Alas, a Blog

Sam Schulman’s disjointed ramblings on gay marriage have been getting a thorough kicking around, but really, I think he deserves some appreciation. After all, while the argument he makes is backward, twisted, and deeply pathological, it is in fact the only real argument there is against gay marriage, that being that gay marriage will damage the Victorian-era ideal of marriage that conservatives cling to. When anti-equality folk say that gay marriage will destroy marriage, that’s what they mean — it will destroy the man-as-breadwinner, woman-as-helpmeet, patriarchal idea of marriage that most Americans have already moved on from. And it is important, I think, to see Schulman’s argument for what it is — the last gasp of a dying ideology.

Schulman starts his jeremiad with a standard bit of wingnut pretzel logic — liberals are intolerant, because they don’t tolerate conservative intolerance:

There is a new consensus on gay marriage: not on whether it should be legalized but about the motives of those of us who oppose it. All agree that any and all opposition to gay marriage is explained either by biblical literalism or anti-homosexual bigotry. This consensus is brilliantly constructed to be so unflattering to those of us who will vote against gay marriage–if we are allowed to do so–that even biblical literalists and bigots are scrambling out of the trenches and throwing down their weapons.

I am curious as to who is preventing Rabbi Schulman from voting against gay marriage. Probably those damn activist judges. But it is interesting that Schulman admits that yes, being called out on bigotry causes bigots to reconsider their beliefs. It’s almost as if many people don’t want to be bigoted, and that when confronted with their own bigotry, they choose to rise above it.

But Schulman has a devastating argument in store that proves that bigotry is not bigotry, one that will make gay marriage vanish in a puff of logic:

But I think that the fundamental objection to gay marriage among most who oppose it has very little to do with one’s feelings about the nature of homosexuality or what the Bible has to say about sodomy. The obstacle to wanting gay marriage is instead how we use and depend on marriage itself–and how little marriage, understood completely, affects or is relevant to gay people in love. Gay marriage is not so much wrong as unnecessary. But if it comes about, it will not be gay marriage that causes the harm I fear, as what will succeed its inevitable failure.

Yes, lesbians and homosexuals, you think that you would like to form a lifetime partnership with your friend and lover, maybe settle down, buy a house, raise a family (or not, as the case may be), grow old together, and when the day comes, as it does for all of us, one of you will slip first into the ether, as your husband or wife sits by your bedside at the hospital. But it turns out that marriage is completely unnecessary for that! Well, except for the hospital thing.

The embrace of homosexuality in Western culture has come about with unbelievable speed–far more rapidly than the feminist revolution or racial equality. Less than 50 years ago same-sex sexual intercourse was criminal. Now we are arguing about the term used to describe a committed relationship. Is the right to marry merely lagging behind the pace with which gays have attained the right to hold jobs–even as teachers and members of the clergy; to become elected officials, secret agents, and adoptive parents; and to live together in public, long-term relationships? And is the public, having accepted so rapidly all these rights that have made gays not just “free” but our neighbors, simply withholding this final right thanks to a stubborn residue of bigotry? I don’t think so.

Funny, most faiths still won’t ordain gay clergy, at least as long as they’re open about it. And several states still prohibit adoption by gays and lesbians. And gays are not allowed to serve in the military. So forgive me if I suggest that marriage is not the “final” right being denied members of the GLBTQQ community; it is simply one of many.

But pointing out that bigotry is indeed a motivating factor in this would damage Schulman’s argument, so he simply pretends that Americans are totally fine with gay people, except for that marriage thing, and he goes on to argue, as bigots always do, that marriage isn’t possible for two people who don’t accept proscribed gender roles:

When a gay man becomes a professor or a gay woman becomes a police officer, he or she performs the same job as a heterosexual. But there is a difference between a married couple and a same-sex couple in a long-term relationship. The difference is not in the nature of their relationship, not in the fact that lovemaking between men and women is, as the Catholics say, open to life. The difference is between the duties that marriage imposes on married people–not rights, but rather onerous obligations–which do not apply to same-sex love.

Now, you may think that this is completely idiotic. After all, all relationships involve give and take between partners, tradeoffs, subordination of individual goals for the good of the partnership, and generally holding your partner’s happiness equal or superior to your own. Those are the primary obligations of relationships, and if you fail in those obligations — as I will freely admit I have — then your relationship will fall apart.

But Schulman is not talking about the types of obligations that most people see as vital to marriage. He’s talking about the way that marriage limits men to their sphere of influence, and women to theirs. And why marriage is no good for two men or two women, because they don’t have to be shaped and molded into society’s view of what men and women should be:

The relationship between a same-sex couple, though it involves the enviable joy of living forever with one’s soulmate, loyalty, fidelity, warmth, a happy home, shopping, and parenting, is not the same as marriage between a man and a woman, though they enjoy exactly the same cozy virtues. These qualities are awfully nice, but they are emphatically not what marriage fosters, and, even when they do exist, are only a small part of why marriage evolved and what it does.

The entity known as “gay marriage” only aspires to replicate a very limited, very modern, and very culture-bound version of marriage. Gay advocates have chosen wisely in this. They are replicating what we might call the “romantic marriage,” a kind of marriage that is chosen, determined, and defined by the couple that enters into it. Romantic marriage is now dominant in the West and is becoming slightly more frequent in other parts of the world. But it is a luxury and even here has only existed (except among a few elites) for a couple of centuries–and in only a few countries. The fact is that marriage is part of a much larger institution, which defines the particular shape and character of marriage: the kinship system.

Yes, it’s true: marriage throughout much of human history has been less about love than building alliances, breeding children, and providing for official morality. The fact that it is no longer seen that way by the vast majority of westerners is, I submit, one of the great triumphs of the modern age. Thank God my daughter will not have to marry against her will, lest she die penniless. Thank God your son will not have to take a wife in order to move up in the business world, a stable man requiring a wife at home. Thank God that I can’t pair my daughter off with the fellow down the road, in order to secure a larger plot of land for myself. Thank God that my daughter, your son, and everyone else will be able to choose their partner, when they do, based on love and mutual respect, and not a vision of gender and family roles that was outmoded in the 1920s.

But Schulman finds this romantic love to be rather pointless. Marriage should not be about love. It should be about hard work and maximum effort.

The role that marriage plays in kinship encompasses far more than arranging a happy home in which two hearts may beat as one–in fact marriage is actually pretty indifferent to that particular aim. Nor has marriage historically concerned itself with compelling the particular male and female who have created a child to live together and care for that child. It is not the “right to marry” that creates an enduring relationship between heterosexual lovers or a stable home for a child, but the more far-reaching kinship system that assigns every one of the vast array of marriage rules a set of duties and obligations to enforce. These duties and obligations impinge even on romantic marriage, and not always to its advantage. The obligations of kinship imposed on traditional marriage have nothing to do with the romantic ideals expressed in gay marriage.

And it’s true, they don’t. Nor do they have anything to do with the romantic ideals expressed in straight marriage in the modern age.

Consider four of the most profound effects of marriage within the kinship system.

The first is the most important: It is that marriage is concerned above all with female sexuality. The very existence of kinship depends on the protection of females from rape, degradation, and concubinage. This is why marriage between men and women has been necessary in virtually every society ever known. Marriage, whatever its particular manifestation in a particular culture or epoch, is essentially about who may and who may not have sexual access to a woman when she becomes an adult, and is also about how her adulthood–and sexual accessibility–is defined. Again, until quite recently, the woman herself had little or nothing to say about this, while her parents and the community to which they answered had total control. The guardians of a female child or young woman had a duty to protect her virginity until the time came when marriage was permitted or, more frequently, insisted upon. This may seem a grim thing for the young woman–if you think of how the teenaged Natalie Wood was not permitted to go too far with Warren Beatty in Splendor in the Grass. But the duty of virginity can seem like a privilege, even a luxury, if you contrast it with the fate of child-prostitutes in brothels around the world. No wonder that weddings tend to be regarded as religious ceremonies in almost every culture: They celebrate the completion of a difficult task for the community as a whole.

Now, of course, one could argue that it’s questionable, at best, whether it’s better for a woman to be raped by one man for life than to be forced into prostitution. And one can note that the prohibition on sex before marriage was never for a woman’s benefit, but for her future husband’s, because if she conceives before he has access to her, she could bear a child for some other men, thus ruining his property. And indeed, one can note that by citing the “duty of virginity” contrasted with child prostitutes in brothels, Schulman is practically standing on a chair, screaming in favor of the Madonna/whore dichotomy. But we can leave all that aside, because in that paragraph, Schulman blew up his own argument, with this sentence:

Again, until quite recently, the woman herself had little or nothing to say about this, while her parents and the community to which they answered had total control.

This is a little like saying, “Until recently, doctors operated on people without sterilizing their instruments, thus causing a lot of deaths due to infection; therefore, gay people shouldn’t get health care.” Yes, the lurching progress women have made on the right to control their own reproductive destinies is not complete, but it has advanced to the point where women do, in fact, have the legal and ethical right to choose their own partners. In the west, the choice for women is not between the brothel and the marital bed. Women are able to choose their partners for themselves, using their own criteria. Women need not cling to virginity until marriage, and very few do, and I know of precious few men who think virginity is at the top of the list for qualities in a potential mate.

Again, this is a triumph of the modern world, which is why it’s fascinating that Schulman seems to pine so openly for a return to the days when the only way for a woman to preserve her virtue was to keep her legs crossed until marriage to a man she didn’t love, so that she could submit to him.

Why must she submit to him? To bear babies, of course:

This most profound aspect of marriage–protecting and controlling the sexuality of the child-bearing sex–is its only true reason for being, and it has no equivalent in same-sex marriage. Virginity until marriage, arranged marriages, the special status of the sexuality of one partner but not the other (and her protection from the other sex)–these motivating forces for marriage do not apply to same-sex lovers.

This is patently ridiculous; there is no child-bearing requirement on straight marriage in the modern age. We don’t forbid marriage for women past menopause, or men with low sperm count. Marriage may once have been primarily about having kids, but we used to write using stone tablets, too; humanity changes.

The next paragraph leads me to think that Schulman has some issues:

Second, kinship modifies marriage by imposing a set of rules that determines not only whom one may marry (someone from the right clan or family, of the right age, with proper abilities, wealth, or an adjoining vineyard), but, more important, whom one may not marry. Incest prohibition and other kinship rules that dictate one’s few permissible and many impermissible sweethearts are part of traditional marriage. Gay marriage is blissfully free of these constraints. There is no particular reason to ban sexual intercourse between brothers, a father and a son of consenting age, or mother and daughter. There are no questions of ritual pollution: Will a hip Rabbi refuse to marry a Jewish man–even a Cohen–to a Gentile man? Do Irish women avoid Italian women? A same-sex marriage fails utterly to create forbidden relationships. If Tommy marries Bill, and they divorce, and Bill later marries a woman and has a daughter, no incest prohibition prevents Bill’s daughter from marrying Tommy. The relationship between Bill and Tommy is a romantic fact, but it can’t be fitted into the kinship system.

Again, Schulman openly pines for something that would represent a giant step back for humankind. My daughter doesn’t have to marry Viktor from the hops farm outside of Metz, the better to help the Fecke family brewery thrive. She’s free to choose from literally ever man or woman of age to marry — or none of them — when she herself becomes an adult. And everyone else is free to choose, or not choose, her. She need not restrict herself to German-Irish vegetarian Unitarians with liberal, divorced parents, and I hope she doesn’t.

Because of that, the universe of people that she could date and later marry is vastly larger than that she is prohibited to marry; indeed, while Schulman handwrings that gay men could date their brothers, the fact is that the lifting of strict clan rules for marriage has vastly reduced the number of close-family marriages. It’s almost unheard of for someone to marry even a second cousin these days; 100 years ago, it was commonplace, because when you have to marry someone from the right community, and their parents had to marry someone from the right community, and their parents had to marry someone from the right community — well, unless your community is the size of Beijing, everyone’s your second cousin.

In the same vein, why would a gay man or lesbian woman date their sibling, when they could date someone else? I’m not saying incest is impossible — but it’s a lot less likely if you haven’t restricted your child’s readily available sexual partners to Viktor from the hops farm.

Schulman continues to party like it’s 1899, noting that it used to be you could tell whether a kid was a bastard or not:

Third, marriage changes the nature of sexual relations between a man and a woman. Sexual intercourse between a married couple is licit; sexual intercourse before marriage, or adulterous sex during marriage, is not. Illicit sex is not necessarily a crime, but licit sexual intercourse enjoys a sanction in the moral universe, however we understand it, from which premarital and extramarital copulation is excluded. More important, the illicit or licit nature of heterosexual copulation is transmitted to the child, who is deemed legitimate or illegitimate based on the metaphysical category of its parents’ coition.

Of course, we’ve pretty much banished illegitimacy to the dustbin of history, along with arranged marriage and virgin brides, and again, good for us. Is my daughter — who was born into a marriage that later dissolved — less “legitimate” than a child born to an unmarried couple that later married for life? Of course not. Nor is either child more legitimate than the one born to a single mother. Or the child given up for adoption. Or any child. No child should be seen as born wanting for the very right to exist. And thankfully, while scolds still cluck about single parents, we no longer view children born to single parents as lesser beings.

Well, most of us don’t; Sam Schulman, on the other hand:

Now to live in such a system, in which sexual intercourse can be illicit, is a great nuisance. Many of us feel that licit sexuality loses, moreover, a bit of its oomph. Gay lovers live merrily free of this system. Can we imagine Frank’s family and friends warning him that “If Joe were serious, he would put a ring on your finger”? Do we ask Vera to stop stringing Sally along? Gay sexual practice is not sortable into these categories–licit-if-married but illicit-if-not (children adopted by a gay man or hygienically conceived by a lesbian mom can never be regarded as illegitimate). Neither does gay copulation become in any way more permissible, more noble after marriage. It is a scandal that homosexual intercourse should ever have been illegal, but having become legal, there remains no extra sanction–the kind which fathers with shotguns enforce upon heterosexual lovers. I am not aware of any gay marriage activist who suggests that gay men and women should create a new category of disapproval for their own sexual relationships, after so recently having been freed from the onerous and bigoted legal blight on homosexual acts. But without social disapproval of unmarried sex–what kind of madman would seek marriage?

Um, me? Millions of other Americans? Billions of humans throughout history? Jesus Christ on a cracker, what kind of human being can even ask that question? Marriage is not about sex. It’s about love. Like most Americans, I had sex before marriage; I make no apologies for it. And while I want my daughter to wait until she’s old enough to have sex, I can assure you that at most, I’ll be waiting at a suitor’s door with court papers looking to get child support fixed. My daughter’s worth and dignity is not determined by her virginity, and I am frankly appalled that anyone would think it was.

Why would any man or woman get married, even after having premarital sex? Because people love each other. Because they decide, deep down, that they want to be with each other forever. This is not a complex or confusing issue; this is the reason that love songs are written. And yet I understand why Schuman has written this, because of course, some people won’t get married without the threat of moral sanction. Again, the fact that the moral sanction is gradually dissipating is a triumph, not a reason for sadness.

Schulman’s last reason for supporting marriage is utterly bizarre.

Fourth, marriage defines the end of childhood, sets a boundary between generations within the same family and between families, and establishes the rules in any given society for crossing those boundaries. Marriage usually takes place at the beginning of adulthood; it changes the status of bride and groom from child in the birth family to adult in a new family. In many societies, such as village India and Jewish Chicagoland, a new bride becomes no more than an unpaid servant to her mother- and sisters-in-law. Even in modern romantic marriages, a groom becomes the hunting or business partner of his father-in-law and a member of his clubs; a bride becomes an ally of her mother-in-law in controlling her husband. There can, of course, be warm relations between families and their children’s same-sex partners, but these come about because of liking, sympathy, and the inherent kindness of many people. A wedding between same-sex lovers does not create the fact (or even the feeling) of kinship between a man and his husband’s family; a woman and her wife’s kin. It will be nothing like the new kinship structure that a marriage imposes willy-nilly on two families who would otherwise loathe each other.

Actually, no. My brother-in-law isn’t a member of my dad’s business, nor has my dad taken him out fishing. They have a cordial relationship, one that is based on their shared love and respect for my sister, but that hardly defines them. My ex-wife was not required to help cook the turkey on Thanksgiving; my sister does not clean her mother-in-law’s home. Quite simply, the world Schulman describes hasn’t existed since the 1950s, if it ever did.

I do find it interesting that “a bride becomes an ally of her mother-in-law in controlling her husband.” Because men will stray, folks; we can’t help it. We’re weak. And we can’t be expected to be faithful to our spouses because we promised to be — heaven forfend!

Marriage is also an initiation rite. Before World War II, high school graduation was accompanied by a burst of engagements; nowadays college graduation begins a season of weddings that go on every weekend for some years. In contrast, gay weddings are rather middle-aged affairs. My impression is borne out by the one available statistic, from the province of British Columbia, showing that the participants in first-time same-sex weddings are 13 years older, on average, then first-time brides-and-grooms. This feels about right. After all, declaring gay marriage legal will not produce the habit of saving oneself for marriage or create a culture which places a value on virginity or chastity (concepts that are frequently mocked in gay culture precisely because they are so irrelevant to gay romantic life). But virginity and chastity before marriage, license after–these are the burdens of real marriage, honored in spirit if not in letter, creating for women (women as modern as Beyoncé) the right to demand a tangible sacrifice from the men who would adore them.

Now, far be it from me to note that gay marriage wasn’t legal until very recently, and therefore many men and women marrying their partners are doing so now because they couldn’t a decade ago, but GAY MARRIAGE WASN’T LEGAL UNTIL VERY RECENTLY, AND THEREFORE MANY MEN AND WOMEN MARRYING THEIR PARTNERS ARE DOING SO NOW BECAUSE THEY COULDN’T A DECADE AGO. Honest to the Ceiling Cat, this is just idiotic; get back to me in a generation to see how gay marriage works out. I’m willing to bet it will settle down to happen sometime in the late twenties or early thirties, which, not for nothing, is the trajectory that straight marriage in America is also heading for. (Incidentally, I don’t have any friends who married within three years of gaining a bachelor’s degree; college graduation hasn’t been the median age for men’s first marriage since 1960, nor for women since 1980.)

But even if it doesn’t, so what? Is marriage less valid if people get married at 37 than it would be if they’d married at 18? Maybe in Calcutta, or 1873 Poughkeepsie, but not today.

These four aspects of marriage are not rights, but obligations. They are marriage’s “a priori” because marriage is a part of the kinship system, and kinship depends on the protection, organization, and often the exploitation of female sexuality vis-à-vis males. None of these facts apply at all to love between people of the same sex, however solemn and profound that love may be. In gay marriage there are no virgins (actual or honorary), no incest, no illicit or licit sex, no merging of families, no creation of a new lineage. There’s just my honey and me, and (in a rapidly increasing number of U.S. states) baby makes three.

Of course, these things are not “a priori” in any marriage I’m familiar with; they are simply not part of the modern marriage structure. But reactionaries like Schulman wish they were, and still push for them to be. That’s why gay marriage is a threat to this vision of marriage — because even though we’ve come a long way in erasing the lie that men must be the heads of households, and women their meek, subservient followers, successful same-sex marriages end that fiction with an exclamation point. How can there be a patriarch in a lesbian marriage? How does a gay couple know which one is supposed to, by divine right, gracefully submit?

And yet, we know these partnerships are already thriving, and with each one we see further proof that marriage does not require an imbalance of power, a leader and a follower, a “kinship structure.” The union of two equals is quite enough.

What’s wrong with this? In one sense, nothing at all. Gays who marry can be congratulated or regarded as foolish based on their individual choices, just as I might covet or lament the women my straight friends espouse. In fact, gay couples who marry enter into a relationship that married people might envy. Gay marriage may reside outside the kinship system, but it has all the wedding-planning, nest-building fun of marriage but none of its rules or obligations (except the duties that all lovers have toward one another). Gay spouses have none of our guilt about sex-before-marriage. They have no tedious obligations towards in-laws, need never worry about Oedipus or Electra, won’t have to face a menacing set of brothers or aunts should they betray their spouse. But without these obligations–why marry? Gay marriage is as good as no marriage at all.

Are you kidding me? Listen, buddy, should my daughter grow up, marry a woman, start a family, and then find out her wife is cheating on her, you’d better bet she’ll face a menacing father-in-law; okay, more accurately she’ll face a father-in-law who is snippy and caustic, as I’m not given to violence. But it will not be okay just because my daughter’s spouse was a girl. And whether my daughter marries a woman, marries a man, or just cohabits with someone for years and years, I expect to see them on holidays and the odd weekend, especially if they come across a kid, or even a pet, in their time together.

That’s the thing Schulman doesn’t seem to get — that if my daughter marries some guy, that guy isn’t going to be my new best friend and business partner. But he is going to be my daughter’s husband, and that means that I’ll see a lot of him. And if she marries a woman? I’ll see a lot of her. Kinship isn’t about an interlocking system of gender-based obligations; it’s simply about love. If my daughter is loved by her spouse, they’ll come over to her father’s apartment even if her father’s kind of annoying and a bad cook, because my daughter loves me and her spouse loves her, and they’re willing to put up with my foibles because that’s what love is.

Sooner rather than later, the substantial differences between marriage and gay marriage will cause gay marriage, as a meaningful and popular institution, to fail on its own terms. Since gay relationships exist perfectly well outside the kinship system, to assume the burdens of marriage–the legal formalities, the duty of fidelity (which is no easier for gays than it is for straights), the slavishly imitative wedding ritual–will come to seem a nuisance. People in gay marriages will discover that mimicking the cozy bits of romantic heterosexual marriage does not make relationships stronger; romantic partners more loving, faithful, or sexy; domestic life more serene or exciting. They will discover that it is not the wedding vow that maintains marriages, but the force of the kinship system. Kinship imposes duties, penalties, and retribution that champagne toasts, self-designed wedding rings, and thousands of dollars worth of flowers are powerless to effect.

Except the kinship system, the system Schulman pines for, does not exist any more. It hasn’t for a good long time. I failed my marriage and my wife; I have not been cast out of society, nor should I be.

As for the illicit nature of unmarried life making everything better — so many straight couples now live together before marriage that I hardly feel the need to address this, but I will: living with someone is what makes the relationship less chaotic and more cozy. And that’s true whether or not you’re married; simply living together in a committed relationship creates a familial dynamic that marriage is more a capstone for than a foundation. As for what sustains a marriage, that is neither the wedding vow nor the kinship system, but love in its most pure form — the love of someone to the point that their happiness is more important than yours. The lack of that is enough that nothing — not vows, not kinship, nothing — can sustain.

Schulman has run through his four reasons for marriage; now, he begins to unburden himself of things that are probably better shared with a therapist.

Few men would ever bother to enter into a romantic heterosexual marriage–much less three, as I have done–were it not for the iron grip of necessity that falls upon us when we are unwise enough to fall in love with a woman other than our mom.

Excuse me, Rabbi, did you just say…

Few men would ever bother to enter into a romantic heterosexual marriage–much less three, as I have done–were it not for the iron grip of necessity that falls upon us when we are unwise enough to fall in love with a woman other than our mom.

You did say that, didn’t you.

Holy hand grenade of Anacreon. That’s…wow.

There would be very few flowerings of domestic ecstasy were it not for the granite underpinnings of marriage. Gay couples who marry are bound to be disappointed in marriage’s impotence without these ghosts of past authority. Marriage has a lineage more ancient than any divine revelation, and before any system of law existed, kinship crushed our ancestors with complex and pitiless rules about incest, family, tribe, and totem. Gay marriage, which can be created by any passel of state supreme court justices with degrees from middling law schools, lacking the authority and majesty of the kinship system, will be a letdown.

Well, funny, but the full force of the kinship system doesn’t seem to have turned marriage into a dream for Schulman. It seems more like something that he loathes, something he wishes he could avoid. And I’m sorry, but why in the wide world of sports would gay men and lesbian women, starting their marriage regimen de novo, choose a marriage system that crushes humans with “complex and pitiless rules” about anything?

Schulman’s argument boils down to this: marriage is a miserable system designed to force men to settle down and marry women, who inevitably withhold sex. It’s also designed to keep women sexually pure so that you know that child is yours, and not some knock-off. It’s a complex, soulless, bloodless, horrible nightmare of a relationship that I only wish I could have avoided. And because gay people aren’t going to have this system, they’re going to be really disappointed.

It’s like logic, only backwards.

When, in spite of current enthusiasm, gay marriage turns out to disappoint or bore the couples now so eager for its creation, its failure will be utterly irrelevant for gay people. The happiness of gay relationships up to now has had nothing to do with being married or unmarried; nor will they in the future. I suspect that the gay marriage movement will be remembered as a faintly humorous, even embarrassing stage in the liberation saga of the gay minority. The archetypal gay wedding portrait–a pair of middle-aged women or paunchy men looking uncomfortable in rented outfits worn at the wrong time of day–is destined to be hung in the same gallery of dated images of social progress alongside snapshots of flappers defiantly puffing cigarettes and Kodachromes of African Americans wearing dashikis. The freedom of gays to live openly as they please will easily survive the death of gay marriage.

Except the flappers paved the way for women who could wear miniskirts and not be ostracized, women who could date who they wanted and not be punished, women who could brazenly do the same thing men do, and still be accepted in society. Their picture is dated, but only because it happened a long time ago; their existence built the world we live in.

And not for nothing ,but the African Americans who wore dashikis, who expressed pride in their ancestry, in their homeland of Africa, who gave their sons and daughters names that harkened back to the land their ancestors had been ripped from? If not for them, I doubt that a man named Barack Obama would be president today.

And so the older gay men and women getting married today will cause younger gay men and women to get married tomorrow, and more important, they will pave the way for true equality, for homosexuals who can serve openly in the military, who can adopt children, who can live in freedom and equality along with their straight counterparts. Thank God for their existence. They are building a better world.

But of course, they’re foolish dreamers, because their relationships are build on mutual love and respect, not on an arbitrary and capricious system of outdated rules. So it’s doomed to fail. But it won’t hurt them — of course not!

So if the failure of gay marriage will not affect gay people, who will it hurt? Only everybody else.

That’s right! When gay people realize that gay marriage is not as sucky as straight marriage, and therefore they abandon it because it doesn’t suck as hard as straight marriage, which endures despite sucking…uh, where was I going with this again?

As kinship fails to be relevant to gays, it will become fashionable to discredit it for everyone. The irrelevance of marriage to gay people will create a series of perfectly reasonable, perfectly unanswerable questions: If gays can aim at marriage, yet do without it equally well, who are we to demand it of one another? Who are women to demand it of men? Who are parents to demand it of their children’s lovers–or to prohibit their children from taking lovers until parents decide arbitrarily they are “mature” or “ready”? By what right can government demand that citizens obey arbitrary and culturally specific kinship rules–rules about incest and the age of consent, rules that limit marriage to twosomes? Mediocre lawyers can create a fiction called gay marriage, but their idealism can’t compel gay lovers to find it useful. But talented lawyers will be very efficient at challenging the complicated, incoherent, culturally relative survival from our most primitive social organization we call kinship. The whole set of fundamental, irrational assumptions that make marriage such a burden and such a civilizing force can easily be undone.

Amen. So let it be. Oh, I doubt we’ll get so far as incest — the genetic issues are insurmountable. But the rest of it? Well, I don’t see that women can “demand” marriage of men; if you don’t want to marry someone, you actually don’t have to. It’s like, the law. Indeed, there are quite a few couples who aren’t marrying, simply because of the baggage of marriage that Schulman so accurately identifies — and on that front, women are leading the way.

As for parents demanding it of their children’s lovers? I’m not going to. Period. Ever. It is not for me to decide when or if my daughter marries; that is a decision for her and her partner, and nobody else. For a parent to demand marriage of a girlfriend or boyfriend is a betrayal of trust; thankfully, it was never demanded of me, and I intend to keep that trend going. As for asking my daughter to wait until she’s “mature” or “ready?” Well, we have this thing called adulthood; until my daughter turns 18, I do have some say in the matter, although realistically, my daughter will make her own decisions. But once she turns 18, all bets are off, and I have no legal recourse to stop her from doing a damn thing, even if I felt the need to.

Should marriage be extended to polyamorous groups? Maybe. In the kinship system, it already is kosher; there’s no Biblical prohibition of polygamy, anyhow. And I certainly don’t care how others want to structure their lives; if not for the current nature of polygamy, which is, ironically, deeply patriarchal, structured, and arbitrary, I’d support it.

So if gay marriage fails, it will allow women more autonomy, create marriage based on love and respect rather than demands and emotional blackmail, and it will generally increase liberty. If that’s failure, I can’t wait to see what success will do.

Schulman does note that the kinship system is awful for women, I’ll give him that.

There is no doubt that women and children have suffered throughout human history from being over-protected and controlled.

But…

The consequences of under-protection and indifference will be immeasurably worse. In a world without kinship, women will lose their hard-earned status as sexual beings with personal autonomy and physical security. Children will lose their status as nonsexual beings.

Huh? What? Women will lose their right to personal autonomy if they’re given the right to freely choose sexual partners? They’ll lose the right to physical security if they’re not required to marry the person their parents approve? Are you fucking kidding me? The dismantling of the kinship system has freed women to chart their own destinies. Do some sail into difficult waters? Of course, but rape is not something that just started in the 1960s. Indeed, it appears that incidences of rape are declining, as more men internalize the idea that women are not property, but instead are fellow human beings with the right to make their own decisions. You know, in opposition to the kinship system. Not to mention that women are now free to marry someone they actually want to marry, someone they willingly consent to sex with, as opposed to a rapist who they are obligated to submit to for life.

Oh, and children being nonsexual beings? That train has sailed.

Kinship creates these protections by adding the dimension of time, space, and thought to our sense of ourselves as food-eating, sex-having, child-rearing creatures. It makes us conscious not only of our parents and siblings but of their parents and siblings–our ancestors and our group identity. The family relations kinship creates–parents, godparents, uncles and sisters-in-law, cousins, clan, tribe, kingdom, nation–expand our sense of where we live and how we live. In our thought, kinship forces us to move beyond thoughtless obedience to instinct: It gives us a morality based on custom, “always adaptable and susceptible to the nuance of the situation.” It makes past experience relevant to current behavior (I quote Michael Oakeshott and paraphrase Peter Winch) and gives us the ability to choose one way of conduct rather than another–the ability which Oakeshott says brings the moral life into being. The commonality of incest prohibitions and marriage rules from one community to another is a sign that we have moved from unselfconscious instinct-obedience (which works well enough to avoid parent-child incest in other species) to the elaboration of human kinship relationships in all their mutations and varieties–all of which have the same core (the organization of female sexuality, the avoidance of incest) but exist in glorious variety. Like the other great human determinant, language, kinship is infinitely variable in form but exists in some form everywhere.

Except in the west, in 2009. For kinship has been dismantled here, for this generation of newlyweds — gay or straight. Ask most men and women why they’re marrying, and the answer is simple: love. Not because you’ve gotta buy the cow to get the non-free milk; cohabitation is common before marriage, and 95% of Americans have sex before marriage. Not because we have to, but because we want to. It doesn’t always work out, but it works.

And it’s a much brighter vision of marriage than Schulman’s ultimately is:

Can gay men and women be as generous as we straight men are? Will you consider us as men who love, just as you do, and not merely as homophobes or Baptists? Every day thousands of ordinary heterosexual men surrender the dream of gratifying our immediate erotic desires. Instead, heroically, resignedly, we march up the aisle with our new brides, starting out upon what that cad poet Shelley called the longest journey, attired in the chains of the kinship system–a system from which you have been spared. Imitate our self-surrender. If gay men and women could see the price that humanity–particularly the women and children among us–will pay, simply in order that a gay person can say of someone she already loves with perfect competence, “Hey, meet the missus!”–no doubt they will think again. If not, we’re about to see how well humanity will do without something as basic to our existence as gravity.

Schulman is right. His notion of marriage — a vision in which women trade their purity for security, in which men trade freedom for heirs, in which married couples trade their independence as a couple for a strict and arcane system of specific rules — this vision of marriage will receive its death blow from gay marriage. The tottering, wheezing, dying kinship notion of marriage will be put out of its misery. But this is not the fault of gay men and lesbian women; straight men and women have been assaulting this system for decades now. Every time a husband and wife decide that they don’t want to have kids, every time a couple moves in together before they marry, every time a man or woman thinks to themselves, “You know, I’m happier alone,” the notion that the future is dependent on an ancient ideal of marriage is dealt another blow. Marriage equality will ultimately free men and women to treat marriage exactly as The Impressive Clergyman laid it out in The Princess Bride — a blessed arrangement, a dream within a dream, love following us forever and ever. It may not have the same effect as an arranged marriage between two people who don’t necessarily like each other in order to ensure adequate, licit procreation — and that, of course, is a great blessing indeed.