THE NEW MARRIAGE MERGERS: Maggie Gallagher replies to Andrew Sullivan

Today, Andrew Sullivan endorses the argument of Stephanie Coontz on marriage.

Stephanie, as those of us in the older marriage debate know, is one of the staunchest opponents of the idea of marriage as a social institution. She has argued for 15 years (since before Barbara Dafoe Whitehead's "Dan Quayle Was Right" article) that, since marriage is only another word for adult intimacy, it makes little sense to try to reduce divorce, or increase the proportion of children living with their own married mom and dad. Family diversity is here to stay so we should embrace it.

The trends towards the deconstruction of marriage are inevitable, she says. People who want to do things like strengthen marriage as a social institutuion are just blindly nostalgic for an earlier era, which never existed anyway.

Hmm. Looks like the new conservative case for gay marriage and the old radical case against marriage are merging, fast.

Andrew Sullivan's post:
WHO CHANGED MARRIAGE?: The heterosexuals, of course! Stephanie Coontz will find few dissenters on the social right. The revolution in civil marriage--in which it became about love, not property, in which women and men were equal, in which children were not necessary--all occurred before the gay revolution. Since marriage has already been redefined to make the exclusion of gays logically absurd, the campaign against letting gays into the human family necessarily raises the suspicion of mere animus. It's not bigotry to say that these are the rules that govern civil marriage and too bad if you can't live up to them (i.e. procreation, or traditional gender roles). But it is suspicious when you abolish all those rules for straights and then use the old rules to bar gays. I don't see how gay marriage opponents manage to get round the logic of this--except by resorting to purely religious arguments (which would invalidate most heterosexual marriages today as well), or simply reiterating the definitional case that marriage is for straights, dammit. This glaring hole on the argument must have something to do with the fact that an idea that was novel in the 1980s is now the law in several civilized countries and one state in America. Reason eventually finds a way. (link)
posted by Eve at 2:31 PM VOTE

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