Justin E. H. Smith
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Books consulted for this essay:
John Boswell, Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality: Gay People in Western Europe from the Beginning of the Christian Era to the Fourteenth Century. 8th Edition. University of Chicago Press, 2005.
Robin Fox, Kinship and Marriage: An Anthropological Perspective. Cambridge University Press, 1967.
Maurice Godelier, Les métamorphoses de la parenté. Paris, Fayard, 2004.
Lewis Henry Morgan, Systems of Consanguinity and Affinity of the Human Family. London, 1871.
Martha C. Nussbaum, From Disgust to Humanity: Same-Sex Marriage and Constitutional Law. Oxford University Press, 2010.
Andrew Sullivan, Virtually Normal. An Argument About Homosexuality. Vintage, 1996.
Göran Therborn, Between Sex and Power: Family in the World, 1900-2000, Routledge, 2004.
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I recently spelled out some of the reasons why I remain doubtful about the prospects for transforming marriage, worldwide, into a gender-indifferent institution. (It is only the worldwide perspective that interests me.) I have not heard, in reply, any substantive arguments against the reasons I give for my doubts, and I have therefore decided that it might be a good idea to try one more time, and this time to make my call for serious engagement more explicit. I would sincerely like to know whether there is something I am missing.
I have been alarmed to see a sort of orthodoxy emerge as if out of nowhere over just the past few years (many of you will be old enough to remember when, in the not-so-distant past, Andrew Sullivan was condemned as a betrayer and a domesticator of the gay spirit for his powerful defense of same-sex marriage in Virtually Normal; I hope no one will try to tell me that everyone who condemned him at the time was, wittingly or un-, an enemy of human rights). This orthodoxy, like its opposite and indeed like all orthodoxies, presumes that any questioning of it amounts to hostility. There is no room in either of the prevailing orthodoxies that have formed around the controversy over same-sex marriage for someone like me: someone who supports marriage equality, but doubts, based on a thorough but admittedly incomplete reading of historical and anthropological scholarship, that the concept of marriage is in fact flexible enough to ever be transformed in such a way that marriage will cease to be heterosexual by presumption.
That is, I believe that we are right to decide to make same-sex unions equal before the law, but that it is not up to us to decide that the primary meaning of 'marriage' will cease to be 'basic unit of kinship, involving the monogamous pair-bonding of a male and a female'. This meaning will remain primary not only because other-sex couples are, as everyone agrees, statistically more common than same-sex couples, but because there is a fairly rigid system of organization in societies throughout the world that continues to be based on a presumption of gender dimorphism, and that continues to take cross-gender pairings as the elementary units of social reality. This is not what I want (I personally couldn't be less interested in 'defending' traditional marriage, though as it happens I don't think it's going to need defending), but rather what I believe to be the case.
I also believe that the movement for marriage equality misunderstands its contingency and ignores the historical forces that brought it into being. One of the triggers of my coming-out as a skeptic occurred a few months ago, when I happened to be speaking with a group of acquaintances who are also outspoken defenders of marriage equality. When quite unexpectedly the topic of first-cousin marriage came up, they began snickering like little boys: like little boys I might add, who in the not so distant past found mirth in every occurrence of the word 'gay'. This caused me to note that there is a certain selectiveness in what counts among educated Western liberals as 'doing the right thing' (a phrase we hear so often, and have heard most recently in connection with the legalization of same-sex marriage in Argentina).
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