Rush to Alter
How Homosexuals Benefit from the Devolution of Marriage
by Bryce Christensen
Only the ideologically blind would deny that homosexual marriage threatens violence against the moral and legal traditions that have defined wedlock for millennia. Homosexual activists have themselves asserted that they aim at more than a “mere ‘aping’” of heterosexual marriage: They want homosexual marriage to “destabilize marriage’s gendered definition by disrupting the link between gender and marriage.” They thus value the homosexual wedding ceremony in part because of the “transformation that it makes on the people around us.”1
But of all those praising or damning homosexuals for breaking the marriage barrier, few have reflected on just what kind of institution homosexuals—who have never wanted marriage in the past—are now claiming for themselves. Indeed, if Americans scrutinize carefully the way the national culture has in recent decades redefined wedlock for heterosexuals, they may well conclude that it is not homosexuals that have changed so much, but rather marriage itself.
Far from being some astonishing development reflecting unprecedented new attitudes among homosexuals, homosexual weddings constitute the predictable (not natural, but entirely predictable) culmination of cultural changes that have radically de-natured marriage. The loss of the natural anchor of a healthy home economy and the supernatural sanctions of religious doctrine left marriage at the mercy of adverse economic, political, and cultural currents for decades before homosexuals ever sought state and church imprimatur for their own wedding vows.
Homosexual marriage looks all too much like the coup de grâce administered only after numerous judges, educators, therapists, activists, and entertainers have already done their worst. It culminates a decades-long attack, rather than initiating a distinctively new assault.
Once defined by religious doctrine, moral tradition, and home-centered commitments to child rearing and sexual complementarity in productive labor, marriage has become a highly individualistic and egalitarian institution, no longer implying commitment to home, to Church, to childbearing, to traditional duties, or even (permanently) to spouse. Gone is the productive bond of husband and wife defined by mutual sacrifice and cooperative labor. It has been replaced by dual-careerist vistas of self-fulfillment and consumer satisfaction.
That homosexuals now want the strange new thing marriage has become should surprise no one: Contemporary marriage, after all, certifies a certain legitimacy in the mainstream of American culture and delivers tax, insurance, lifestyle, and governmental benefits—all without imposing any of the obligations of traditional marriage (which most homosexuals decidedly do not want). Thus, while the attempt to deny that homosexuals have the right to marry is understandable and even morally and legally justified, such an attempt is probably foredoomed if it does not lead to a broader effort to restore moral and religious integrity to marriage as a heterosexual institution.
Unfortunately, even conservatives remain fixed on the novelty of homosexual actions, as though marriage had not already been radically redefined in American culture before homosexuals rather belatedly joined in the assault. Conservative columnist Thomas Sowell, for example, understandably responded to homosexual marriages by decrying the “lawless” acts of a “headstrong minority” convinced that they are “above the law.” But in his appeal for the “rule of law,” he failed to acknowledge that in many ways American law already subverts the institution to which homosexuals are now laying siege.
Obligatory Marriage
Once strongly reinforced by both religious doctrine and legal statute, marriage stood for centuries as the socially obligatory institution that shaped the individual for an adulthood of self-sacrifice and cooperative home-centered labor focused especially on the tasks of bearing and rearing children.
Bryce Christensen teaches English at Southern Utah University and is a contributing editor to The Family in America (www.profam.org/pub/fia). He is the author of Utopia Against the Family (Ignatius) and editor of several volumes, including The Retreat from Marriage (Rowman & Littlefield), The Family Wage (Focus on the Family), and Day Care: Child Psychology and Adult Economics (The Rockford Institute).
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