WHILE OPINION polls have consistently shown most Americans are in favor of maintaining current marriage laws, two-thirds of high school seniors and a majority of those in their twenties favor gay marriage. The reason for this divergence is clear. There has been less public argument against gay marriage than in favor of it. While older people nonetheless tend to retain an older view of marriage, many young people have concluded that opposition to change merely reflects prejudice or squeamishness. Moreover, the case for gay marriage largely boils down to the simple claim that everybody should be treated the same way. This is always a powerful claim in a democracy, especially among the young.
The problem in the debate so far has been the failure to grasp what marriage means in most people's lives. Marriage is so much a part of our world that we have trouble imagining how things would look without it. Some people say marriage is "by definition" between a man and a woman. But that by itself tells us nothing. We have to seriously consider what stands behind this definition, and why people are so attached to it.
It is undeniable that the potential for reproduction constitutes something unique about the union of one man and one woman. Science may eventually change that, but sexual reproduction is sure to remain the easiest and manifestly most natural way. Even if some marriages are childless, it surely makes a difference that all marriages are between men and women. Marriage as we know it is bound up with -- even a product of -- natural sexual differentiation, the most massive and undeniable feature of which is the potential for reproduction.
This gives rise to a feeling that marriage is part of the natural order, an order bigger than ourselves and our desires. To be sure, widespread divorce has weakened this feeling over the past 30 years, but it remains a powerful force in people's lives, one that we perhaps take for granted precisely because of its ubiquity. Permitting marriage between people of the same sex would make marriage a different thing -- and not a better one.
More than any other institution, marriage provides guidance that helps people live their lives. One need only think of the times in one's youth when one wondered whom one would eventually marry. I can attest that even gay people, when young, wonder about that, though with a certain ambivalence. Those youthful daydreams, which are so important in shaping and coloring the rest of one's life, would not be possible in a world without marriage, and would be compromised if marriage itself were compromised.
Disconnecting marriage from procreation would make it seem less bound up with a world larger than we are. Marriage would become more like a commitment we make, an act of the will, and less like an acceptance of or conformity to the fundamental order of things. Perhaps such a change would, to some extent, constitute greater realism. However, it would not produce greater happiness, either in itself or in its consequences, which would include people taking their marriages less seriously, considering alternatives more readily when the going gets rough, and seeking guidance more often in desire, whim and fashion.
We humans are ambiguous creatures. We are of course unhappy if our desires are thwarted, but we are also unhappy if we have no guidance apart from desire. Our desires themselves need to be guided or informed by a view of what is good, what constitutes happiness. Some desires can lead to happiness, others cannot; distinguishing between the two is sometimes a delicate task, one at which we all need help, especially when we're young. No institution informs the desires of most human beings in as profound and salutary a manner as marriage.
Instituting gay marriage would indeed provide guidance to some young gay people, and would thereby improve some people's lives. This is a serious argument. However, marriage could not be as crucial to gays as it is to heterosexuals. Marriage has developed over many centuries to meet the needs of heterosexuals. Gay marriage would inevitably be a kind of imitation. Like most imitations, it couldn't wholly succeed, and would therefore result in more or less self-conscious parody.
Widening marriage to include people of the same sex means stripping it of much of its meaning and diminishing it for everybody. This would have a relatively small effect on the lives of people who are already married, and whose notion of marriage is already largely settled, but it would have a profound and harmful effect on future generations of Americans.
Manuel Lopez's column appears Thursdays in The Cavalier Daily. He can be reached at mlopez@cavalierdaily.com.
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