Higamus, Hogamus. . . Reflections on Gay Marriage
16th July 2011
This raises a further observation and prediction. I think some of the energy behind the demand for gay marriage arises as much from a desire for recognition as much as the usual egalitarianism. Some of my old lefty-hippie friends from the sixties find the whole gay marriage controversy bemusing, since the countercultural left of the sixties disdained the authoritative state recognition of marriage as “just a piece of paper.” But now suddenly for people on the left that “piece of paper” is thought crucial to the proper recognition of their social status. This isn’t just about legalities: the legitimate legal arguments about property, inheritance, insurance benefits, and other legal impediments gay couples face could be solved in many other ways short of changing the positive law of marriage.
The key issue of the ‘gay marriage’ controversy, as I have always said, isn’t marriage, it’s the respectability that the married state has always enjoyed among civilized people. Homosexuals don’t really care about marriage; what they care about is being Respected As Normal, which is why the various ‘domestic partnership’ alternatives Just Aren’t Good Enough. Homosexuals will not be satisfied unless and until they are accepted by heterosexuals as normal, just as ‘civil rights activists’ weren’t satisfied with ‘separate but equal’, but insisted on being considered as equal to white people in every possible respect — even some silly ones, like agitating to be cast as Shylock in The Merchant of Venice, just to use an egregious example. (The problem with this, of course, is that the abnormality of homosexuality is a demonstrable physical and historical fact, something that can’t be said about being black.)
The first Republican Party platform of 1856 said that the main object of the new party was to rid the nation of “the twin relics of barbarism, polygamy and slavery.” The argument at that time was that the “barbarism” of both “peculiar institutions” rested on the same ground—both are an affront to human equality. In the simplest terms, if one man is to have more than one wife, some other man will have none. Why should we care about this? Well, check in with China in a few years, where the widespread practice of sex-selective reproduction favoring males (where are the global feminists on this, by the way?) is leading to a major demographic distortion that will surely have significant social consequences.