The liberal case against gay marriage

Public Interest, Summer, 2004 by Susan M. Shell

THE issue of gay marriage brings to a head, like few other issues of our time, a central conflict between two moral positions that interact like seismic plates beneath the surface of contemporary American political life. It is commonly thought that the issue of gay marriage pits secular liberals against religious conservatives. While this understanding is accurate up to a point, it is also seriously misleading. The most stubborn and intransigent opponents in the conflict are both in their way sectarian.

The first position is more or less a traditional Christian one. That is, it accepts the idea of an authority higher than human choice that must remain within limits set by that authority. New understandings of these limits have arisen in recent years, allowing the individual pursuit of happiness more leeway and removing much of the shame and guilt that once kept traditional sexual norms in place. Nevertheless, its basic familial ideal remains intact: a monogamous, heterosexual, and devotional relationship directed toward the rearing of children. For most proponents of this view, gay marriage represents a direct assault on the grounding authority by which life at its most serious and intimate is lived.

The second position, which takes human freedom as its central and highest good, could be classified as "liberationist" or postmodern. Distrustful of traditional rules as intrinsically oppressive, it seeks the individual's emancipation from all norms that might hamper the quest for spiritual and material autonomy. For the most radical liberationists, all universal norms are suspect, with the sole exception of something like a duty to "accept difference." Among the more moderate proponents, this suspicion is replaced by an uneasiness with respect to "moral judgment" that approaches or imitates humility of a more traditional Christian sort, at least when applied to others. Thus, for the liberationist camp, gay marriage is either a celebration of the individual's heroic struggle to find love and validation in a hostile world, or at the very least, it is no one else's business.

The debate over gay marriage is currently polarized by these two sectarian forces. It would be politically beneficial to define a genuinely liberal approach that is fair to both. Such an approach would include them in the ongoing and generally fruitful compromise between revealed religion and the principles of individual rights and freedoms from which the United States has historically drawn strength. The point is not to abandon the position formulated by Locke and other liberal thinkers, but to reaffirm and enhance it in the face of new conditions and challenges. Such thinkers have generally viewed marriage as a contractual arrangement between two individuals for the sake of mutual advantage and the generation and rearing of children to the point where they can be self-reliant (in Locke's thinking) and/or capable of exercising their individual rights in a responsible civic manner (according to Kant). How might such older liberal views be usefully adapted to the present?

The question is complicated by a common, relatively recent view that there is no one way to be a family--that all forms of family life are to celebrated equally as products of individual choice, at least so long as they make people happy. Conversely, it is said, intolerance and lack of respect for "difference" breed unhappiness. Liberals typically uphold the right of individuals to pursue their own understandings of happiness, so long as they do not encroach upon the rights of others. What, then, can weaken an apparently liberal presumption in favor of allowing people to define marriage however they choose, other than an illiberal deference toward a particular religious norm that has no right to political establishment? The answer lies in marriage itself, as it has been understood and practiced almost universally.

The essence of marriage, liberally construed

Though it is often assumed that no principled liberal case exists against gay marriage, this is incorrect. In a liberal democracy, private groups may hold their own views on the desirability or reprehensibility of homosexual relations. But it is not the business of the state either to endorse or forbid such practices publicly. Neither is it the business of the liberal democratic state to define marriage in a way that speaks to the special needs of a single sect. Liberalism proceeds by taking its fundamental bearings from certain basic human experiences about which sectarians can reasonably be expected to agree--for example, the general human aversion to violent death and the claims to which that aversion naturally gives rise. Thus the first step in defining a liberal approach to marriage is to find a way of understanding marriage that is similarly true to the human situation and at the same time relatively impartial with respect to present-day sectarian conflicts.

A suitable account of marriage might begin as follows: Most human societies have honored the notion that special responsibility for children lies with the biological parents. This has also been the view of almost all influential thinkers on the subject--including "liberal" ones. No known society treats the question of who may properly call a child his or her own as simply "up for grabs" or as a matter to be decided entirely politically as one might distribute land or wealth.