This will be cross-posted on my blog, http://wantsomewood.blogspot.com
We all know that liberals are enemies of Christmas, thanks to the education we've received from political geniuses like Bill O'Reilly and John Gibson. Sometimes, reading certain liberal columnists makes one wonder if they don't want to give the likes of O'Reilly and Gibson a chance to declare liberals enemies of marriage. Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen, for instance, doesn't seem able to bring up the topic without becoming snide. In a November 20, 2003 column, he described marriage as "both wobbly and wheezing -- the butt of cynical jokes, a gold mine for divorce lawyers and, even for the non- initiated, the triumph of hope over experience." Meanwhile, in Salon.com, Sara Miles writes that "(s)traight people are just not that into marriage anymore," and adds that "(l)egal marriage gives heterosexuals the right to hire a cheesy '70s cover band, read embarrassing poetry to their friends, and fight with their parents over whom to invite to a party with bad food." (It certainly doesn’t sound like anything I have any interest in attending.) She also cites the usual half-of-all-marriages-end-in-divorce statistics.
In the American Prospect, marriage historian E. J. Graff describes marriage as "an institution that many heterosexuals are fleeing." Most heady of all, perhaps, is Alisa Solomon's article in the Nation, in which she speaks approvingly of the 1971 Gay Activist Alliance takeover of the New York City Clerk's office (in which the GAA activists did not allow straight couples into the office to get marriage licenses) and the possibilities it raised for "abolishing marriage altogether."
Some of these authors, especially Graff, make good points, and Miles's essay, especially, is personal, heartfelt, and very worth reading. That said, what's most fascinating is that all of these writers were making an argument not against marriage in general, but for legalizing gay marriage.
I think that a more effective argument for gay marriage would be one that was also for marriage. This would appeal to facts, since the death of marriage, to paraphrase Mark Twain, has been exaggerated. The half-of-all-marriages-end-in-divorce figure that Miles and many other people cite is a statistical myth, and the divorce rate has actually been dropping for the last several years (it is surprising how rarely liberals cite this statistic, given that it punches a hole in a common social-conservative argument that the "American family is dying"). Graff is right that people are marrying later, but they are also more likely to stay married--which is not surprising, since statistics have long shown that marriages are more likely to last if they begin later in life.
It also appeals to common sense. After all, if marriage is as bad as Cohen and Miles make it sound, why is it something worth fighting for?
Gay marriage activists should take a page from the civil rights movement here. In 1965, as the voting-rights movement gathered steam, Martin Luther King did not argue that black people needed an unfettered right to vote, even though voting is a waste of time because all politicians lie, and voting doesn't make a difference anyway (a commonly-expressed sentiment about voting then and now). Instead, he celebrated the right to vote as "(the) greatest privilege as an American," and said that if more people had a secure right to vote, a "new era would open for all Americans."
He said those things because he understood what was at stake, and he also understood that something had to be really worth fighting for, if people were going to march and lobby and protest and get beaten up for it (as civil rights activists were, of course, that very year and throughout the history of the movement). If something is worth fighting for, it should be described with inspiring language as King did, not putdowns like the ones described at the beginning of this article.
It should be added that a few liberals (notably Solomon, in the article cited above) speak of the often-sexist past of marriage, or what they consider to be its inherent sexism. It is true that in the past, marriage often was sexist (although that's mostly just because everything in almost every society in history has been sexist), but that doesn't mean that marriage is fundamentally a bad thing, or that marriage's past history has to determine, or does determine, the way marriage is now.
The best analogy I can come up with is this. Through most of human history, government's main function was to protect the interests of kings and wealthy people, yet liberals quite rightly realize that there is no immutable law that says that government always has to be that way, and that is why we champion the good things government can do (and often does do), namely regulate industry so we have no child labor, less pollution, safer and fairer workplaces, and so on. Similarly, there is no reason why we have to oppose marriage because of its less-than-perfect history; in fact, the assumption that that bad history makes marriage flawed could very well get in the way of efforts to grant marriage rights to gays and lesbians.
(I should add that what I’m advocating meshes very well with what progressive writer Ann Friedman argues in this excellent piece, namely framing gays’ right to marriage as a civil rights issue and not merely a cultural issue or a question of fairness.)
No one doubts now that much was at stake during the 1960's battles for voting rights; liberals can all agree that the stakes are high for gay marriage rights as well, especially after the passage of Proposition 8 in California, which stunned those of us who support gay marriage rights. Even though attitudes have begun to change in the last few years, this election shows that marriage is still the one right that too many straights are not ready to grant to gays. Hearts and minds have to be changed if this situation is ever to improve. Would a better, more inspiring argument help that change happen?