- On the Defensive: National and Personal Security
- Obama Harnesses Tao and They Call it Empty
- Gay Marriage - a Conservative Cause
- Military Bureaucracy Threatens Security
- The Puzzling Fits of Mao Suit Management
- Our Common Odyssey
- Political Animal Plays God
- Empty Business and the Crystallization of Mind
- Thinking Inside the Box - A Conservative Viewpoint
Gay Marriage - a Conservative Cause
April 15th, 2008
When same sex couples want to live the conventional life of marriage, conservatives balk. And yet same sex marriages would do more to put a focus on the family in America’s liberal communities than the strongest of conservative coalitions could ever succeed in accomplishing.George Lakoff has suggested same sex marriage needs to be reframed as a right. After all, what kind of monster would oppose the right to marriage? But same sex marriage isn’t only about demanding more rights. As in the case of conventional marriage, same sex marriage is about taking on more duties. It is not about breaking up the family with some new social experiment, but rather it is about creating a new legal relationship which builds up and places emphasis on family in a newly transformed world. Same sex marriage needs to be reframed as an urgent issue of re-establishing commitment across the cultural board of American life.
For same sex marriage brings commitment to a sexual orientation which has rightly or wrongly been associated with indulgence and license. Why do conservatives fail to respect this urge toward stability, commitment, and a life of love in same sex couples? Aren’t these the sort of values conservatives have been most strongly advocating in recent years?
It is asserted that same sex marriages draw into question the sanctity of marriage itself, threatening the further opening of marriage laws to group marriage and the marriage of sheep - some really do make this claim. When pastors present such arguments, one has to wonder what their flocks have been up to when not reading the Bible. Perhaps we should cross that bridge when it comes.
More to the point, one might argue that the institution of marriage has become fragile in recent years and that any changes in the legal status of that institution threaten to highlight the arbitrary nature of it. Of course, to make such a claim, one would have to argue that the institution is a legal construction and not an act of God. Yet, conservatives would seem to have won on the issue of strengthening the institution of marriage anyways. Now large swaths of the liberal demographic have taken to the streets to demand the right to marry.
The legalization of same sex marriage encourages commitment and love in gay and lesbian relationships, rather than clandestine relationships in the course of fragmented lives. It conditions same sex couples into conventional habits and lifestyles. And in so doing it strengthens families by making the outcaste gay nephew or lesbian sister someone who understands and respects family life. One would think that the counter-cultural communities would be most threatened by such a movement as the one that has arisen for the right to marry. In a nation of broken families, often divided along political lines, it is difficult to take conservative efforts to strengthen family values seriously when they make it a top priority - not one of many but number one - to thwart the desire for family in gay and lesbian couples.
So, if same sex marriage encourages conservative habits in an expanded social sphere is this a liberal or conservative cause? And if we say it is a little of both, then what has become of liberalism? And is conservatism really as pro-family as we tend to think?
Leave a Reply