Given the breathless advance notice of Stanley Kurtz’s magnum opus on gay marriage (all the advance blurbs were penned by, er, Stanley Kurtz), I have to say that his cover-story in the Weekly Standard is notably thin. Kurtz wants to argue that advocates of gay marriage are really trying to destroy the institution, rather than join it, and that this is fueled by a far left agenda in the gay community. What Kurtz doesn’t acknowledge is that there has been a long debate among gays about marriage rights and those of us who took the conservative position, despite enormous pressure and vitriol from our peers, have largely won the argument. Bypassing our achievement in nudging the gay community toward the center and right, he then dredges up fringe activists on the left as representative of the same-sex marriage movement. Some of them, such as Ettelbrick and Polikoff, were the fiercest critics of gay marriage (and gay conservatives) in the past; now Kurtz enlists them as the meaning of our cause for marriage equality. This is like using Al Sharpton to criticize the agenda of the DLC. It’s guilt by absurd association.
MONOGAMY: Then he brings up again the polygamy argument. This is a slippery slope case, the only one you’ve got if the substantive case won’t hold up. Why would same-sex marriage lead to polygamy? Kurtz argues that both undermine monogamy as the marital norm. Huh? Surely polygamy – by allowing men lots of wives within marriage – makes fidelity a moot question. By removing the very structure of a two-person marriage, it makes the sacrifice of monogamy close to meaningless. Not so for two lesbians committed to each other for life. Nor – even more intensely – for two men. So polygamy defines monogamy down. But same-sex marriage brings a culture of monogamy to a previously marginalized population. Aren’t these two phenomena actually going in opposite directions? Kurtz’s answer is that gay men simply cannot be monogamous in marriage. The evidence? Well, we don’t have hard evidence for this because we don’t have gay marriages yet. I’d go further and say we won’t know the future impact of marriage on gay people until a full generation has grown up in the knowledge that such future relationships are possible. But can we make a guess? Kurtz locates a study by a “queer theorist” to make the case that gay men are beneath marriage. (Isn’t it strange how the far right and far left love to use each other?) What does the study find? That 82 percent of lesbians – indistinguishable from straight women and morethan straight men – believe in the monogamy-marriage link. (Remember that two-thirds of Vermont civil unions have been lesbian). What does the study say about men? It finds that “among married heterosexual men, 79 percent felt that marriage demanded monogamy, 50 percent of men in gay civil unions insisted on monogamy, while only 34 percent of gay men outside of civil unions affirmed monogamy.” (The missing category is what single straight men feel about monogamy. I bet it isn’t that different from single gay men.) But the inference here is obvious: getting into a civil union ratcheted up the monogamy quotient among gay men from 34 percent to 50 percent. Cause or effect? Hard to tell. But is it unreasonable to think that real marriage – with its far deeper social ramifications – would ratchet it up some more? Surely it would. Look, I think there’s a genuine worry about men and marriage, and I don’t think it’s crazy to believe that on average male-male marriages may have more adultery than straight marriages (and straight marriages may have more adultery than lesbian marriages). It’s fair to worry about that. But the shake-out of equal marriage rights would in all likelihood be a slight increase in monogamy in marriage as a whole (the impact of all those lesbians) and a strong trend toward fidelity among gay men, where none existed before. Why isn’t that a reasonable social gain for all of us? What Kurtz wants you to believe is that one percent of marriages will have more of an impact on the remaining 99 percent than the 99 percent will have on the one percent. Sorry, but it just doesn’t make sense.
The Dish 