First, I am acutely sensitive to the maintenance of the family because I have a hobby horse which I ride ceaselessly on these threads: the left is attacking every institution which holds our society together and which holds back the advance of socialism/communism/statism. The attacks on the family were fashioned originally by The Frankfurt School which delivered a 1-2 punch, attacking the family and destroying the father's role as an authority figure within the family. That means That The Frankfurt School and its misbegotten spawn have long aimed to destroy the institution of marriage.
Therefore, I am reflexively hostile to any threat to the institution of marriage because I see it as part of the crimes of cultural marxism arising out of The Frankfurt School. If I am to err, let it always be on the side defending the world against The Frankfurt School.
Let me clear away some of the underbrush. There has been much equating of abortion and homosexual marriage. The objection to abortion is profound and it need not be grounded in religion. Abortion is the killing of a human being not yet born and as such it is indefensible. Moreover, the practice involves the infliction of harm on an innocent victim who in this case cannot defend himself. That certainly is not true of adult homosexuals desirous of entering into a marriage. There cannot be said to be a victim. To the degree that opponents of homosexual marriage are seen to be invoking the law to impose their objections to private conduct, without a victim, the political party which supports them will not be supported by an increasing number of Americans. To the degree that the opponents of homosexual marriage are seen to be invoking the law to punish activity done in private which subjectively makes them squirm, the political party which supports them will not be supported by an increasing number of Americans.
The Question for me becomes, does the very fact of the law sanctioning marriage between couples of the same sex inevitably undermine the institution of marriage between heterosexual couples? I know that the social conservatives are emphatic in holding that the institution of heterosexual marriage will be mortally compromised. But I have never understood exactly why this should be so. I think the belief is that sodomy is such a grotesquerie that to equate it with the God ordained sacrament is to defile marriage. To sanctify sodomy with a solemn and legal marriage certificate is an outrage which defiles marriage.
It seems to me that this reaction is a subjective one and that means that one man's subjective reaction is as valid as another man's. Some people are troubled by this and some people are not. I have trouble declaring that one reaction ought to be elevated in the law over the other.
There is also the problem that sodomy between consenting adults done in private has been awarded by the Supreme Court the status of constitutional protection. Therefore, no state may prohibit homosexual sex done by adults in private. Evidently, they have a constitutional right of privacy to bugger each other as much as they want.
Parenthetically, it is important to note that almost nobody objects to civil unions or civil contracts which give gays the right of inheritance, custody and visitation, hospital access, and burial rites etc. I am inclined to think that society ought to grant these rights to gays as a matter of course. On the other hand, conservatives rightly reject the notion that someone can declare himself married and thereby obtain benefits from the government to which he would not otherwise be entitled. I am very much in sympathy with this position. Hence one source of my ambivalence.
So opponents of homosexual marriage are being forced onto an ever narrowing land bridge. On one hand the activity sanctified by marriage, homosexual sex, has already been sanctified by the Supreme Court and is therefore perfectly legal. On the other hand the majority of Americans agree that virtually all the benefits of marriage should be accorded homosexuals by virtue of their choosing to enter into a civil contract. So the narrow land bridge says that homosexuals can do everything else married couples can do except go through a ceremony which is acknowledged by the state. The problem with this remaining remnant of dry land from which to object to homosexual marriage is that homosexuals can easily find some church which will conduct the ceremony. So opponents of homosexual marriage are reduced to maintaining the hollow position that the church ceremony, which practically can be done at will, may not be acknowledged by the state.
As the ground under the feet of those who object to homosexual marriage continues to erode, it is becoming clearer that they are on the wrong side of history. That is not necessarily a good thing. Not a good thing for our society and, unfortunately, not a good thing for the conservative movement.
There is an argument which weighs on behalf of the opponents of gay marriage. The historical fact is that marriage is and always has been inextricably bound up in religion and it is a deep tradition in our culture that marriage is done according to the precepts of our Judeo Christian heritage. Clearly, homosexual marriage is explicitly and provocatively contrary to those faiths. Religion has given birth to the concept of marriage and as such it has a claim on the concept. It is a claim that says if you want a make a marriage you must do it according to our precepts, if you want to behave contrary to our precepts you must call it something else: a "civil union" would be a good name.
This argument says that it is important to protect the sanctity of marriage from degrading it by associating it with sodomy. I am sympathetic to this view because as I stated at the beginning, if you destroy the family you have gone a long way toward destroying any resistance to the kind of society people like Barack Obama would like to impose on us.
But I am not so sympathetic as to go to the wall to protect the institution of marriage from a threat which I see to be attenuated and probably inevitable when to do might compromise other important precepts of conservatism resulting in the very real sacrifice of real victims- like unborn babies.
I read the reasons in this article which the author invokes to argue that homosexual marriage is "harmful." I remain unconvinced that there is a connection between the "reasons" he adduces and harm to the institution of marriage. That, of course, is a different issue than whether homosexual marriage is somehow harmful to society.
Where is society today? It is in a state of flux as a result of cultural and technological forces which have not yet fully played out but which clearly are resulting in degrading the institution of marriage. Culturally, we are in the post Murphy Brown age in which Vice President Dan Quayle was rounded upon by the keepers of our culture when he rebuked the network for holding up unwed motherhood as a desirable state. Today, nearly 70% of African-American births produced bastards as do an increasing number of whites, nearing or exceeding the 40% mark. Clearly, the culture has passed the institution of marriage by. That is not to endorse this trend in the culture but merely to remark it.
Technology has also had a profound role to play. Long before Murphy Brown, around 1960, a seismic event occurred which has profoundly altered not just marriage but our entire culture. It was then that the pill was introduced and with it the virtual assurance of an ability to control pregnancy and procreation. Marriage as an institution was designed to manage those theretofore uncontrollable realities. As those realities became controllable, the need for marriage declined. The culture was further modified even before the pill by the introduction of penicillin which brought venereal disease largely under control, thus eliminating another practical need for the monogamy theoretically associated with marriage.
The women's movement perversely brought us no-fault divorce which has destroyed more marriages that homosexual marriage possibly could. The change in our divorce laws cannot occur in a vacuum and it is impossible to insist that our marriage laws will not change as the culture, technology and divorce laws all sweep past the institution.
Of all the places for conservatism to place its energy, opposition to homosexual marriage will produce fewer fruits, the greater blowback, and risk portraying the conservative movement as having been overrun by history.
One final thought, we ought as conservatives to distinguish between opposition to court sanctioning of homosexual marriage, especially rulings by federal courts, and referenda or actions of state legislatures who are representatives of the people. We have sound constitutional grounds to object to the courts sanctioning homosexual marriage against the will of the people, especially as it was expressed by referendum in California, for example. As a matter of philosophy we should object to the tyranny of judges, they have no special expertise or authority to decide these issues. There is no federal constitutional right to sodomize, even in private, despite what the courts say and, by implication, there is no federal constitutional right to legitimize buggery with matrimony.
If the states acting through their elected representatives or through referenda decide to legitimize homosexual marriage, that is quite another thing.
