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Code
of Honor
Mr. Kurtz is also a fellow at the
Hudson Institute |
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A champion of the campaign for gay marriage, Sullivan has nonetheless fiercely criticized the excesses of the gay-rights movement. For this, Andrew has been subjected to vicious personal attacks, all of which he has parried with pluck and dignity. I know of no better way to pay tribute to Andrew Sullivan than to firmly but respectfully pursue our honest disagreement over the issue of gay marriage. I began that debate with an article critical of Sullivan in the September 2000 issue of Commentary, and with several earlier pieces at National Review Online, " Gay in Hollywood," "Love and Marriage," and "The Right Balance." Sullivan has now offered a partial answer by taking on "Love and Marriage" in his latest TRB column in The New Republic. One of the glaring weaknesses of that column is Sullivan's refusal to acknowledge or respond to the full range of arguments that I and others have made against gay marriage. Sullivan claims that several key arguments have actually been "abandoned" by the foes of gay marriage. Yet I myself have only recently offered up extensive versions of precisely the points that, according to Sullivan, the foes of gay marriage have forsaken. Take, for example, the claim that gay marriage will lead inexorably to polygamy. This argument was derided by Sullivan and his allies as implausible fear-mongering when opponents of gay marriage raised the prospect, in a strictly theoretical way, in 1996, during the debate over the Defense of Marriage Act. Yet as I showed in my Commentary piece, the last five years have seen the rise of a movement for "polyamory" — a form of group marriage. Polyamorists are now organized throughout the country, with websites and regular conferences, and have gotten some national publicity. And the polyamorists have a cause celebre, the case of April Divilbiss, a woman living with two "husbands" whose child has been removed by the courts. Can anyone doubt, then, that gay marriage will bring in its wake suits from polyamorists seeking the legalization of group marriage? What seemed laughable only five years ago is already both a practical reality and a profound threat to the future of marriage. And Vermont's supreme court will be hard pressed to show why the grounds upon which it mandated homosexual civil unions (the broad state constitutional claim that government is instituted for the "common benefit" of the people) would not also mandate polyamorous marriage. So the threat of legalized polygamy and group marriage has materialized, and I myself have put the issue forward in a recent article (several actually). Sullivan's claim that the polygamy argument has been "abandoned" by foes of gay marriage is therefore demonstrably false. Sullivan also claims that the opponents of gay marriage no longer maintain that, through an interpretation of the Full Faith and Credit Clause of the U. S. Constitution, the courts might overturn the Defense of Marriage Act and impose gay marriage on the entire country after it is legalized in but a single state. Here Sullivan conveniently passes over the very serious danger to DOMA posed by a constitutional challenge based upon the equal-protection clause. And only last week, in "The Right Balance," I showed that Sullivan's discounting of court-imposed gay marriage on "Full Faith and Credit" grounds is utterly unwarranted. Sullivan has yet to reply to that argument. In "Love and Marriage," I argued that gay marriage would make it difficult to combat heterosexual promiscuity or the high divorce rate. In his reply, Sullivan points out that heterosexual promiscuity and high divorce rates predate gay marriage. But this misses my point. The changes in heterosexual sex and marriage since the sixties have been bound up inextricably from the start with changed attitudes toward homosexuality. While I neither expect nor seek a full restoration of the social system of the fifties, gay marriage would lock in and radicalize the post-sixties separation of sexuality from reproduction within marriage, hampering attempts even to moderate current trends. Sullivan claims that I take too little account of lesbian couples, who are generally models of monogamy. But as I showed in "Love and Marriage," much of the problem of gay marriage is its undermining effect on the ethos of sexual complementarity — particularly the notion that men have certain responsibilities to women in light of their sexual vulnerability and their need for support as mothers. Many lesbian advocates of gay marriage actually look forward to the prospect of undermining the ethos marital complementarity, since they understand it as oppressive to women. (And by the way, this explains why, contrary to Sullivan's claims, an infertile heterosexual couple is not equivalent to a homosexual couple. An infertile heterosexual couple embodies and strengthens the ethos of sexual complementarity. A homosexual couple does not.) Sullivan offers a sort of arithmetical rebuttal to the claim that the lack of sexual fidelity in even many of the most committed gay male couples threatens to separate the ethos of marriage from monogamy. For Sullivan, the superior fidelity of many lesbian couples balances out the greater promiscuity of many gay male couples, making same-sex marriage, so far as its effects on monogamy are concerned, a wash. And if lesbians marry at a higher rate than gay men, there could even be a net gain in marital monogamy. Yet, Sullivan's "mathematical" argument doesn't work, precisely because marriage is so dependent upon a socially shared ethos of fidelity. Consider the following example. I attended a college renowned for its honor code. Students signed a stringent pledge, promising not to cheat in any way, and promising to confront and, if necessary, report anyone seen cheating to the school's honor council. Having signed the pledge, students were permitted to take exams unsupervised. There was great pride in the code, and the powerful ethos of honor gave the school its identity. But what if a new group of students was admitted to the school, half of whom were paragons of honesty, but the other half of whom, although willing to sign the honor code, freely proclaimed their rejection of its fundamental principles. Suppose this group of new students admitted that they intended to cheat at will. Indeed, suppose they went further and rejected the whole notion of "cheating," calling it outdated and oppressive, and speaking of what had once been called "cheating" as simply an "alternative form of learning." What sort of effect would even this small but vocal group have upon the ethos of honor at this college? Marriage also operates according to a code of honor — a code, as it happen, that forbids cheating. And that code of honor is enforced, not so much by the intervention of concerned individuals (although that is important) as by a shared ethos — an ethos that is powerful precisely because it is shared, and known to be shared. It is the delicate dignity and reputation of the institution (be it a college, or the institution of marriage itself) that confers honor upon those who publicly pledge to make the sacrifices necessary to maintain the code. Yet it would take only a small group willing to openly subvert the code, to break the spell, so to speak. That is why Sullivan's "arithmetical" defense on the question of sexual fidelity will not do. When he is not putting forward his "mathematical" argument, Sullivan assumes that only those gay couples who embrace the traditional ethos of monogamy will marry. But this is almost certainly a mistaken assumption. As I showed in my earlier piece, "Point of No Return," there is every likelihood that many homosexual couples who reject monogamy will nonetheless marry — for the sake of the financial and legal benefits. And many of these couples hope to use their marital status to actively subvert conventional cultural notions of marital honor. Perhaps under pressure from my arguments in "Love and Marriage," Sullivan now claims that even gay male marriages will be at least as monogamous as straight ones. But this claim clearly contradicts Sullivan's own position in his book, Virtually Normal. There, Sullivan actually praises the "openness of the contract" that characterizes so many gay male unions and offers it as something that might actually strengthen marriage as an institution (pp. 202-203). While I strongly disagree that the "openness" of gay male marriage will do anything but weaken marriage for heterosexuals, the point is that, in Virtually Normal, Sullivan actually concedes what he now denies — the carry over effect on marriage from gay sexual "openness." And like those hypothetical collegiate advocates of "alternative modes of learning," Sullivan even attempts to redefine cheating by turning it into a plus. If even the conservative Sullivan once openly put forth this argument, just wait until large numbers of married gay radicals get to work. But for the really serious "subversion" to begin, the radicals will need full-fledged gay marriage, not simply civil unions. Only when gay couples are formally married will everything they say and do, in the nature of the case, work a change within what marriage actually is. That's one reason why Sullivan's pointing to the seeming lack of negative effects from Denmark's system of "registered partnerships" doesn't begin to show us what full-fledged gay marriage will actually mean for the institution of marriage itself. But the deeper reason why we aren't even close to the point where the real effects of gay marriage will become evident is that the shared moral ethos that supports an institution doesn't generally change in simple or strictly incremental fashion. It will take a few years of full-fledged gay marriage in several Western cultural centers to reach a critical mass of "subversion" sufficient to set off the next big implosion in the institution of marriage. In Virtually Normal, Sullivan himself describes a parallel effect when he speaks of the relative collapse of the belief in the sinfulness of homosexuality (p.53). To reach the point where claims of the perverse or sinful nature of homosexuality no longer "worked their magic" on the public at large, it was first necessary to create substantial zones of disagreement about what homosexuality was. Once the issue was thrown up for discussion, the old codes and exhortations (which were powerful precisely because they were taken for granted) lost much of their effect. But isn't the institution of marriage itself vulnerable to just such a collapse? After reaching a critical mass of social space in which the link between marriage and monogamy is actively questioned, don't we risk precipitating a radical disenchantment of the old codes of honor? And by the time we reach that point, it will be far too late to turn back. It will take a few years, but once advocates of gay marriage have got what they want and no longer need to be on their best behavior, Hollywood's cutting edge directors and television producers will quickly discover that the "edgiest" topic in town is the new kind of marriage being pioneered by homosexual couples who combine emotional commitment with sexual "openness." Andrew Sullivan's great strength is also his weakness. Even as Sullivan defends the gay-marriage movement, the particular arguments he employs put him at some distance from the cultural and political heart of the gay community. It is precisely Sullivan's tendency to understate the persistence and influence of gay cultural radicalism that gives rise to his unduly sanguine claims about the positive effects of gay marriage upon the institution of marriage itself. Yet that is something about which, as a society, we simply cannot afford to be wrong. |
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hen
it comes to Andrew Sullivan, no question about it, I'm a fan. The
New Republic under his editorship was my dream of a magazine;
I'm a loyal reader of his pioneering "me-zine," 