| Monday, May 17, 2004 |
22:09 - There's two sides to every Schwartz
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Well, now that it's a fait accompli, at least in one state, I guess I may as well weigh in on the gay marriage topic once more.
Yeah, it's a good thing. Yeah, I'm for it. But I guess I have to be something of a spoilsport on what's being hailed from end to end as a great day of victory for Civil Rights, and note that there's still a discussion to be had, still issues to be settled, and still a lot of hearts and minds to be won. And even once all is said and done, there will still be room in the discussion to look back and say, "Did we do the right thing?"
Yes, it's a Civil Rights thing. But then again, no, it isn't. This is something new, and the precedents we have don't adequately describe the situation. That's what's got everybody so screwed up, and it's why there's still such a polarization over it in the country between two sides that both think they're irrevocably right.
Andrew Sullivan is in full superhero mode, and well he might be. But he might do well to not get cocky (as it were). He's casting gay marriage as the kind of unassailable expression of Civil Rights—or inalienable rights, or natural God-given Basic Human Rights, depending on the vocabulary you like—that automatically grants the plaintiff the moral high ground in this day and age. He's partially right, but also partially wrong. There are two sides here, not to get too ambivalent and Calvin-in-the-Cubist-universe about it, and both have a point.
Look, for instance, at this quote from a James Dobson, a religioid being ridiculed by Sullivan with his "Derbyshire Award":
Barring a miracle, the family as it has been known for more than five millennia will crumble, presaging the fall of Western civilization itself. This is a time for concerted prayer, divine wisdom and greater courage than we have ever been called upon to exercise. For more than 40 years, the homosexual activist movement has sought to implement a master plan that has had as its centerpiece the utter destruction of the family. The institution of marriage, along with an often weakened and impotent Church, is all that stands in the way of its achievement of every coveted aspiration. Those goals include universal acceptance of the gay lifestyle, discrediting of Scriptures that condemn homosexuality, muzzling of the clergy and Christian media, granting of special privileges and rights in the law, overturning laws prohibiting pedophilia, indoctrinating children and future generations through public education, and securing all the legal benefits of marriage for any two or more people who claim to have homosexual tendencies.
This is, as Sullivan puts it, "unhinged". It's a stream of obdurate vocabulary steeped in an ideology that speaks to a throng of the converted, and it's very repugnant. But... there's a kernel of truth in there. Look under all the fearmongering, the churchified moralizing, and the blithering about a "homosexual grand master plan". And you'll find that there's a substrate of what can only be seen as fact.
Few can deny, to be blunt, that there have been some very significant changes to our country's social structure over the past half century. Most would characterize these changes as good: an almost unhesitating acceptance of racial mixing (I don't use the word "tolerance", deliberately, as it's become too charged to be useful anymore) being the prime example. But the concept of family has changed fundamentally, too, in many ways. Few would disagree that, on balance, these changes are positive: more empowerment for women, more earners in the workplace, kids no longer having the luxury of a teenaged period of "innocence", instead having to grow up a lot faster to deal with what's arguably a much more complex world (I'm not so naïve as to believe that the Fifties were that much simpler than today just because the pictures were in black and white and people thought swearing was a bad thing, but there's certainly truth to it as well).
Only the most deludedly optimistic, however, can claim with a straight face that there have been no downsides to the evolution of the "family" in the last fifty years. Kids growing up with no parents in the house, because they're both working. Kids being raised by the TV. Divorces seen as harmless business decisions, treated no more seriously than getting a second mortgage. Marriages of novelty. Single-parent households. Sex outside of marriage seen as the norm, not the exception, and certainly nothing to be ashamed of or avoided. I would, in fact, go so far as to say that the erosion of the American family lies at the heart of a lot of the problems we keep bitching about day to day: a generation of sarcastic, TV-minded cretins determined to see only the irony and the hypocrisy in any action the U.S. does, projecting a cracked self-image into a looming shadow of self-loathing as large as a whole country. Today's college-age kids have grown up being taught that everybody's a winner regardless of the sacrifices anyone has to make, and to expect a gold star for figuring out how to parrot the lines that adhere a person's image to the prevailing social constructs of the day. Once upon a time it was the family the kid was expected to emulate, even if he rebelled against it. Today it's the gang, the study group, the sign-wavers with a cause and the ear of the admissions board, the graduate stipend committee. Just do what you have to do to get the "in"—say what you have to say—and your way is paid for. In the absence of role models, family values, and those other antiquated two-word phrases that became objects of mockery on Saturday Night Live in the 90s, the if-it-feels-good-do-it bubbliness of the Sixties has been reincarnated in the form of a bitter, angsty nihilism that Lileks talked about today. It's out there, it's real, and it wouldn't be anywhere near as strong—I daresay—if we hadn't embarked on the Grand Experiment that began fifty years ago, moved the mother out of the kitchen and into the workplace, and gave us the vibrant, energetic, edgy, always-on-the-edge-of-breakdown social landscape we have today.
So it is with gay marriage. Yes, there are the upsides. Yes, it's a good thing. Yes, stories like this stir the heart. But one must always remember that this victory comes at the expense of a defeat for someone else, and that "someone else" is the part of America that thinks there's something—not sure what—that's just a little bit eerie, or worrisome, or (dare we say it) wrong about merely smiling benevolently while two guys suck face in front of the altar as the throngs cheer and the TV cameras roll. These aren't people who hate gays. These aren't people who would burn crosses or wave Bibles on streetcorners. These are people who sense that the idea of marriage is truly something sacred, something important, something ancient—older than civilization itself—that shouldn't be messed with. Interracial marriage they can handle; nothing wrong with that. But same-sex marriage? How exactly are we supposed to explain this to our kids?
And there's two ways of looking at gay marriage. One way is as a Civil Rights issue, as something whose time has simply come; regardless of what slippery-slope notions it might be seen as paving the way for, it's serving a very real need, and it's got all kinds of political and social precedent behind it. But the other way to regard it is as a factor in the concept of the family, and a potential answer to the question of "How different from the idealized Fifties do we want to make ourselves?"
It's easy to see gay marriage as just another of those things that have eroded the traditional family since that time—a cheapening of the concept of marriage, the willingness to extend membership in this special club to a group of seemingly incompatible applicants, just for the sake of "fairness"; just another reason for a couple who get tired of each other to split up and surrender the kids to the mercies of the courts, or never to bother getting married in the first place. But then again, it's just as easy to point out that gay marriage is a positive action—a grant of the right to marriage, something that should strengthen the concept of marriage by encouraging more people to get married and think about what that act really means. It could be that the effect that gay marriage will have on marriage in general will be to set a positive example, to re-establish "marriage" as something we all consider worth fighting for and defending and cherishing—to create a heightening of the awareness of "marriage" in the social landscape that makes people think all the harder about just how much it means to them to stay married for the sake of their kids, or to pledge their vows so as to form an unbreakable unit that blends with so many others to become part of a firm and proud community.
But whichever side a person takes of the above, he'll have to acknowledge that the other side exists, and is morally and intellectually consistent. We can pour the sarcasm on each other; we can puff up our chests and crow about our stances on the moral high ground; we can ridicule each other and paint each other as desperate caricatures of our real selves until we've made a mockery of the whole issue and reduced it to a comedy routine. But none of that will get us anywhere; neither side of the argument is going to understand the other until they both decide to want to understand each other, and make honest and respectful pledges to go about this as deliberately as necessary to keep everybody happy. If we must disagree, let's agree to disagree—let's not parody each other with invective. Let's understand just how serious this issue is—to the other side, not just to our own—and treat it with the delicacy and the respect that such a serious argument deserves.
UPDATE: Now this is an interesting point.
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Brian Tiemann
