Other Mitch dude

East. · Dec 31, 1969

is this suppose to be cool or something

ESfreeridepa · Dec 31, 1969

you can tell the coolness of this picture by the fact that he has a ciggarette in his mouth.

statuswhitegirl · Dec 31, 1969

Unlike most libertarians, I don't have an opinion on gay marriage, and I'm not going to have an opinion no matter how much you bait me. However, I had an interesting discussion last night with another libertarian about it, which devolved into an argument about a certain kind of liberal/libertarian argument about gay marriage that I find really unconvincing. 
 
Social conservatives of a more moderate stripe are essentially saying that marriage is an ancient institution, which has been carefully selected for throughout human history. It is a bedrock of our society; if it is destroyed, we will all be much worse off. (See what happened to the inner cities between 1960 and 1990 if you do not believe this.) For some reason, marriage always and everywhere, in every culture we know about, is between a man and a woman; this seems to be an important feature of the institution. We should not go mucking around and changing this extremely important institution, because if we make a bad change, the institution will fall apart. 
 
A very common response to this is essentially to mock this as ridiculous. "Why on earth would it make any difference to me whether gay people are getting married? Why would that change my behavior as a heterosexual" 
 
To which social conservatives reply that institutions have a number of complex ways in which they fulfill their roles, and one of the very important ways in which the institution of marriage perpetuates itself is by creating a romantic vision of oneself in marriage that is intrinsically tied into expressing one's masculinity or femininity in relation to a person of the opposite sex; stepping into an explicitly gendered role. This may not be true of every single marriage, and indeed undoubtedly it is untrue in some cases. But it is true of the culture-wide institution. By changing the explicitly gendered nature of marriage we might be accidentally cutting away something that turns out to be a crucial underpinning. 
 
To which, again, the other side replies "That's ridiculous! I would never change my willingness to get married based on whether or not gay people were getting married!" 
 
Now, economists hear this sort of argument all the time. "That's ridiculous! I would never start working fewer hours because my taxes went up!" This ignores the fact that you may not be the marginal case. The marginal case may be some consultant who just can't justify sacrificing valuable leisure for a new project when he's only making 60 cents on the dollar. The result will nonetheless be the same: less economic activity. Similarly, you--highly educated, firmly socialised, upper middle class you--may not be the marginal marriage candidate; it may be some high school dropout in Tuscaloosa. That doesn't mean that the institution of marriage won't be weakened in America just the same. 
 
This should not be taken as an endorsement of the idea that gay marriage will weaken the current institution. I can tell a plausible story where it does; I can tell a plausible story where it doesn't. I have no idea which one is true. That is why I have no opinion on gay marriage, and am not planning to develop one. Marriage is a big institution; too big for me to feel I have a successful handle on it. 
 
However, I am bothered by this specific argument, which I have heard over and over from the people I know who favor gay marriage laws. I mean, literally over and over; when they get into arguments, they just repeat it, again and again. "I will get married even if marriage is expanded to include gay people; I cannot imagine anyone up and deciding not to get married because gay people are getting married; therefore, the whole idea is ridiculous and bigoted." 
 
They may well be right. Nonetheless, libertarians should know better. The limits of your imagination are not the limits of reality. Every government programme that libertarians have argued against has been defended at its inception with exactly this argument. 
 
Let me take three major legal innovations, one of them general, two specific to marriage. 
 
The first, the general one, is well known to most hard-core libertarians, but let me reprise it anyway. When the income tax was initially being debated, there was a suggestion to put in a mandatory cap; I believe the level was 10 percent. 
 
Don't be ridiculous, the Senator's colleagues told him. Americans would never allow an income tax rate as high as ten percent. They would revolt! It is an outrage to even suggest it! 
 
Many actually fought the cap on the grounds that it would encourage taxes to grow too high, towards the cap. The American people, they asserted, could be well counted on to keep income taxes in the range of a few percentage points. 
 
Oops. 
 
Now, I'm not a tax-crazy libertarian; I don't expect you to be horrified that we have income taxes higher than ten percent, as I'm not. But the point is that the Senators were completely right--at that time. However, the existance of the income tax allowed for a slow creep that eroded the American resistance to income taxation. External changes--from the Great Depression, to the technical ability to manage withholding rather than lump payments, also facilitated the rise, but they could not have without a cultural sea change in feelings about taxation. That "ridiculous" cap would have done a much, much better job holding down tax rates than the culture these Senators erroneously relied upon. Changing the law can, and does, change the culture of the thing regulated. 
 
Another example is welfare. To sketch a brief history of welfare, it emerged in the nineteenth century as "Widows and orphans pensions", which were paid by the state to destitute families whose breadwinner had passed away. They were often not available to blacks; they were never available to unwed mothers. Though public services expanded in the first half of the twentieth century, that mentality was very much the same: public services were about supporting unfortunate families, not unwed mothers. Unwed mothers could not, in most cases, obtain welfare; they were not allowed in public housing (which was supposed to be--and was--a way station for young, struggling families on the way to homeownership, not a permanent abode); they were otherwise discriminated against by social services. The help you could expect from society was a home for wayward girls, in which you would give birth and then put the baby up for adoption. 
 
The description of public housing in the fifties is shocking to anyone who's spent any time in modern public housing. Big item on the agenda at the tenant's meeting: housewives, don't shake your dustcloths out of the windows--other wives don't want your dirt in their apartment! Men, if you wear heavy work boots, please don't walk on the lawns until you can change into lighter shoes, as it damages the grass! (Descriptions taken from the invaluable book, The Inheritance, about the transition of the white working class from Democrat to Republican.) Needless to say, if those same housing projects could today find a majority of tenants who reliably dusted, or worked, they would be thrilled. 
 
Public housing was, in short, a place full of functioning families. 
 
Now, in the late fifties, a debate began over whether to extend benefits to the unmarried. It was unfair to stigmatise unwed mothers. Why shouldn't they be able to avail themselves of the benefits available to other citizens? The brutal societal prejudice against illegitimacy was old fashioned, bigoted, irrational. 
 
But if you give unmarried mothers money, said the critics, you will get more unmarried mothers. 
 
Ridiculous, said the proponents of the change. Being an unmarried mother is a brutal, thankless task. What kind of idiot would have a baby out of wedlock just because the state was willing to give her paltry welfare benefits? 
 
People do all sorts of idiotic things, said the critics. If you pay for something, you usually get more of it. 
 
C'mon said the activists. That's just silly. I just can't imagine anyone deciding to get pregnant out of wedlock simply because there are welfare benefits available. 
 
Oooops. 
 
Of course, change didn't happen overnight. But the marginal cases did have children out of wedlock, which made it more acceptable for the next marginal case to do so. Meanwhile, women who wanted to get married essentially found themselves in competition for young men with women who were willing to have sex, and bear children, without forcing the men to take any responsibility. This is a pretty attractive proposition for most young men. So despite the fact that the sixties brought us the biggest advance in birth control ever, illegitimacy exploded. In the early 1960s, a black illegitimacy rate of roughly 25 percent caused Daniel Patrick Moynihan to write a tract warning of a crisis in "the negro family" (a tract for which he was eviscerated by many of those selfsame activists.) 
 
By 1990, that rate was over 70 percent. This, despite the fact that the inner city, where the illegitimacy problem was biggest, only accounts for a fraction of the black population. 
 
But in that inner city, marriage had been destroyed. It had literally ceased to exist in any meaningful way. Possibly one of the most moving moments in Jason de Parle's absolutely wonderful book, American Dream, which follows three welfare mothers through welfare reform, is when he reveals that none of these three women, all in their late thirties, had ever been to a wedding. 
 
Marriage matters. It is better for the kids; it is better for the adults raising those kids; and it is better for the childless people in the communities where those kids and adults live. Marriage reduces poverty, improves kids outcomes in all measurable ways, makes men live longer and both spouses happier. Marriage, it turns out, is an incredibly important institution. It also turns out to be a lot more fragile than we thought back then. It looked, to those extremely smart and well-meaning welfare reformers, practically unshakeable; the idea that it could be undone by something as simple as enabling women to have children without husbands, seemed ludicrous. Its cultural underpinnings were far too firm. Why would a woman choose such a hard road? It seemed self-evident that the only unwed mothers claiming benefits would be the ones pushed there by terrible circumstance. 
 
This argument is compelling and logical. I would never become an unwed welfare mother, even if benefits were a great deal higher than they are now. It seems crazy to even suggest that one would bear a child out of wedlock for $567 a month. Indeed, to this day, I find the reformist side much more persuasive than the conservative side, except for one thing, which is that the conservatives turned out to be right. In fact, they turned out to be even more right than they suspected; they were predicting upticks in illegitimacy that were much more modest than what actually occurred--they expected marriage rates to suffer, not collapse. 
 
How did people go so badly wrong? Well, to start with, they fell into the basic fallacy that economists are so well acquainted with: they thought about themselves instead of the marginal case. For another, they completely failed to realise that each additional illegitimate birth would, in effect, slightly destigmatise the next one. They assigned men very little agency, failing to predict that women willing to forgo marriage would essentially become unwelcome competition for women who weren't, and that as the numbers changed, that competition might push the marriage market towards unwelcome outcomes. They failed to forsee the confounding effect that the birth control pill would have on sexual mores. 
 
But I think the core problems are two. The first is that they looked only at individuals, and took instititutions as a given. That is, they looked at all the cultural pressure to marry, and assumed that that would be a countervailing force powerful enough to overcome the new financial incentives for out-of-wedlock births. They failed to see the institution as dynamic. It wasn't a simple matter of two forces: cultural pressure to marry, financial freedom not to, arrayed against eachother; those forces had a complex interplay, and when you changed one, you changed the other. 
 
The second is that they didn't assign any cultural reason for, or value to, the stigma on illegitimacy. They saw it as an outmoded vestige of a repressive Victorial values system, based on an unnatural fear of sexuality. But the stigma attached to unwed motherhood has quite logical, and important, foundations: having a child without a husband is bad for children, and bad for mothers, and thus bad for the rest of us. So our culture made it very costly for the mother to do. Lower the cost, and you raise the incidence. As an economist would say, incentives matter. 
 
(Now, I am not arguing in favor of stigmatising unwed mothers the way the Victorians did. I'm just pointing out that the stigma did not exist merely, as many mid-century reformers seem to have believed, because of some dark Freudian excesses on the part of our ancestors.) 
 
But all the reformers saw was the terrible pain--and it was terrible--inflicted on unwed mothers. They saw the terrible unfairness--and it was terribly unfair--of punishing the mother, and not the father. They saw the inherent injustice--and need I add, it was indeed unjust--of treating American citizens differently because of their marital status. 
 
But as G.K. Chesterton points out, people who don't see the use of a social institution are the last people who should be allowed to reform it: 
 
 
In the matter of reforming things, as distinct from deforming them, there is one plain and simple principle; a principle which will probably be called a paradox. There exists in such a case a certain institution or law; let us say, for the sake of simplicity, a fence or gate erected across a road. The more modern type of reformer goes gaily up to it and says, "I don't see the use of this; let us clear it away." To which the more intelligent type of reformer will do well to answer: "If you don't see the use of it, I certainly won't let you clear it away. Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to destroy it." 
 
This paradox rests on the most elementary common sense. The gate or fence did not grow there. It was not set up by somnambulists who built it in their sleep. It is highly improbable that it was put there by escaped lunatics who were for some reason loose in the street. Some person had some reason for thinking it would be a good thing for somebody. And until we know what the reason was, we really cannot judge whether the reason was reasonable. It is extremely probable that we have overlooked some whole aspect of the question, if something set up by human beings like ourselves seems to be entirely meaningless and mysterious. There are reformers who get over this difficulty by assuming that all their fathers were fools; but if that be so, we can only say that folly appears to be a hereditary disease. But the truth is that nobody has any business to destroy a social institution until he has really seen it as an historical institution. If he knows how it arose, and what purposes it was supposed to serve, he may really be able to say that they were bad purposes, that they have since become bad purposes, or that they are purposes which are no longer served. But if he simply stares at the thing as a senseless monstrosity that has somehow sprung up in his path, it is he and not the traditionalist who is suffering from an illusion. 
 
 
Now, of course, this can turn into a sort of precautionary principle that prevents reform from ever happening. That would be bad; all sorts of things need changing all the time, because society and our environment change. But as a matter of principle, it is probably a bad idea to let someone go mucking around with social arrangements, such as the way we treat unwed parenthood, if their idea about that institution is that "it just growed". You don't have to be a rock-ribbed conservative to recognise that there is something of an evolutionary process in society: institutional features are not necessarily the best possible arrangement, but they have been selected for a certain amount of fitness. 
 
It might also be, of course, that the feature is what evolutionary biologists call a spandrel. It's a term taken from architecture; spandrels are the pretty little spaces between vaulted arches. They are not designed for; they are a useless, but pretty, side effect of the physical properties of arches. In evolutionary biology, spandrel is some feature which is not selected for, but appears as a byproduct of other traits that are selected for. Belly buttons are a neat place to put piercings, but they're not there because of that; they're a byproduct of mammalian reproduction. 
 
However, and architect will be happy to tell you that if you try to rip out the spandrel, you might easily bring down the building. 
 
The third example I'll give is of changes to the marriage laws, specifically the radical relaxation of divorce statutes during the twentieth century. 
 
Divorce, in the nineteenth century, was unbelievably hard to get. It took years, was expensive, and required proving that your spouse had abandonned you for an extended period with no financial support; was (if male) not merely discreetly dallying but flagrantly carrying on; or was not just belting you one now and again when you got mouthy, but routinely pummeling you within an inch of your life. After you got divorced, you were a pariah in all but the largest cities. If you were a desperately wronged woman you might change your name, taking your maiden name as your first name and continuing to use your husband's last name to indicate that you expected to continue living as if you were married (i.e. chastely) and expect to have some limited intercourse with your neighbours, though of course you would not be invited to events held in a church, or evening affairs. Financially secure women generally (I am not making this up) moved to Europe; Edith Wharton, who moved to Paris when she got divorced, wrote moving stories about the way divorced women were shunned at home. Men, meanwhile (who were usually the respondants) could expect to see more than half their assets and income settled on their spouse and children. 
 
There were, critics observed, a number of unhappy marriages in which people stuck together. Young people, who shouldn't have gotten married; older people, whose spouses were not physically abusive nor absent, nor flagrantly adulterous, but whose spouse was, for reasons of financial irresponsibility, mental viciousness, or some other major flaw, destroying their life. Why not make divorce easier to get? Rather than requiring people to show that there was an unforgiveable, physically visible, cause that the marriage should be dissolved, why not let people who wanted to get divorced agree to do so? 
 
Because if you make divorce easier, said the critics, you will get much more of it, and divorce is bad for society. 
 
That's ridiculous! said the reformers. (Can we sing it all together now?) People stay married because marriage is a bedrock institution of our society, not because of some law! The only people who get divorced will be people who have terrible problems! A few percentage points at most! 
 
Oops. When the law changed, the institution changed. The marginal divorce made the next one easier. Again, the magnitude of the change swamped the dire predictions of the anti-reformist wing; no one could have imagined, in their wildest dreams, a day when half of all marriages ended in divorce. 
 
There were actually two big changes; the first, when divorce laws were amended in most states to make it easier to get a divorce; and the second, when "no fault" divorce allowed one spouse to unilaterally end the marriage. The second change produced another huge surge in the divorce rate, and a nice decline in the incomes of divorced women; it seems advocates had failed to anticipate that removing the leverage of the financially weaker party to hold out for a good settlement would result in men keeping more of their earnings to themselves. 
 
What's more, easy divorce didn't only change the divorce rate; it made drastic changes to the institution of marriage itself. David Brooks makes an argument I find convincing: that the proliferation of the kind of extravagent weddings that used to only be the province of high society (rented venue, extravagent flowers and food, hundreds of guests, a band with dancing, dresses that cost the same as a good used car) is because the event itself doesn't mean nearly as much as it used to, so we have to turn it into a three-ring circus to feel like we're really doing something. 
 
A couple in 1940 (and even more so in 1910) could go to a minister's parlor, or a justice of the peace, and in five minutes totally change their lives. Unless you are a member of certain highly religious subcultures, this is simply no longer true. That is, of course, partly because of the sexual revolution and the emancipation of women; but it is also because you aren't really making a lifetime committment; you're making a lifetime committment unless you find something better to do. There is no way, psychologically, to make the latter as big an event as the former, and when you lost that committment, you lose, on the margin, some willingness to make the marriage work. Again, this doesn't mean I think divorce law should be toughened up; only that changes in law that affect marriage affect the cultural institution, not just the legal practice. 
 
Three laws. Three well-meaning reformers who were genuinely, sincerely incapable of imagining that their changes would wreak such institutional havoc. Three sets of utterly logical and convincing, and wrong arguments about how people would behave after a major change. 
 
So what does this mean? That we shouldn't enact gay marriage because of some sort of social Precautionary Principle 
 
No. I have no such grand advice. 
 
My only request is that people try to be a leeetle more humble about their ability to imagine the subtle results of big policy changes. The argument that gay marriage will not change the institution of marriage because you can't imagine it changing your personal reaction is pretty arrogant. It imagines, first of all, that your behavior is a guide for the behavior of everyone else in society, when in fact, as you may have noticed, all sorts of different people react to all sorts of different things in all sorts of different ways, which is why we have to have elections and stuff. And second, the unwavering belief that the only reason that marriage, always and everywhere, is a male-female institution (I exclude rare ritual behaviors), is just some sort of bizarre historical coincidence, and that you know better, needs examining. If you think you know why marriage is male-female, and why that's either outdated because of all the ways in which reproduction has lately changed, or was a bad reason to start with, then you are in a good place to advocate reform. If you think that marriage is just that way because our ancestors were all a bunch of repressed bastards with dark Freudian complexes that made them homophobic bigots, I'm a little leery of letting you muck around with it. 
 
Is this post going to convince anyone? I doubt it; everyone but me seems to already know all the answers, so why listen to such a hedging, doubting bore? I myself am trying to draw a very fine line between being humble about making big changes to big social institutions, and telling people (which I am not trying to do) that they can't make those changes because other people have been wrong in the past. In the end, our judgement is all we have; everyone will have to rely on their judgement of whether gay marriage is, on net, a good or a bad idea. All I'm asking for is for people to think more deeply than a quick consultation of their imaginations to make that decision. I realise that this probably falls on the side of supporting the anti-gay-marriage forces, and I'm sorry, but I can't help that. This humility is what I want from liberals when approaching market changes; now I'm asking it from my side too, in approaching social ones. I think the approach is consistent, if not exactly popular. 
 
Update A number of libertarians are, as I predicted, making the "Why don't we just privatise marriage?" argument. I don't find that useful in the context of the debate about gay marriage in America, where marriage is simply not going to be privatised in any foreseeable near-term future. I wrote an immediate follow up saying just that, but of course, I got a lot of readers from an Instalanche, which I didn't expect (no one expects an Instalanche!), and they just read the one post. So the second post is here; if you are thinking of making the argument that we should just get the state out of the marriage business, please read it. 
 
Also, a lot of readers are saying that I'm wrong about marriage always being between a man and a woman, citing polygamy. I have been told this is a "basic factual error." 
 
No, it's not. Polygamous societies do not (at least in any society I have ever heard about) have group marriages. Men with more than one wife have multiple marriages with multiple women, not a single marriage with several wives. In fact, they generally take pains to separate the women, preferably in different houses. Whether or not you allow men to contract for more than one marriage (and for all sorts of reasons, this seems to me to be a bad idea unless you're in an era of permanent war), each marriage remains the union of a man and a woman. 
 
Posted by Jane Galt at April 2, 2005 06:24 AM | TrackBack | Technorati inbound links 
 
Comments 
Jane, 
 
If this was an essay on economics, it would be the best essay on economics I've read in a year or more. 
 
If this was an essay on social structures, it would be the best essay on social structures I've read on a year or more. 
 
If this was an essay on conservative versus reformer mindsets, it would be the best essay on *that* that I've read in a year or more. 
 
In fact, it was all three of those things, and I'm frankly stunned at how excellently you've made so many points in such a short space. 
 
Bravo. 
 
TJIC 
 
Posted by: TJIC on April 2, 2005 08:45 AM 
 
Amazing essay. Simply amazing. 
 
While I find myself on the "pro-" side of the gay marriage issue, that's more because I know several 20+ year extremely stable gay couples, and those are the people I can't see forbidding to marry. In practice, that's probably not going to be the norm, any more than it's the norm for heterosexuals. Any analysis of the effects of gay marriage will have to include analyzing how gay marriages will fail or become disfunctional, just like heterosexual marriages do. Their failure modes could easily be different than het marriages, and those differences could be socially significant. 
 
 
Posted by: Dave on April 2, 2005 09:30 AM 
I agree that there might be unintended consequences in legalizing gay marriage, I always read the fine print and "game" all rules, at least in my head, anyway. There is certainly a chance that the legalization of gay marriage would cause social change that we can't anticipate. I think the areas you concentrate on, quickie divorce, modern contraception, and welfare laws are/were all easily gamed by people who want to "beat the system", i.e. gold diggers, the pathologically promiscuous, and deadbeat dads in your examples. 
 
I guess you could point at health insurance for the spouse as an area that could be gamed by gay marriage. For me, thats not a major factor, I favor universal health care. Gay marriage should be a matter for each religion to decide. But gay's should be allowed civil unions that give them the same rights and financial considerations as heteros. Just think how much fun the Schiavo case would have been if it was Michelle instead of Michael. Think Delay and the far right would have cared if that were the case? Sorry, sometimes I just can't resist. 
 
Posted by: So Fabulous on April 2, 2005 09:54 AM 
Holy cow! How about an executive summary? You've come down with JayRosenitis. 
 
Posted by: Stanley on April 2, 2005 09:57 AM 
Marriagve is an institution to encourage monogamy and social interdependence. As a single woman on my own, I can tell you that economically speaking, I would be better off if I were living with a roommate or a partner. 
 
While I would have higher expenses for some food, I can tell you that most food is often sold in bulk or in units that are more friendly towards a couple, as opposed to a single person. I pay more for food in smaller portions. The same is true on rent. A two bedroom apartment in my building is approx. 400 more than a one bedroom per month. I pay more per square foot than my friends do. After that, many of my monthly expenses would be cut in half. 
 
In rural societies, there was a reason a marriage was between a man and a woman. On a farm, extra hands were an asset, and the cheapest way to produce that asset was to have a baby and wait ten years. Sure there was a delay, and investment in a child, but on the whole, marriage between a man and a woman was the best way to ensure plenty of farm hands for twenty years, especially when half of them weren't likely to make adulthood. 
 
Further, a marriage was a partnership that worked on doing different types of work to be successful, work that fell down gender lines - laundry versus plowing. It fell on gender lines because of comparative advantage. Due to a man's upper body strength, different relexes, and overall being stronger, it made more sense for a man to be out in the fields, doing very brawny labor or hunting, as opposed to being in the house and gathering. 
 
Nowadays, we don't need as many children (though saying we need none is a way to social doom), and labor does not need to fall as much down gender lines. However, marriage is still the best way of ensuring monogamy, which is economically and emotionally more healthy state. Monogamy ensures a person is less likely to catch a STD, provides a unique source of emotional support and eliminates risks associated with a promiscuous lifestyle. 
 
While there are other reasons for marriage, and I admit straight marriage falls down on this a lot, the best reason is because two people want to commit to supporting each other and being full partners for the rest of their lives. This is not a unique phenomenon to straight people; there are a lot of gay couples who want this. But unless we can say that that is what we want gay marriage to look like - monogamous, full-on emotional and economic support - then we risk losing the whole point of marriage. And the problem is, I have seen too many gay commentators say that gay marriage would need more "outs" for individuals to cheat and not invalidate the marriage (Andrew Sullivan come one down!). Which defeats the whole freaking point. 
 
There may be other, better reasons for marriage, and for the reason marriage has always been between a man and a woman, even in extensive slave holding societies where adoption was relatively easy, and field hands could be made by breeding your slaves (I'm thinking Greece and Rome here). But until we say that gay marriage will be just as monogamous as straight marriage - or, more precisely, gay marriage will not have as a premise the idea that infidelity is part of the package (i.e. all marriages are open and supposed to be), then we are mucking around in the roots of marriage, and should stay clear. 
 
Posted by: Nora on April 2, 2005 10:04 AM 
Jane: 
 
If we replace "gay marriage" with "desegregation," what exactly changes? Should, for example, we be a little more forgiving of the memory of Bull Connor, who acted on roughly the same argument? 
 
Social institutions matter, and changing them can have big effects. Good point, I suppose. But how you are distinguishing social institutions from other changes that effect a number of people, or the social institution of marriage from others, I can't see. Even if all you're arguing is that we should be more forgiving of people who make arguments against the extension of civil rights (however trivial), there needs to be something more. After all, the guilt of those previously on the wrong side of history has been a pretty powerful social institution as well. 
 
Posted by: SomeCallMeTim on April 2, 2005 10:25 AM 
Excellent essay--well worth the length. One basic issue that you don't consider, though, is to what extent the historical legal changes were the result of rather than the cause of social changes. By this reasoning, the big change is the social acceptance of gays and gay relationships. This change what may (or may not) have a the subtle but profound impact on the institution of heterosexual marriage. The actual legalization of gay marriage may be rather unimportant--it has become a topic for debate because of the greater acceptance and, as the level of acceptance increases, legalization of gay unions will likely become a foregone conclusion. But even if the laws are maintained in opposition to public opinion, the effect of homosexual unions being thought of as a an alternative form of 'normal' rather than 'deviant' will have it's effect on heterosexual marriage anyway. 
 
The recent bankruptcy law changes are an interesting point of comparison. It seems that what has happened is that bankrupcy filings have increased substantially without changes in the laws at least in part because the social stigma associated with bankrupcy has mostly disappeared, but in this case, rather than codifying this increased tolerance, the effort has been to try to pass a law that will counteract it. 
 
But it is still a case of changes in attitudes and behavior leading legal changes rather than being caused by legal changes. 
 
Posted by: mw on April 2, 2005 10:26 AM 
If we replace "gay marriage" with "desegregation," what exactly changes? Should, for example, we be a little more forgiving of the memory of Bull Connor, who acted on roughly the same argument? 
 
I was going to write something like this...but Tim beat me to it and probably wrote it better than I would have. 
 
We could substitute any number of social or economic issues for "gay marriage" for this exercise. Jane's argument would certainly speak truth to power for those against the change. 
 
In the end it's all about oppressing civil rights because of fear and losing control. 
 
Posted by: carla on April 2, 2005 11:11 AM 
"I realise that this probably falls on the side of supporting the anti-gay-marriage forces, and I'm sorry, but I can't help that." 
 
What's to apologize for? No matter what your sympathies (within reason), reality will sometimes run against them. Gay marriage didn't become an issue for serious public consideration until a few years ago, and not even gay activists agree with each other agree on why it's a good idea. I don't think there's anything untoward about pointing out that changing things without thinking through the ramifications is a bad idea. 
 
Posted by: Sean Kinsell on April 2, 2005 11:30 AM 
I really enjoyed this essay and found it very stimulating, but I do have one serious problem with it: The argument ignores the possibility that same-sex marriage might have unknown positive consequences. If the consequences are either neutral or bad--but we don't know which--then caution is clearly in order. But if same-sex marriage might actually help both gay and straight people alike (as Jonathan Rauch has argued), then we face a very different situation. 
 
In the end, the question comes down to whether we think the hard-to-calculate good consequences outweigh the hard-to-calculate bad consequences. One way of approaching the problem is to experiment with same-sex marriage on a limited scale as a way of gathering data about it. And that's exactly what we are doing right now. 
 
Posted by: Jason Kuznicki on April 2, 2005 11:32 AM 
Tim and carla: 
 
Segregation was the historical ehco of five hundred years of brutal, systemmatic kidnapping, rape, and torture. Civil rights activists of the last few decades understood it as such, and few today would disagree that we're better off without it. Indeed, African American authors from Frederick Douglass forwards were intimately acquainted with the antecedents of the "social institution" of segregation: the legal institution of slavery. 
 
In other words, desegregationists had more than met Chesterton's criteria for bulldozing the gate; he's offering a warning, not posting an injunction against all social change. 
 
You, on the other hand, suggest that nonexistent warning (made out of "fear of losing control", right?) as a justification for the change itself. Please. 
 
Conflating marriage with slavery is exactly the kind of vapidity Jane is arguing against here. If you don't see that one is worthy of social sanction, and that the other was abominable, you're probably missing her point. 
 
Posted by: John Deszyck on April 2, 2005 11:53 AM 
See, I disagree that the primary reason marriage has become a completely different institution is because of relaxed divorce laws. 
 
Marriage has become a completely different institution, in my opinion, because marriage doesn't bring as many advantages anymore. 
 
Life isn't what it was 100 years ago. 100 years ago, people needed long, secure, dependable relationships to survive. Today, long, secure, dependable relationships generally create uncertainty, and the advantage goes to people who can drop everything and re-invent themselves in a year or two. 
 
Today, the people who suffer the most from economic downturns, changes in industry, and anything else, are families. People who have long-term commitments they have to honor. 
 
I'm single, never been married, early 30s. Life in the modern world suits me just fine. I life a life of near-luxury. Meanwhile, the "families" I know -- friends of mine who had kids, settled down -- live in general terror of the completely unpredictable and rapidly changing modern economy. No job is secure. At any time, they could go from being comfortably middle class to impoverished, as their careers of choice are wiped out. 
 
There's no place to set down "roots" because any neighborhood you move to could drastically change from middle-class to either gentrified or impoverished within the next 10 years. There are no more family farms, or family businesses -- these get scooped up or crushed by massive institutional competitors. 
 
Marriage is one of two things today: 
 
1) A pooling of resources, in which spouses pursue separate career paths, and combine their earnings while sharing costs. This is simply a trade-off of flexibility for higher income. As long as both spouses have stable, predictable careers, it's great, but what's stable and predictable about a career these days? Whenever one spouse has to make a career change they are immediately limited by whatever the other spouse is doing at the time. For example, several friends of mine in law school are married. As they graduate they are either a) looking for a job within driving distance of their spouse's job or b) completely uprooting their spouse from spouse's career. I on the other hand, have the entire united states to choose from, with no trade-offs, as I look for a job. 
 
2) A division of labor, in which spouse earns income, while the other stays at home and raises the kids. Once upon a time, one breadwinner could lead a fairly reliable career path, either by creating a small business/farm, or choosing a trade to develop. No more. Does daddy have a good job? Tomorrow daddy could be selling pants at the Gap, whether Daddy today is 5 or 25 years into his chosen "career." This isn't horrible for a single, mobile person -- I've changed careers three times already in my life and I'm in my mid-30s. But for a "family" doesn't bring much security anymore. 
 
The second situation is especially important for the non-breadwinner, because it means that those (mostly women) who agree as part of a marriage contract to "stay home and raise the kids" aren't committing to any kind of secure, predictable situation. "Marry me and I'll take care of you for the rest of your life" doesn't have the same ring to it anymore than it did when a man with a farm, or a business, or a good trade once said it. 
 
Posted by: Aaron on April 2, 2005 12:08 PM 
Carla, Tim - 
 
Segregation is not the norm in every society from the dawn of time. Many societies were much more racially mixed (Greece, Rome, Egyptian, and I am sure a lot of tribal societies). While there has always been fear of the other, especially individuals of different ethnicities and religions, and with it accompaning discrimination, that discrimination has not been UNIVERSALLY legislated into law based on race, or factors that cannot be changed. In fact, you cannot say the same ethnic or religious group has been discriminated against across all cultures. 
 
On the other hand, marriage has universally been deemed to be between a man and a woman. Whether or not gay relationships have been considered the norm, marriage has always been heterosexual. So gay marriage is not quite the same thing as the civil rights movement. 
 
Posted by: Nora on April 2, 2005 12:18 PM 
One argument I've never seen addressed, at least to my satisfaction is this: what are the practical matters that gay folks have to endure that married couples dont? All the church marriages I've been to are religious ceremonies, which are then recognized by the state. 
 
Are there benefits? I know there are. But aren't most of them economic? And I think, really, kind of dated. Most of them seem to lie in the area of relationships (i.e. visitation, who can speak for the other spouse, insurance provided for spouses), taxes, and property rights, i.e., inheritance. Are there any I'm missing? 
 
I say this because it seems to me that its not the relationship issues that are the problem, gays are as free to associate or not as anyone else and any church could perform a ceremony that was binding before god, if they so chose. So what's the nut of the practical matter? That if there is a non-working spouse of a gay couple, there's no insurance benefit? That there is no automatic inheritance for the spouse? As a trust and estates lawyer, I can tell you this is quickly remedied the same way a heterosexual couple's wills are taken care of. 
 
That's why when I hear Ellen DeGeneres say that her partner wouldn't be protected in the event of her death, I laughed, thinking "Hmm, if your lawyers and accountants dont' have you legally papered up 9 ways from sunday, I just got me a new client . . . ". Ellen, the only way your partner isn't protected in event of your death, is if YOU don't do anything about it. 
 
I am sympathetic to the emergency cases of say a hospital not allowing what, a spouse, or something to visit? Is this really an issue? And honestly, I'm asking because I want to know, and don't have any familiarity with the issue. 
 
But the ultimate point I'm getting at is that the "civil rights" aspect of this doesn't really pursuade me, and I think some folks compare as well as most commentators who use this argument seem to think. Essentially, denying someone's cohabited partner the right to get insurance, joint filing of tax returns, and being to lazy to pay to get a will done (trust me again, even heterosexuals don't want the default), when millions of heterosexuals are similarly situated doesn't strike me as the most compelling of civil rights claims. I am open to persuasion, but goodness, the law is full of "well, you can't do it that way, but this way will work" situations. 
 
But that's just the practical argument. I'm fully persuaded by the moral argument that gay couples should be allowed to enter into socially binding arrangements. So, yes, I'm pro-gay marriage, but really, its not as open and shut, as Jane so admirably pointed out, as folks might have you believe, that either you're standing on the side of goodness and enlightenment or knuckledragging conservatism. I do believe there will be negative repercussions, but that on balance, its worth the risk. Folks don't often point out that after segregation the black communities ended up losing their best and brightest who moved up and out. That meant two things, the local communities lost their business and social leaders, and the business and social leaders were now in a pool of folks where they probably didn't stand out as much anymore. 
 
Posted by: CyberSurfer on April 2, 2005 12:28 PM 
Aaron if what you say is true, and I suspect that it is to some degree, then it may be necessary to have the polity confer more benefits to married couples who have children. If being married and having kids does not confer an economic advantage anymore, and society suffers greatly absent sufficient procreation with competent socialization, as we may see in Japan and Western Europe in the next few decades, then we may need to provide more incentives for people to marry, stay married, and have children. It is wonderful that you have a great life. If too many people respond to incentives as you do, however, the outcome would not be positive for society as a whole. Note that I ma not specifically proposing anything. Yet. 
 
Posted by: Will Allen on April 2, 2005 12:28 PM 
Will, 
 
Why incentivize people to do what's economically inefficient? While the married-with-children relationship was once valuable, it's no longer so, as far as I can tell. 
 
I agree that kids are important. But why simply encourage people to go back to the old relationships when they aren't efficient anymore? If marriage is economically inefficient NOW, how much more so will it be if society subsidizes that economically inefficient relationship? 
 
If kids are important, why not subsidize having kids? Why subsidize the marriage relationship? Marriage doesn't cause kids. 
 
Posted by: Aaron on April 2, 2005 12:44 PM 
Simple arguments applied to complex systems or institutions are generally wrong. In spite of Jane's lengthy post, each argument basically came down to a simplistic "X was done, therefore Y happened.". Virtually nothing in society is that simple. A large number of factors can and generally do affect any one institution during any given time frame. She points to what happened to marriage in the inner city from the 1960's to the 1990's. What else happened during that time frame? How did the War on Drugs and the attendant increase in the number of young men from the inner city being in prison contribute? Did the initial promise and then failure (in the eyes of some) of aspects of the civil rights movement contribute? How about white flight from the cities, taking away a large tax base to help support the infrastructure and services of the cities? How many other factors can anyone who cares to think about it come up with that could easily break down the validity of the arguments based on a one action, one reaction relationship? 
 
Posted by: Jim S on April 2, 2005 12:49 PM 
Good post, cybersurfer, although my attitudes more closely mirror Jane's. Part of the reason I am more agnostic than pro gay marriage is that, although there are certainly circumstances in which gay partners suffer because they cannot marry, their tribulations aren't even in the same universe as was the case with the victims of Jim Crow, and, as Jane notes, the unforseen outcomes with tinkering with marriage are potentially hugely detrimental, as has been already witnessed in the past 50 years. 
 
It seems to me that that primary societal purpose of marriage in the modern world is to provide the best chance of a good environment in which to socialize children. Socializing children is still the most important wide-spread activity that any society engages in. This is easier to do with two adults under the same roof, and I know this for a fact. Whether there is any significant statistical advantage to having role models of both sexes for a child to learn from is not something I can make any judgement on. If simply allowing gay mariage, in the current context of marriage, lessens the percentage of children who have two adults under the same roof to socialize them, then I would oppose gay marriage, and it is not inconceivable that this is the case, for reasons Jane illustrated extremely well. 
 
If, on the other hand, it were to be recognized that the way in which heterosexual marriage has been degraded, in terms of the institution's performance in socializing children, then perhaps this could be addressed in a fashion in which allowing gay marriage would be of minor importance. This is extraordinarily complex, to put forth an understatement, which is why I do not have firm opinions on the matter, other than I strongly believe that nobody really knows much of anything regarding this topic. 
 
Posted by: Will Allen on April 2, 2005 12:55 PM 
If we want to see what effects gay marriage will have on the institution of marriage, I suggest that we sit back and watch the countries that now allow it. Let's do lots of analysis over a 30 - 40 year time span and then make a rational, informed decision. I only wish we had used that criterion when we were debating no-fault divorce. 
 
Posted by: cj on April 2, 2005 12:58 PM 
Because, Aarron, there is significant reason to believe that children have a better chance of being socialized well when there are when there are two adults under the same roof engaging in that task. If this outcome of having two adults under the same roof socializing children can be accomplished, absent calling the relationship a "marriage", fine, but that seems to be re-inventing the wheel. 
 
Posted by: Will Allen on April 2, 2005 01:00 PM 
Aaron, one thing that too few libertarians realise is that there is a societal interest in having lots of kids even if there is no social security system. When you are eighty or so, and you need to retire, you are going to want to draw on your assets. But your assets just represent a claim on current production. No kids, no current production. Or to put it more simply, if people don't have babies, who's going to take care of you in the nursing home? 
 
[Immigrants! say many libertarians. Look again. Birthrates are falling faster in the third world than they are here. And immigration to the US is made attractive only by the high productivity of current native-born workers 
 
If no one has kids, when you are old, you will starve. 
 
Posted by: Jane Galt on April 2, 2005 01:11 PM 
By the way, Jane, this may have been your best post ever. It would be interesting to get a response from Andrew Sullivan. 
 
Posted by: Will Allen on April 2, 2005 01:18 PM 
". . .by creating a romantic vision of oneself in marriage that is intrinsically tied into expressing one's masculinity or femininity in relation to a person of the opposite sex; stepping into an explicitly gendered role." 
I'm tearing out a piece of Jane's great post to run down a rabbit trail. 
I think that the same thinking applies to sexuality within marriage. When I define my sexuality always and only within the context of my marriage and my wife, then I am a bit more "bulletproof" when it comes to pornography and affairs; and thus also to STDs and children out of wedlock. 
The benefits to society if most people married for life and remained faithful to their spouse really stagger the mind. 
 
 
Posted by: cj on April 2, 2005 01:18 PM 
Wow. Great post. 
 
Posted by: Jaybird on April 2, 2005 01:22 PM 
I really haven't read much of Sullivan's, or anyone else's punditry on this matter, because nearly everyone speaks with a certitude on the issue that is entirely unwarranted, but if Sullivan has indeed envisioned gay marriage in a fashion in which the value of monogamy is reduced further, he really is off-track. 
 
Posted by: Will Allen on April 2, 2005 01:27 PM 
Jane, you made one error of fact. "For some reason, marriage always and everywhere, in every culture we know about, is between a man and a woman." In the Cheyenne and possibly other American Indians, there apparently were male-male marriages. Since the Cheyenne had very strongly defined male and female roles, one partner (called hemanah) apparently had to play the female role fully - like cooking the food and then feeding the manly partner first. 
 
In present American society, often both partners in a heterosexual marriage take on what my grandparents would have called "the man's role." That is, they go to work full-time, and give their job nearly as much importance as their family, if not more. So would it be all that destructive if in a few percent of families, both partners actually were men. 
 
Also, "a man and a woman" seems to imply one of each. You're forgetting all the polygynous cultures, some of which (Arabic for instance) used to be pretty successful. (You can't say the same for polyandry - many husbands. The only known example is Tibet, where in some places life was so hard that one man might fall short in doing the "man's work" of one small household.) 
 
Now, if you want to argue that monogamy was part of the reason European cultures kicked everyone else's butts for the last five centuries, you could probably find some good arguments there. Like maybe bad marriages were what pushed Socrates to spend his spare time philosophizing in the marketplace and later Europeans to take years-long voyages of exploration. Or more seriously, a good marriage in a society with some respect for women enables a man to go on voyages, crusades, etc., knowing his wife would hold the homestead in his absence. I think that would be less likely to work out with multiple wives - but worse, polygynous societies tend to downgrade women to the point where a wife could not carry on her husband's business in his absence. 
 
Posted by: markm on April 2, 2005 03:07 PM

mski · Dec 31, 1969

^ well said

*thebusiness · Dec 31, 1969

^^^ your a fuckin fag

armadat-hall · Dec 31, 1969

did you guys seriously read all this 
?

*thebusiness · Dec 31, 1969

nope,.

Other Mitch dude

East.

ESfreeridepa

statuswhitegirl

mski

*thebusiness

armadat-hall

*thebusiness

Media information

Share this media