Adam Serwer and Steve Benen have had their fun attacking the logic of Ross Douthat’s incoherent anti-gay marriage column, and now it’s my turn. Douthat is caught up in a trap that catches many, probably most conservatives. The official values, as I’ve said before, or our nation are liberal values. We believe in equality and justice. So conservatives who want to argue for inequality have to work themselves into pretzels trying to claim that inequalities we see aren’t really inequalities. Often, this works well enough to convince people that are mostly invested in preserving inequalities that they aren’t bad people, but sometimes the logic is so inane, that even people who harbor prejudice can’t be convinced. (Such as when you’re talking about segregation under the “separate but equal” rationalization.) We’ve come to that point with gay marriage.
Judge Walker did us all a favor by attacking the issue head on, using feminist arguments grounded in equality to make his point. Since Walker brought feminism and women’s equality into this, conservatives are put in a position where they have to argue for the primacy of patriarchal marriage while pretending that they support egalitarian marriages, though this is a direct contradiction. The way they play this game is, as usual, to play the “patriarchy? I don’t see no stinking patriarchy!” card, trying to argue that feminists made up “the patriarchy” in order to pretend women are victims, though they sometimes will admit that there was a patriarchy at some point in time, or that other countries that they wish to invade do have patriarchies, but we don’t. Douthat spews this nonsense all over his incoherent column, often contradicting himself directly.
He wants to be taken seriously, so he concedes that there was such a thing as a patriarchal marriage, though he doesn’t use that term. But after immediately conceding that “traditional” marriage doesn’t necessarily mean monogamous marriage or the nuclear family, he switches straight into patriarchy-denial mode:
Nor is lifelong heterosexual monogamy obviously natural in the way that most Americans understand the term. If “natural” is defined to mean “congruent with our biological instincts,” it’s arguably one of the more unnatural arrangements imaginable. In crudely Darwinian terms, it cuts against both the male impulse toward promiscuity and the female interest in mating with the highest-status male available. Hence the historic prevalence of polygamy.
This is a favorite patriarchy denial tactic, though you rarely see it get so boldly stupid. The idea is to deny that there’s a long history of this thing called a “patriarchy”, where men own and control women’s bodies through economic, social, and violent means, and instead argue that inequalities that exist are strictly due to inherent desires and lack of intelligence on women’s part. In this case, Douthat’s going so far as to argue that polygamy is the result of women’s natural desires to be sexually exclusive plus greedy. This, of course, is so incorrect as to be laughable. Polygamy is a logical outcome of assuming one gender is human and the other is functionally livestock to be collected and sold by the human gender. Women didn’t invent polygamy in order to make life easier for men and their pockets fatter. But it is amusing to realize that Douthat thinks that those Mormon polygamists marry off 12-year-old girls to 70-year-old men because this reflects a 12-year-old girl’s innate, biological (Darwinian!) desire to get it on with a wrinkly old misogynist.
So what are gay marriage’s opponents really defending, if not some universal, biologically inevitable institution? It’s a particular vision of marriage, rooted in a particular tradition, that establishes a particular sexual ideal.
Which is to say, Douthat’s arguing that since evil old patriarchy is our natural inclination, our ideal of marriage is a way to fight back against our deepest, ugliest natures. Marriage is great because it’s anti-nature! Of course, this doesn’t explain why it has to be male-female. Nor does it explain why money-grubbing monogamist women have to swear to be faithful (and often fail), when the only person whose nature is being thwarted are promiscuous men. (I’m beginning to feel like I have to blame the wives of conservative men for the current state of evo psych blather. By taking on the duty of being good, reassuring wives all the time, their poor husbands are convinced that their wives never look sideways, and therefore feel assured when they claim that women’s nature is to be monogamous to men who are promiscuous. If women married to conservative men told the truth about how much they look, perhaps said men wouldn’t spout bullshit with such self-assurance.)
The point of this ideal is not that other relationships have no value, or that only nuclear families can rear children successfully. Rather, it’s that lifelong heterosexual monogamy at its best can offer something distinctive and remarkable — a microcosm of civilization, and an organic connection between human generations — that makes it worthy of distinctive recognition and support.
So, Western marriage is basically an imposition of civilization over our natural desires (as defined by Douthat), but the reason that it has to be male/female is because that’s the combo that produces natural children, right? So, marriage is good because it’s unnatural, but it’s actually because it’s natural. It’s both at once and nothing at all! Just as long as the gays don’t get a piece of it.
As the fact-finding in the Prop 8 case found, this argument is groundless. They have yet to find one divorce caused by gay marriage. The notion that straight married people will somehow lose support if gay people can get married makes about as much sense as arguing that 12-year-old girls, given the choice, prefer to leave childhood to wear prairie dresses while waiting on and having sex with old men.