A Piling of Argument

Links to worthwhile pieces about gay marriage have begun to clog my bookmarks file, so I thought I'd put them all together in one post. They're all related, inherently, anyway.

Let me start with an anecdote. My wife teaches third grade, and the mother of one of the girls in her class mentioned that the gay marriage debate has found its way into her daughter's head. The girl saw something about it on the news and turned around to declare, "I don't see what the problem is. They're just people; let them marry." I haven't fully explored the implications, myself, but my initial reactions are to be bemused that many adults aren't managing deeper thought than that little girl and to recoil some from the reality that, to address the girl's question, one would have to skirt such topics as are known to sap innocence.

The always-worth-reading Boston University professor Peter Wood brought that anecdote to mind with a piece on NRO looking at gay marriage — and civil unions — from his anthropological point of view:

He noted that, as he has gone around and talked to people in the state about the issue, he has found many who are diffident. They have essentially bought the line, "Why should I care? If two gay people get married, how does that hurt me?" In truth, it probably wouldn't. The destructive consequences would fall mainly on the young and the vulnerable who would grow up in a society without the bulwark of traditional marriage protecting them against the excesses of their own immature appetites and the rapacious desire of older males ever eager to expand the zone of sexual permissiveness.

That "expanding zone of sexual permissiveness" isn't just the paranoid vision of conservatives unable to deal with shifting mores. As Christopher Johnson notes, pedophiles are beginning to feel the pull of their right to be free of "adultist oppression":

For most of his life, he has buried his emotions and masked his long-secreted attraction. It wasn't until recently that Ashford decided to throw off the shackles of pedophilia and shed light on what he says is a misunderstood "sexual orientation." Last year, he became perhaps one of the first pedophiles in the world to put his name and face on a Web site to publicly profess his love for children.

Of course, the anthropological view is only one way of looking at a problem and, therefore, isn't wholly sufficient to require a particular policy. Yet, the indications that the adverse shifts in culture of which Prof. Wood warns and that Mr. Ashford's pleas make tangible are coming from many directions. Stanley Kurtz, for example, tells of the intentions of family law professors to leverage gay marriage to introduce group marriage, and not just for the purposes of increasing the potential for lawyers' fees:

These contracts would recognize marriages in any combination of number or gender. Ertman's goal is to render distinctions between any possible sexual grouping "morally neutral." Again, what’s interesting here is that all of these radicals favor gay marriage. Yet each sees gay marriage as a stepping stone to the effective abolition of marriage itself.

Linda Chavez, meanwhile, notes that gay marriage advocates "reject the notion that there is anything radical about their demand or that it would do harm to the institution of marriage itself," yet while spying in the liberal quarters of the radio spectrum:

Jonathan Katz [no relation], the executive director of the Larry Kramer Initiative for Gay and Lesbian Studies at Yale University (named for the founder of the confrontational gay rights group ACT-UP) admitted on National Public Radio's "Talk of the Nation" this week that gay marriage "would revolutionize the institution of marriage itself. The advent of lesbian and gay marriage might, in fact, serve to not only reinvigorate but to redefine an institution that is increasingly viewed by many in our culture as having outlived its usefulness."

One thing, we can hope, that has not outlived its usefulness is the law. Domenico Bettinelli thinks it might be possible that Massachusetts law would permit "Gov. Mitt Romney... simply to declare the judiciary has overreached into executive powers and issue an executive order stating to that effect." While such action on the East Coast front of the battle would require some governmental spine, the administrators of California's government have recourse to a more obvious and less controversial justification for upholding the rule of law. As David Morrison quotes:

"Instead of saying bride or groom, the form in San Francisco says applicant one and applicant two," Lafaro said. The license form also uses the terms "unmarried individuals" rather than "unmarried man" or "unmarried woman.

"The changes make the licenses invalid," Evans said.

Nice 'n' neat. Of course, this is going to be a messy cultural struggle, without those straightforward defenses always available, and without the administrative confidence always to exploit them. To help bolster the spine (or change the mind) of your particular representatives, you might do as Lane Core has done.