Same-Sex
Culture War
by David W. Machacek
In the
country at large, the Massachusetts supreme court’s same-sex marriage
decision inaugurated a vigorous debate between liberals and conservatives,
but for the most part it was an example of what the French call a dialogue
of the deaf.
On November 27, David Crary of the Associated Press
predicted a “nation-wide, state-by-state struggle that will be complicated,
nasty and politically treacherous.”
Not surprisingly, reporters associated most of the
nastiness with those who opposed gay marriage on religious grounds. “Comes
now the parade of homophobes, the army of fear, the snarling intolerance of
bigots,” Norm Prattis predicted in the December 1 Connecticut Law Tribune.
He could well have been thinking of the Rev. Lou
Sheldon of the Traditional Values Coalition, who the day before had offered
this reaction to the Massachusetts decision to Helen Kennedy of the New York
Daily News: “It’s nuclear is what it is—it’s nuclear. That court struck
like a terrorist.”
Jonathan Rauch of the Brookings Institution in the
March 7 New York Times agreed with the premise that marriage is “the bedrock
of civilization.” But he couldn’t grasp how the establishment of gay
matrimony would threaten it. “Would millions of straight couples flock to
divorce court if they knew that gay couples, too, could wed?”
“This is hardly the greatest challenge to the sanctity
of marriage. No, that would be the succession of nutty television shows in
which one humiliated contestant after another is discarded before one of
them ‘wins’ the path to the altar,” argued Boston Globe columnist
Adrian Walker on November 20. “If Massachusetts Family Institute president
Ron Crews is so concerned about the American family, why doesn’t he take on
‘The Bachelor’?”
Of course, Ron Crews and others on the religious right
have been taking on television shows that glorify promiscuity and satirize
marriage for years. They have also been taking on rising rates of divorce,
out-of-wedlock childbirth, premarital and extramarital sex, and parents who
pursue self-fulfillment at the expense of their children’s needs. And a
survey of the coverage suggests that few journalists are trying very hard to
report the religious right’s arguments against same-sex marriage with much
depth.
A more sober account of objections to same-sex marriage
would recognize that opponents see gay marriage as only further evidence of
a more general trend in American culture away from traditional norms and
toward a culture of sexual and family irresponsibility—a culture that even
glorifies such irresponsibility in the name of personal freedom and
individual rights.
“It’s not that the gay marriage movement suddenly
unleashed a withering assault on the sturdy institution of marriage,”
commented columnist David P. Gushee in the Religion News Service file
on December 8. “Every dimension of the historic meaning of marriage in
Western culture has been in decline for some time.”
The clearest enunciation of the religious right’s
position on same-sex
marriage can be obtained from the movement’s websites.
Here, for example, is a statement from Peter Sprigg, posted on the website
of the Family Research Council (FRC):
“The divorce revolution has undermined the concept
that marriage is a life-long commitment. As a result, there’s been an
epidemic of broken homes and broken families. The sexual revolution has
undermined the concept that sexual relations should be confined to marriage.
As a result, there’s been an epidemic of cohabitation, sexually transmitted
diseases, abortions, and broken hearts.
“The concept that childbearing should be confined to
marriage has been undermined. As a result, there’s been an epidemic of
out-of-wedlock births, single parenthood, and fatherless children. The
pornography revolution, particularly with the advent of the Internet, has
undermined the concept that a man’s sexual desires should be directed toward
his wife. As a result, there’s been an epidemic of broken relationships,
abused wives, and sex crimes, and the consequences have been overwhelmingly
negative.”
Religious right organizations have opposed legal
recognition of other interpersonal domestic relationships as well as gay
marriage. Also on the FRC website, Dr. Allan C. Carlson objects that “a
series of recommendations from the American Law Institute (ALI) issued last
November would strip traditional marriage of most of its distinctive legal
status—not by direct repeal, but rather by extending the protections
afforded by marriage to other relationships,” including, “cohabitating
domestic partners, both heterosexual and homosexual.”
“The ultimate result of expanding the definition of
marriage,” says Glen T. Stanton in “Is Marriage in Jeopardy?” on the Focus
on the Family website, “is that marriage would mean everything—and nothing.”
“Promiscuity, adultery, cohabitation, divorce and
out-of-wedlock births have severely damaged the institution of marriage,”
William J. Bennett argued on his Empower America website. “When our behavior
does not live up to the standard, we have two choices: We can change our
behavior or change the standard.” Proponents of gay marriage, Bennett
claimed, “would change the standard.”
The culprits were not just ‘radical homosexual
activists’ but the much broader “sexual revolution, which replaced the
traditional marriage ethic with a code that has sought to free both marriage
and human sexuality from restraint and commitment.”
When portrayed in this way, it would appear that both
conservatives and liberals could agree with Adrian Walker’s characterization
of the Massachusetts court decision in the November 20 Boston Globe:
“Ultimately, this decision recognizes, and codifies, social changes that
have been evolving over decades.” For proponents, this was why same-sex
marriage should be legally recognized; for opponents, precisely why they
shouldn’t be.
If social acceptance of same-sex couples was only one
(small) part of a much bigger threat to marriage, then why was the religious
right so vociferous about it?
Mobilization against same-sex marriage can draw on the
considerable prejudice against homosexuals that remains in the general
population, with or without the help of the religious right. Homosexuals
made easier scapegoats than sexy young adults, struggling single moms, or
disenchanted divorcés.
For like it or not, premarital sex, divorce,
cohabitation, and out-of-wedlock childbirth have all been widely accepted,
if not entirely embraced, as facts of contemporary social life. Those horses
are out of the barn.
While the overwhelming public response to the religious
right’s objections to changes in American sexual and family norms has been a
resounding “Butt out,” same-sex marriage has been like a “shot of
adrenaline” for the movement, as Sandy Rios, president of Concerned Women
for America, explained to Nancy Benac of the Associated Press on November
24. The issue “promises to reopen the flow of financial contributions to
their advocacy groups that had slowed to a trickle when Republicans took
over Washington,” the New York Times’ David D. Kirkpatrick reported
February 8.
The main reason, however, for the religious right’s
focus on gay marriage seemed to be that so many within that fold were
genuinely terrified by the prospect. Legally sanctioned gay marriages from
this viewpoint place American society at the bottom of a slippery slope,
teetering on the edge of moral chaos.
“What is happening in our culture,” wrote conservative
syndicated columnist Cal Thomas November 18, “is an unraveling of all we
once considered normal….It is like morally corrupt ancient Israel when there
was no king ‘and everyone did what was right in his own eyes’ (Judges
21:25).”
Many see marriage, family, and church as refuges of
moral order in a society increasingly characterized by moral anarchy. Gay
marriage, to say nothing of the ordination of gay bishops, suggests that the
chaos is now moving into the safe zone.
Advocates of same-sex marriage and other alternative
family forms, says a statement on family values by the Alliance Defense
Fund, “scoff at the idea that there is any set of values or beliefs that is
generally good for families or culture.”
Without moral absolutes, anything and everything goes.
“Issues of what’s right and what’s wrong, and what constitutes moral and
immoral, no longer matter,” wrote Thomas a year before the SJC decision in
an article prophetically entitled “The Gay Rights War is Over and We Lost.”
The only arguments that seemed to hold any promise of
bridging the chasm came from a few on the pro same-sex marriage side who
took the religious right’s fears about the dissolution of marriage
seriously. “Gays are not attacking marriage. They want to practice it,”
wrote Washington Post house liberal Richard Cohen in a November 20
column. And by doing so, they provided “the last, best argument” for shoring
up an embattled institution: “love and commitment.”
And from the moderate right came the New York Times’
David Brooks, expressing concern, in a November 22 column, about a “culture
of contingency” in which marriage is treated as valid only as long as it is
enjoyable and convenient.
“You would think that faced with this marriage crisis,
we conservatives would do everything in our power to move as many people as
possible from the path of contingency to the path of fidelity.” The way to
fight moral chaos was by promoting marriage as a “moral commitment, renewed
every day through faithfulness.” Conservatives “shouldn’t just allow gay
marriage. We should insist on gay marriage.”•
|