The Case for Marriage

"I wrote a book on gay marriage in 2004. And what I found while writing that book is that you can’t make the case for gay marriage, unless you make the case for marriage generally. People need to understand why marriage makes sense in order to understand why gay marriage makes sense. I don’t make the rights-based case – that marriage is a civil right and everyone should be able to do it. I make the responsibility-based case, which is that marriage is something that people should do for the benefit of each other, and their children, and society. Marriage creates family, it creates kin, it creates social capital. It’s the best way to raise children. People who get married are not people that society is doing a favor for – they are doing a favor for society. They are undertaking an extreme promise and burden – of lifelong care of another person and of their children. So I was casting about to make the case for gay marriage and came across what I thought was a wonderful book called the Case for Marriage , which is by a scholar named Linda Waite and by Maggie Gallagher, who is a pro-marriage activist. And one of the reasons I picked this book is that it’s a good book if you want to understand why marriage is such a socially and personally productive thing. But also because, ironically, a couple of years later Maggie Gallagher emerged as one of America’s leading opponents of same-sex marriage. Yes, vigorously. She’s helped found a group called National Organization for Marriage, which is trying to oppose it state by state, and was a key player in opposing it in California. But it’s also ironic. Because if you turn to page four of Maggie Gallagher’s book, you’ll find “ Five Myths of the Post-Marriage Culture. ” And post-marriage myth number two is as follows: “Marriage is mostly about children; if you don’t have kids, it doesn’t matter whether you cohabit or marry or stay single.” She goes on to say that that’s false, and she says: “We will show you how, in some cases, for some people, marriage can literally make the difference between life or death.” Of course that’s exactly the position I take about marriage, and anyone who has lived through the AIDS crisis knows marriage can literally make the difference between life or death. And that’s why I like to send people to this marriage advocate book, to explain why she’s wrong, and why marriage makes sense for gay people – for all the same reasons it makes sense for straight people. The Case for Marriage is still a very good book. It’s just ironic to me, that so many people who made such good traditional arguments, such a compelling traditionalist case for marriage, turn their backs on many of those same arguments when the word homosexual is applied. Well Maggie wasn’t going to do it. What happened was that in 2003, the Supreme Court of the United States struck down the sodomy law as unconstitutional. And that set off a backlash. And one of the things people started saying was ‘Next thing we’ll have homosexual marriage!’ And then of course on November 18th, the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court orders gay marriage. So you can imagine there was something of a panic going on. And it seemed to me very important that people understand this is not just a civil rights question. It is that to some extent. But more fundamentally it is a question of: What is the best model for human relationships? Why do we believe in marriage? If it’s so important for children to grow up in households with two married parents, why would we want gay couples with kids to set the opposite example by raising their kids out of wedlock? Why would we want to turn all same-sex couples into advertisements for cohabitation? And I also wanted to make clear that what gay people are asking for here is not benefits. No one delivers a truckload of cash to your door when you get married. All they’re asking is to make the noblest commitment that most adults ever get the chance to make."