[Crossposted on “Alas” and on “TADA.” Any comments against same-sex marriage should be put in the “TADA” thread, please. –Amp]
Noah Millman is a conservative blogger whose argument against same-sex marriage I’ve occasionally seen cited on discussions of the best anti-SSM arguments (such as this thread on Crooked Timber).
Noah has since changed his mind and now favors marriage equality. Interestingly — especially from a feminist point of view — he now explains his former opposition to SSM as mistaken concerns about manhood — what I’d call gender insecurity. In his anti-SSM argument, he wrote:
How do you explain to an ordinary straight 14 year-old – not explain; how do you build it into his deep assumptions about the world, such that it is second-nature – that he will fully become a man not when he beds his first woman but when he weds her, if we can no longer talk about weddings in terms of men and women, but only in terms of people in love?
Responding to himself, Noah now writes:
There’s no magic man-dust you can sprinkle on yourself, no path of life that will make you a man if you aren’t one. I understand the intentions of the marriage ideology in this regard. Its adherents just want to raise the psychic rewards for being good, for being true, to stand some ideal up against the myriad other false ideas of manhood that seduce young men, ideologies that can be more directly destructive. But the only effective opposition to these false ideas is good people. You can’t make men of these boys by saying: here, do this and you’ll be a man. You can only make men of them by showing them actual men, and giving them the time to learn from them, and from their own experience, how to be one.
I’ve got a son myself. I want him to grow to be a man. I hope to do my small part to teach him what that means, by example. I want him to marry when he already knows he is a man, and ready to make mature choices and assume mature responsibilities, not to marry in order to prove to himself that he’s a man.
I’d like to move away from the ideology of manhood altogether — this idea that we have to teach boys how to be men. Men are the grown-up form of boy; if boys are kept healthy and physically safe, they become men automatically. So unless Noah’s son is transgendered, he will grow into a man.
Framing manhood as something which can be achieved, or not achieved, or lost, is in my view inherently destructive. It teaches those who don’t measure up to common conceptions of manhood — those who are bullied, those who are sexually insecure, those who earn low incomes, those who need help — to damage themselves with self-contempt. It also encourages some guys who are determined to prove their own manhoods to act in destructive and violent ways towards others.
Nonetheless, I admire Noah’s willingness to change his mind for the better.
There’s a lot of gender insecurity in arguments against same-sex marriage. Listening to folks who oppose SSM, it seems like a miracle that anyone grows up to identify as a woman or as a man. Elizabeth Marquardt, for example, argues against equal rights for lesbians and gays because it might lead to changing how birth certificates are worded, which, she suggests, will make it unlikely that children will understand how to be mothers and fathers:
In Spain birth certificates for all children, not just for those raised by same sex couples, now say Progenitor A and Progenitor B. […] Will today’s children be inspired to grow up and be good Progenitors “A” and “B” for the next generation? Or will it all be a little too vague for them to figure out?
This is, frankly, a ludicrous straw to clutch. Heterosexual marriage — and good parenting — existed long before birth certificates. But both Elizabeth’s and Noah’s positions indicate the extreme gender insecurity at the heart of the anti-SSM position. Well, I can relate to that; lots of us grow up with gender-related insecurities. The problem is, anti-SSM folks deal with their gender anxieties by insisting on saddling queer people with second-class citizenship. That’s deeply unfair.
In his current, pro-SSM post, addressing the argument that straight marriage cannot survive without a ban on SSM, Noah writes:
…honestly, if our own marital commitments really did depend on excluding gay people, that would just mean we’ve got a whole lot of work to do in our own corner of things; we can’t ask gay couples to bear our burden for us.
Let’s hope that Noah won’t be the last SSM opponent to realize that.
...raise taxes on all red states to pay for free healthcare for undocumented immigrants. I don't know, that last one…