Sooooo...Gay Marriage...

The more I think about the subject, the more tedious it becomes, the more I don't want to be involved in the discussion, the more I would wish that all TV shows not about the weather and the stock market be banned. Mostly I object to being required to put my nose in other people's business. I honestly don't want to have to care about the gay couple down the street, or what they do when the lights are turned off. That's their business, and as long as they behave with civility and decorum, I don't see that I should have to get involved. They want tolerance, I am willing to grant it. They want friendship, I see no reason to withhold it.


But that's not enough. Now the gay activist community (this is of course a broad generalization. No two gays, or even gay activists, are the same. But there is an ideology that drives many, and it is that I choose to address) wants their gayness to be my business. And they want me to like it. And if I don't, I'm no different from Cotton Ed Smith. I must silence my opinions and smile. The gay activist community is required to do nothing. They get to keep their disdain for straight culture, their disdain for religion, their hypersensitivity. The parades stay.


If I'm being maudlin, it's because I don't like broad, sweeping societal change without good reason. And I still don't see the point to gay marriage. What stops two gays or lesbians now from spending the rest of their lives together, if they should wish to do so? The fact that the "breeders" don't clap their hands in approval? Who cares? The disposition of property? Surely a will and a good lawyer can accomplish as much. The extension of health benefits? More reasonable, but a function of our excessively regulated and hence excessivly expensive healthcare system. $200 a month I give to a health insurance company so they can not pay my medical bills when I need them paid. The whole blessed house of cards is a bureaucratic abyss. I can sympathize with gay couples who have an extra hoop to jump through, but are their really many gay couples with a stay-at-home member? Aren't they already covered?


To be fair, this whole thing may well end up being a tempest in a teapot. Extending the name of marriage to gay couples may well be the last piece in their puzzle of normality. And normality may be the thing that settles them down and allows them to re-integrate into society as full stalwart members, dedicated to its protection and continued existence rather than tearing its mores down one by one (my, what a sweeping mass of generalizations. I humbly beg patience again). In a few decades, we might hardly notice gay culture or gay people, because they really will be just like the majority.


It would be nice if such were so. I have never been one for demonizing gays qua gays, merely a "queer" culture that seems to want to do nothing but shock Mommy and Daddy. If gay marriage were to give homosexuals a reason to leave all that behind, it might well be worth the change, provided that we set up some hard legal principles that prevents the polyamorists and pedophiles from riding in on the slipstream.


This problem does need to be addressed, however many assurances Andrew Sullivan makes. Identity politics has done much for the gay community, and I am unconvinced that the same could not, within a few decades, empower other sexual minorities and thus undo the last of our taboos. Looked at rationally, there is no reason why any uncoerced sexual act should be considered wrong. Most of them do no immediate physical harm. Sure, a man who has two wives or a woman with a ten-year-old husband might be abusing them, but it need not necessarily be so. Desire is not abuse. The two come from parallel but different motivations.


What we have ended up doing in our society is divorcing the two purposes of sex, the unitive and the procreative (yes, Virginia, the act does exist in part so that the world can be peopled). More and more we have treated the latter as an irritating block to the former, far more important purpose. Sex has ceased to be the creative force that brings and affirms life and has become the pleasure-button we slam like so many descalped rats. I don't see that continuing on this path will do other than cheapen sex further, which cheapens life further, because sex is the source of life. As I wrote after Laurence v. Texas, this is not the fault of homosexuals exclusively or even primarily. Their rise to toleration is but a symptom of it. I would not wish to undo that same rise to toleration. I would rather wish we could stop using it as an excuse to further the proposition that nothing is more important than satisfying one's desires.