By Robin Phillips
Neither side in the same-sex ‘marriage’ debate could claim that the Supreme Court’s ruling last Wednesday came as a decisive victory. Nevertheless, there were some definite winners and losers. Let’s begin by looking at the losers.
The Losers
Wednesday Was a Bad Day for Christians
Significantly, the Supreme Court did not ‘discover’ a right to gay ‘marriage’ in America’s constitution. Nevertheless, by declaring that it is unconstitutional for the federal government to limit marriage to a relationship between a man and a woman, the Court paved the way for gay marriage to be implemented throughout the states. As more and more states pass laws to change the definition of marriage, the inconsistency will be highlighted. After all, is it really fair for a couple to be ‘married’ in Washington but not married once they cross over the border into Idaho? Faced with this inconsistency, it will probably be only a matter of time before all 50 states begin approving same-sex ‘marriage.’ As this happens, Christians will be the first to suffer.
The reason we know that Christians will suffer is because that is exactly what happened in Canada, the first English-speaking country to legalize gay ‘marriage.’ Since 2005 when Canadians changed their definition of marriage, Christian business owners, florists, caterers, educators and many others have all found themselves prosecuted for their refusal to recognize gay ‘marriages’ or participate in gay weddings. Some of these cases were highlighted by Michael Coren last year in an article for The National Review Online titled, ‘Canadian Crackdown’ :
Although precise figures about gay marriages in Canada are elusive, there are thought to be fewer than 30,000, after an initial surge of around 10,000 as soon as the law was passed. But if large numbers of gay people failed to take advantage of the law, the law certainly took advantage of its critics. Again, definitive figures are almost impossible to state, but it’s estimated that, in less than five years, there have been between 200 and 300 proceedings — in courts, human-rights commissions, and employment boards — against critics and opponents of same-sex marriage. And this estimate doesn’t take into account the casual dismissals that surely have occurred….
As I write, two Canadian provinces are considering legislation that would likely prevent educators even in private denominational schools from teaching that they disapprove of same-sex marriage, and a senior government minister in Ontario recently announced that if the Roman Catholic Church did not approve of homosexuality or gay marriage, it “would have to change its teaching.” What has become painfully evident is that many of those who brought same-sex marriage to Canada have no respect for freedom of conscience and no intention of tolerating contrary opinion, whether that opinion is shaped by religious or by secular belief.
(For more about the challenges faced by Christians when same-sex ‘marriage’ is legalized, see myth #3 in my article ‘Five Gay Marriage Myths.’)
Wednesday Was a Bad Day for Children
The Supreme Court Ruling did not codify same-sex ‘marriage’, but it did create the legal space for same-sex ‘marriage’ to begin to be mainstreamed in the states. The collateral effect of this cannot be overstated, since it will inevitably help to reinforce the notion that moms and dads are interchangeable. The logic for this spurious notion is already substantially in place. Listen to what Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse said in an article reflecting on her debate with Judith Stacey:
I crossed swords with Judith Stacey…at a debate at Bowling Green State a few years ago. I asked her point blank if she believed men and women were completely interchangeable as parents. In front of that very friendly audience, she said absolutely: the gender of parents doesn’t matter….
Treating same sex unions like marriage amounts to saying that mothers and fathers are interchangeable. It is a coin toss from a child’s point of view, whether they have two moms, two dads, or one of each.
The damage caused by this spurious notion that moms and dads are interchangeable is felt most directly by the children. As Ryan T. Anderson explains,
Social science claiming to show that there are “no differences” in outcomes for children raised in same-sex households does not change this reality. In fact, the most recent, sophisticated studies suggest that prior research is inadequate to support the assertion that it makes “no difference” whether a child was raised by same-sex parents. [See Jason Richwine and Jennifer A. Marshall, “The Regnerus Study: Social Science and New Family Structures Met with Intolerance,” Heritage Foundation Backgrounder No. 2726, October 2, 2012] A survey of 59 of the most prominent studies often cited for this claim shows that they drew primarily from small convenience samples that are not appropriate for generalizations to the whole population. [Loren Marks, “Same-Sex Parenting and Children’s Outcomes: A Closer Examination of the American Psychological Association’s Brief on Lesbian and Gay Parenting,” Social Science Research, Vol. 41, No. 4 (July 2012).]
Meanwhile, recent studies using rigorous methods and robust samples confirm that children do better when raised by a married mother and father. These include the New Family Structures Study by Professor Mark Regnerus at the University of Texas–Austin [See Children from Different Families, http://www.familystructurestudies.com/] and a report based on Census data recently released in the highly respected journal Demography. [Douglas W. Allen, Catherine Pakaluk, and Joseph Price, “Nontraditional Families and Childhood Progress Through School: A Comment on Rosenfeld,” Demography, November 2012.] Recognizing same-sex relationships as marriages would legally abolish that ideal. It would deny the significance of both mothering and fathering to children: that boys and girls tend to benefit from fathers and mothers in different ways. Indeed, the law, public schools, and media would teach that mothers and fathers are fully interchangeable and that thinking otherwise is bigoted.
(For further reading, see my post ‘Gender Matters.’)
Wednesday Was a Bad Day for Friendships
In his Nicomachean Ethics Aristotle showed that laws create norms for citizens which implant certain notions of virtue on their souls. The laws contribute to the formation of how we think and perceive the world around us. Aristotle was right, but the principle he understood works both ways. Bad laws enshrine norms on the public consciousness that reinforce destructive and soul-destroying patterns of thought.
What are the destructive patterns of thoughts created by rulings that create the legal space for same-sex ‘marriage’? We have already seen one, which is that moms and dads are completely interchangeable. Another destructive pattern of thought concerns friendships.
As the logic behind ‘gay marriage’ becomes increasingly accepted, many citizens are increasingly coming to think that marriage is simply an intense emotional bond, with no necessary connection to procreation or child-rearing, and no fixed core other than the consent of two adults who love each other. In fact, both law-makers and homosexual activists have steered away from asserting that the sexual dimension is central to the essence of a same-sex ‘marriage,’ as I showed in my article ‘Gay Marriage Becomes a Joke‘ and ‘Gay Marriage and the Revenge of the Gnostics‘ and in my article ‘Why Gay Marriage is a Public Threat (part 1).‘
In their book What is Marriage?, Girgis, Anderson and George show that by redefining marriage to mean simply an emotional union of persons, the difference between marriage and friendship becomes purely quantitative rather than qualitative. As Girgis, Anderson and George explain,
Misunderstandings about marriage will also speed our society’s drought of deep friendship, with special harm to the unmarried. The state will have defined marriage mainly by degree or intensity – as offering the most of what makes any relationship valuable: shared emotion and experience./ It will thus become less acceptable to seek (and harder to find) emotional and spiritual intimacy in nonmarital friendships. These will come to be seen not as different from marriage (and thus distinctively appealing), but simply as less. … A critical point here is that marriage and ordinary friendship do not simply offer different degrees of the same type of human good, like two checks written in different amounts. Nor are they simply varieties of the same good, like the enjoyment of a Matisse and the enjoyment of a Van Gogh. Each is its own kind of good, a way of thriving that is different in kind from the other. Hence, while spouses should be friends, what it takes to be a good friend is not just the same as what it takes to be a good spouse.
Wednesday Was a Bad Day for Most Americans
You would be forgiven for thinking that Wednesday’s ruling was welcome to most Americans. That is certainly how the media is portraying it. However, most Americans are actually opposed to changing the definition of marriage. In Ryan T. Anderson’s article ‘On Marriage, Inevitability Is a Choice We Can Reject’, he shares some fascinating facts:
Citizens have gone to the polls to vote about marriage in 35 states. The truth about marriage has prevailed 32 of those 35 times. In only three states have citizens voted to redefine marriage—all in the 2012 election—and in each state the truth about marriage far outperformed the Republican presidential candidate. For example, in liberal Maryland, Mitt Romney received 36 percent of the vote, while marriage received 48 percent.
All this in a campaign in which proponents of redefinition had a 4:1 financial advantage and the backing of national figures: President Obama, Vice President Biden, governors, and a host of business, sports, and entertainment leaders.
Wednesday’s ruling guarantees that the voice of most Americans will continue to be marginalized. Take their ruling on Hollingsworth v. Perry, which was brought to the Supreme Court after California executives refused to enforce a constitutional amendment that voters had enacted to limit marriage to a union between a man and a woman. The governor of California, emboldened by the Supreme Court ruling, has instructed government officials to disregard Proposition 8, thus bypassing the democratic process. This portends a dangerous shift in the balance of power away from representative government, for it gives the executive branch in the states authority to nullify duly enacted laws they do not approve.
Wednesday Was a Bad Day for the Practice of Monogamy
In discussing the differences between heterosexual unions and homosexual unions, Dermot O’Callaghan noted the tendency for homosexual men to downplay the importance of Monogamy. The notion that “Fidelity is not between your legs but between your ears” (quoted in When Gay People Get Married, p. 95) is a typical position within the homosexual community. Up to now, such ideas have been sequestered to the homosexual community; however, as gay marriage becomes legal in more and more American states, we should expect to see cross-fertilization between homosexual and heterosexual notions of faithfulness under the concept of the new understanding of marriage implicated by the change of law.
Don’t take my word for it that homosexual ‘marriage’ tends towards non-monogamy. Their own writings clearly establish this. Dermot O’Callaghan writes that
A study called The Male Couple found that “all couples with a relationship lasting more than five years have incorporated some provision for outside sexual activity …”
Another study, Beyond Monogamy, indicates “a positive correlation between longevity and non-monogamy.” It says, “… non-monogamy isn’t by nature de-stabilizing. In fact, the results of this study would suggest the opposite – many study couples said non-monogamy enabled them to stay together”.
The agony of non-monogamy amongst gay men surfaces repeatedly in the literature. Other terms include:
– Negotiated Non-monogamy etc.
Ryan Anderson has also showed just how mainstream the polemics against monogamy are among the homosexual community:
Andrew Sullivan, who has extolled the “spirituality” of “anonymous sex,” also thinks that the “openness” of same-sex unions could enhance the bonds of husbands and wives:
Same-sex unions often incorporate the virtues of friendship more effectively than traditional marriages; and at times, among gay male relationships, the openness of the contract makes it more likely to survive than many heterosexual bonds.… [T]here is more likely to be greater understanding of the need for extramarital outlets between two men than between a man and a woman.… [S]omething of the gay relationship’s necessary honesty, its flexibility, and its equality could undoubtedly help strengthen and inform many heterosexual bonds.
“Openness” and “flexibility” are Sullivan’s euphemisms for sexual infidelity. Similarly, in a New York Times Magazine profile, gay activist Dan Savage encourages spouses to adopt “a more flexible attitude” about allowing each other to seek sex outside their marriage. The New York Times recently reported on a study finding that exclusivity was not the norm among gay partners: “‘With straight people, it’s called affairs or cheating,’ said Colleen Hoff, the study’s principal investigator, ‘but with gay people it does not have such negative connotations.’”
A piece in The Advocate candidly admits where the logic of redefining marriage to include same-sex relationships leads (and notice what the author thinks of his opponents): “Anti-equality right-wingers have long insisted that allowing gays to marry will destroy the sanctity of “traditional marriage,” and, of course, the logical, liberal party-line response has long been “No, it won’t.” But what if—for once—the sanctimonious crazies are right? Could the gay male tradition of open relationships actually alter marriage as we know it? And would that be such a bad thing?”
The Winners
Wednesday Was a Good Day for Polygamists and Polyamorists
Any reference to polygamy in the public discourse has tended to be dismissed as conservative scare mongering and ‘slippery slope’ speculation. Of course, they say, legalizing same-sex ‘marriage’ won’t open the door to polygamy.
But consider. The Supreme Court kicked the problem of defining marriage into the lap of America’s 50 states, each of which is now tasked with the monumental authority of deciding for themselves what the definition of marriage will be within their borders. But if each and every state must now decide for itself what the meaning of marriage is, then in principle the field is wide open. If it is wrong to exclude homosexuals from getting married, why is it okay to exclude polygamists from getting married, or bisexuals, some of whom must have at least two spouses (one from each gender) in order to be sexually fulfilled?
Significantly, Anne Wilde, one of America’s leading advocates for polygamist rights, commented on the ruling, “I was very glad… The nuclear family, with a dad and a mom and two or three kids, is not the majority anymore.”
Joe Darger, a polygamist in Utah, said, “We’re very happy with it. I think [the court] has taken a step in correcting some inequality, and that’s certainly something that’s going to trickle down and impact us.”
Meanwhile, pro-polygamy journalists are cashing in on the moment to write articles showing that the acceptance of polygamy follows naturally from the same logic that pursued by those advocating same-sex ‘marriage.’ (See Matt Lewis’ article ‘The Case for Polygamy’ and McKay Coppins’s article ‘Polygamists Celebrate Supreme Court’s Marriage Rulings’.)
Already the stage is set for protracted legal battles challenging the constitutionality of America’s anti-polygamy rules. To quote again from Ryan Anderson’s article,
A federal judge in Utah allowed a legal challenge to anti-bigamy laws. A bill that would allow a child to have three legal parents passed both houses of the California state legislature in 2012 before it was vetoed by the governor, who claimed he wanted “to take more time to consider all of the implications of this change.” The impetus for the bill was a lesbian same-sex relationship in which one partner was impregnated by a man. The child possessed a biological mother and father, but the law recognized the biological mother and her same-sex spouse, a “presumed mother,” as the child’s parents.
The same holds true of polyamorists, those who want the benefits of polygamy without marital bonds. Ryan Anderson:
If sexual complementarity is eliminated as an essential characteristic of marriage, then no principle limits civil marriage to monogamous couples….
New York University Professor Judith Stacey has expressed hope that redefining marriage would give marriage “varied, creative, and adaptive contours,” leading some to “question the dyadic limitations of Western marriage and seek…small group marriages.” In their statement “Beyond Same-Sex Marriage,” more than 300 “LGBT and allied” scholars and advocates call for legally recognizing sexual relationships involving more than two partners.
University of Calgary Professor Elizabeth Brake thinks that justice requires using legal recognition to “denormalize[] heterosexual monogamy as a way of life” and “rectif[y] past discrimination against homosexuals, bisexuals, polygamists, and care networks.” She supports “minimal marriage,” in which “individuals can have legal marital relationships with more than one person, reciprocally or asymmetrically, themselves determining the sex and number of parties, the type of relationship involved, and which rights and responsibilities to exchange with each.”
In 2009, Newsweek reported that the United States already had over 500,000 polyamorous households.[34] The author concluded:
[P]erhaps the practice is more natural than we think: a response to the challenges of monogamous relationships, whose shortcomings…are clear. Everyone in a relationship wrestles at some point with an eternal question: can one person really satisfy every need? Polyamorists think the answer is obvious—and that it’s only a matter of time before the monogamous world sees there’s more than one way to live and love.
A 2012 article in New York Magazine introduced Americans to “throuple,” a new term akin to a “couple,” but with three people whose “throuplehood is more or less a permanent domestic arrangement. The three men work together, raise dogs together, sleep together, miss one another, collect art together, travel together, bring each other glasses of water, and, in general, exemplify a modern, adult relationship. Except that there are three of them.”
Wednesday Was a Good Day for Homosexuals
At the beginning of the court proceedings, lawyer Ted Olson, representing those in favour of same sex marriage, let the cat out of the bag that these cases actually were not about equal rights, but normalization. He said, “marriage…is a matter of status and recognition.” (See my ‘Normalizing Perversion’ and ‘Normalcy Fields and Homosexual Acceptance.’)
Yes, same-sex couples want to get access to the same tax breaks and financial benefits of those in a real marriage, but this tends to be secondary to their more basic goal of changing how we think about homosexual activity. This is also a point that Andrew Sullivan made in his book Virtually Normal: An Argument About Homosexuality. He concludes the book by arguing that changing the definition of marriage to include same-sex couples would have a humanising and traditionalising effect on homosexuality.
This goal of normalization took a giant leap towards being realized on Wednesday when the Supreme Court declared in all seriousness that the federal government has no right to say what it means by marriage in its own laws and programs. This creates the conceptual space for being able to call a same-sex relationship a ‘marriage’, which can only result in homosexual behaviour continuing to be normalized in the minds of the American public.
The sinister side of normalization is that it can only survive if the opposing view—that marriage is a union only of a man and a woman—is delegitimised, even criminalized. The hand-writing is already on the wall that this is what we can expect. To quote again from Ryan Anderson’s article, ‘Marriage: What It Is, Why It Matters, and the Consequences of Redefining It’,
The law and culture will seek to eradicate such views through economic, social, and legal pressure. If marriage is redefined, believing what virtually every human society once believed about marriage—a union of a man and woman ordered to procreation and family life—would be seen increasingly as a malicious prejudice to be driven to the margins of culture. The consequences for religious believers are becoming apparent.
The administrative state may require those who contract with the government, receive governmental monies, or work directly for the state to embrace and promote same-sex marriage even if it violates their religious beliefs. Nondiscrimination law may make even private actors with no legal or financial ties to the government—including businesses and religious organizations—liable to civil suits for refusing to treat same-sex relationships as marriages. Finally, private actors in a culture that is now hostile to traditional views of marriage may discipline, fire, or deny professional certification to those who express support for traditional marriage.
In fact, much of this is already occurring. Heritage Foundation Visiting Fellow Thomas Messner has documented multiple instances in which redefining marriage has already become a nightmare for religious liberty. If marriage is redefined to include same-sex relationships, then those who continue to believe the truth about marriage—that it is by nature a union of a man and a woman—would face three different types of threats to their liberty: the administrative state, nondiscrimination law, and private actors in a culture that is now hostile to traditional views.
After Massachusetts redefined marriage to include same-sex relationships, Catholic Charities of Boston was forced to discontinue its adoption services rather than place children with same-sex couples against its principles. Massachusetts public schools began teaching grade-school students about same-sex marriage, defending their decision because they are “committed to teaching about the world they live in, and in Massachusetts same-sex marriage is legal.” A Massachusetts appellate court ruled that parents have no right to exempt their children from these classes.
The New Mexico Human Rights Commission prosecuted a photographer for declining to photograph a same-sex “commitment ceremony.” Doctors in California were successfully sued for declining to perform an artificial insemination on a woman in a same-sex relationship. Owners of a bed and breakfast in Illinois who declined to rent their facility for a same-sex civil union ceremony and reception were sued for violating the state nondiscrimination law. A Georgia counselor was fired after she referred someone in a same-sex relationship to another counselor. In fact, the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty reports that “over 350 separate state anti-discrimination provisions would likely be triggered by recognition of same-sex marriage.”
Wednesday Was a Good Day for Statists and Totalitarians
In the aftermath of Wednesday’s decision, one important point has been overlooked by nearly everyone. I refer to the fact that the Supreme Court has made clear that without the intervention of government (in this case, the government of each state), there is no pre-political, existential state of affairs that mark certain types of relationships out as being marriage within a state of nature.
Although there are over a thousand references to marriage in federal laws and programs, the Supreme Court has now declared that the federal government cannot actually say what marriage means. The God-like authority to determine what makes a marriage a marriage, and by extension what makes a family a family, is now up to each individual state. But by declaring that each state can determine for itself which collections of individuals constitute a ‘family’, the Court has implied that both marriage and family are little more than legal constructs at best, and gifts from government at worst. In the former case, marriage and family lose their objective fixity; in the latter case, we all become wards of the state.
For consider, if the meaning of marriage did have an objective fixity prior to positive law, then it would make no more sense to let the states define it than it would to let them define what is meant by the colour red in the traffic code.
Properly understood, heterosexual marriage exists in nature and is then recognized by the state on the basis of intrinsic goods attached to it; by contrast, homosexual marriage is an abstract legal entity with no natural or existential existence. Since neither consummation nor biologically-derived intrinsic goods are viable concepts among same-sex couples, it follows that the only way a consensual relationship between two people of the same sex can be upgraded into marriage is if the state steps in and declares that relationship to be a marriage, in much the same way as the state might declare something to be a corporation or some other legal entity.
Once we appreciate this fact, we see that same-sex ‘marriage’ is actually the totalitarian option. Once gay ‘marriage’ is introduced into a state, it undermines the integrity of every family and every marriage in the nation by rearranging the family’s relationship to government. Same-sex marriage would rearrange the relationship between family and state by making our most vital connections merely the result of positive law. For without the mechanisms of the state to confer the status of marriage upon two members of the same sex, there are no acts that organically mark their union out as being a specifically marital one. The existential reality of the relationship, which is usually explained in terms of a commitment of love between two consenting adults, does not itself distinguish that relationship from numerous other sorts of loving relationships that exist in this world. So what is it that sets this type of relationship apart to make it ‘marital’? Again, the answer is that it can only be the state.
But here’s the rub: once we concede that same-sex ‘marriage’ is purely the creation of positive law, then for these ‘marriages’ to be truly equal to heterosexual ones, we would have to acknowledge that EVERY marriage and family comes after political institutions rather than before them. This concedes to the state the power to determine what collections of individuals are a marriage or a family, rather than acknowledging that the state merely recognizes a reality that precedes itself and exists within a state of nature, lat alone as a primary institution of Almighty God.
Ironically, by their refusal to acknowledge that the federal government can actually recognize a specific meaning to the word ‘marriage’, the Supreme Court acted in the most totalitarian way conceivable, for once again it implies that our most vital connections are merely the result of positive law. At first the significance of this is purely symbolic and abstract, but it cannot remain so for long. Eventually, the ubiquitous effects of this rearrangement cannot but be felt at every level of family life.
Consider, when a family sits down at the table to eat together, there is a huge practical difference if they think they are only a family because of bonds created by the state vs. if they think they are a family because of bonds that are natural and pre-political. When a son says, “that’s my Dad” or a man says “that’s my wife”, the meaning is completely different if you think these relationships are purely legal constructs instead of natural, pre-political realities. Canadian Douglas Farrow gave further examples of these ubiquitous effects after that nation legalized same-sex ‘marriage.’ In his article ‘Why Fight Same-Sex Marriage?’ he commented: “Six years ago, when same-sex marriage became law in Canada, the new legislation quietly acknowledged this [that family is nothing more than a legal construct]. In its consequential amendments section, Bill C-38 struck out the language of ‘natural parent,’ ‘blood relationship,’ etc., from all Canadian laws. Wherever they were found, these expressions were replaced with ‘legal parent,’ ‘legal relationship,’ and so forth. That was strictly necessary. ‘Marriage’ was now a legal fiction, a tool of the state, not a natural and pre-political institution recognized and in certain respects (age, consanguinity, consent, exclusivity) regulated by the state.”
(To read more about the totalitarian implications of gay ‘marriage’, see John Milbank’s excellent article, ‘The impossibility of gay marriage and the threat of biopolitical control’ or my article ‘Why Gay Marriage is a Public Threat Part 1.’
Wednesday Was a Good Day for Feminists
Ever since the mid-twentieth century, there has been a very vocal strain of feminists who have been calling for the destruction of marriage. The strange thing is that now scores of public thinkers who were previously opposed to marriage are now singing the praises of ‘gay marriage’ precisely because this is seen as a way to deconstruct the family and redefine marriage into oblivion and meaninglessness.
Throughout the seventies, eighties and nineties it was commonplace for feminists to condemn the matrimonial state. This can be seen in the way Catharine MacKinnon, like other second-wave feminists, have compared sexual intercourse within marriage to rape, saying, “What in the liberal view looks like love and romance looks a lot like hatred and torture to the feminist. Pleasure and eroticism become violation. (Catherine A. MacKinnon, Applications of Feminist Legal Theory to Women’s Lives, Temple University Press, 1996), p. 39.) Elsewhere the Harvard Press author said, “The major distinction between intercourse (normal) and rape (abnormal) is that normal happens so often that one cannot get anyone to see anything wrong with it.” (Catherine A. MacKinnon, quoted by Christina Hoff Sommers, “Hard-Line Feminists Guilty of Ms.-Representation,” Wall Street Journal, November 7, 1991.)
Feminist author and journalist Jill Johnson was equally unbending in her antipathy to marriage. Writing in 1973, she commented that “Until all women are lesbians, there will be no true political revolution.” (Jill Johnson, Lesbian Nation: The Feminist Solution, New York: Simon and Schuster, 1973.) This echoed a whole body of feminist and lesbian literature aimed at discrediting marriage. Here is just a sampling of some of the statements from this corpus:
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“Like prostitution, marriage is an institution that is extremely oppressive and dangerous for women.” Andrea Dworkin, ‘Feminism: An Agenda’ (Letters from a War Zone, Brooklyn, NY: Lawrence Hill Books, 1993), p. 146.
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“Feminism stresses the indistinguishability of prostitution, marriage, and sexual harassment.” Catharine MacKinnon, Feminism Unmodified: Discourses on Life and Law (Harvard University Press, 1987), p. 59.
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“We can’t destroy the inequities between men and women until we destroy marriage.” Robin Morgan Sisterhood is Powerful (New York: Random House, 1970), p. 537
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“We have to abolish and reform the institution of marriage.” Gloria Steinem, cited in the Saturday Review of Education, March 1973.
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“Legal marriage thus enlists state support for conditions conducive to murder and mayhem.” Claudia Card ‘Against Marriage and Motherhood’(Hypatia, vol. 11, no. 3, Summer 1996).
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“Being a housewife is an illegitimate profession…the choice to serve and be protected and plan towards being a family-maker is a choice that shouldn’t be. The heart of radical feminism is to change that.” Vivian Gornick, The Daily Illini, April 25, 1981.
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“If women are to effect a significant amelioration in their condition it seems obvious that they must refuse to marry…The plight of mothers is more desperate than that of other women, and the more numerous the children the more hopeless the situation seems to be…Most women…would shrink at the notion of leaving husband and children, but this is precisely the case in which brutally clear rethinking must be undertaken.” Germaine Greer, The Female Eunuch (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1971), pp. 317 & 320.
By now you should get the picture. It isn’t complicated. The narrative is essentially marriage is bad and must be destroyed.
Now fast-forward to the present and what do you find? You find many of these same writers are now agitating for gay marriage. Why is this? Have they suddenly had a major ideological shift to go from anti-marriage to pro-marriage? No. Their agenda is consistent but their tactics have changed. They now realize that little can be achieved on the large scale through explicit calls for the abolition of marriage and therefore they have settled on a new strategy that seeks the same ends while ostensibly placing a high valuation on the institution of marriage. Only in this way can they successfully shift the unconscious normalcy fields in ways consonant with their long-term goals.
This isn’t just speculation on my part. Dozens of public feminist figures (including Gloria Steinem, quoted above, in addition to leading activists, scholars, educators, writers, artists, lawyers, journalists, and community organizers) signed a joint statement in the summer of 2006 entitled, ‘Beyond Same-Sex Marriage: A New Strategic Vision for All Our Families and Relationships.’ This statement argues that those who are advancing same-sex ‘marriage’ have not gone far enough. The statement argues that traditional nuclear families are no longer the norm and that government needs to be more elastic in what it considers to be “legitimate families.” They write, “The struggle for same-sex marriage rights is only one part of a larger effort to strengthen the security and stability of diverse households and families.” How diverse? The Statement suggests that anyone living together should be considered a family, including “Close friends and siblings who live together in long-term, committed, non-conjugal relationships…” It also suggests that “legitimate families” can involve people who don’t live together, including “Queer couples who decide to jointly create and raise a child with another queer person or couple, in two households.”
What is going on here shouldn’t be difficult to grasp. When marriage and family can mean anything, then marriage and family will mean nothing, which is what the radical feminists have wanted all along. Supporting ‘gay marriage’ is simply one stop along the itinerary towards the destruction of the family. Some feminists, such as Masha Gessen, have been candid enough to acknowledge this. (See the video ‘Gay Marriage Activist Reveals Movement’s True Agenda: Destroy Marriage.’) Ryan Anderson reminds us that
Leading LGBT advocates admit that redefining marriage changes its meaning. E. J. Graff celebrates the fact that redefining marriage would change the “institution’s message” so that it would “ever after stand for sexual choice, for cutting the link between sex and diapers.” Enacting same-sex marriage, she argues, “does more than just fit; it announces that marriage has changed shape.” Andrew Sullivan says that marriage has become “primarily a way in which two adults affirm their emotional commitment to one another….
New York University Professor Judith Stacey has expressed hope that redefining marriage would give marriage “varied, creative, and adaptive contours,” leading some to “question the dyadic limitations of Western marriage and seek…small group marriages.” In their statement “Beyond Same-Sex Marriage,” more than 300 “LGBT and allied” scholars and advocates call for legally recognizing sexual relationships involving more than two partners….
Some advocates of redefining marriage embrace the goal of weakening the institution of marriage in these very terms. “[Former President George W.] Bush is correct,” says Victoria Brownworth, “when he states that allowing same-sex couples to marry will weaken the institution of marriage…. It most certainly will do so, and that will make marriage a far better concept than it previously has been.” Professor Ellen Willis celebrates the fact that “conferring the legitimacy of marriage on homosexual relations will introduce an implicit revolt against the institution into its very heart.”
Michelangelo Signorile urges same-sex couples to “demand the right to marry not as a way of adhering to society’s moral codes but rather to debunk a myth and radically alter an archaic institution.” Same-sex couples should “fight for same-sex marriage and its benefits and then, once granted, redefine the institution of marriage completely, because the most subversive action lesbians and gay men can undertake…is to transform the notion of ‘family’ entirely.”
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