(10:10 PM) | Adam Kotsko:

Protecting the Family

At the church where Richard and Kari's wedding took place, they had a petition in support of some kind of law or constitutional amendment that would limit marriage to one man with one woman. This would be in the interests of protecting the family. (A brief sidenote: when people talk about "the family" in generic terms, does it ever seem to be some kind of vague Mafia reference? "This policy will be good for The Family. I'm going to offer you a constitutional amendment that you can't refuse to ratify," etc.) Although no one around me at the time wanted to talk about it, I made a couple points vis-a-vis this petition:

1. If homosexual marriage is legalized, heterosexual marriage will continue to enjoy the same legal protections it currently enjoys. No one's talking about outlawing traditional marriage.
   
2. If homosexual marriage were legalized, the overwhelming majority of people would not avail themselves of the opportunity. For most people, marrying a member of the same sex is not a real alternative to marrying a member of the opposite sex.

In essence, legalizing gay marriage would affect very few people. It would grant legal protections mainly to people who would have settled down in de facto monogamous relationships anyway. It would be more likely to encourage greater commitment in the gay community than it would be to encourage more people to become homosexual -- I doubt that there are any people out there who would really enjoy having gay sex, but are waiting until gay couples have the same legal rights as straight couples.

There are a ton of conservative (in the literal, not political, sense of the word) ways to justify the idea of gay marriage, at least in the United States today, but I think the most compelling one is the one that Andrew Sullivan and David Brooks go out of their way not to mention: it would shut the gay community up. They would have absolutely the same legal protection as straight people. The state would even go so far as to formally recognize their long-term, committed relationships and grant them certain privileges for seeking that recognition. Since the state would be giving them exactly what they asked for, they would lose all credibility in the public eye if they were to continue to claim persecuted minority status. This whole ugly debate would be over, and the mainstream press could talk about other things (although the Christian press would likely continue to fight the battle long after everyone else stopped giving a shit, since kicking dead horses seems to be the special role of Christianity in the modern world). Instead of having an unsightly, highly publicized subculture that glorifies promiscuity and sexual transgression, we would have a group of people just trying their best to be productive and responsible members of society. We'd perhaps lose out on a little tax money here and there, but the dramatic rise of fashion sense per capita after the complete mainstreaming of the gay community would more than make up for it.

This is all based on the theory that the surest way to undermine a revolutionary movement is to give in to its immediate demands. It has a lot of cool applications -- for instance, we absolutely should cave into al Qaeda's demands that we move our troops out of Saudi Arabia. For every token gesture we make, token gestures that fulfill the letter of their demands, it's that much less international credibility that the terrorists have. Once we've granted bin Laden the things that he's been complaining about for decades, if his organization continued to behave in a terrorist manner, the "Arab street" might start to think that bin Laden is a power-hungry nihilist who was just looking for convenient excuses to launch attacks against a nation he was already predisposed to dislike.

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