Sam Schulman on Kinship and Marriage Neutering

Sam Schulman had a piece in the Weekly Standard (Volume 014, Issue 35) that I am surprised we haven't discussed here until now. In "The Worst Thing About Gay Marriage", he claims that same-sex "marriage" will wither away, but could very well remove marriage from the larger kinship system in process, with disastrous effects. The piece has many concepts that we have examined in this blog.

[Make the jump if you want to read quotes and some analysis.]

The embrace of homosexuality in Western culture has come about with unbelievable speed - far more rapidly than the feminist revolution or racial equality. Less than 50 years ago same-sex sexual intercourse was criminal. Now we are arguing about the term used to describe a committed relationship. Is the right to marry merely lagging behind the pace with which gays have attained the right to hold jobs--even as teachers and members of the clergy; to become elected officials, secret agents, and adoptive parents; and to live together in public, long-term relationships? And is the public, having accepted so rapidly all these rights that have made gays not just "free" but our neighbors, simply withholding this final right thanks to a stubborn residue of bigotry? I don't think so.

As a society, we are broadly tolerant and even affirming of homosexuality. But we are not willing to surrender marriage.

When a gay man becomes a professor or a gay woman becomes a police officer, he or she performs the same job as a heterosexual. But there is a difference between a married couple and a same-sex couple in a long-term relationship. The difference is not in the nature of their relationship, not in the fact that lovemaking between men and women is, as the Catholics say, open to life. The difference is between the duties that marriage imposes on married people--not rights, but rather onerous obligations--which do not apply to same-sex love.

I disagree that there is no difference in the nature of the relationship and the nature of the behavior. But I'll take his point. It is very different to prevent a homosexual person from holding a job than it is to deny that a same-sex pairing is marriage.

The entity known as "gay marriage" only aspires to replicate a very limited, very modern, and very culture-bound version of marriage. Gay advocates have chosen wisely in this. They are replicating what we might call the "romantic marriage," a kind of marriage that is chosen, determined, and defined by the couple that enters into it. Romantic marriage is now dominant in the West and is becoming slightly more frequent in other parts of the world. But it is a luxury and even here has only existed (except among a few elites) for a couple of centuries--and in only a few countries. The fact is that marriage is part of a much larger institution, which defines the particular shape and character of marriage: the kinship system.

He goes on to discuss "four of the most profound effects of marriage within the kinship system".

The first is the most important: It is that marriage is concerned above all with female sexuality. The very existence of kinship depends on the protection of females from rape, degradation, and concubinage.

I can see some feminists and male hedonists scoffing that this, denying that fornication is degrading to women. (It is degrading to women – and to men.)

This most profound aspect of marriage--protecting and controlling the sexuality of the child-bearing sex--is its only true reason for being, and it has no equivalent in same-sex marriage.

The fact that women are the ones with the wombs makes a big difference. Women are certain the child within them is their child. Maternity fraud is not a possibility in the same way that paternity fraud is. A man who is sexually assaulted can't get pregnant as a result, but a woman can. A man can leave or die during the pregnancy and the baby will be born just the same, but a woman can't literally walk away from being pregnant (though she can abort), nor does the baby survive if she dies (unles the baby is removed and is far along enough). As tainted and diseased as a man may become through fornication, the child is never inside his body. Conversely, the child is conceived within the woman, grows for nine months within her, and is likely to pass through her genitals at birth.

Second, kinship modifies marriage by imposing a set of rules that determines not only whom one may marry (someone from the right clan or family, of the right age, with proper abilities, wealth, or an adjoining vineyard), but, more important, whom one may not marry. Incest prohibition and other kinship rules that dictate one's few permissible and many impermissible sweethearts are part of traditional marriage. Gay marriage is blissfully free of these constraints. There is no particular reason to ban sexual intercourse between brothers, a father and a son of consenting age, or mother and daughter. There are no questions of ritual pollution: Will a hip Rabbi refuse to marry a Jewish man--even a Cohen--to a Gentile man?...If Tommy marries Bill, and they divorce, and Bill later marries a woman and has a daughter, no incest prohibition prevents Bill's daughter from marrying Tommy. The relationship between Bill and Tommy is a romantic fact, but it can't be fitted into the kinship system.

Neutering marriage does not simply add to marriage. It changes the basic meaning of marriage and its interaction with culture.

Third, marriage changes the nature of sexual relations between a man and a woman. Sexual intercourse between a married couple is licit; sexual intercourse before marriage, or adulterous sex during marriage, is not. Illicit sex is not necessarily a crime, but licit sexual intercourse enjoys a sanction in the moral universe, however we understand it, from which premarital and extramarital copulation is excluded.

The fact that we have allowed the separation of sex from marriage by removing any stigma or shaming from fornication and even forming public policy around accommodating it (also by condoning withholding oneself from one's spouse) is not unrelated to a sizable percentage of the population failing to see the significance of marriage uniting the sexes.

Gay lovers live merrily free of this system. Can we imagine Frank's family and friends warning him that "If Joe were serious, he would put a ring on your finger"? Do we ask Vera to stop stringing Sally along?

There may be smatterings of this here and there, but it doesn't seem to be widespread and standard.

Fourth, marriage defines the end of childhood, sets a boundary between generations within the same family and between families, and establishes the rules in any given society for crossing those boundaries. Marriage usually takes place at the beginning of adulthood; it changes the status of bride and groom from child in the birth family to adult in a new family.

While I agree marriage can provide a clear delineation between childhood and adulthood, and any person who marries should "leave & cleave" – meaning they are forming a new family that takes precedence over allegiance to their family of origin – I am a firm believer that an unmarried person can be a fully mature adult.

Marriage is also an initiation rite. Before World War II, high school graduation was accompanied by a burst of engagements; nowadays college graduation begins a season of weddings that go on every weekend for some years. In contrast, gay weddings are rather middle-aged affairs. My impression is borne out by the one available statistic, from the province of British Columbia, showing that the participants in first-time same-sex weddings are 13 years older, on average, then first-time brides-and-grooms. This feels about right. After all, declaring gay marriage legal will not produce the habit of saving oneself for marriage or create a culture which places a value on virginity or chastity (concepts that are frequently mocked in gay culture precisely because they are so irrelevant to gay romantic life).

One of the reasons for this is that there isn't the risk of "unwanted" conception.

Sooner rather than later, the substantial differences between marriage and gay marriage will cause gay marriage, as a meaningful and popular institution, to fail on its own terms. Since gay relationships exist perfectly well outside the kinship system, to assume the burdens of marriage--the legal formalities, the duty of fidelity (which is no easier for gays than it is for straights), the slavishly imitative wedding ritual--will come to seem a nuisance…They will discover that it is not the wedding vow that maintains marriages, but the force of the kinship system. Kinship imposes duties, penalties, and retribution that champagne toasts, self-designed wedding rings, and thousands of dollars worth of flowers are powerless to effect.

Any attempts to bring traditional kinship pressures involved in marriage to same-sex "marriage" are likely to be rebuffed with appeals to "acceptance", "progress", and ignorance, as in "You can't understand, because you're not gay".

As kinship fails to be relevant to gays, it will become fashionable to discredit it for everyone. The irrelevance of marriage to gay people will create a series of perfectly reasonable, perfectly unanswerable questions: If gays can aim at marriage, yet do without it equally well, who are we to demand it of one another? Who are women to demand it of men? Who are parents to demand it of their children's lovers--or to prohibit their children from taking lovers until parents decide arbitrarily they are "mature" or "ready"? By what right can government demand that citizens obey arbitrary and culturally specific kinship rules--rules about incest and the age of consent, rules that limit marriage to twosomes?

After all, we are striving for equality, right?

Click through and read the whole thing. It is thought-provoking.

(H/T: Mere Comments)