

...In this connection he recounts a number of anecdotes testifying to the wrongs suffered by gays in devoted relationships: women who cannot get family leave to help their incapacitated partners, dying men forbidden to see their partners in their final hours. These stories do more than shout injustice, in Rauch's view; they demonstrate how the present system discourages the caregiving impulses that society ought to shore up, while subtly reinforcing the "moral laziness" of Americans when it comes to thinking about the lives of their fellow citizens.

Rauch disputes most of the scenarios that social conservatives--the "Chicken Little crowd"--have warned would follow the legalization of gay marriage. He dismisses the boys-will-be-boys claim: that gay men would corrupt the ideal of marital fidelity. Though he expects that marriage would indeed go some way toward reducing gay promiscuity, he also points out that, historically, societies have tolerated a certain amount of male adultery without causing the institution to collapse. Nor does he think that gay marriage would open the door to other unconventional sorts of marital arrangements. For Rauch, it is not gay marriage but rather marriage "lite" that would extend the welcome mat to incest and polygamy. Lacking any cultural history, arrangements like civil unions and domestic partnerships risk being hijacked. Gay marriage, on the other hand, affirms the traditional principle of "one person, one spouse."

As for the "sex-centered view" that gay marriage would threaten the traditional family--that is, one consisting of a man, a woman, and their children--Rauch sees this as especially insulting to gays. "There is one thing no homosexual couple can do," he bristles, "and that is to procreate." Marriage may be "uniquely good for children," he writes, but that does not mean that procreation is the reason for marriage. In fact, the well-being of children is just one more reason to extend marriage to gays, since there are thousands, perhaps even millions, of children living with unwed gay parents. ...

But Rauch's sociological acumen fails him on one crucial issue: the connection between marriage and children. Here he resorts to caricature, presenting concerns about maintaining the traditional family as a creepy obsession of the religious Right or as a mere prejudice in favor of "penile-vaginal intercourse." This is hardly serious.

What unites the various forms of marriage over the course of human history is their shared concern to solidify and extend the biological bonds connecting a man, a woman, and their offspring. Marriage is, above all, culture's way to make such families work. By contrast, Rauch's own definition of marriage--"two people's lifelong commitment, recognized by law and by society, to care for each other"--is a thin, highly parochial depiction, one that would be unrecognizable to most people who have ever exchanged vows. To marry is not simply to acquire a devoted lifelong partner; if it were, polygamy would be unknown, and history would have already yielded as many gay marriages as it has grains of thrown wedding rice (a fertility symbol, by the way). The procreative imperative is the only reason we are talking about marriage in the first place.

Rauch suggests two related objections to this line of thinking. First, that marriage is an evolving institution that has changed to meet shifting social realities; as he puts it, our definition of marriage should reflect how "it is practiced today." Second, that since many married couples do not procreate, the primary focus of marriage is clearly not children.

There is no denying that the institution of marriage has evolved over the centuries and that it has come to satisfy a range of human needs: it creates bonds of kinship, simplifies the division of labor, domesticates young men, and provides sentimental companionship. Unfortunately, over the past several generations, this evolutionary process has gone into such overdrive that the original purpose of marriage--procreation and childrearing--has nearly faded from the collective consciousness. Today, a third of all babies in the U.S. are born to unmarried mothers, and increasing percentages of Americans disagree with the statement that "the purpose of marriage is having children." Defining marriage in terms of how "it is practiced today," as Rauch would have it, is like determining normal by taking the temperature of someone who has a fever.

Rauch is keenly aware of the results of this shift in our cultural mores. As he recently told an interviewer, his interest in marriage arose in part from his realization that the "problems of poverty and crime . . . are really offshoots of the collapse in the family." By just about every measure, the growing disjunction between marriage and childrearing has been bad news for children, for the social order, and for our ideals of equality. Marriage has evolved, all right, but evolution is not the same thing as progress.

Would gay marriage help to cure the institution, as Rauch argues? It is hard to see how. Like Andrew Sullivan, the other major gay conservative voice in support of same-sex unions, Rauch insists that the core meaning of the institution lies in adult mutuality. Children are at best a distant consideration. By defining them out of marriage, Rauch would pull us even farther from its original meaning.

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posted by Eve at 5:54 PM VOTE

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