On Gay Marriage

On Gay Marriage

I've been feeling increasingly depressed over the past few weeks. It's not the kind of depression that's interminable, or which, say, completely incapacitates my sense of humour. But when it sets in, I find it difficult to break out of.

One reason why I've been feeling a little down recently is the conservative backlash against gay rights that has sprung from the US Supreme Court's recent decision in the Lawrence vs Texas case. If the American courts have finally acknowledged both the illogicality and inhumaneness of Texas' and other states' attempts to incarcerate gays on the basis of their sexuality, the American people has shown a far more hypocritical attitude towards the treatment of its own citizens. For the past decade, opinion polls have generally indicated an increased willingness on the part of the American people to tolerate and accept gays. This, it would seem, is the natural progression from the decriminalization of homosexuality in several states and also the recognition that gays and lesbians cannot be justifiably pathologized, as though their sexualities were simply a disease requiring to be cured. But the positivistic assumption that the quest to ratify gay rights in America law, once in motion, can never go backwards, has been proven wrong. For while Americans are prepared to recognize that gays aren't a class of criminals, and that they have every right to conduct consensual sex in the privacy of their own homes, they refuse to recognize that gay, like straight couples, are capable of maintaining loving, monogamous relationships. The refusal to recognize the legality of gay marriages is at its core a refusal to accept that gays are anything but an underclass in society, not privy to the civic status and distinction that the term 'marriage' affords couples.

Conservatives opposed to gay marriage like to cite the putative promiscuity of all gays -- a promiscuity which, apparently, is a congenital by-product of their sexuality -- as reason to deny gay couples formal recognition of their union. Conservative bloggers such as Clayton Cramer argued with overwrought ideological fervour that gays, apparently, are unable to conduct monogamous relationships. There are several problems here. Firstly, the fact that many gay men are promiscuous isn't sufficient reason to deny all gays the right to marriage. Secondly, there's little creditable evidence to suggest that gay men are especially more promiscuous than straight men -- just ask Colin Farrell. Given the high incidence of divorce in Western societies nowadays, it would appear that promiscuity (which admittedly is only one of many factors in the increasing divorce rates in Western countries) is, if anything, a social problem, common to all sexualities and genders. Thirdly and most importantly, monogamous gay unions are already evident all around the world. I think of two couples I know in Sacramento, California -- including one pair to whom I'm very close -- who have been together for over 6 and 12 years, respectively, or of another couple I know in Sydney who've been together for just over a decade. And there's the couple who live a few blocks away from me, and who have been together for over 25 years. These are the sort of people that the loud and brash conservative movement -- we might think of them as radical conservatives -- never acknowledges, for fear that it would topple their campaign to recriminalize, repathologize, and to eradicate homosexuality forever. These couples inspire me, and they set an example of monogamy and fidelity for subsequent generations of straights and gays.

A popular conservative canard is that marriage in our society is typically defined as the union of two individuals for the purpose of reproduction. But there are plenty of couples who don't have children, and they're still allowed to marry. Moreover, there are plenty of de facto and divorced couples who do have children, regardless of the fact that they're not legally married.

The sad truth is that opponents of gay marriage aren't really trying to uphold societal traditions so much as justify their longstanding prejudice against gays. Unfortunately, many of these people would characterize themselves as tolerant and accepting of homosexuality; now they're forced to question to what extent they are truly accepting of it at all.

More on this later, in relation to a special front in what Justice Scalia rather cryptically called "the culture wars" (I thought those wars only concerned Shakespeare and great books!): the relationship between religion and homosexuality.