To the Editor:
Sam Schulman is right that people have come to see same-sex marriage as inevitable [“Gay Marriage—and Marriage,” November 2003]. In fact, more than two-thirds of Americans now believe gay people will win the freedom to marry, and nationwide polls show that while there is not yet consistent majority support for marriage equality, the majority is ready to accept it. Substantial majorities oppose discriminatory attacks on gay families, including proposals to amend the Constitution to ban gay marriage.
Like many others, Mr. Schulman bases most of his arguments against marriage equality on religious principles. But lesbian and gay couples seek the right to civil marriage licenses, not a mandate from the state telling religious communities to perform marriage rites. Churches and members of the clergy should not be compelled to recognize gay unions, just as they do not have to perform the weddings of interfaith couples or divorced people.
Mr. Schulman asserts that marriage has been unchanged throughout modern history. But within the lifetimes of many of us, women in fact lost rights when they married, people were denied the right to marry someone of the “wrong” race, couples were not allowed to terminate failed or abusive marriages, and government prevented even married couples from using contraception. Despite opponents of equality who claimed at each turning point that change was against “God’s will” or “the definition of marriage,” we changed the law, and few Americans would argue today that marriage was better before such changes.
Mr. Schulman contends that ending the exclusion of same-sex couples from marriage will have a devastating impact on this important and most resilient institution. But the strength of marriage is based not on whom it excludes, but rather on love, commitment, self-sacrifice, responsibility, and the shared pursuit of happiness. If we as a society believe that marriage promotes stability, healthy families, and strong communities, why would this not hold true for same-sex couples as well? Today many same-sex couples are raising children. It makes no sense to punish these children for having the “wrong” kind of parents, or to withhold from their parents the structure of marriage.
There is simply no logical or constitutional reason why gay couples should be denied the same freedom to marry that the Supreme Court has said may not be denied to, for example, deadbeat dads or convicted felons. Ending discrimination in marriage is both right and inevitable. Any other solution condemns gay Americans to the status of second-class citizens, separate and unequal.
Evan Wolfson
Freedom to Marry
New York City
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To the Editor:
Sam Schulman is to be applauded for at least attempting a reasoned argument against gay marriage. In fact, he is uncommonly honest in acknowledging that the idea of same-sex marriage appeals “to our better moral natures as well as to our reason.” But Mr. Schulman’s argument stumbles and falls—as all such arguments ultimately do—because he peddles his subjective perceptions and experiences as essential truths and is unable to articulate any specific injury that would flow directly and necessarily from the institution of same-sex marriage.
Mr. Schulman makes a very awkward attempt to argue that gay marriage would victimize women, basing his case on a picture of heterosexual marriage that is both sexist and completely unrecognizable to me. He argues that marriage is “built around female sexuality and female procreativity.” But what about marriages that last well beyond a woman’s childbearing years or indeed beyond a couple’s sexual appetite for one another?
Mr. Schulman completes his Victorian image by suggesting that a man’s role in marriage is, at best, functional. He argues that men need not be married to “feel safe and free” in expressing their sexuality, and that male premarital sex is not “essentially incomplete” compared to married sex. One wonders how Mrs. Schulman takes this news, but then surely she must know by now that Mr. Schulman married her only out of a desire for children, or to placate her, or out of fear of losing her. This is not marriage as I have come to know it in my own life or in the lives of my peers.
Even if one accepts all of Mr. Schulman’s points about the nature and purpose of marriage, we still have not seen an actual victim of publicly recognizing same-sex marriages. Would women lose some institutionalized protection against rape? Would they be prevented somehow from having their sexuality, as Mr. Schulman puts it, “gathered in”? If same-sex marriage is so very bad, one ought to be able to explain in some detail what terrible things would happen as a result of allowing it. Mr. Schulman gives us a good deal of clucking but displays no pieces of fallen sky.
Tim Decker
Chicago, Illinois
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To the Editor:
If a term other than “marriage” were applied, would Sam Schulman support granting to gay couples all of what he calls the “real, tangible benefits” to which any married straight couple—completely irrespective of their ability or intention to create new life, to sustain the species, or to help the woman avoid unhappiness—is automatically entitled? If not, his arguments are nothing more than a veiled endorsement of continued second-class citizenry for gay people.
Evan Schwartz
New York City
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To the Editor:
Sam Schulman does the marriage debate a great service with his thoughtful and thought-provoking piece. I agree with him that “the essence of marriage is to sanction and solemnize that connection of opposites which alone creates new life.” I am not sure how he thinks that differs from my own formulation, which he is generous enough to quote: “Most men and women are powerfully drawn to perform a sexual act that can and does generate life. Marriage is our attempt to reconcile and harmonize the erotic, social, sexual, and financial needs of men and women with the needs of their partner and their children.”
The difference, I suppose, is that Mr. Schulman champions the idea that marriage is primarily about protecting women. Most good family men feel this way about their marriages, and there would be more good family men if more women encouraged and applauded them for it. Mr. Schulman taps here into some of the profound sources of the marriage idea, including the reality that sex between men and women is a radically unreciprocal act.
One of the deep, inarticulate erotic attractions of marriage for men is that it gives new meaning to their otherwise urgent, random, and seemingly futile sexuality. In becoming a husband and father, a man finds a way of experiencing manhood that is not at odds with love—which is a fancy way of agreeing with Mr. Schulman’s view that marriage gives the average man a chance to be the hero. That marriage survives today at all—85 percent of Americans marry despite our ongoing sexual revolution—is a tribute to how deep-seated is the male need to experience masculinity in this way.
Nonetheless, it will not do to define the essence of marriage as respecting the freedom of women to choose fathers for their children. I think Mr. Schulman is right that few men and most women feel unprotected in sexual intercourse outside of marriage and that this is one powerful impetus toward marriage. But it is impossible to survey the laws surrounding sexuality and marriage across cultures and still view them as intended to protect women’s freedom of choice or their psychological well-being. Many societies both support marriage and radically degrade women.
The fundamental reason for marriage, what Mr. Schulman calls its “essence,” is that every society needs babies and babies need mothers and fathers. Men and women also need each other, but in ways that masculine norms may make it difficult for men to articulate.
Maggie Gallagher
Institute for Marriage and
Public Policy
Washington, D.C.
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To the Editor:
“The Talmud records that God weeps when a man puts aside his first wife.” In fact, the Talmud says (in Tractates Gittin and Sanhedrin) that the altar, not God, weeps. This correction is significant in that the symbolism of the altar’s weeping is meant to express one of the points of Mr. Schulman’s argument. The altar, as focal point of the temple service, is the meeting place, as it were, of two opposites: mortal man and immortal God. The altar therefore cries when marriage, another meeting place of two opposites, is torn asunder. In this sense, the altar’s weeping speaks to the very nature of marriage as a connection between man and woman exclusively.
Avraham Alter
Brookline, Massachusetts
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Sam Schulman writes:
Vexingly, Evan Wolf-son repeats arguments in favor of gay marriage that I may have overpraised while ignoring or mischaracterizing the arguments I advanced against it. Thus, he restates the “civil rights” case: when marriage is restricted to heterosexual couples, the good things marriage delivers are unfairly denied to those of different sexuality.
But I contended—strenuously—that marriage has nothing to do with delivering such things as commitment, monogamy, stability, or happiness. Instead, it is about protecting female sexuality from male depredation, and ensuring the orderly passing-on of genetic and material inheritance from one generation to the next. Marriage is thus simply not germane to the concerns of couples who do not consist of a woman and a man.
What goes for marriage goes for marriage laws: they, too, cannot and do not legislate happiness, monogamy, or stability. Would Mr. Wolfson complain that laws against cockfighting violate the civil rights of children because such laws apply only to chickens? In any case, if the courts succeed in inventing gay marriage, a much larger group of our fellow citizens than gays will still suffer a deprivation of what Mr. Wolfson seems to think of as their civil rights, simply by dint of their inability, for one reason or another, to hold on to the love of another person.
Tim Decker, in spite of his generous attempt to follow my way of looking at things, likewise fails to understand my argument. If it is “sexist” to make any distinction between men and women, then he is right to describe me, along with most feminists, as a sexist. My description of the different meanings of marriage for men and women was not meant to be a complete catalog. Nevertheless, at bottom men and women are forced to understand marriage differently because, in perfectly obvious and universal ways, their sexuality has different consequences.
I have no doubt that Mr. Decker experiences marriage in a more exalted fashion than I describe. I certainly do. But marriage has its lows as well as its highs—indeed, if lovers had only highs, marriage need not exist. To understand what makes marriage necessary to our humanity, Mr. Decker should close his Dante and contemplate instead the sour-faced father with a shotgun, the harassed mother of a daughter saying to herself, “Were this wild thing wedded, more love should I have, and much less care.”
Mr. Decker asks what specific injury would befall existing marriages within, so to speak, a half-mile radius of a lawful gay marriage. It is a good question, if only because some supporters of the traditional definition of marriage make the mistake of insisting on such very specific—yet terribly vague—injuries. But let me answer with another hypothetical question. What injuries would occur if incest were legalized between consenting adults? (This is an important question for me since I believe that marriage exists as an extension of the incest taboo.) To be sure, scientists might predict an increase in the prevalence of birth defects. But such an increase, however precisely calculated, would be trivial compared with the consequences that would follow for our humanity.
A question of a different sort is posed by Evan Schwartz: would I be willing to grant all the real, tangible benefits of marriage to gay couples if the arrangement were not called “marriage”? First of all, it seems to me (whose legal training consists of having taken the LSAT exam 30 years ago) that contracts can indeed be devised to replicate those specifically tangible benefits that marriage is expected to deliver. In the Western world—in the Roman and the Jewish traditions, for example—marriage was initiated by forming contracts between two individuals, and nothing does or should prevent two (or more) people from entering into such contracts today.
But let me point to a neglected problem with the idea of “civil unions.” Just as marriage does not exist to make two people happy, so, too, the purpose behind the shared material benefits of marriage is not to make a strong and happy relationship. Marriage’s property rights and rights of inheritance developed to protect a family’s wealth, real estate, status, and so forth from one generation to the next, even when—particularly when—there was conflict within marriages and families. The power to pass on to one’s own children one’s accumulated property, and the property of one’s ancestors, is one of those basic needs that define us as human.
How does this apply to gay civil unions? A point I have not adequately stressed is that marriage is dangerous. It demands of a man and a woman that they put themselves in one another’s power. This creates the opportunity to perpetrate many a crime in secret: the physically and/or psychologically stronger partner can exert influence on the weaker that is based not on love but on violence and greed. Such things happen between married couples and between parents and children; but in traditional marriage, which takes place within a larger system of kinship, several forces mitigate the danger, including the presence of watchful children and siblings.
Gay partnerships have few if any of these natural lines of defense. They are only as strong as are the mutual honor, sincerity, and love of the two partners themselves—rather slender reeds in any relationship, as who among us can fail to attest? I would expect that, within gay-marriage simulacrums, instances of callous exploitation, looting of property, physical violence, and medical murder would be piteously high. It is for others to calculate whether the gains would be worth the suffering of the elderly, ill, weak, and sexually needy at the hands of the strong and ruthless.
To the generous and always impressive Maggie Gallagher, I would say that we differ most of all on the question of whether children or women are at the center of marriage’s essence. To me, at any rate, that “essence” is less about respecting women’s freedom to choose fathers than about ensuring women’s ability to exercise any freedom or physical integrity at all—however limited this can be in many societies. In this respect, there is no difference between marriages that include children and those that do not.
Praising my character in order to excuse our disagreement, Maggie Gallagher suggests that I make the mistake of other “good family men” who believe that marriage is about protecting women. I think instead that marriage is important because it protects women from bad family men—and from bad men in general.
Finally, after being criticized by Evan Wolfson for making a covertly religious argument and damned with faint praise by Tim Decker for making an argument based on reason alone, it is bracing to be so authoritatively corrected by Avraham Alter. His reminder—and eloquent interpretation—of what the Talmud actually says in the passage I imprecisely cited is worth attending to. In tampering so casually with the institution of marriage, we play heedlessly with the wellsprings of what makes us human—and not gods.
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