But gay marriage is coming to America first and foremost because marriage here is a secular concern, not a religious one. The objection to gay marriage is almost invariably biblical, but nobody’s legal vows in this country are defined by interpretation of biblical verse-or at least, not since the Supreme Court stood up for Richard and Mildred Loving. A church wedding ceremony is a nice thing, but it is neither required for legal marriage in America nor does it constitute legal marriage in America. What constitutes legal marriage in this country is that critical piece of paper that you and your betrothed must sign and then register with the state. The morality of your marriage may indeed rest between you and God, but it’s that civic and secular paperwork which makes your vows official here on earth. Ultimately, then, it is the business of America’s courts, not America’s churches, to decide the rules of matrimonial law, and it is in those courts that the same-sex marriage debate will finally be settled.
Anyhow, to be perfectly honest, I find it a bit crazy that social conservatives are fighting so hard against this at all, considering that it’s quite a positive thing for society in general when as many intact families as possible live under the estate of matrimony. And I say this as someone who is-I think we can all agree by now-admittedly suspicious of marriage. Yet it’s true. Legal marriage, because it restrains sexual promiscuity and yokes people to their social obligations, is an essential building block of any orderly community. I’m not convinced that marriage is always so terrific for every individual within the relationship, but that’s another question altogether. There is no doubt-not even within my rebellious mind-that in general, matrimony stabilizes the larger social order and is often exceedingly good for children. [1]
If I were a social conservative, then-that is to say, if I were somebody who cared deeply about social stability, economic prosperity, and sexual monogamy-I would want as many gay couples as possible to get married. I would want as many of every kind of couple as possible to get married. I recognize that conservatives are worried that homosexuals will destroy and corrupt the institution of marriage, but perhaps they should consider the distinct possibility that gay couples are actually poised at this moment in history to save marriage. Think of it! Marriage is on the decline everywhere, all across the Western world. People are getting married later in life, if they’re getting married at all, or they are producing children willy-nilly out of wedlock, or (like me) they are approaching the whole institution with ambivalence or even hostility. We don’t trust marriage anymore, many of us straight folk. We don’t get it. We’re not at all convinced that we need it. We feel as though we can take it or leave it behind forever. All of which leaves poor old matrimony twisting in the winds of cold modernity.
But just when it seems like maybe all is lost for marriage, just when matrimony is about to become as evolutionarily expendable as pinkie toes and appendixes, just when it appears that the institution will wither slowly into obscurity due to a general lack of social interest, in come the gay couples, asking to be included! Indeed, pleading to be included! Indeed, fighting with all their might to be included in a custom which may be terrifically beneficial for society as a whole but which many-like me-find only suffocating and old-fashioned and irrelevant.
It might seem ironic that homosexuals-who have, over the centuries, made an art form out of leading bohemian lives on the outer fringes of society-want so desperately now to be part of such a mainstream tradition. Certainly not everyone understands this urge to assimilate, not even within the gay community. The filmmaker John Waters, for one, says that he always thought the only advantages of being gay were that he didn’t have to join the military and he didn’t have to get married. Still, it is true that many same-sex couples want nothing more than to join society as fully integrated, socially responsible, family-centered, taxpaying, Little League-coaching, nation-serving, respectably married citizens. So why not welcome them in? Why not recruit them by the vanload to sweep in on heroic wings and save the flagging and battered old institution of matrimony from a bunch of apathetic, ne’er-do-well, heterosexual deadbeats like me?
In any case, whatever happens with gay marriage, and whenever it happens, I can also assure you that future generations will someday find it ridiculous to the point of comedy that we ever debated this topic at all, much the same way that it seems absurd today that it was once strictly illegal for an English peasant to marry outside of his class, or for a white American citizen to marry someone of “the Malay race.” Which brings us to the final reason that gay marriage is coming: because marriage in the Western world over the last several centuries has been moving-slowly but inexorably-in the direction of ever more personal privacy, ever more fairness, ever more respect for the two individuals involved, and ever more freedom of choice.
You can chart the beginning of the “marital freedom movement,” as we might call it, from sometime around the mideighteenth century. The world was changing, liberal democracies were on the rise, and all over western Europe and the Americas came a massive social push for more freedom, more privacy, more opportunities for individuals to pursue their own personal happiness regardless of other people’s wishes. Men and women alike began to express ever more vocally their desire for choice. They wanted to choose their own leaders, choose their own religions, choose their own destinies, and-yes-even choose their own spouses.
Moreover, with the advancements of the Industrial Revolution and the increase in personal earnings, couples could now afford to purchase their own homes rather than live forever with extended family-and we cannot overestimate how much that social transformation affected marriage. Because along with all those new private homes came… well, privacy. Private thoughts and private time, which led to private desires and private ideas. Once the doors of your house were closed, your life belonged to you. You could be the master of your own destiny, the captain of your emotional ship. You could seek your own paradise and find your own happiness-not in heaven but right there in downtown Pittsburgh, for instance, with your own lovely wife (whom you had personally selected, by the way, not because it was an economically advantageous choice, or because your family had arranged the match, but because you liked her laugh).
One of my personal hero-couples of the marital freedom movement were a pair named Lillian Harman and Edwin Walker, of the great state of Kansas circa 1887. Lillian was a suffragette and the daughter of a noted anarchist; Edwin was a progressive journalist and feminist sympathizer. They were made for each other. When they fell in love and decided to seal their relationship, they visited neither minister nor judge, but entered instead into what they called an “autonomistic marriage.” They created their own wedding vows, speaking during the ceremony about the absolute privacy of their union, and swearing that Edwin would not dominate his wife in any way, nor would she take his name. Moreover, Lillian refused to swear eternal loyalty to Edwin, but stated firmly that she would “make no promises that it may become impossible or immoral for me to fulfill, but retain the right to act always as my conscience and best judgment shall dictate.”
It goes without saying that Lillian and Edwin were arrested for this flouting of convention-and on their wedding night, no less. (What is it about arresting people in their beds that always signals a new era in marriage history?) The pair were charged with failure to respect license and ceremony, with one judge stating that “the union between E.C. Walker and Lillian Harman is no marriage, and they deserve all the punishment which has been inflicted upon them.”
[1] Pardon me for a moment. This is such an important and complicated point that it warrants the only footnote of this whole book. When sociologists say that “marriage is extremely good for children,” what they really mean is that stability is extremely good for children. It has been categorically proven that children thrive in environments where they are not subjected to constant unsettling emotional changes-such as, for instance, an endless rotation of Mom’s or Dad’s new romantic partners cycling in and out of the home. Marriage tends to stabilize families and prevent such upheavals, but not necessarily. These days, for instance, a child born to an unmarried couple in Sweden (where legal marriage is increasingly passe, but where family bonds are quite solid) has a greater chance of living forever with the same parents than a child born to a married couple in America (where marriage is still revered but divorce runs rampant). Children need constancy and familiarity. Marriage encourages, but cannot guarantee, familial solidity. Unmarried couples and single parents and even grandparents can create calm and stable environments in which children can thrive, outside the bonds of legal matrimony. I just wanted to be very clear about that. Sorry for the interruption, and thanks.