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Fall
2006
Gay Marriage:
Destroying the Family to Save the Children?
 Karla's son Marcel, partner Jenny, daughter Nina and Karla |
When I was married and I got into a fight with my husband, one of the things he used to hurt at me, with outraged contempt and anger was, “you just want what you want!” It certainly confused me—and it produced a kind of knee jerk effect of making me want to deny his accusation: “No, I do not want what I want!” Huh? Wait, yes I do, and that is a good thing!
In a similar way, I find gay marriage proponents often get mired in the accusations of the right wing. With regard to gay marriage, the right wing claims that allowing gay marriage will “destroy the family,” and the immediate knee-jerk lgbt rejoinder is, “No, it will not!”
But wait. Maybe gay marriage will destroy the family. And that is a good thing.
Stanley Kurtz, a research fellow at the Hoover Institution, a right-wing think tank, was on a radio show arguing against gay marriage. I found myself in agreement with everything he was saying, except his arguments made me more in favor of gay marriage. Kurtz was railing that gay marriage “is interpreted not to emphasize the importance of marriage and childrearing, but to emphasize the infinite flexibility of the family,” and that “when the tie between marriage and parenthood is broken, marriage seems to fall away.” He offered as evidence the situation in Scandinavia where there is as he said de facto gay marriage and where gay couples are allowed to adopt children. He cited certain sections of Norway where 80% of first-born children and 60% of subsequent-born children are born out of wedlock.
I found this fascinating. I had thought that gay marriage was really not much to be in favor of, really, a kind of liberal lowest-common-denominator agenda item for gay rights. But if it could enable women to have children without needing to be married to a man, it could cause marriage to “fall away,” well, count me as an avid supporter of the cause!
The really interesting part about Kurtz’ position is that he claimed to be in favor of heterosexual marriage because, in his view, it goes without saying that it is best for children to be born to married heterosexual parents. He is certainly guilty of sloppy logic on that one. And, more to the point, he’s got his facts wrong. It turns out children actually fare much better in the depraved and decadent Norway. In fact, Norway has a lower child poverty rate, infant mortality rate and rate of accidents involving children than the US. And, when it comes to education, Norway spends more as a percentage of its GDP and the pupil/teacher ration and average class size in schools is lower than in the US. It turns out that the poorest children I Norway receive double the income of the poorest children in the US. So if the argument is that gay marriage will destroy the family (like in Norway) and that will be bad for children, it looks like the right wing is way off. Maybe destroying the family (as we know it) will turn out to be good for children.
If, as a society, we want to do what’s best for children, then, maybe we should lay off all the hype about marriage (heterosexual or otherwise) and actually do what’s best for children: make sure their caretakers—however many and whatever their gender—have the financial wherewithal, the time, the child care, and the emotional support to take good care of their children, and make sure children have adequate health care and education. Raising children is serious business and we should not be tying their futures to the vicissitudes of romantic love.
Instead, everyone talks about supporting marriage as a way of supporting children. So why don’t we just cut out the middleman? Because it means cutting out the man, after all. If we supported children and their caretakers, why, then, women wouldn’t need men so much and we too could have 80% of our children born out of wedlock. We too could choose to be in a relationship not because our children will suffer financially if we’re not (sound like prostitution?), but because the relationship is good for us. We too, could take care of all children—not just those born to women married to middle or upper class men.
But then, mothers would no longer be held hostage to staying in abusive or just plain shitty relationships in order to safeguard the welfare of their children. Men would have to actually be nice, respectful, sensitive, and even do their share of the housework in order to keep a woman. Men couldn’t be the shitholes that they are but be able to stay married because of their financial upper hand. (When I was divorcing my husband, he once exclaimed, “I knew I was an asshole, but I thought we’d be married forever!” What made him think that? What makes so many men think that?)
Could it be that men are afraid that they can’t cut it, that women would dump them en masse if they didn’t maintain the financial upper hand, making it untenably difficult to raise children without their paycheck?
So if the right wing is right, if gay marriage serves to further break the tie between raising children and marriage, and if that is what they mean by destroying the family, then that’s a good thing. Ultimately, if the purported concern is children, then let’s improve the welfare of children—and let’s go all the way in destroying marriage!
So while I support gay marriage as a stopgap measure, to the extent it provides benefits like health insurance, inheritance rights and hospital visitation to gay partners, ultimately, I think those rights should be likewise severed from marriage. All people, single, partnered or otherwise, should have health insurance and be able to visit sick friends or relatives. Rather than defending the institution of marriage, I think it should be reduced to a social or religious ritual in which people commit to each other in some meaningful way. But almost no benefits should come with it—except maybe a toaster or two and a nice honeymoon. Society should have no stake whatsoever in who loves each other, who sleeps with each other, and the commitments they do or do not make or keep. Society does, however, have an abiding obligation to make sure all people—including children—have access to the resources that will ensure their health, well-being and life chances. And access to those resources should not be mediated by who you’re fucking. (That is the reason so many feminists have argued that marriage is a form of prostitution—to the extent women’s access to resources is determined by their having to have repeated sex with a certain man, it is true.)
So I guess I am for gay marriage, but only to the extent that it can fulfill the fears and predictions of the right wing’s objections to it—to the extent that it contributes to the breakdown of the patriarchal family, to the severance of ties between marriage and the well-being of children, and to the breakdown of male control over women. But those are very high hopes, even for something as feared and reviled by the religio0us right as gay marriage. I guess I won’t be holding my breath.
Karla Mantilla
Washington, DC
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