galvagin

Last night, the wife and I went to see Dan Savage speak at Olsson's.

Fortunately, M got there early, as the place was packed. Mostly, Dan Savage is just funny, and he was no disappointment on that front (there was a great extended description of when he and his partner were travelling cross-country with their son, who ended up with diaper rash a night they stayed at a motel. As the kid is screaming "Daddy, my butthole hurts!" and "Daddy, stop touching my butthole!" as he tries to put antibacterial cream on, visions of someone calling the cops on them - in South Dakota, likely none-too-friendly-to-gays-cops - dance in their heads. But then, after all is settled down and no cops arrive, "A kid screams bloody murder at 3AM for half an hour and no one calls the cops? What the fuck is *wrong* with people in South Dakota?")

But he actually talked about the gay marriage issue in a way that I thought was really smart and well-put. If you don't know his work, Savage supports gay marriage, but he and his partner aren't married (they *could* go to MA or Canada if they wanted to) and don't plan to get married (even if gay marriage becomes more widely available), despite the fact that they have a relationship that is "conservative" in just about every way except that, well, they're gay (e.g., Savage's partner is a stay-at-home parent who does all the cooking and cleaning, they've been together for years, have a six-year-old adopted son, etc.).

So, Savage started out by talking about one typical argument against gay marriage: it's about kids. And he made the oft-made point that that can't be the right argument - plenty of homosexual couples have kids (through artificial insemination, previous heterosexual relationships, or adoption), and plenty of heterosexual couples don't (or even can't - after all, there's no law preventing sterile couples from getting married. And, AFAIK, no one wants one. Just my own aside about one boneheaded response I heard to this counterargument: "Yeah, but straight couples, even if they're sterile/too old/whatever *could* have kids, if G-d decides to give them one, so they're leaving the possibility open!" Uh-huh. And G-d could make a gay man pregnant, or parthenogenerate, or something, if He wanted to, too. Both violate what we currently know of biology, and so I'd think both would equally count as flouting the procreational aspect of marriage).

But then he started talking about monogamy. Monogamy is a big talking point for many pro-gay-marriage folks - the idea that long-term, monogamous gay couples who have "proven" their love to each other ought to have a right to get married. Savage is a skeptic about monogamy (typical quote: "Hey, if you're with a guy for thirty, forty years and he only cheats once or twice, he's pretty *good* at monogamy, not bad at it"), especially notions of it that are extremely rigid, and take the stance that all extracurricular sexual desire ought to be extinguished upon coupling (i.e., people who think that you're bad if you even have desires for other folks, even if you don't act on them). That's neither here nor there, except that it led to him pointing out how there's a double standard here, even among many on the left. Many straight couples are not monogamous, whether it's occasional "cheating" or a conscious decision not to enforce monogamy. In very few states are there any laws dealing with this, and even in those they are basically unenforced. We *do* make a big deal about straight monogamy, but where it falters, we're as likely to welcome a redemption story as condemn it outright - and no one looks at Bill Clinton (e.g.) and says, "hey, that proves that straight people shouldn't get married."

All of this brings me to the point that I thought was really interestingly made. Basically, he said, marriage has been being redefined - by heterosexuals! - for a long time now. Once it was an institution solely aimed at child-rearing and monogamy. But not any more. And good riddance - the obsession with children and monogamy was part of marriage's institutional role of ensuring paternity in a system that treated women and children as *property* (gotta make sure that the kid's mine, or the property relations get screwed up). Modern companionate marriage looks very different from the medeival ideal: now it's a freely-entered-into (and freely-left) relationship between equals, with parameters set largely by mutual consent. This doesn't make it any less serious - in fact (and this is my addition), companionate marriage is a relationship that demands much more intensity of moral and emotional involvement than older forms (e.g., you weren't really expected to *love* your partner, and I'd put sex-for-love on a higher plane than sex-for-political-alliance).

But companionate marriage is an institution that it doesn't really make sense to exclude homosexuals from, since there's no longer any gender differential or focus on biological children built in to the concept (the only ways in which homosexual couples necessarily differ from heterosexual ones). Savage's key point was that the current push for gay marriage is not so much an attempt by gays to redefine marriage, but an attempt by gays to enter into a relationship that straight people have already redefined.

I think this view is well-borne-out if you look at a lot of the anti-gay-marriage folks. Their arguments are typically either weak (it's about children) or impenetrably revelation-based (G-d just said no). But the side rhetoric is telling - Rick Santorum, for instance, saying that liberals want to destroy the distinction between men and women and replace familial relationships with a totalitarian state - er, sorry, "village elder" - control (no, I've not read his whole book, only excerpts. And I'm not going to, I don't have that kind of time.). Many opponents of gay marriage seem to be motivated at least in part by a desire not just to keep gays out of marriage, but to undo the redefinition of marriage that's happened in the straight community over the past couple hundred years.

But, as Savage pointed out, there's lots of stuff that was really evil about the old version of marriage. Women and children were property (side rant: saying that woman's particular role should be thus-and-so and a man's the other is to strip both of some of their personhood and autonomy - it's one thing to choose to stay at home to cook and clean, it's QUITE another to be told that, while that's equally valuable, it is what you MUST choose to do. In relationships as in political life, there is no such thing as 'separate but equal.'), and marriage largely a way of cementing relationships among families (or a spoil of war, etc.). We can't go back to strict man-woman-procreation defined marriage without taking on most if not all of its morally odious aspects.

This isn't to say, of course, that we should sneer at man-woman-procreation style marriages, where the man is the breadwinner and the woman stays at home, etc. But for autonomous individuals, that ought to be a choice among a variety of options. It's a beautiful thing if chosen, it's slavery if enforced.