America's debate about gay marriage is utterly misconceived on both sides because few institutions are as misunderstood as marriage. Liberals understand marriage as a civil right - a social celebration of a loving bond. Conservatives, on the other hand, understand marriage either as a religious covenant or a civic institution for the rearing of children. Both are wrong and society will suffer if laws continue to be shaped by such misconceptions.
Love, sex and children - all three are crucial to marriage's purpose, to its history and its future. Marriage is society's attempt to regulate all three while protecting the greatest thing in human life: family. A family - a real family - means something greater than a union of two people; it is a commitment to unselfishly building the future of society. Families raise the children whose behavior and values will decide the future of human society. This is the mistake the liberal advocates of gay marriage make: thinking it is all about the individuals involved.
Marriage is not a vehicle for personal fulfillment; marriage is a control that society places on individuals - an endorsement of love and partnership withheld unless earned by the promise to behave virtuously and productively with respect to love, sex and children. To be married is to have one's love and lifestyle endorsed by one's community, which recognizes a union as something that is morally worthy and socially valuable. If marriage were defined merely by "love," no hard and fast restrictions could be employed. Polygamy and incest are as valid as any other arrangement in terms of personal fulfillment but are not acceptable ways to form a family, and so they do not deserve marriage.
There may be some moral poverty in the liberal position on marriage, but conservatives who oppose gay marriage solely because they restrict marriage to child-rearing and who believe that gay parenthood should not be encouraged miss the point also. Marriage is a school for virtue, teaching men and women to be better human beings and members of society. Marriage constrains the sexual adventurism of men especially and encourages the submission of men and women's individual desires - first to each other and then to their families. Monogamy, which is encouraged by social and legal expectations, stabilizes society and civilizes men. This is evidenced in the extreme by the high rates of crime and violence that plague societies with large numbers of unmarried young men. It must be remembered, though, that gay marriage is only a part of restoring moral stricture to society. People do not merely behave better when married, but when expected to marry because the channel cut by society for sex and love is paved with moral expectations.
Traditional conservatives argue that women civilize men, not marriage. Gay couples prove them wrong. While the particular expectations of women help mature young - or sometimes old - men, this is secondary to the work to recalibrate one's life around that of another, regardless of gender. Countless gay couples dedicate themselves to each other, to the virtues of faithfulness and trust, and raise families. This should be encouraged, even insisted upon, by society. When the virtuous work of partnership is discouraged in the gay community, people capable of the best of human life are cast into a moral sewer of promiscuity and faithlessness. Marriage in this sense is a tool to equalize the gay community; being gay should not lessen the social expectation that a young man or woman should end up married with a family.
Of course, the most prominent conservative argument against gay marriage is rooted in the claimed religious origin of marriage. This claim is not quite true. Marriage precedes Christianity as a legal institution and precedes perhaps all religions as a social ritual. Forms of monogamous social union are found across human cultures and time. Religion did, however, find marriage and imbue it with divine meaning. These meanings are beautiful and serve society and morality unquestionably well; yet they cannot be diffused in a pluralist society, which contains persons of many faiths and those of none. The religious meaning of marriage was wonderful, and tenable, when a religious consensus prevailed. Today, no religious consensus prevails. A moral consensus of essential virtues can be held together, however: It is this consensus, insisting on loyalty, monogamy and selflessness, which should back arguments for gay marriage.
Gay marriage is that most problematic of disputes: Conservatives are wrong for the right reasons, liberals accidentally right for the absolute worst reasons. Such a state of affairs can come about only because society has lost sight of itself, of its values and its rights, in the disruption following the loss of America's religious consensus. If gay marriage is to accomplish the purpose of marriage, then society will have to remember that moral purpose and insist on it.
Roraig Finney's column appears Mondays in The Cavalier Daily. He can be reached at r.finney@cavalierdaily.com.
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