conservative case for gay marriage - jonathan rauch

8/6/2019 Conservative Case for Gay Marriage - Jonathan Rauch

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CONSERVATIVE POLICY DILEMMAS

What I learned at AEIJONATHAN RAUCH

HE official topic of today's discussion is: "Shouldconservatives support same-sex marriage?" The unof-ficial subtitle, at least of my talk, is: "Everything I KnowAbout Gay Marriage, I Learned at the American Enter-prise Institute." Though I'm now at the Brookings Institu-tion, my first think tank appointment was at AEI. It washere as a guest scholar that I learned so much from somany of the leading lights of conservatism, and I'd liketo think that many of my arguments for gay marriage are,in fact, conservative arguments.

Too many people on the Right are panicking instead ofthinking when it comes to same-sex marriage. The presi-dent of the United States, unfortunately, is someone I putin that category. But it seems to me that if you apply thekinds of principles that I first learned at AEI, and whichfolks like AEI's president Christopher DeMuth have doneso much to advance over the last 20 years, I think youreach two conclusions, or at least I do: The first is thatsame-sex marriage is an idea that conservatives ought tosupport. The second is that even if you still reject gaymarriage in principle, a national ban on same-sex mar-riage, which is what the president and many other conser-vatives are advocating nowadays, is a very unconservativeapproach.

My book Gay Marriage: Why It Is Good for Gays, Goodfor Straights, and Good for America t is largely about whysame-sex marriage is what I call the "trifecta of modernEditor's Note: The essays in this section are adapted from remarksdelivered at the American Enterprise Institute Book Forum, "ShouldConservatives Favor Same-Sex Marriage?" April 15, 2004.tTimes Books. 207 pp. $22.00.

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18 THE PUBLIC INTEREST / SUMMER 2004

American social policy": a win, a win, and a win--goodfor gays, good for communities around them (that is tosay, the straight world), and above all, good for the insti-tution of marriage as a whole. If gay marriage is enacted,gay couples will get the legal protections of marriage, butthat's hardly the most of it. They also get a more pro-found love, a destination for love that enriches their liveswhether they ultimately get married or not--the knowl-edge that romantic attachment properly points toward some-thing larger than itself. They also get the enormous per-sonal benefits that marriage alone conveys: Married peopleare healthier, happier, more prosperous, and more secure.They suffer from less incidence of drug addiction andcriminal behavior. They even live longer. Those are thingsto which gay citizens ought to have access, and in all ofthese ways, gay Americans will benefit from integrationinto the culture of marriage.

The straight world gets another irreplaceable benefit:the stability that comes from knitting people into families.Indeed, that is what marriage uniquely does: It createsfamily. I have a cousin right now who is 60 years old,married, and suffering from cancer. Her husband is caringfor her throughout the difficult experience of chemotherapy,not just physically but emotionally. Without her husband,I doubt she would be alive. There is simply no substitutefor the love and care of a spouse. Even though my cousin'smarriage is nonprocreative, I do not think anyone canreasonably say that society has no stake in their union.Since her husband is caring for her, the rest of societydoes not have to.

Above all, the institution of marriage itself is a likelybeneficiary of same-sex marriage. This is an opportunityto bolster the ethic and the culture of marriage at a timewhen society has been abandoning these things. The fun-damental principle for all Americans, straight or gay, oughtto be that sex, love, and marriage go together, automati-cally. If you're a straight family with kids, and if a gaycouple lives next door, you should want to see them up-holding the ideal of marriage. That's good for your kids.(It's also good for their kids, if they have any.) At a time


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CONSERVATIVEOLICYDILEMMAS 19when heterosexuals are increasingly treating marriage aspurely optional, this is a rare opportunity to arrest ourslide down the slippery slope away from marriage and torecommit ourselves to marriage.

The problem today is not gay couples wanting to getmarried. That is not the threat to marriage. The threat tomarriage is straight couples not wanting to get married orstraight couples not staying married. Same-sex marriage ispotentially a dramatic statement that marriage as suchmnot cohabitation, not partnership, not anything else--isthe gold standard and the model to which all Americansshould aspire. Everybody should be expected to make mar-riage their aim. That doesn't mean they necessarily haveto marry, but that it is the noble and right thing to do.

'ERE is an important point conservatives should beable to understand and, in fact, do understand in manyother contexts: We live in a world of great uncertaintyand unintended consequences. We lack a lot of informa-tion. The wisest person or committee in the world cannotget everything right and will often make unintended mis-takes. How do we make policy in such an uncertain andoften surprising world? Modern conservatism has devel-oped some important principles for how to do so, and I'lldiscuss three of them.

The first principle is that individuals count. Conserva-tives often remind us never to lose sight of the individual.That doesn't mean you consider only individual welfare,but you must consider it, and you must reject a crudeutilitarianism that simply sees individuals as means to anend rather than as ends in themselves. Conservatives aregenerally the first to object to those collectivist policiesthat relegate individuals to the status of mere human bricksor timber. If you would not confiscate someone's incomefor the common good, for example, why confiscate theirmarriage? How many of you would give up your marriage tomake someone else's family stronger? And if you're notmarried, how many of you would give up the opportunity toget married to make someone else's family stronger?

Maggie Gallagher, president of the Institute for Mar-


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riage and Public Policy, has written as follows: "Willsame-sex marriage strengthen or weaken marriage as asocial institution? If the answer is that it will weakenmarriage at all, we should not do it" (emphasis added).What's missing in this calculus are the enormous benefitsthat marriage can bring to 10 or 15 million homosexualAmericans who are now locked out of the culture of mar-riage, which makes individuals happier, wealthier, and moresecure in life. Being deprived of marriage, or even theprospect of marriage, is thus a severe hardship for gays.Now, it is true that we must balance social costs againstindividual benefits. I don't deny that for a moment. That'swhy we have, for example, securities laws. People will dothings that are good for themselves but bad for society.What I am arguing is that Gallagher's way of looking atthe problem, which is all too common among conserva-tives on this one issue, cannot be the correct (or trulyconservative) approach. It cannot be right to say that allof the good that is accomplished for l0 to 15 million gaypeople doesn't count against any harm incurred upon so-ciety. That, it seems to me, is not recognizing the valueof gay lives. It's sacrificing their rights and interests for acollective good.

HE second conservative principle I learned at AEI isespect for market forces. How many times have Iheard conservatives criticize liberals for mistaking the in-tention for the deed? Conservatives rightly remind us thattighter regulation of campaign finance, gun ownership, orenergy prices does not stop social change. Rather, it dis-torts the channels through which change runs, often caus-ing adverse unintended consequences. Just saying that youwant to make something scarcer, for example, doesn't makeregulating or banning it the right answer.

Exactly the same thing applies to same-sex marriage,though here the forces at issue are social market forces--arrangements that people are making in their personal lives,in their social lives. These forces can be managed--andshould be managed--by society, but they cannot simplybe stopped. The fact is that same-sex unions, of one sort


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CONSERVATIVE POLICY DILEMMAS 21or another, are here for good. They're not simply going todisappear. Societal recognition of some kind will increas-ingly follow these committed relationships. Given thesenew social facts, American society has a strong interest inrecognizing the nobility of the commitment these couplesare making. And marriage is the best institution we haveto accomplish that.

The ban on gay marriage favored by many conserva-tives won't stop societal recognition from flowing to thesecouples eventually. What it will do is shut marriage outof a new social market. It will effectively convey that thisnew market, this new demand for recognition, can haveanything except marriage. And, of course, if that demandcannot be met by marriage, it will be met by somethingelse.

HIS leads me to the third principle I learned at theAmerican Enterprise Institute, which is the importanceof managing risk rationally. Suppose it is argued, as manyon the Left do, that welfare reform or education and Medi-care vouchers are terrible and dangerous policy ideas--sodangerous in fact that they should never, ever be tried,even on the smallest scale. The extreme opposition ofliberals to such sensible reforms is akin to the "precau-tionary principle" favored by some environmentalists, whichopposes any change that is not proven in advance to besafe. Well, the precautionary principle turns out not to beconservative at all. It is, in fact, radical, because it looksonly at the risks of change and not at the risks of block-ing change, which are often greater. We should keep thisin mind when thinking about the pros and cons of same-sex marriage.

There is a significant downside potential of denyingsame-sex marriage, something the American conservativemovement has not fully recognized. The first kind of risk--which is actually closer to a certainty than a mere risk--lies in creating and subsidizing alternatives to marriage:"civil unions," as they're called, or various forms of "do-mestic partnerships." Absent gay marriage, these variousforms of nonmarriages will become legally and socially


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sanctioned in the years ahead. They will offer halfwayhouses between marriage and nonmarriage, which will, inmany cases, depending on how they're designed, offer thebenefits of marriage without the responsibilities, the rightswithout the obligations.

Politics in a democratic society being what it is, manyof these nonmarriage arrangements will be open to hetero-sexuals over time if not immediately. In fact, the majorityof domestic partnership programs already in place in thiscountry--under the auspices of corporations and state andlocal governments--are already open to opposite-sexcouples. Often, opposite-sex couples are the majority totake advantage of them. And even if these alternatives tomarriage were not eventually made available to heterosexu-als, their very existence would validate the impression thatmarriage is just one relationship life style among many oth-ers. Such alternative arrangements will inevitably erode thespecial status that marriage still enjoys.

So perhaps, as is often argued by some conservatives,the only choice is to reject even such halfway houses tomarriage as civil unions--no gay marriage, no civil unions,no nothing. This would be even worse, because it wouldmean that the vessel into which gay commitment willflow will be cohabitation. Every gay couple will becomea potential advertisement for the possibilities of life out-side of marriage. Over time, judges, legislators and soci-ety as a whole will accomodate gay couples by conferringmarriage rights and social recognition upon cohabitants.And, of course, there is nothing that can prevent straightpeople from cohabiting as well.

A second important downside risk to be considered isthat nondiscimination, for better or worse, has become asacred principle in American public life. It has becomepart of the nation's civic religion. By banning gay mar-riage outright--saying not here, not anywhere, not ever--marriage as such may come to be viewed in the public'smind as a discriminatory institution. It once seemed far-fetched to say that men would shun elite clubs that dis-criminated against women, and thus a lot of clubs contin-ued to discriminate against women. Well, of course, nowa-


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CONSERVATIVEOLICYDILEMMAS 23days, men-only clubs are rare. They're increasingly mar-ginal in society, and most men wouldn't join one. This isthe last thing we would want to see happen to the institu-tion of marriage.

Just recently, Benton County, Oregon, stopped issuingmarriage licenses, on the grounds that it wanted no partof a discriminatory institution. Over time, as the nationalconsensus moves toward equality for homosexuals, thereis a serious risk that marriage will be stigmatized andmarginalized if it is legally demarcated as a discrimina-tory institution.

O what's a truly conservative approach to the socialhallenge of gay marriage? We're fortunate that welive in a country that is ideally suited to tackle this kindof problem. In the United States, with its federalist sys-tem, marriage traditionally falls within the boundaries ofstate law. It seems clear that the conservative solution tothis issue is to try same-sex marriage in a state or acouple of states that are ready to have it. Let's find outhow it works, and see what happens. It is unlikely thatthe world will end. In fact, the experiment may provesuccessful and spread for that reason. By taking the feder-alist approach, the public will get a real sense of what itis doing--without, importantly, imposing a single policyon the whole country.Same-sex marriage should be viewed as an opportunityto shore up the institution of marriage. Flatly banning itcannot possibly be the conservative answer. Thus it isregrettable that, on the issue of gay marriage, some of myconservative friends sound very much like the NationalEducation Association on the subject of school vouch-ers--unwilling to concede any need for any change, avert-ing their eyes from the plight of the unserved and themisserved, asserting that reform can entail only hazardsand no benefits, insisting that even one experiment any-where ever is one too many, and unwilling to offer alter-natives other than wishing the whole issue would go away.My challenge to conservatives today is to stop makinggay marriage the exception to their conservative principles.

conservative case for gay marriage - jonathan rauch

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