Against the Possibility of Equality

While the anti-gay marriage Defense of Marriage Act passed the Senate overwhelmingly on its way to being enacted into law, a law to prohibit discrimination in employment failed by a hair. On the surface, the votes make no sense. Since marriage is mostly a private act between consenting adults, while employment discrimination laws place the hated hand of government on everyone who runs a business, Americans might have expected exactly the opposite outcome from the supposed anti-government Congress. Marriage is the problem.

What’s the threat that the Defense of Marriage Act defends marriage from? The possibility of childlessness? True, gay marriages produce no biological offspring, but for more than half a century, the American Constitution has forbidden the government from intervening in the private decision to reproduce. Gay marriages may not be a refuge from sexual sin in some eyes, but the laws against adultery and fornication have gone unenforced for decades.

There’s only one aspect of marriage left for gays to undermine: its inequality. Historically, culturally, economically and socially, traditional marriage has been an association of inequality. In ancient Athens, the great Aristotle took marriage as an example of the naturalness and universality of the right of men to rule everywhere in society. Even the revolutionary currents of the Protestant Reformation and the Enlightenment failed to sweep away the assumptions of marital inequality. As revolution and civil war swept over England in the 17th century, English wives were enjoined to be “chaste, silent and obedient” by contemporary advice manuals.

Today, William Bennett and the rest of the virtues crowd invoke the authority of Alexis de Tocqueville, the great commentator on American democracy, as they force women into marriage with social pressures such as the withdrawal of welfare. Some years ago, William Kristol, now the editor of the hot conservative magazine the Weekly Standard, argued against “women’s liberation,” explicitly invoking “the relevance of Tocqueville.” If America was to flourish, Kristol said, women must “grasp the following three points: the necessity of marriage, the importance of good morals and the necessity of inequality within marriage.” No unisex thinker, Kristol comes right out and says “it seems natural, at least in the sense of necessary, that the man be the head.”

Not only is inequality necessary for marriage, it seems that no inequality is too savage for the traditional marriage advocates. Recently, authorities in Orange County have been caught in the act of marrying girls as young as 13 to their much older sexual partners as a condition of releasing charges of statutory rape. The 13-year-olds probably have no difficulty grasping Kristol’s threefold lessons.

Obviously, gay marriages can be unequal as well, either because they emerge from a culture of inequality or for reasons rooted in the individual psychologies of the participants. The difference is that gay marital inequality, while optional, is not a “necessity.” Only gay marriage makes the fantasy of necessary inequality impossible, because where would the “natural” inequality that allows Kristol’s husbands to govern come from? Two men or two women usually are separated only by a narrow range of strength. They are not raised from birth to assume different limits on their life chan- ces, and they both either are or are not vulnerable to the possibility of pregnancy. Who “necessarily” governs?

So the politicians sort of got it right. Gay marriage is indeed a threat to traditional marriage. Once word of the possibility of equality in marriage seeps out, who knows what radical consequences will ensue?