I hesitate to even add anything to the maelstrom of hateful words surrounding the subject of gay marriage. Nevertheless, I feel I have several things to say on the subject that, if not new, certainly remain almost totally unexpressed in the mainstream media.
Why Government Intrusion?
As I scan the possible justifications for lending government support to what seems at first to be a purely private contract between two people, it occurs to me that the only good reason for the government to endorse a marriage is because marriages between men and women are the best source of something that governments cannot provide for themselves: the next generation of law-abiding, well-adjusted, physically, socially, mentally, emotionally healthy, contributing citizens. No institution yet contrived can match the ability of marriage in this regard. It is the right horse to bet on—the success of marriages between men and women translates into the overall success of society at large. If it were not for the potential to beget children, there would be no reason for the government to extend benefits to married couples at all.
Yes, not everyone who gets married has children. Nothing else the government pays for or sponsors yields perfect results either. Roads crack—do we stop paving them? Statistically speaking, it is a safe bet that newlyweds are A. Able to beget children, and B. Planning to do so at some point. As such, the success or failure of their relationship will have lasting consequences. The children they have will be more likely to contribute to society if the marriage succeeds, and more likely to be a burden if it fails. One child can become an eighty year burden or an eighty year benefit to society, and the success of the parents' marriage is the main factor determining which of these outcomes society will be forced to deal with later on.
There are always exceptions to such rules, but laws meant to govern 300 million people should be based on aggregates, general trends, reliable heuristics, and statistics, not on glowing exceptions. Therefore, it does make sense for representative government to offer incentives to men and women who get married to each other to stay married. The purpose of codifying marriage is not to fulfill some imaginary right to have one's romantic relationships endorsed by the government; it is to channel heterosexual relationships into permanence for the benefit of their offspring, and, by extension, everyone else influenced by those children throughout their lives.
Equal Rights
One assertion by the pro-gay marriage advocates is that they are being denied "equal rights" (forgive my scare quotes). Do we have the "right" to get married? Marriage is not a right, but a privilege granted to individuals who meet qualifications of fitness. There are other examples of this. For instance, a blind or crippled person may want to be a firefighter or soldier, yet be denied the privilege because they lack specific qualifications. The purpose of funding firefighters through tax dollars is to fight fires, and anyone whose body does not meet certain standards is denied the privilege. If it were a right, there would be wheelchair ramps in fire stations for firefighters who are incapable of sliding down the pole. The government pays firefighters, but that does not mean everyone has an equal right to be employed as a firefighter; stringent qualifications must be met by those who wish to pursue the profession. This arrangement benefits everyone, not just those who fight fires.
Equal Privileges, Then?
Just because you do not want to exercise a privilege or right does not mean you do not have it. I choose not own any guns. (I find the idea of owning a device designed to end human life uncomfortable.) But that does not mean I do not have equal rights with the people who do own guns. It also does not mean I am entitled to some compensation for my un-exercised rights in the form of new rights. (The freedom to drive at 20 miles per hour over the posted speed limit would be my first choice.) Similarly, just because a person does not prefer to marry someone of the opposite sex does not mean they do not have the privilege of doing so. Anyone can get married to anyone of the opposite sex, and any children that come from that relationship become their legal stewardship. There is no law preventing adults marrying adults of the opposite sex based on sexual orientation (or anything else, for that matter).
"Equal Rights" Evades Responsibility
In this context, the phrase "equal rights" as employed by same-sex marriage advocates contains a false premise. By clamoring for "equal rights," gay marriage advocates are actually asking for new rights, or privileges, that did not previously exist. Acknowledging this fact would be very inconvenient for them. First, it would require admitting that they are asking America to redefine marriage, which means tearing down the narrower traditional limits of the legal definition, and expanding them to include gay couples. If we are redefining marriage to include other relationships besides a man and a woman, this also means setting NEW LIMITS—explaining what relationships besides heterosexual and homosexual relationships deserve to be defined as marriages, and which should be excluded.
Another rhetorical slight-of-hand maneuver is to refer to all laws defining marriage as one man-one woman as a "ban on gay marriage." This imparts the stench of prejudice to proponents of such laws. But defining marriage as one man and one woman only is not engineered as a snub to homosexuals; it also excludes polygamy, bestiality, pedophilia, and a host of other relationships from legal recognition as marriage. Since it is not yet socially acceptable to stand up for these more festive variations, gay marriage proponents will not mention their exclusion by accurately describing the full intended effect of such laws. It is not anti-homosexual; it is pro-heterosexual monogamous marriage, and excludes everything else, whether it is shielded behind the sandbag barricade of fashionable political correctness or not.
What Is Not A Marriage?
Redefining marriage necessitates setting up new boundaries of exclusion as well. Creating new boundaries to exclude others is a responsibility no one in the same-sex marriage camp has taken up, at least not publicly. None of the proponents for redefining marriage have taken the time to explain which relationships, under their proposed new legal definition, do NOT qualify as marriages. Polygamy, polyandry, polygyny, polyamory, bestiality, pedophilia, paraphilia, etc.—why are these NOT qualified to be marriages? Corporations, can they adopt or not? Can parents marry their children? Why or why not?
Attempting to answer these sticky questions would require Solomonic wisdom, be a painstaking task to legislate clearly, and leave gay marriage proponents smelling of the same stodgy self-righteous fuddy-duddyism and hypocrisy they paint their opponents as having. How hypocritical of them to tell some guy he cannot marry his truck, or his horse. Who will clean up the mess of poorly-defined boundaries? Someone else, apparently.
When the attempt to legally define marriage is driven by something other than procreation and the rearing of the next generation of healthy, intelligent, law abiding citizens, then all logic for excluding any relationship from the definition of marriage goes out the window.
Judicial Prestidigitation
The false cry for "equal rights" also sidesteps another inconvenient obstacle. Whether they choose to exercise the privilege, any adult can marry another adult of the opposite sex in America. New privileges, a change in the laws, are what gay marriage proponents are really asking for. In America, new laws are created through grinding legislative, not streamlined judicial, channels. The tedious and clunky representative legislative process is circumvented by judges who legislate from the bench through broad or spurious interpretations of laws. They invent new rights where none previously existed out of thin air via vague, sweeping interpretations, because this is the quickest avenue to legalizing same-sex marriage. It is unethical, undermines democracy, turns judges into monarchs, and makes a joke of representative government. One or two judges overturn a ballot referendum by millions of people who constitute a legal majority of voters? Is this America?
Reiteration
The only reason I can see for governments to support marriages at all is the unrivaled potential of successful man-woman marriages to produce contributing citizens. All people have to deal with the consequences of these relationships, good or bad, so it behooves representative government to support them in attempting to establish permanence and offer them benefits. Returns are reaped in the form of universal benefits to society, namely, the next generation of productive citizens. No such universal benefit is derived from defining any other form of relationship as a marriage, or by extending the benefits associated with marriage to such relationships.
Marriage is not a right, but a privilege extended by the government to men and women because their relationships have enormous impact on the future of the country, for good or ill.
Everyone enjoys equal privileges under the current system, whether they choose to exercise them, or prefer not to.
Gay marriage advocates have side stepped the responsibility to come up with a well-defined new legal version of marriage, falsely claiming that their definition is already embedded somewhere in current laws, and needs only proper recognition for full expression and endorsement. This indicates a lack of forethought or concern for the consequences of their demands on society at large.
Adoption
What about letting gay couples adopt? (A marriage license would instantly bequeath that option.) Could they benefit society that way? Adoption is a necessary safety net, not a trampoline or a hammock. It is less effective than having a man and a woman raise the child they conceived. Issuing marriage licenses to couples should be based on the apparent biological fitness of the couple to make new citizens. (While draconian means would be required to assess this with certainty, noting that the applicants for the license are a man and a woman dramatically increases the likelihood that they will be fertile.)
Children learn more by example than by words. What implicit message are we sending to children when we endorse the absence of one or both biological parents? Will boys learn that their proper role is to contribute DNA and leave others to care for their children? Society is already bearing an enormous load from such delinquency. If same-sex marriage were legalized, dead-beat dads (and mothers) would suddenly be cloaked with an aura of generosity, national heroes in a civil rights battle instead of irresponsible adults.
It does not make sense to me to bring couples who are admittedly unable to have children into a system that exists for the purpose of managing the consequences of procreative decisions. Why subsidize that which is unproductive? Do we want more adoption, or do we want policies meant to encourage procreative responsibility? Do we want people signing up for parenting duties with the admission, right out of the gate, that children they raise will be missing one or both biological parents? If there are three or four people who could each be construed as a child's legal guardian, could resulting conflicts over custody increase the burden on the legal system and social services?
In passing, we should note that all logic and reason behind having a set number of parents or guardians disappears when gay marriage is endorsed. When marriage and guardianship are functions of biological parentage, two is the obvious number. If we are no longer using biological parentage to assign custody, why not have three, four, or any other number of equal legal guardians? Because it's unnatural? If biological parentage is not the benchmark for assigning guardianship, what aspect of a relationship IS? Is it sexual attraction? Financial solvency? The age and intelligence of the potential guardians? Why not let GM or GE adopt children? If we are trying to imitate nature for the children's benefit, let's go all the way and declare one man and one woman to be each child's legal guardian.
While adoption is a necessary safety net that can produce great individuals, and is preferable to the alternative of burdening the state with the expense of institutions to care for orphans, it does not work as well as letting a married man and woman who begot the child raise that child together. It does not make sense to promote a new, inferior institution as an equal or replacement for its extant superior. That which is subsidized flourishes, and it makes sense to pour resources into the statistically superior institution of one man, one woman marriage than gay marriage, or other variations.
Mormon Polygamy A Justification For Gay Marriage?
There is another talking point here, commonly bandied about by gay marriage proponents, that deserves some attention.
I am a Latter-day Saint, and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, or Mormons, has played an active roll in defending the "one man, one woman" legal definition of marriage. The Church has been charged with hypocrisy, since polygamy was practiced by two percent of its members on frontier America during the late 1800s. But it was an unconventional means to a similar end as traditional marriage. According to Brigham Young, probably the most famous polygamist in the history of America, "This is the reason why the doctrine of plurality of wives [polygamy] was revealed, that the noble spirits who are waiting for tabernacles [bodies] might be brought forth ("Journal of Discourses," 4:56 (Sept. 21, 1856))." He asserted that if children are born into good homes to good families, "...the righteous [will] increase, while the unrighteous shall decrease and dwindle away..."
My point is that even the underlying cause for the practice of one man having more than one wife among Mormons in the late 1800s was to beget children, and raise them to be contributing members of their community. It was a church assignment to engage in polygamy, and men who could not support more than one wife and her children were not expected or even allowed live this way. It was not a casual social convention designed to gratify male lust. While the States were engaged in the ugly business of prosecuting a civil war, the Mormons were multiplying and building up a society on the American frontier. Polygamy was meant, in part, to facilitate this process. I am descended from some of them, and my cultural inheritance has been one of sobriety, self-restraint, public service, and tolerance for other creeds.
By contrast, those who are clamoring for "equal rights" are demanding to use a public facility (marriage) while at the same time asserting that what they do is no one's business but their own. But the point of marriage is to make an otherwise private contract a public issue, since the potential for procreation affects the entire community. Far from being a sign of bigotry, criticism of a potential union is sometimes welcomed. It is traditional in many marriage rites for the one performing the ceremony to ask the audience to offer protestation, actually calling for evidence regarding impediments to the fitness of the couple. Legal marriage is a matter of public record. Those who marry run the risk of public disapproval. Does a non-heterosexual couple need public endorsement to engage in anything they choose behind closed doors? Does anything they do affect the general welfare? The effects of their behavior are so limited that to bring their relationship under public scrutiny is both pointless and perverse, a kind of forced voyeurism.
A procreative motive, and concern for the benefit of society at large (rather than more private, selfish motives) separates polygamy as practiced by late 1800s Mormons from gay marriage.
Altar and Sacrifice
Finally, a word about my generation's perceptions of marriage in general. I think the symbolism of the altar is lost on people today. An altar is a place to make sacrifices, not an ATM or a slot machine. It is true that marriage has benefits, but review the vows that many couples make when they get married, and see the sacrifices side by side with the positives: "...for richer or for poorer"..."for better or for worse"..."in sickness and in health..." You get a spouse, but you "...[forsake] all others..." "Till death do us part" is also lost on a society that considers open discussions of the inevitability of death uncouth. One of you is going to have to bury the other, and the idea is built into typical marriage vows.
Is it any wonder that many couples write their own vows, rather than making these traditional promises? This also denotes an erosion of marriage, a lowering of the bar.
Marriage between a man and a woman involves sacrifices as well as benefits. It makes sense to extend privileges and support to men and women who promise to make this sacrifice, because successfully kept commitments at the altar form the bedrock of society. Children derive great security, and a sense of identity, simply from witnessing their parents treating each other well. This security is foundational to individual character, and the love demonstrated by parents is later reflected in the benevolent and loving actions of their children.
The general lack of understanding that marriage is difficult as well as rewarding, a blessing as well as a sacrifice, is probably what accounts for most of the failed marriages of this generation. A selfish generation views the institution of marriage from the what's-in-it-for-me vantage point. When the choice comes between staying together and sacrificing, or divorce, many choose divorce.
Uniting two different people, a man and a woman, for the remaining duration of their lives, is difficult, specifically because they are different. Different in temperament, psychological make-up, desires, and physiology. The convention of legally prescribed marriage acts as a scaffolding to bolster this relationship. As the average lifespan of Americans grows, the enormous question of whether the next generation will be a blessing or a burden to their country looms large, and supporting marriage between a man and a woman will help ensure that the next generation is emotionally grounded, mentally stable, and ready to take the place of their parents in society.
