A conservative case for gay marriage
Hausknecht, Murray
CANADA'S DECISION to permit same sex-marriage and the recent Supreme Court decision striking down anti-sodomy laws have once again filled the air with familiar conservative arguments featuring...
...They are also auguries of the future: what was won for women and for racial and ethnic minorities will surely be won, in the lifetimes of some of us, for gay and lesbian couples...
...Promiscuity is also a moral evil because promiscuity is sex without love and without a desire for a family...
...The adaptive capacity of conservatism allows it to make its contribution to a democratic politics...
...To be sure, marriage is related to the nurturing and socialization of children, but historically that has never been its only purpose...
...In those communities, unlike the larger society, the expectation that people will and should get married cannot act as a deterrent to promiscuity as it does in the surrounding society...
...society cannot afford to turn a blind eye to sex without love and a lifelong monogamous commitment...
...Still, even in the most "god-fearing" and "law-abiding" of times, to say nothing of "dissolute" or "decadent" eras, marriage vows have a chancy career...
...These vows are typically part of a religious ceremony, and when civil law prohibits adultery or "fornication," secular and divine power together generate pressures supporting the marital promises...
...At the most fundamental level, the Canadian decision to permit same-sex marriage—a policy supported by Canada's supreme court, legislature, and prime minister, and which has evoked practically no public opposition—forcibly challenges the certainties that structure understandings of the world and define a person's place and identity...
...It is unlikely, however, that conservatives will support same-sex marriage in the foreseeable future...
...its potential for creating chaos in relationships and institutions can be, if not eliminated, at least moderated...
...The felt need for something like Proposition 22 indicates that the usual defenses of the "natural order" had to be bolstered by the authority of the state...
...CANADA'S DECISION to permit same sex-marriage and the recent Supreme Court decision striking down anti-sodomy laws have once again filled the air with familiar conservative arguments featuring "traditional morality" and "family values...
...That is, promiscuous sex, although not totally approved, is accepted by many as an inevitable and perhaps a defining element of the culture...
...The present situation is very much like the one that culminated in Roe v. Wade and the ultimate success of the civil rights movement: what was once considered "unnatural"—abortion, black and white kids sitting together in the same classroom, interracial marriage—are now accepted as unremarkable features of everyday life...
...It is a rhetoric that allows talk of marriage without explicitly mentioning sex...
...Just as there is a vulgar Marxism, there is a vulgar conservatism or, at least, a vulgar conception of conservatism...
...Consider only, for example, the practical implications of mari*Edward 0. Laumann, John H. Gagnon, Robert T. Michael, and Stuart Michaels, The Social Organization of Sexuality (University of Chicago Press, 1994...
...One promise a marriage ritual exacts of a couple is the vow of "faithfulness" or exclusivity: no sex outside the marriage...
...Close to 94 percent of the married respondents reported only one sex partner and just over 78 per cent had only one partner in the previous five years.' Even granting the notorious difficulties of sex surveys, the findings indicate that marriage, although not totally effective, does successfully regulate sex...
...Sex is a constant threat to the routines that constitute everyday life and that allow people to live, work, and play together, whether in corporations, the military, universities, or country clubs...
...when it did surface it could be brushed off as "deviance," "illness," or "evil" to be dealt with by the law, medicine, or religion...
...This argument is open to the objection that it brings conservatism itself into question...
...Despite the ever present possibility of guerrilla counterattacks, these are campaigns that have been won...
...If marriage does discipline sex, then those denied its benefits can more easily drift into a life of disorderly or promiscuous sex...
...The same survey found that "homosexual active men" engaging in "same-gender sex" have "higher mean numbers of partners" and lower rates of "longterm relationships" than heterosexual men, although the amount of promiscuity is not as great as stereotypes imagine...
...an order largely beyond human control that constitutes the taken-for-granted physical and social worlds in which we live...
...We may expect fierce battles, because certainties that touch the core of people's lives are never easily surrendered...
...On reflection, this is not surprising...
...Logic aside, though, one would expect that conservatives, who value social order for its own sake, would support samesex marriage, albeit reluctantly, if only as a means of controlling disorderly sexual behavior...
...Sex, however, can be channeled or disciplined...
...Canada, though, contradicts the implicit premise of Proposition 22 and, as an important and powerful authority, its openness to samesex marriage raises the stakes immeasurably...
...Lesbians are significantly less promiscuous and have more longterm relationships...
...For example, marriage has been used to cement alCOMMENTS & OPINIONS liances between families with common interests— particularly economic ones—and to create alliances between nations...
...Traditional morality" means, in the words 8 n DISSENT / Fall 2003 of California's "Defense of Marriage Act," Proposition 22 (which was overwhelmingly approved in 1999), "marriage between a man and a woman...
...What the rhetoric obscures is another end of marriage: the regulation of sex...
...This is precisely the situation of gay men...
...JUNE 2003 • MURRAY HAUSKNECHT is a member of the Dissent editorial board and a sociologist writing from New York...
...Still, the history of the past fifty years gives us grounds for optimism...
...In gay communities, promiscuity can be part of the subculture...
...In 1992 the most sophisticated and statistically rigorous national survey of American sexual behavior asked more than three thousand respondents between the ages of eighteen and fifty-nine how many "sex partners" they had in the past year...
...In a letter to the New York Times immediately after the Supreme Court decision declaring the Texas anti-sodomy law unconstitutional, a Chicago man stated that conviction with an unadorned simplicity and directness: "Laws against sodomy, adultery, and other deviant sexual practices . . . are . . . just, for they are in conformity with the natural law . . . the Texas law should have been amended to include heterosexual deviancy as well as homosexual activity...
...His unhappiness is understandable, because certainties about how the world works, one's place in the world, and, indeed, one's identity are commonly founded on conceptions of the natural order...
...Family values" ties marriage to procreation or, as the director of the Institute for American Values maintains, a "biological bond between parents and children...
...True, conservatives are always uneasy in the face of change and often fight it fiercely...
...This reveals a logical contradiction between "family values" and "traditional morality...
...The latter's opposition to same-sex marriage encourages a promiscuity that monogamous, lifetime relationships, a basic premise of "family values," are expected to prevent...
...It assumes that conservatives oppose all change, and that when change occurs it occurs only, so to speak, over their dead bodies...
...Throughout most of the nation's history, homosexuality has existed outside cultural consciousness...
...After the Stonewall rebellion in 1969, when gays resisted police trying to raid an after-hours bar, homosexuality was out of the cultural closet...
...Lack of formal recognition of same-gender relationships [marriage] and lack of social pressure and support," the research suggests, account for the fewer longterm relationships "and the higher rate at which new partners are acquired...
...In his dissent in the Texas sodomy case, Justice Antonin Scalia specified in greater detail the "just" laws the Chicagoan defends: "State laws against bigamy, same-sex marriage, adult incest, prostitution, masturbation, adultery, fornication, bestiality, and obscenity . . . [are] called into question by today's decision . . . "Any questioning of laws founded on the natural order 0 n DISSENT / Fall 2003 creates a disorienting, anxiety-provoking world of ambiguous shape and structure...
...Terms such as "harassment," "escapade," "fling" underline its disorderly possibilities...
...A challenge to any one of these certainties has a domino effect...
...logic, social realities, even "family values," are not going to determine the responses of conservatives on this issue...
...Basic to much conservative thinking is a fundamental conviction that institutions and much of personal behavior are founded on a natural order...
...We are tempted, though, to overestimate its lack of success...
...Because sex is always highly vulnerable to fears and anxieties, the disorientation is even more intense when laws regulating sex, such as those cited by Scalia, seem to be threatened...
...It starts from the proposition that sexual promiscuity is a social evil because it threatens the stability of the social order...
...In exchange, as it were, each assumes the responsibility of providing the other with the satisfactions of sex...
...the moralist's jeremiad and the gossip's snicker focus attention on the failure of marriage rather than on more prosaic realities...
...ACONSERVATIVE CASE for gay marriage is not as impossible as it may sound...
...Honoring the dictates of law, religion, and public expectation domesticates sex...
...Marriage, then, to understate the case somewhat, is not wholly effective in regulating sex...
...But when their resistance is unsuccessful, conservatives and conservatism ought to be able to adapt to the new situation...
...tal inertia, perhaps more easily understood as one of marriage's "economic" benefits: all other things being equal, marriage increases the probabilities of attaining the satisfactions of sex without incurring the "costs" of continually searching for partners in the "open market...
...For conservatives, the nub of the problem is promiscuity, both DISSENT / Fall 2003 n 9 COMMENTS & OPINIONS homosexual and heterosexual...
...But whatever the purpose, its attainment depends on the successful control of the sex drive...
Vol. 50 • September 2003 • No. 4
