What I learned at AEI

Public Interest, Summer, 2004 by Jonathan Rauch

THE official topic of today's discussion is: "Should conservatives support same-sex marriage?" The unofficial subtitle, at least of my talk, is: "Everything I Know About Gay Marriage, I Learned at the American Enterprise Institute." Though I'm now at the Brookings Institution, my first think tank appointment was at AEI. It was here as a guest scholar that I learned so much from so many of the leading lights of conservatism, and I'd like to think that many of my arguments for gay marriage are, in fact, conservative arguments.

Too many people on the Right are panicking instead of thinking when it comes to same-sex marriage. The president of the United States, unfortunately, is someone I put in that category. But it seems to me that if you apply the kinds of principles that I first learned at AEI, and which folks like AEI's president Christopher DeMuth have done so much to advance over the last 20 years, I think you reach two conclusions, or at least I do: The first is that same-sex marriage is an idea that conservatives ought to support. The second is that even if you still reject gay marriage in principle, a national ban on same-sex marriage, which is what the president and many other conservatives are advocating nowadays, is a very unconservative approach.

My book Gay Marriage: Why It Is Good for Gays, Good for Straights, and Good for America ([dagger]) is largely about why same-sex marriage is what I call the "trifecta of modern American social policy": a win, a win, and a win--good for gays, good for communities around them (that is to say, the straight world), and above all, good for the institution of marriage as a whole. If gay marriage is enacted, gay couples will get the legal protections of marriage, but that's hardly the most of it. They also get a more profound love, a destination for love that enriches their lives whether they ultimately get married or not--the knowledge that romantic attachment properly points toward something larger than itself. They also get the enormous personal benefits that marriage alone conveys: Married people are healthier, happier, more prosperous, and more secure. They suffer from less incidence of drug addiction and criminal behavior. They even live longer. Those are things to which gay citizens ought to have access, and in all of these ways, gay Americans will benefit from integration into the culture of marriage.

The straight world gets another irreplaceable benefit: the stability that comes from knitting people into families. Indeed, that is what marriage uniquely does: It creates family. I have a cousin right now who is 60 years old, married, and suffering from cancer. Her husband is caring for her throughout the difficult experience of chemotherapy, not just physically but emotionally. Without her husband, I doubt she would be alive. There is simply no substitute for the love and care of a spouse. Even though my cousin's marriage is nonprocreative, I do not think anyone can reasonably say that society has no stake in their union. Since her husband is caring for her, the rest of society does not have to.

Above all, the institution of marriage itself is a likely beneficiary of same-sex marriage. This is an opportunity to bolster the ethic and the culture of marriage at a time when society has been abandoning these things. The fundamental principle for all Americans, straight or gay, ought to be that sex, love, and marriage go together, automatically. If you're a straight family with kids, and if a gay couple lives next door, you should want to see them upholding the ideal of marriage. That's good for your kids. (It's also good for their kids, if they have any.) At a time when heterosexuals are increasingly treating marriage as purely optional, this is a rare opportunity to arrest our slide down the slippery slope away from marriage and to recommit ourselves to marriage.

The problem today is not gay couples wanting to get married. That is not the threat to marriage. The threat to marriage is straight couples not wanting to get married or straight couples not staying married. Same-sex marriage is potentially a dramatic statement that marriage as such--not cohabitation, not partnership, not anything else--is the gold standard and the model to which all Americans should aspire. Everybody should be expected to make marriage their aim. That doesn't mean they necessarily have to marry, but that it is the noble and right thing to do.

HERE is an important point conservatives should be able to understand and, in fact, do understand in many other contexts: We live in a world of great uncertainty and unintended consequences. We lack a lot of information. The wisest person or committee in the world cannot get everything right and will often make unintended mistakes. How do we make policy in such an uncertain and often surprising world? Modern conservatism has developed some important principles for how to do so, and I'll discuss three of them.

The first principle is that individuals count. Conservatives often remind us never to lose sight of the individual. That doesn't mean you consider only individual welfare, but you must consider it, and you must reject a crude utilitarianism that simply sees individuals as means to an end rather than as ends in themselves. Conservatives are generally the first to object to those collectivist policies that relegate individuals to the status of mere human bricks or timber. If you would not confiscate someone's income for the common good, for example, why confiscate their marriage? How many of you would give up your marriage to make someone else's family stronger? And if you're not married, how many of you would give up the opportunity to get married to make someone else's family stronger?