A question that is often asked of those who oppose gay marriage is, “Why do you care?” After all, no one is proposing making gay marriage mandatory. What your neighbors do in the privacy of their own bedroom should be their business, etc., etc.
All this is true. But what changes when gay marriage is allowed — or even when homosexuality becomes a publicly affirmable preference — is not what goes on in the privacy of their own bedroom. Homoerotic encounters have occurred in basically all known human cultures, and honest conservatives (starting with Plato) have acknowledged that this is more or less inevitable. What disturbs opponents of gay marriage isn’t so much the gay sex as the public acceptability of gay relationships.
And the reason this disturbs them, in the end, is that it increases the likelihood that their own son will come out, that their daughter will never give them grandchildren — that the form of life to which they have submitted will be abandoned by their children.
To this extent, opposition to gay marriage is of a piece with the kind of slut-shaming behavior that we’ve seen from Rush Limbaugh in the past week — and indeed with the opposition to birth control that underlies it. Extramarital sexual encounters have also always occurred in all known human societies, and women have always pursued such encounters to some extent, because (you may want to cover your children’s eyes at this point) women enjoy sex. It’s different, though, when an accomplished professional woman publicly makes this point. It’s even more different when she makes it in the midst of making the case that health insurers should be required, by a publicly debated and proclaimed law, to cover birth control — because the threat of pregnancy has been one of the major tools for bringing women back into the fold of marriage, either preemptively or in the “shot-gun wedding” situation.
Now it is the case that some fathers have an unhealthy fixation on their daughters’ sexual purity. Yet I think that when they see the successful law student on television talking about making birth control more easily available, there’s a thought in the back of their minds: “Well, great — now there’s no reason for my daughter to get married and produce that grandchild.” I’d imagine that a similar thought-process is involved with publicly legalized abortions.
In both cases, it seems to me that the goal of policing the sexual behavior is not directly to prevent said sexual behavior — as anyone is forced to acknowledge if they think about it for a few seconds, such behavior is more or less inevitable. The goal, instead, is to keep such behavior from being publicly acknowledged.
Who is the audience for this secrecy? I don’t think it’s the majority of people, because it appears that the majority of people are fairly firmly inclined toward heterosexuality and tend to wind up in relatively monogamous pairings if left to themselves. Nor is it the people who are strongly inclined to the various types of illicit sex, who will generally get their fix in some way regardless of the public obstacles.
The audience is the borderline case, that small sliver of the population who could go either way — who might be attracted to the same sex while being more or less content to stick with the opposite sex, who might be open to a broader range of sexual encounters but finds monogamy more or less adequate. Such people will tend to go the more socially acceptable route, because that’s what gives them access to having their own publicly acknowledged family (which apparently a lot of people want to do for whatever reason). When same-sex couples have access to all the same public acknowledgment and family-formation abilities, when single mothers can raise a child who turns out more or less fine — then that’s gone. Then the whole system falls apart.
Again, one might ask why that matters. If your gay son can get married to the man of his dreams and raise a grandchild, haven’t you more or less gotten what you wanted? This question ignores the fact that a big part of the appeal of the so-called “traditional” route is its self-evidence, the sense that one is doing the objectively right thing. Even for the 100% straight, 100% monogamously-inclined individual, traditional marriage requires significant sacrifice, and it requires even more for those strongly inclined toward the same sex or toward promiscuity. If the spell of self-evidence is broken — if not everyone has to do it — then all those sacrifices are called into question.
Legalizing gay marriage really does call existing heterosexual marriages into question, and the question is: Why did I do this? If there was another way, why did I sacrifice in order to conform? The attitude of resentment that results is perhaps unattractive, but it is not incomprehensible.
For that reasons, individualistic defenses basically completely miss the point. It’s not a question of individual preference, but of social formation. And this is precisely the point where I think the advocacy of gay marriage and reproductive freedom in terms of individual choice fall short: they fail to mount a critique of the social form that they really are undermining and should undermine. This leads to conformist approaches, such as arguing that gay couples can form nuclear families that are just as good as heterosexual couples’, or that access to birth control helps promote greater family stability by allowing everyone to consolidate their economic position, etc.
What we need instead is a public discussion of the ways that the nuclear family is destructive — and a way of convincing the resentful reactionaries that their feelings are rooted in the way that the social norms enforcing the nuclear family have hurt them. Then the fairness argument can be turned in the other direction: no one should have to live under such a stultifying regime. Until then, reactionary outbursts are going to be more or less inevitable, and the advances that have been made toward sexual freedom will remain much more fragile than we generally imagine.