And A Misread

Both Andrew Sullivan and Virginia Postrel seem to have got it wrong. Postrel:

The drive for gay marriage represents the end of the sexual revolution. Marriage lost its glamour. It lost its connection to sex. Divorce got so easy that "single mom" became a sympathetic political trope. Cohabitation became normal. Nowadays, nobody--least of all gays--has to get married to be a respectable member of society. And yet people want to get married. They want to bind themselves to be monogamous. They want to promise in public to face bad breath in the morning. That's pretty remarkable.

Fuzzy thinking here. First off, I think the very fact that marriage is such an issue right now more or less belies the idea that it's lost its glamor. (Update: I'm reminded of a session in a psych class on "Sex Roles and Human Behavior" the last time I was in college in which the instructor proclaimed that the old stereotype of the "feminine role" was dead; I found myself sitting there pointing out that we were in a college class in a major and fairly liberal city, and that even in that city, there were many people for whom that simply wasn't true. There seems to be a human tendency to think that our own experience reflects the world. Nope.) Frankly, I think a statement like that reveals the triviality of Postrel's thinking here. We've established that marriage as a social institution carries with it a meaning that no other institution does, strictly in terms of community relationships. You can make a case that no one has to get married to be a respectable member of the community -- depending on what "respectable" means. That's not the point: it's not a matter of making yourself into a "respectable" member of the community, but of how the community identifies you and your place within it. Single men are perceived differently than married men and their status in the community -- their role -- is different. Ditto women.

Sullivan compounds the mistake.

And one of the most historically radical of communities, the gay and lesbian population, has chosen to add this conservative choice to its array of possibilities. In so many ways, real conservatives should be rejoicing. How did such a marginalized group come to seek such a traditional way forward?

First off, I dispute the idea that the gay community has been one of the most radical. A fragment of it, perhaps, but the community includes many more people than Sullivan is accounting for here. Let's face it, even during the seventies and eighties, most of us were in the closet. That's hardly radical.

Second, why is marriage suddenly a "conservative" institution? Social institutions with that weight (and while I won't accuse either commentator of trivializing marriage, I think they both need to go back and take another look) are rather beyond those sorts of labels. I suspect that in Sullivan's mind, "conservative" denotes anything he approves of. As for gays and lesbians wanting to get married, of course we do: we recognize the necessity for defining ourselves as an integral part of the community, and mariage is by far the best way to do that. True, it carries with it a particular status, as part of a couple, but for those of us who are part of couples anyway, we might as well enjoy the recognition.