Though both Jonathan Chait and Amanda Marcotte approve of same-sex marriage, they differed on Monday in their assessment of the case against it. (Each was responding to a Ross Douthat column written in the wake of the Supreme Court’s decision in Obergefell v. Hodges.)
Chait, of New York magazine, claimed that anti-gay-marriage arguments have been pitiful and consequently were doomed from the get-go. He declared that “preventing gay people from marrying each other serves no coherent purpose. Allowing them to marry harms nobody.”
From Chait’s post (bolding added):
The same-sex-marriage ban was never a premeditated social policy. It simply reflected an age-old abhorrence of homosexuality, and the instinctive or religiously inspired impulse to treat same-sex romance as a sin to be stamped out. Opponents of same-sex marriage have had to reverse engineer public-policy justifications, and the result was utterly feeble…
Douthat acknowledges that the drive to bring marriage to gay life is a conservative movement, which triumphed against the more radical voices in the community disdaining marriage as heteronormative. But he argues that the rise of pro-marriage beliefs in the gay community, and the decline of marriage among the straight community, are related…
This speculative-at-best, ridiculous-at-worst assumption that same-sex marriage corrodes straight marriage creates the premise for the second piece of Douthat’s argument: It’s acceptable to ban same-sex marriage for the sake of straight marriage. Douthat leaves this part of the argument unexplained in his column. But it’s even harder to accept than the first part. Assume that his first premise is correct, that permitting same-sex marriage will somehow lead fewer straight people to get or stay married. Is that really an acceptable basis to deny gay people equal rights?...
…The weakness of his argument is significant and revealing precisely because Douthat is the deepest and most careful advocate of social conservatism in the United States. There is reason to trust that his version of the anti-same-sex-marriage argument is the sharpest that can be found. And it’s not very sharp…
Fairness does not always prevail in politics. Sometimes good ideas lose, or win for bad reasons. But the triumph of same-sex marriage offers a hopeful case where the cause of justice prevailed precisely because it was obviously and undeniably just.
Meanwhile, Marcotte argued in a Talking Points Memo column that same-sex marriage helps to “redefine…marriage as an institution of love instead of oppression,” and that the anti-gay-marriage forces are clinging to the idea that marriage is “about dutiful procreation and female submission” (bolding added):
This argument, that same-sex marriage somehow undermines “traditional” marriage, never really made sense to many Americans, for good reason…
…It was never just about man-woman marriages. The tradition that is disappearing is the belief that marriage is a duty, especially for women…
…Marriage is, bit by bit, becoming more about a partnership between equals who choose each other for the purpose of love and happiness. Which means it’s becoming less about giving men control over women’s lives…
…To accept same-sex marriage is to accept this modern idea that marriage is about love and partnership, instead of about dutiful procreation and female submission...
Reading Douthat, you do get a better idea of why conservatives see same-sex marriage as a threat to traditional marriage. It’s not because straight people won’t want to get married if gays are doing it, too. It’s because it redefines marriage as an institution of love instead of oppression…
…[E]ven though Douthat is willing to get closer to the real argument, he still pulls back from stating it bluntly…The longing for traditional gender roles and female submission has to be communicated covertly, because blunt statements in favor of it are treated, in mainstream America, like fringe right wing craziness.
