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Wednesday, February 25, 2004
posted by gbarto at 3:11 AM:
You've already read it, but here's Instapundit's latest on gay marriage.The TurkeyBlog, for the record, thinks "marriage" probably ought be between a man and a woman. He also thinks taxes should be lower and French fries fat free. But, realistically, an institution that has survived the 25 marriages of Elizabeth Taylor and Zsa Zsa Gabor probably isn't going to shrivel away because Johnny married Johnny and Joan married Joan at last weekend's double wedding.
The bottom line is that when two people spend considerable time building a life together, there needs to be some assurance that they will both be entitled to the fruits of their shared efforts. This is gradually being achieved through the careful use of available legal instruments - if one can afford them. And yet, it is much easier to protect the investment you've made in a business you partially own than in the very roof over your head in certain circumstances. For heterosexual couples, many elements of such problems are solved in the blanket solution called marriage. While the traditionalist in me is squeamish about calling it marriage, there should be some such solution available to homosexuals unless we want to send the message that homosexuals are so beyond the pale that values like loyalty, committment, shared effort and entitlement to the fruits of shared efforts aren't even worth bothering about where they're concerned. Some people hold that view, I know. I'm not one of them.
As a student of literature, I'm well aware of the power of words. It's why the traditionalist in me is nervous about expanding the definition of marriage. But I'm equally aware of how that cuts for those who view their homosexual committment as being at least equal to the committment between Liz Taylor and Larry Fortensky. Which puts us at a point where compromise on language is both desirable and impossible. Leaping into the void of impossibility, the TurkeyBlog's final statement is this: Marriage has been with us quite some time, and will continue to be with us. Even if the word "gay" gets stuck in front, I'm sure it will muddle through. While the TurkeyBlog isn't comfortable with the phrase "gay marriage," he prefers it to the idea that consenting adults can be told that no committment exists where they have mutually agreed it does. It raises his hackles when government tells people they don't really understand the meaning of what they're doing.
The TurkeyBlogger recommends that gays be given some institution with the attendant rights and responsibilities which marriage brings to heterosexuals. The depth or shallowness of the committment they brought to the new institution, then, would determine whether "gay marriage," by whatever name, became a serious societal institution or became one more element of a counterculture available to those who go for such things but ignored by the larger society. In other words, "gay marriage" could only seriously impact marriage if people took it seriously as being of a piece with marriage. And that would depend on whether the unions homosexuals formed struck the larger society as being an awful lot like what marriage looked like for most people - in which case "gay marriage" would uphold marriage - or something that just wasn't the same, in which case "gay marriage" would stay in quotation marks, held apart from the traditional institution.
The greatest fear for the ultras among the liberals, at such a point, would be that "gay divorce" became the next big thing after and gay marriage was made a mockery. One wonders, though. Would the ultras among conservatives lose more sleep over fears of the whole institution of marriage disintegrating, or over the possibility that gays, mindful of what was at stake, would approach their new institution with a greater measure of caution and seriousness than that shown by their heterosexual brothers and sisters? It would, after all, be pretty rough for the "traditional" institution of marriage if people took for granted that Johnny and Jack would stay together while placing their bets on how long Anna Nicole Smith's next "till death do us part" would actually last.
The careful reader will note that I've laid out a case for even calling it gay marriage if need be, without explicitly supporting or rejecting the proposition. Such a reader has surely already decided whether this makes me a hypocrite or a pragmatist.
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