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Sunday, Nov 22, 2009
When we were done our friend's eyes widened and she leaned in and grabbed my arm.
"That's wonderful," she said, a little too loudly. "I would love to have a three-way. Or an affair." She pronounced the word "ah-fay-yah," for comic effect. "An ah-fay-yah, I think, would be better than a thu-ree-waya. I don't think I would want my husband to know the details."
She said all of this in front of her husband, of course, who laughed at what he believed was a joke.
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A couple of bizarre double standards have been getting a lot of press since those "unelected, activist judges" in Massachusetts, as George W. Bush likes to call them (should George W. Bush really be pointing fingers at unelected public officials?), and the mayor of San Francisco kicked the debate on gay marriage into high gear.
The double standard relentlessly promoted by opponents of gay marriage -- and attacked just as relentlessly by supporters -- is that marriage is about having children. Since gays and lesbians can't have children, according to religious conservatives, we shouldn't be allowed to marry. It has been almost comically easy to punch holes in this argument. Not all married straight couples can have children (the elderly, the sterile); many straight couples who can have children choose not to. And it's not exactly a secret that thousands of gay and lesbian couples have had children or plan to have children through adoption or insemination. If marriage is about children, how is it that childless straight couples can marry but same-sex couples with children cannot?
By promoting this double standard social conservatives have unwittingly exposed the shocking truth about marriage in America today: The institution, as currently practiced, is terrifically hard to define. Marriage is whatever two straight people say it is. Kids? Optional. Honor? Let's hope so. Till death do us part? There's a 50/50 chance of that. Obey? Only if you're a female Southern Baptist. Modern marriage can be sacred (church, family, preacher), or profane (Vegas, strangers, Elvis). What makes a straight couple married -- in their own eyes, in the eyes of the state -- is their professed love, a license issued by a state, and the couple's willingness to commit to each other publicly. How a straight married couple chooses to express love, exactly what it is they're committing to, is entirely up to them. It's not up to the state, their reproductive systems, or even the church that solemnizes their vows.
This is the reason so many defenders of "traditional marriage" sputtered their way through appearances on "Nightline" and the Sunday morning news programs. Traditional marriage is just one option among many these days. A religious straight couple can have a big church wedding and kids and the wife can submit to the husband and they can stay married until death parts them -- provided that's what they both want. Or a couple of straight atheists can get married in a tank full of dolphins and never have kids and treat each other as equals and split up if they decide their marriage isn't working out -- again, if that's what they both want. (It should be pointed out, however, that a religious couple is likelier to divorce than atheists who marry in a tank full of dolphins.) The problem for opponents of gay marriage isn't that gay people are trying to redefine marriage but that straight people have redefined marriage to a point that it no longer makes any sense to exclude gay couples. Gay people can love, gay people can commit. Some of us even have children. So why can't we get married?
But supporters of gay marriage have been peddling this same double standard, and it's just as easy to punch holes in.
