And another American family is destroyed

I try to incorporate a diverse set of opinions into my Blogroll. I figure, what's the point in constantly reading analysis that instead of challenging me merely restates what I already believe to be true. I think its important for us all to look at and understand not just the individual arguments across any particular policy or issue, but the narratives and worldviews that people on all sides are rooted in. Having spent four years in a University Debating Union, with people who like to entrench themselves in a position and defend it to the death for fun, I've exhausted my romance with the oppositional style of decision making and, though I know this sounds cliche, feel that the only way we can make real progress is by listening and understanding.

So when I came across this post on Ladyblog, enumerating the detrimental societal effects of Single Sex Marriage on heterosexual couples, I controlled my initial anger, my desire to launch into a point by point dissection of her post, and tried to think of what lay under this line of argument. Helen Rittlemeyer say this (bold my own).

I can’t revolutionize the debate over gay marriage in one post (only Eve Tushnet can do that), but there’s one thing I wish supporters of same-sex marriage understood better: You can change the institution of marriage without changing its definition. In other words: There are things that logically follow from the extension of marriage to gay couples, things that follow from the plain and literal fact that both parties are the same gender. There are also changes that gay marriage is likely to bring about, things that follow from the integration of gay culture into the institution. To focus merely on the former effects is equivalent to reading a poem exclusively for its literal meaning.

I suspect that I will sound less crazy if I preface further explanation with this analogy to welfare reform. (That sentence did not sound helpful, but trust that it is.) In a perfect world, charity would be handled by private institutions; liberals point out that some people fall through the cracks in such a system, so we might as well supplement private assistance with public aid. The next step in the debate is the important one: Liberals, thinking literally, say that there’s no reason why government welfare can’t exist alongside private charity; conservatives understand that, when organic institutions stop being a necessary source of public services, they wither. Public welfare does not forbid private aid, but it does prevent it.

In much the same way, the integration of gay couples into "marriage" does not forbid strong and healthy heterosexual unions; that doesn’t mean it won’t affect them...

To opponents of Single Sex Marriage like Helen the issue is not an abstract about the rights of other people, people I suspect she has relatively little personal contact with. To Helen, this is an extremely personal issue. Motivated by fear yes, but not the kind of ultra-bigoted fear of the other, demonizing the LGBT community as a slobbering mob preying upon our children that Lewis Black so aptly parodied. No, while Helen may have some very misguided views of "the Gay community" as she puts it, and may stereotype LGBT relationships, I don't think she's really worried about the "Gay Banditos".

Instead Ms. Rittlemeyer is worried about what this would mean for her own marriage. For that of her friends and of her children. What does it say about her if I would be allowed to marry another man? And while this is a fear I don't share, I think its a fear that we all can understand. Love, marriage, being part of a couple or a family are not only difficult endeavors but terrifying things. Even more so in this day and age, when we can look at the statistical evidence and see how pathetic our chances of success are. Every person who decides to get marriage has to do so with the knowledge somewhere in their mind that it is dramatically more likely to end in pain and tears and bitterness than happiness. And if that's the case now, what does that say about our parents marriages and the ages past when divorce was not so equally attained. Does it threaten our image of a better past? Does it challenge the myth of happiness and love that we all grew up with? Does it bear its head and say that in all the history of the world people have always been unhappy and relationships have always been dysfunctional and we have always in the end been alone, clinging to a broken institution.

But if you don't want to face these implications then you have to construct a narrative in which relationships in the modern age are significantly different from those of a past one. You have to be willing to believe that had divorce been as easily attainable in the 18th century as it became in the later half of the 20th that those couples wouldn't have broken up. And that's why we get all this rhetoric about the decline of society in the past fifty years.

Of course Helen Rittlemeyer also seems to believe that we should shame unhappy heterosexual couples into marriage instead of allowing them to separate.

Will gay marriage reinforce the modern fiction that gender doesn’t matter? Will it inhibit society’s ability to shame breeder couples into growing up and tying the knot instead of persisting in ad hoc, temporary, and conditional cohabitation?

The implication from this seems to be that unhappy, potentially abusive or adulterous marriage is better than separation, a belief that I don't think all people on her side of the SSM debate hold.

Still I think the overriding narrative is one in which opponents of Single Sex Marriage, who usually happen to also oppose abortion rights and lament the ease of divorce, are more afraid of what it does to their past relationships than what it could do to their future ones.