Arguing gay marriage

National Review, Dec 13, 2004 by Deroy Murdock

For better or worse, social conservatives have provided a coherent rationale for limiting marriage to the union of one man and one woman. This limitation, we are told, is designed to maintain traditional family arrangements and create an ideal environment for child-rearing.

Midge Decter must have missed that memo. She argues ("An Amazing Pass," Nov. 8) that lesbian marriage is no big deal. "They are women," Decter writes, "and women are by nature monogamous, wishing to be mothers, for instance, and to bring up their children in stable households."

"The real issue here is with, and about, the men," she continues. "For men are not by nature monogamous--it is women who make them so." She concedes that "there have also been homosexual [male] couples who have famously lived together for years and years, sometimes indeed for life, but what heterosexuals would define as marital loyalty has little or nothing to do with it."

This argument is circular. One cannot expect the most committed and faithful gay couples to practice marital loyalty while denying them the freedom to marry.

If Decter can live with monogamous lesbian marriages, she can have no principled objection to equally faithful gay-male marriages. Conversely, according to Decter's thinking, promiscuous lesbians should be forbidden to wed, or their marriage licenses should lapse if either female can prove that the other cheated.

Indeed, Decter's logic suggests that marriage-license laws should be amended to require and enforce monogamy, perhaps through biennial affidavits filed with local marriage bureaus. Those committed to monogamy could marry and stay wed. Those who cheat would have their licenses revoked. Those who lie under oath, even about sex, would face perjury charges.

If the marriage debate is about fidelity, and not really about the children, social conservatives should permit and, indeed, encourage faithful matrimony among gay Americans.

Deroy Murdock

New York, N.Y.

MIDGE DECTER REPLIES: Dear, dear, Mr. Murdock--laws are simple, and should be, but social reality is often, indeed usually, complex. Does one really have to point out that understanding a phenomenon is not the same as advocating it? In any case, the point was that gay marriage, so far from being a matter of either justice or compassion, is merely a further greasing of the slippery slope we have been on for some years now. First came the demand for a cure for AIDS that would help to perpetuate blind promiscuity. Then for marriage. And next, mark you, for the legitimation of pederasty (something, along with bathhouse frolics, in which women by their nature don't happen to be involved, that's all).