Divorce and Gay Marriage
March 12, 2009 8 Comments
Stephen Baskerville writes about divorce and the role it has played in the gay rights movement.
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Some four decades ago, while few were paying attention, the Western world embarked on the boldest social experiment in its history. With no public discussion of the possible consequences, laws were enacted in virtually every jurisdiction that effectively ended marriage as a legal contract. Today it is not possible to form a binding agreement to create a family. The government can now, at the request of one spouse, simply dissolve a marriage over the objection of the other. Maggie Gallagher aptly titled her 1996 book The Abolition of Marriage.
The full implications of the “no-fault” revolution have never been publicly debated. “The divorce laws . . . were reformed by unrepresentative groups with very particular agendas of their own and which were not in step with public opinion,” writes Melanie Phillips in The Sex-Change Society. “Public attitudes were gradually dragged along behind laws that were generally understood at the time to mean something very different from what they subsequently came to represent.”
Today’s disputes over marriage in fact have their origin in this one. Demands to redefine marriage to include homosexual couples are inconceivable apart from the redefinition of marriage already effected by heterosexuals through divorce. Though gays cite the very desire to marry as evidence that their lifestyle is not inherently promiscuous, activist Andrew Sullivan acknowledges that that desire has arisen only because of the promiscuity permitted in modern marriage. “The world of no-strings heterosexual hookups and 50 percent divorce rates preceded gay marriage,” he points out. “All homosexuals are saying . . . is that, under the current definition, there’s no reason to exclude us. If you want to return straight marriage to the 1950s, go ahead. But until you do, the exclusion of gays is . . . a denial of basic civil equality” (emphasis added). Gays do not want traditional monogamous marriage, only the version debased by divorce.
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Before my feminist readers (I have some of those….right?) jump all over me, let me be clear that I believe the availability of divorce and the option for men and women to leave troubled marriages is an important one. While I am a very vocal proponent of hard work in marriages and doing everything we can to maintain these relationships…the truth is that some are beyond saving. With that said, it’s an interesting point that Baskerville brings up and one that is often used by gay marriage proponents. Essentially it boils down to, “Marriage is already flawed, so allowing gay marriage won’t make it any worse.” I’ve always hated that rationale and I think it is extremely harmful to the movement for gay marriage.
If gay marriage proponents are ever going to win the support of conservatives and the many moderates/centrists who are still opposed to gay marriage, they are going to have to start emphasizing the positive contributions they can make towards marriage as an institution. I would like to see more discussion about using marriage as a means of building wealth, of their role as parents, etc. Although their reasons are important and fair, an over-emphasis on the personal benefits and less emphasis on the societal benefits actually delays acceptance.
Marriage is an important institution for a lot of reasons. The one that is most important is that there are a lot of positive impacts on society when we have more marriages. Gay marriage proponents need to begin highlighting the positive role they can play in larger society if they want to gain the support of that society.
Mike,
When those who oppose gay marriage are willing to stand up and just as loudly denounce divorce as it is currently practiced, then and only then should those who support gay marriage switch their tactics. Until then, divorce remains a far greater threat to American families. As my therapist put it while I was being divorced by my first wife – we’ve made divorce an easy excuse for people who are having a bad day.
I think that most conservatives would be happy to do so…but as soon as you criticize the number of divorces in this country, liberals tell you that without divorce women would be abused more often and kept subservant to men. They seem divorce as liberating.
I realize you’re a Leftie, but surely you see that the liberalization of our attitudes towards marriage are what got us to this point.
I think you’re right when you say that “Marriage is already flawed, so allowing gay marriage won’t make it any worse.” is a bad argument. It’s like saying that marijuana should be legal because cigarettes are worse and they’re legal. That’s equally (if not more so) an argument for banning cigarettes.
But I think that statement is a mischaracterization of the real argument. The point is that it’s disingenuous for people to get all bent out of shape about gay marriage because it represents something unconventional/against their religious beliefs, when they’re completely fine with lots of other laws that permit marriage different from those conventions and beliefs.
Z, as Phillip and I were discussing, I don’t think conservatives are happy with the state of marriage and general and would like it to be harder to disolve marriages. But there’s a lot of opposition on the Left to any lessening of the ability to divorce. they see it as vital to the freedom of women (kind of like abortion i guess).
Well… okay, I guess. I see divorce as something important for the freedom of everybody, but it’s women who’ve historically been treated as property in marriage so I buy your characterization in general.
But I’m sort of confused about your point. What difference should it make if “there’s a lot of opposition on the Left” towards restricting divorce? Conservatives fight for things that liberals disagree with all the time… you might even say that’s the point of having a different name for the different groups, they tend to disagree.
What I was saying was that conservatives see gay marriage as a more important, more frightening threat to conventional marriage, as opposed to divorce — because they fight against it more fiercely.
Or are you saying that if liberals were more adamantly for gay marriage, conservatives would shrug and back off? I doubt it…
I think that conservatives have shrunk from the fight against divorce because they can’t get anywhere. Everytime a conservative politician admits to an affair liberals say, “See, the party of ‘family values’ are hypocrites.” The message is, since some conservatives cheat on their wives, they are just proving that no one should tell people about the importance of marriage. Likewise, remember the outrage over coveant marriages on the Left? I really need to do a blog post about that subject, because I thought they were a fantastic idea. But the notion that it would be harder to divorce, even if both parties agreed to those conditions before the marriage, made people on the Left crazy.
Mike,
My left political leansings do not mean that I always agree with everything that can be labeled “liberal.” Again, stop using such a big brush.
I’m also a divorced father watching his relationship with his daughters degrade daily because their mother (who did the leaving but says it was “mutual”) sees no place for me in the girl’s lives, and blames me for the deterioration. So I’m not unbiased either in terms of divorce.
My parents have been married 43 years, my grandparents were married 55 years, and as a Protestant christian I take the marriage vow extremly seriously. As I told the judge at the final divorce hearing, I think we as a society have become too permissive abotu ending marriage, and despit ethe rhetoric, it is in most cases an unmitigated disaster for all involved, most notably the children. There are no “good” divorces. He then told me, quite directly, that the statutes he worked under gave him no choice but to dissolve the marriage on my ex-wife’s word that it was irretrievably broken. That was 10 years ago. It never gets better.
So mine is not a “mainstream” liberal perspective on the issue. I’m also a realist, and I don’t dismiss the evidenc eo fmy own experience just because it doesn’t fit the orthodoxy.
I agree with all of that Phillip – but again, I think it’s extremely hard for conservatives to criticize divorce. Remember the outrage over covenant marriages a few years ago? I thought they were a brilliant idea and yet liberals acted like it was the middle ages.