by Matthew Sitman
Damon Linker points to the “most decisive weakness” in theocon Robbie George’s brief against same-sex marriage – and notes that, really, George’s arguments are more about contraception than gay unions:
Permitting gay marriage will not lead Americans to stop thinking of marriage as a conjugal union. Quite the reverse: Gay marriage has come to be widely accepted because our society stopped thinking of marriage as a conjugal union decades ago.
Between five and six decades ago, to be precise. That’s when the birth control pill — first made available to consumers for the treatment of menstrual disorders in 1957 and approved by the FDA for contraceptive use three years later — began to transform sexual relationships, and hence marriage, in the United States. Once pregnancy was decoupled from intercourse, pre-marital sex became far more common, which removed one powerful incentive to marry young (or marry at all). It likewise became far more common for newlyweds to give themselves an extended childless honeymoon (with some couples choosing never to have kids).
In all of these ways, and many more, the widespread availability of contraception transformed marriage from a conjugal union into a relationship based to a considerable degree on the emotional and sexual fulfillment of its members — with childrearing often, though not always, a part of the equation. And it is because same-sex couples are obviously just as capable as heterosexual couples of forming relationships based on emotional and sexual fulfillment that gay marriage has come to be accepted so widely and so quickly in our culture.
Daniel McCarthy elaborates:
There is, of course, a good reason why even Robert George and Charles Cooper don’t argue that heterosexuals who cannot bear children may be denied access to the institution of marriage: because marriage is not only about children, and in fact the West has a long history of balancing priorities between marriage-as-about-children (proles) and marriage-as-about-love-between-two-people (fides)—until now, specifically a man and a woman. Carle Zimmerman’s Family and Civilization, oft-cited here, sketches that history. Although the relative weights of proles and fides have shifted over time, both have been definitive components of the ideal until now.
One weakness of the traditionalist argument has been its failure to adhere strictly enough to proles. But the failure to give fides its due has perhaps contributed at least as much to the rout. Can anything other than marriage, if homosexuals are to be excluded from that, accommodate fides? Would any alternative be acceptable to others who cannot bear their own children—“domestic partnerships” for the aged? The question answers itself.
The Dish 