Why Homosexuals Want

What Marriage Has Now Become

Bryce Christensen

Bryce Christensen teaches English at Southern Utah University and is a contributing editor to The Family in America, a publication of the Howard Center for Family, Religion & Society. He is the author of Utopia Against the Family, published by Ignatius.

Who anticipated the rapid sequence of events that in early 2004 brought hundreds of homosexual couples -- in Massachusetts, California, New York, Oregon, and elsewhere -- before officials willing to pronounce them married? Sympathetic observers have lauded these couples for their bravery; unsympathetic observers have marveled at their brazenness. Conservative groups have now set in motion initiatives to prohibit further homosexual marriages and to invalidate those that have occurred. But amid all of the commentators praising or damning homosexuals for breaking the marriage barrier, few have reflected on just what kind of institution homosexuals are now claiming. If Americans scrutinize carefully the way the national culture has in recent decades re-defined wedlock, they may well conclude that it is not homosexuals that have changed so much as marriage itself. Seen from this perspective, homosexual weddings constitute the predictable culmination of cultural changes that have radically de-natured wedlock.

Only the ideologically blind would deny that homosexual marriage threatens the traditions that defined wedlock for millennia. Homosexual activists themselves assert that they aim at more than a mere aping of heterosexual marriage: they want homosexual marriage to “destabilize marriage’s gendered definition.”

But the destabilization of marriage hardly began with homosexual unions. To those who have been paying attention to what American culture, legislation, and jurisprudence have been doing to wedlock since at least the 60s, homosexual marriage looks like the coup de grace administered only after judges, educators, therapists, activists, and entertainers have already done their worst.

Once strongly reinforced by both religion and law, marriage stood for centuries as the socially obligatory institution that shaped the individual for an adulthood of self-sacrifice and cooperative home-centered labor focused on childbearing and child-rearing. Marriage thus defined the very center of the American social vision when President Teddy Roosevelt spoke of the “great primal work of home-making and home-keeping” and when he praised the married couples producing the country’s “best crop,” its “crop of children.”

However, by the late 20th century, the American supports for marriage had weakened in a number of ways -- none of them involving homosexual marriage. First, the breadwinner/homemaker division of labor (a vestige of the husband-wife division of labor on the once-numerous family farms) came under cultural and economic assault, as labor unions leaders, employers, and government officials turned against the “family wage” system which once paid a married father enough to support an at-home wife and their numerous children. New policies favored female employment and two-career homes.

As mothers moved into paid employment, the social roles of parents became increasingly indistinguishable. In economic terms, many American children had two “fathers” long before advocates of homosexual marriage ever attempted to give children two biologically male parents. The obliteration of the economic distinction between husband and wife also inevitably suppressed the biological event that most forcibly defined gender differences: childbirth. Marital fertility plummeted, helping (along with Roe v. Wade) to push overall fertility in the United States below replacement level in what some have called “a birth dearth.” Influential environmentalists and Malthusians welcomed the change.

So, too, did divorce lawyers. In part because the marriages of one-child or DINK couples (Double-Income, No-Kids) are fragile, divorce rates shot up in the 60s and 70s, even as compliant lawmakers enacted No-Fault divorce statutes reducing wedlock to a legal revolving door. For the first time, the state actually allied itself with spouses who wished to sever marital ties. Meanwhile, federal policymakers undermined wedlock with welfare policies subsidizing the mother-state-child family in which Uncle Sam served as surrogate husband and father. Even as overall fertility languished, out-of-wedlock births soared.

Perhaps even more damaging to wedlock than the changes in law and economics was the cultural erosion of religious commitment. Sociologists have reported not only a decline in church attendance among young adults in recent decades but also a softening of doctrinal orthodoxy. Certainly, young Americans were not taking behavioral cues from St. Paul when they made pornography a growth industry (aided by a libertarian Supreme Court), relegated premarital virginity to the history books, and removed the stigma from cohabiting without benefit of clergy. For many couples the religious symbolism of the white wedding dress had become a bad cultural joke long before homosexuals made a wedding dress of any sort optional. And widespread insouciance about the scriptural prohibition against adultery was enriching divorce lawyers long before homosexuals ever starting queuing up for marriage licenses.

By the 90s, marriage had lost so much of its cultural substance that for many it hardly seemed worth the bother. Between 1970 and 2000, the marriage rate dropped an astonishing 40 percent. Some homosexual couples have even asked, “Why should we scramble to get onto a sinking ship?” But homosexual couples seeking to be married do so precisely because the traditional freight of marriage -- complementary gender roles, work in a real home economy, child-bearing, sexual fidelity, permanence -- has been thrown overboard as the marital ship has settled ever lower in the water. The de-natured thing that marriage has become now appeals to homosexuals because it now offers insurance, employment, lifestyle, and government benefits while imposing none of the traditional obligations.

Many Americans oppose homosexual marriage because it undermines the social institution that has always meant bride and groom. Their views are quite understandable. But unless these Americans recognize and are prepared to undo the cultural harm done to wedlock over the last four decades, their fight against homosexual marriage will fail.     *

“If Columbus had an advisory committee he would probably still be at the dock.” --Justice Arthur Goldberg