Millennial Attitude Bleg
I’m working on an article about how young adults are increasingly likely to call themselves pro-life, and increasingly likely to support gay marriage. There are a lot of narratives you could tell about how someone comes to hold either or both of these beliefs; I want to get some sense of which narratives people tell themselves. [ETA: Whoa, that phrasing is awful! "Which narratives people tell themselves" = how people explain, in their own words, how they came to hold their beliefs.]
So! If you are pro-life, pro-gay-marriage, and under 25, please email me at eve_tushnet@yahoo.com . If you know other people who fit the bill, please give them my information! And if you’re on any mailing lists which might truffle up some responses, I would be thrilled if you’d repost this request.
Being over 25 and having gotten considerably more skeptical of gay marriage since I first started writing about it, I am unable to help directly, but I suppose some of you all can oblige? I think the piece Eve is working on may be for TAC, actually.
P.S. Eve’s “Romoeroticism” essay that was published at Inside Catholic the other week is really excellent, and I can’t believe I haven’t linked to it yet! It might help to shed some more light on the idea that was at the core of my unpublished Culture11 essay.
P.P.S. Will Wilson asks marriage traditionalists some good questions, and the correct answers are “Yes” to “B” and “C”, and “Not so much” to “A”.
Filed under: abortion, marriage
In an ideal world, sure, but that’s not the question I was asking. ;~) The question is: Are you willing to trade gay marriage for no-fault divorce? That is; A, B, and C stand or fall as a group.
I think if Sullivan is consistent, he pushes the button. Interestingly, most of the leftists I’ve run this thought experiment by refuse to push the button. That is, they would rather never get gay marriage than have it at the cost of losing no-fault divorce. A moments reflection, however, reveals that this is unsurprising.
Ahhhhh, I didn’t get that … and it makes the question much harder. I’ll have to think on it again.
I feel a little reticent to comment on your increasing skepticism toward gay marriage since that is not particularly what this post is about, but since you did mention it in this particular post, and since I have a stake in this debate, I’m going to give myself permission to state my opinion. I understand if you don’t respond to it because it’s maybe kinda off-topic, but I do plan on pressing some of your buttons :)
I read over your concerns in your post about what broadening the definition of “marriage” might do to society, and I’m less than impressed. My problem is that I feel like conservatives idealize the way marriage is currently viewed, and the direction it is headed. When they idealize our current situation/trajectory, as I think you may be doing, then the changed definition of marriage seems like a much bigger change.
Straight people have ruined the institution of marriage (by Christian idealized standards), and even if we never legalize gay marriage, straight people are on a trajectory to continue ruining marriage. Not legalizing gay marriage doesn’t improve the situation one bit. It’s not a “win” for traditionalists if gay marriage isn’t made legal. Traditional, idealized conceptions of marriage is dying quickly in our culture, and *even if* we don’t legalize gay marriage, it will continue its steady suffocation.
50% divorce rate in both Christian and non-Christian circles. The number isn’t going to get smaller.
The strong and natural link between marriage and children was destroyed back in the 70s when contraception came on the scene. Sex is primarily recreational now (and I imagine it always was), and with recent stats showing that 80% of conservative protestants my age are/have been in some sort of sexual relationship outside of marriage, I think it’s safe to say that sex is no longer tied to marriage at all, even among most Christians.
We allow sterile couples, elderly people, and straight people who don’t plan on having any kids, to get married. If you want to protect the link between marriage and children, shouldn’t something be done about this? How about pre-nups that require all straight people to have at least one kid? We could do that with gay marriages, too. Require that they either adopt or surrogate at least one kid.
In our culture, people don’t get married in order to have kids, they get married because they love each other and want to be companions in life. In our culture, when two people really love each other, the “thing to do” is get married. And, further, there’s nothing particularly religious about it.
You claim that there’s a difference between hetero love and homo love. I don’t really know what to make of that. How so? You also claim that there’s a difference between hetero and homo sex. Well, yes, to put it crudely…different holes. Still, most heteros and homos engage in oral and masturbatory sex. But why is any of this something to worry about?
Also, let’s play by conservative estimates and say that only about 3% of the population is gay. Of those gay people, only some of them want to be married. Do you honestly think that having maybe 1-2% of our population married to the same-sex is going to be something landmark?
And finally, I think we have some rosy picture of what traditional marriage has looked like to Christians. We might remind ourselves that the ancient Jews practiced polygamy until a few centuries after Christianity began, and that there are 0 verses in the Bible against polygamy. Also, for the first 1500 years of church history, it was literally heresy to claim that marriage was a higher good than celibacy. Orthodox doctrine for 1500 years was that marriage was a sort of necessary evil for baby-making, and that truly virtuous people were single. I’m not making this up. People were excommunicated from the church for even suggesting that marriage was on a par with celibacy. You wanna talk about a radical change in values? How about when, after 1500 years, protestants started declaring that marriage was actually a good thing, and we started thinking that marriage was “biblical”?
So I think we need to disabuse our American Christian selves of this notion that marriage is this great “traditional” Christian value.
In all, I think we need to sober up about “tradition” and sober up about the current state/trajectory of marriage. When we do that, we see that gay marriage is not a very radical change.