Commenter chris and myself have objected to gay marriage on grounds that heterosexual marriage is essentially an anti-cuckoldry social rule codified into law, and gay marriage undermines that social rule by importing homosexual norms into heterosexual marriage. (This is inevitable if gay marriage is the legal and cultural equal of heterosexual marriage.) The consequence of gay marriage and its attendant norms will be the end of monogamy and the patriarchal nuclear family, which will destroy the most important lynchpin of civilization.
Coming to the same conclusion, but from a different angle, is Quads, who writes succinctly about the ways in which gay marriage upends the traditional order honed by millennia of evolutionary trial and error.
Gays of yesterday used to understand that they were in some way broken. It wasn’t just that they had a sexual dysfunction, but that they were excluded from broader social life. They could never produce a family, they could never be part of the basic unit of society. They knew it and embraced it. This is no longer the case.
Society has changed. Its basic unit is no longer the family, where men and women each play a part, where knowledge is passed from one generation to the next. (That was too bigoted.) Now it’s the individual, a citizen who pays taxes and consumes goods and services, who is society’s basic unit. This is all it means to be normal — this is what the social revolutions of our time asserted. Everyone is identical — men, women, blacks, whites, asians — and everyone plays the same social role. In this atomized context, where marriage and sex are private behaviors, then gays really are Just Like Us.
Today’s gays see themselves as normal. Any bigotry against them is just arbitrary and irrational, because they can do anything you can do. They work and pay taxes and consume goods, Just Like Us. And to an extent they are normal, they’ve marinated their whole lives in a culture of atomized individuals. Marriage isn’t a ritual, something with social significance, but just an achievement, like buying a car or getting a diploma. So any combination of private reasons — tax benefits or a fantasy of being “married” some day — is justification enough. Gays are Just Like Us, their money is as good as yours. Gays are Just Like Us, and they’ll believe this even as they get fisted by a stranger in the airport bathroom.
Just Like Us is a pithy phrase that encapsulates the conflict Quads mentioned between socially significant ritual and individually rewarding achievement. In a society increasingly breaking down into being defined by its least common constituent parts (ie consumerist cogs), the normalization of and rationalizations for gay marriage will necessarily have a corrosive effect on heterosexual marriage, subverting the social oversight dimension of marriage and substituting it with a shrunken hyper-individualistic quality which reduces marriage to a private consumer purchase with no implication for the wider society.
Gay marriage is an empty sacrament of accumulation — a rite of crassness — without a broader and deeper connection to family or society, past or future, and without the gravity of acting as an occasion and a commitment enforcing a collective rule which exists for the benefit of a larger social purpose than the kitschy gratification of deracinated and atomized consumerist impulse.
Mark my words, we will pay dearly for the folly of passively acceding to the gay marriage fuggernaut.
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