It’s perhaps inevitable that progress in public attitudes toward gays that homophobia will morph into new lifeforms. One such trope that seems to be making the rounds is the notion that gays and lesbians are making their demands for marriage frivolously, that they’re more excited about registering at Williams-Sonoma and choosing tuxes and buying wedding cakes than they are in the long slog of living in a committed marriage or sacrificing for a family.
It’s a notion that Joe Sciacca put forward in his Herald column yesterday (sorry, it’s subscriber only), criticizing gay activists for focusing on wedding cakes on not on what marriage actually, profoundly means. And Shelby Steele strikes a similar pose in a WSJ op-ed (that Andrew Sullivan dissects to good effect): “Gay love is freed from the procreative burden. It has no natural function beyond adult fulfillment in love. If this is a disadvantage when children are desired, it is likely an advantage when they are not–which is more often the case. In any case, gays can never be more than pretenders to an institution so utterly grounded in procreation.” Here we have only a slightly more subtle version of the implication of that video shown in Catholic parishes. In contrast to earnest straight folks, who know only sacrifice and far-seeing wisdom, the implication goes, gay men and women are selfish people, pursuing pleasure only for the moment and therefore unfit to enter the temple of marriage.
There are a couple of immediate responses we can have to these characterizations - gays are hardly the only ones gushing over registries and wedding cakes after all - but let me concede that there’s a grain of truth in them. In general, gays and lesbians do want the fantastical trappings of romance that the wedding, for better or worse, has come to embody. On average, gay men in particular are more focused on the present than their straight counterparts and the vast majority of them are unburden by the sacrifices required in raising children. (Lesbian couples are another matter, and I wonder where critics come up with the notion that few of them are procreative).
I happen to think we should have every right not to have any selfishness held against us in the way the state treats us. But beyond that, I can’t help but bristle at the attempt to blame gays for their own marginalization from marriage: if a majority fail by some putative standard for longterm, self-sacrificing relationships, whose fault is that? While the straight marriages that last and thrive do so because of the work put in by both parties, they also receive constant support from the social and kinship networks, as well as from the legal framework that codifies their relationship. Even if one doesn’t feel that the model/ideal of lifelong straight marriage should be the only option available to people (I don’t), the recent demonization of gays as shallow smacks of classic blaming the victim.
And if I may wax Judith Butlerian, but I’m not sure why mimicry of marriage that Steele fears would be bad thing. After all, straights mimic marriage too: mimic their parents’ relationship, mimic the romantic ideals of novels and movies, mimic the super-ego universe of social science and self-help and Dr. Phil. Gay is to straight not as copy is to original, but as copy is to copy.
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