August 6, 2006
Retrosexual Posted by Frederic D. Schwarz at 09:30 AM EST One strange feature of the debate over same-sex marriage is that today’s homosexuals appear desperate to adopt an institution that so many other Americans (and even more Europeans) have abandoned over the last 40 years. Trend setters indeed! Unless it’s another case of retro camp irony, which seems unlikely, since getting married is, or should be, a much more serious business than buying a 1950s cocktail shaker. I’ve always meant to write a blog entry about how every sentence I speak or write now seems to start with the words “I’m old enough to remember . . .” In this case, I’m old enough—just barely—to remember when pop songs used to talk about getting married. There was the Dixie Cups’ “Chapel of Love” (“Today’s the day when we’ll say ‘I do’ and we’ll never be lonely any more”) and Manfred Mann’s “Do Wah Diddy” (“I’m hers, she’s mine, wedding bells are gonna chime”) and the Hollies’ “Bus Stop” (“One day my name and hers are going to be the same,” which would be doubly confusing to today’s youth), and hundreds of others. The Beach Boys’ “Wouldn’t It Be Nice,” whose lyrics can be paraphrased as “Wouldn’t it be nice if we were old enough to get married, so we could have sex,” recently made No. 5 on National Review’s list of the Top 50 Conservative Rock Songs. All the songs I’ve just mentioned came out before my time, but they were still somewhat current during my 1970s boyhood. By then, pro-marriage sentiment in pop music had dwindled greatly, though it lingered on in songs like the Fifth Dimension’s “Wedding Bell Blues” and Carly Simon’s “That’s the Way I’ve Always Heard It Should Be,” in both of which a woman wistfully asks a man why he won’t marry her. In the pop music of the last 30 years, however, the question of marriage barely even arises. Love and marriage used to go together like a horse and carriage. Now some commentators and lawmakers, on the left and the right, want to get the government out of the marriage business entirely. After all, who needs it? Any non-traditional couple can find a church with sufficiently liberal principles and have a wedding ceremony and throw a great reception afterwards. All the main legal features of marriage could be duplicated under another title, with such complications as joint income-tax filing and inheritance rights included or omitted according to whether they seem necessary. Ideally, each couple could work out a contract tailored to its individual needs instead of accepting a pre-packaged deal. For example, New York State Assemblywoman Barbara Lifton, whose district is mostly in Ithaca (a college town—no surprise), wants to remove the word “marriage” from the state’s legal code and make “civil commitment” the single standard for everyone. “Why should state government become a religious institution?” she asks. Ms. Lifton’s question, suggesting that marriage is no more than a sectarian tradition, shows that we have come full circle since colonial days, or rather half circle, because the Pilgrims and Puritans felt just the opposite, considering marriage to be strictly a state function, not a religious one. Marriage was very important to the New England colonists, and they enacted severe penalties for fornication and adultery (and even worse for homosexual acts, though it’s no surprise the disputatious Puritans quarreled over defining exactly what was prohibited; in one legal case from the 1640s involving two young men, ministers were consulted on the question of whether the biblical condemnation of homosexual acts applied when there was no bodily penetration). But Pilgrim and Puritan alike took the Bible as their guide, and since the Bible says nothing about clergymen solemnizing marriages, they resisted the practice. Edward Winslow, a Pilgrim who was an important figure in the early days of the Plymouth and Massachusetts Bay Colonies, said in the 1630s that marriage was “a civille thinge, and he found nowhere in ye word of God that it was tyed to the ministrie.” Not until 1708 did Hannah Sturtevant marry Josiah Cotton in Massachusetts’s first church wedding. Just as had happened with the early settlers’ shunning of Christmas as a Papist fiction, the universal human liking for a party eventually overcame religious scruples. Anyway, it’s true that the distinction between marriage and “civil commitment,” or whatever one wishes to call it, is largely artificial. Ms. Lifton’s proposal, like most libertarian schemes, makes sense if you assume that (a) sweeping changes can be introduced and accepted with little or no disruption and (b) most people are as fascinated as the typical libertarian is with making choices and weighing options. But by the same token, if everything in marriage can be duplicated with domestic partnerships, or simply shacking up, why do same-sex couples need it? Why are they flocking to an institution that opposite-sex couples, with all the weight of tradition behind them and a much higher rate of parenthood, are increasingly shrugging off? The answer is, of course, that, like so many issues that we spend our time debating, this one is symbolic. As Jeanette Baik, a former American Heritage editor, wrote a few years ago, “Homosexual activists consider marriage mainly a vehicle for mainstreaming homosexuality, with the law on their side.” I don’t agree with everything Jeanette says in the article, and there’s no point in arguing about it, since she no longer works here. But she is absolutely right that the reason behind the push for same-sex marriage is not that gays are being denied any rights. Rather, it is meant to be a statement—to give gays a new triumph and give their opponents a thumb in the eye. In this sense, gay marriage is the tribute that radicalism pays to tradition. The very existence of a pro-gay-marriage movement points up how important and powerful that tradition is, and that explains why gay marriage—which, as I say, will make little practical difference either way—is encountering such great opposition among Americans.
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