Opinion
Why Conservatives Should Support Gay Marriage
by Bob McGrew
Editor Emeritus

Across the United States, gay marriage has become a defining issue in state politics: California has enacted a ban on gay marriage, while Vermont has enshrined it as civil unions. Gay marriage is replacing abortion as social conservatives' most defining issue. Yet, by rights, gay marriage should be the least objectionable part of the so-called 捌gay agenda.' Anti-discrimination laws impinge on the freedom of religious believers to choose who teaches their children, who leads their Boy Scout troop, whom they associate with. Hate crimes laws ask for special treatment for special victims. In contrast, gay marriage imposes no special obligation on heterosexuals and no special privileges for gays that straight people do not already enjoy. As Jon Stewart joked on the Daily Show, it's not like gay marriage will be mandatory.

Now, there's no constitutional right to gay marriage, as some of its proponents hope to argue. But that doesn't stop gay marriage from being a good idea 򳒂 and for some very conservative reasons. Unlike the other gay issues, social conservatives oppose gay marriage not because it offers special treatment for gays but because they fear that it will destroy the institution of heterosexual marriage. But, in fact, exactly the opposite is true. It's the alternatives to gay marriage that pose the most threat to heterosexual marriage 򳒂 and that threat is not hypothetical but there today.

So what is the greatest threat to marriage today? Not gay marriage, but cohabitation. Cohabiting couples increased by 54% as a percentage of households in the 捌90s, compared with a 7% decline for married couples. Living together is increasingly being defined not as a trial period before marriage but as an alternative to marriage itself. Most large companies offer benefits to unmarried couples just as they do to married couples, and almost all do so for opposite-sex partners as well as same-sex partners. Cities like San Francisco and Los Angeles have long had domestic partner registration for both gay and straight partners, and Gray Davis just signed AB 205 to extend that to all of California. Live-in boyfriends and girlfriends are often invited to Thanksgiving dinner and treated as part of the family. For people of a certain age, cohabitation is now normal - and if you can get all the benefits of marriage just from shacking up, what's the point of actually getting married? In Sweden today, registered domestic partnerships are more numerous than marriages and rarely lead to them.

Domestic partnerships are so popular among cities and corporations only because they are the way to offer gays benefits and recognition short of marriage. But they are almost never restricted only to same-sex couples. For corporations, it would be a gender discrimination issue and a lawsuit magnet to restrict partner benefits to same-sex couples. For states and municipalities that create domestic partnerships, making them open to heterosexuals and homosexuals alike blunts the criticism that they are offering special treatment to gays.

Some social conservatives might want to resolve this problem by just getting rid of domestic partner benefits and laws entirely, either through laws or through boycotts of offending companies. But this is not even remotely possible as a matter of practical politics. If resisting gay marriage is a fight, imagine trying to take away benefits already granted to gay couples. And this is only going to get more difficult over the years in a society where Will and Grace is a top-rated show and Queer Eye for the Straight Guy is the talk of the town.

Yet there is one way to get rid of domestic partnerships with a single stroke, saving marriage from its single greatest competitor. That way is making gay marriage legal. In 2000, after the passage of Vermont's civil union law, the University of Vermont decided to withdraw its long-standing domestic partner benefits for same-sex couples, requiring civil union for gays and marriage for straights in order for partners to obtain benefits. Corporations, like universities, have a strong fiscal incentive to drop their domestic partner benefits if gay marriage is allowed. By restricting benefits to marriage, they will still be able to attract gay employees without losing straight employees. Domestic partner legislation would wither on the vine after losing its most important constituency. Marriage for heterosexual couples would even get a publicity boost from the stories about gay people getting happily married.

Moreover, such a change wouldn't impact religious marriage. Civil marriage doesn't imply religious recognition just as a religious marriage does not imply a civil one. Gay marriage is even now practiced by several Christian denominations in the United States, but this in no way forces civil marriage to include gays.

To conservatives, marriage is one of the most important social institutions, and the arguments for it go far beyond providing for the care of children. Most conservatives would argue that marriage should be the ideal even for people that don't want to or can't have children. Married people live longer, stay healthier, and lead happier lives. They do so because true happiness is found, not in short-term promiscuous relationships to satisfy one's sexual needs, but in a deep, loving, committed relationship to another person. For now, marriage is still the ideal to which heterosexuals aspire. Allowing gay marriage can make that long-term, loving commitment the ideal for gay people as well. Surely the benefits to gay people of long-term committed relationships should be laid on the balance scale of public policy. After all, consideration for the interests of gay people is part of the love for the sinner that Christianity enjoins.

Instead of making opposition to same-sex marriage an integral part of their platform, conservatives and Republicans should support it. It will help gays aspire to long-term relationships just as straights do - and it will save opposite-sex marriage from becoming that old-fashioned thing your parents did.

Page last modified on Thursday, 02-Mar-2006 00:26:34 MST.