WILL SSM HELP OR HARM MARRIAGE?: Jonathan Rauch replies to Maggie Gallagher

A most useful post from Maggie.

In the spirit of locating precisely where our difference lies...

Would it be right to say that our specific disagreement is in how we expect the culture to interpret same-sex marriage? You believe SSM will be interpreted as a (further) retreat from the idea that marriage is bound up with parents' commitment to their (biological) children, and a retreat generally from the notion that father-mother family structure is preferred? Whereas I believe that SSM will be interpreted as conveying society's preference for marriage over non-marriage as the preferred way to make a family?

If so, we can both be right. Both vectors could operate and interact.

Magnitudes could be large or small (I suspect pretty small). We're kidding ourselves if any of us claims to have certain knowledge of how these cultural vectors will net out.

My biggest frustration in this debate is that I can't get opponents of SSM to focus on the potential risks to marriage of not having SSM. How will the culture interpret that? I agree that words and symbols matter, and if we don't have SSM, a couple of decades from now politically sensitive people (not just on the left) will avoid the word "marriage" because it will connote discrimination. They won't talk about "husbands" and "wives" at all, because that's non-inclusive language.

Everyone will just be "partners." As George F. Will likes to admonish conservatives, "Cultural change is autonomous." I'm not saying Maggie should accept SSM as inevitable. It isn't. I'm saying that if we don't have SSM, the culture won't stand still. It may bypass marriage.

Similarly, Maggie worries that with SSM, society and law will no longer be able to express a preference for male/female/bio-child union. I worry that without SSM, in a few years society and law will no longerbe able to express a preference for marriage. We'll all just have"unions" or "relationships" or "partnerships."

Perhaps, anyway, that captures a bedrock disagreement.

On faith communities, I can't blame them for worrying about government pressure to conform with SSM. M. and I probably share a worry that government is putting too much conformist pressure on private social institutions of many kinds, not just churches. But this cuts both ways.

Over time, more and more religious institutions will bless same-sex unions. I'd rather they lent their blessing and prestige to marriage than to something else. And, over time, any choice the government makes is going to make some religions unhappy. In the infinite-regress debate over who's being intolerant of whom, I think the trump card is held by the actual gay couples who are denied actual marriage. The severest intolerance is to deny people the opportunity to make basic choices in life.

I've never been on board with the "child/adult-centered marriage" dichotomy because I think it misunderstands the role and value of marriage. It's like saying, "Which is better, imports or exports?" I believe all marriage is child-centered, because it sets the right kind of example about how people should live and it makes people and society and children better off. It's good for kids when elderly couples without kids marry, just as it's good for elderly people when couples with kids marry. I want kids to grow up in neighborhoods where they see marriage all around them and where marriage is one of life's basic universal expectations. And preferably where sex and status are tied to marriage as well. I don't kid myself that SSM will cut theo ut-of-wedlock childbirth rate in half. But I think it sets the right kind of example, and I know that marriage can't be universally expected if it's not universally allowed.

Maggie sez: "The goal of the same-sex marriage movement is publicly and visibly to assert the legal and moral equality of same-sex and opposite-sex couples. If same-sex marriage is a civil right, this necessarily and intrinsically means that the fact that sex between men and women makes babies is not an important fact, socially or legally."

Sentence 1 is correct. But the second sentence should read, "If same-sex marriage is a civil right, this necessarily and intrinsically means that the fact that sex between men and women makes babies is not THE ONLY important fact, socially or legally." Big difference, yes?

posted by Eve at 6:53 PM VOTE

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