May 11th, 2009
The most important question isn’t whether or not homosexuals should marry, but what truly motivates gay marriage advocates.
I’m ambivalent about gay marriage. I strongly prefer civil unions, because properly applied, they grant equal rights to gay couples (visitation, etc.) without infringing on anyone’s freedom of conscience. That being said, I’m o.k. with the prospect of legalizing homosexual marriage, just as long as it isn’t used as a bludgeon to assault the nuclear family (or religion—no reverend should be forced to marry any couple in violation of his faith). This isn’t some self-hating conservative defense mechanism. I don’t have anything against social conservatives; in more ways than not, I am one. I merely think that as long as gay marriage is actually about equal rights, and not a proxy for the ongoing culture war between conservatives and progressives, I could live with it. Admittedly, I’m taking huge leap of faith on this one.
You see, the left has a long history of undermining the traditional family, particularly the institution of marriage. From a Machiavellian perspective, this makes sense. For most people, familial obligations are more important that ideological ones. A man committed to his family has less free time, energy, and motive to overthrow the very society that sustains his family. Also, the private love expressed through traditions such as marriage is a threat to revolution, because it isn’t directed to the community, but those who are special to us—our friends and family. Marriage’s private obligations undermine commitment to utopian schemes, which is intolerable to anyone who seriously wishes to remake society. Even al-Qaeda has complained about potential recruits being more committed to their villages than to radical Islam.
Sometimes the left assails marriage though the idealization of promiscuity, as seen in the deceptively antagonistic practice of “free love.” Pre-Nazi German socialists, such as the League of Progressive Women’s Associations, promoted free love under the guise of feminism. This necessarily entailed the abolition of legal marriage, which enforces monogamy through law. During the height of second-wave feminism, feminists regularly penned editorials about how marriage isn’t about love, but possession, making it a discriminatory institution. The Weather Underground called monogamy, and essential part of modern marriage, a “political error.” Long before Oneida, New York, became a quaint tourist community, Father John Humphrey Noyes led a cult of bible communists there. Coupling or reproducing without his permission was grounds for expulsion. Instead, under the concept of “complex marriage,” everyone was married to everyone else. It takes a village to share an STD.
Paradoxically, traditional marriage, often derided as overly controlling, has also been attacked from a puritanical standpoint. In an essay titled, “Women and Marriage,” Hitler wrote that marriage, as it was practiced in the bourgeois society he hated, is “generally a thing against nature” (to whom it may concern: conservatives don’t generally rail against the bourgeois). Ann Lee, a leader of the Shakers (think of a self-indulgently demonstrative version of the Quakers) broke up husbands and wives upon conversion to her bizarre sect (the Shakers also prohibited procreation). The solemn Harmonists, another failed outgrowth of the evangelical left, forbade their followers form engaging in sex, much less marriage. While few things are more different in method than free love and the tyrannical regulation of love, they share the same extremely communitarian impulse: no bond between individuals shall be stronger than their devotion to the collective. The only difference is that free love cheapens and dispels affection, while puritanism suffocates it.
Often the left assaults marriage (and the nuclear family) through children. Leftist education theory, which is openly hostile to homeschooling, is one example of this. The ballyhooed philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, whose emphasis on creativity at the expense of guided instruction still has a profound influence on educators, wanted children to be taken from their parents and raised in state-run boarding schools. In George Orwell’s 1984, children are turned against their parents as they’re bred by the state to become “junior spies,” monitoring their caretakers for any subversive behavior. This only foreshadows the real life attempts by UK educators to “mobilize” students in order to “turn their parents green,” directly encouraging children to make Mum and Dad’s lives a “misery” if they don’t separate the cardboard from the plastic upon recycling. This thematic disregard of parental authority is what conservatives are moping about when we occasionally complain that Hollywood pretends that children are wiser than adults.
I’m far from the first person to tie together the totalitarian impulse and hostility to traditional family. As touched on in Jamie Glazov’s United In Hate, history’s greatest dystopian novels recognize the threat the nuclear family poses to control freaks. Much like the puritanical opponents of marriage, the Oceanic government in 1984 only tolerates love directed towards the state. In contrast, Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World depicts a society where recreational sex is encouraged by the government, but familial features such as childbearing and coupling are strictly controlled. In Huxley’s colorless nanny state, two-thirds of women are sterilized, while the rest are forced to use contraceptives. Through technology, procreation is achieved outside of sex, eliminating the need for families. The much lesser-known We, by Yevgeny Zamyatin, similarly portrays a communal denial of love and marriage, as “everyone belongs to everyone else.”
Considering all of this, as well as the left’s general hostility to American tradition, can anyone really blame conservatives for not trusting supporters of homosexual marriage when they claim that their cause is just about civil rights? In the 1990’s, queer theorists declared that marriage was an oppressive force. Now the same collage of activists is sadistically lashing out at a beauty pageant contestant for mildly stating she doesn’t support gay marriage. What are we supposed to make of that? Is the concentrated push for gay marriage, something few people cared about fifteen years ago, a mature shift from moving against American institutions to moving towards them, or is it just a tactical adaptation? Is the left collectively thinking, “Denouncing marriage didn’t work, so why not render it meaningless through cultural relativism?” I’d like to believe that gay marriage advocates are well-meaning; liberals generally don’t know much about their own philosophical antecedents, and anyone who actually believes that opposition to gay marriage is an example of homophobia likely isn’t sophisticated enough to engage in stealth advocacy. Yet history, and the childish tone of today’s gay marriage advocates, suggests that they’re driven by something more than an innocent regard for civil rights.
Corss-posted at: 