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Keeping Marriage Straight
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 The current
debate over same-sex marriage suffers grievously from a sort of
national imbecility about institutions. It might force clarity into the
discussion if we banned the word rights. Then again, some people
seem to prefer banning clarity.
“The issue of marriage goes far beyond the
commitment of two people of the same sex,” writes David Mixner in
Time magazine. “It goes to the civil rights of gay and
lesbian Americans. The effort to ban same-sex marriage would deny us the
basic right accorded to our neighbors and
friends.  The
issue involves immigration, taxation, family leave, health care, adoption,
Medicare, and numerous other benefits and rights.” And yes, he
ascribes opposition to same-sex marriage to “fear of change”
among people who are “frightened” by homosexual love.
Like most gay advocates, Mr. Mixner implies that the
nature of the institution doesn’t matter; only vaguely defined
“rights” do. These include government entitlements. But how
could nonhomosexuals be prevented from contracting same-sex marriages to
cash in? Or would only homosexuals be permitted to contract such
marriages? This is only one of many practical problems, most of them
unforeseeable, that would surely arise from basing an institution on alleged
rights instead of actual social needs. If that prospect doesn’t excite
“fear of change,” it ought to.
To hear the gay version, you’d think that marriage
was created to endow heterosexuals with special “rights” that
were denied to homosexuals — a total, and lugubrious, misconception.
The institution is prior to the rights attached to it.
Nearly every society has some version of marriage,
simply because the institution is necessary for the care of women and
children and for the orderly distribution of property. This social necessity
isn’t a matter of creating rights, but of defining pretty basic
obligations. The people on whom these obligations must be imposed are,
obviously, those who are capable of having children.
![[Breaker quote for Keeping Marriage Straight: Institutions and rights]](2006breakers/060801.gif) The
people most apt to want the pleasures of marriage without the obligations
are, as you may have observed, young men. Men complain about marriage.
Women don’t complain about marriage; they complain about men.
The relation between marriage and “rights”
is much more complicated than the gay version suggests. In most societies
marriage is less a right than a duty, and the failure or refusal to marry can
bring shame and other penalties on the unmarried. In many societies parents
choose spouses for their children or, even more commonly, reserve the
power to veto their children’s choices. The notion that marriage is
merely the natural and proper conclusion of romantic love is a recent and
dubious Western idea.
Arranged marriages seem heartless to us, but the
parents who do the arranging usually do so with full consideration of the
welfare of their children, as well as the interests of the family. And their
choices may be more prudent than those the children might have made on
their own. Not that the parents are always wiser, but the conception of
marriage as an individual “right” is by no means the only view of
the matter. At any rate marriage didn’t originate with the idea of the
individual’s pursuit of happiness — an idea that, in fact, has
proved subversive of the institution and its obligations.
The simplest refutation of the gay version is that some
societies have been very tolerant of homosexuality and pederasty, like
ancient Greece and Rome, without feeling any need to institute same-sex
marriage. In fact, it apparently never occurred to Greco-Roman homosexuals
and pederasts to demand such a thing. They seem to have been content with
their informal arrangements, since procreation wasn’t involved.
Institutions have their own purposes and inner logic. That
is what makes them institutions. Their definitions make them more or less
exclusive; a Baptist can hardly complain if he is rejected by a Catholic
seminary. To say that Baptists ought to be accepted is really to say that
Catholic seminaries shouldn’t exist. You can argue that they
shouldn’t exist in the first place; but you can’t argue that if
they accept non-Catholics they remain Catholic.
Marriage means a permanent union between people of
opposite sexes. That’s the whole idea. The advocates of same-sex
marriage aren’t really complaining about discrimination; they’re
complaining about marriage.
Joseph Sobran |
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| Copyright © 2006 by the
Griffin Internet Syndicate, a division of Griffin Communications This column may not be reprinted in print or Internet publications without express permission of Griffin Internet Syndicate 
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