The Gay Marriage Question

Now that the California Supreme Court has spoken about gay marriage, it’s time for conservatives to think.

What is it that we want? Apart from our natural conservative instinct that warns us against the innovation of gay marriage, what really is our problem?

And we should also think: what do the advocates of gay marriage want? Marriage activist Maggie Gallagher asks this latter question.

Given that the California Supreme Court (and the US Supreme Court with its Guantanamo Bay decision) demostrates that the elite’s commitment to judicial activism is still at full speed ahead, we should look at what advanced legal circles are thinking on marriage, she writes.

If a court can rule that same-sex marriage is a fundamental right (i.e., one deeply rooted in our nation’s traditions) then it can make up anything. Elite legal minds get to figure out what they think and break it to the rest of us once they’ve decided.

What the elite has decided, Maggie thinks, is that “gay is the new black.” That means that opponents to the gay agenda will be treated like the old racist South.

[O]nce the principle is in the law, the next step will be to use the law to stigmatize, marginalize, and repress those who disagree with the government’s new views on marriage and sexual orientation.

That is what they are doing in Canada already, of course. That is why Mark Steyn and Maclean’s were up before the British Columbia human rights tribunal for saying hateful things about Muslims.

In my view this progressive tide still has a ways to run. It may start to ebb if it starts if it has negative effects on the liberal elite. But that is unlikely. More likely would be the total destruction of the poor.

No, our best hope is women. All the stuff about equal rights and love in the context of marriage is a misunderstanding of marriage as a social institution, and pretty soon women are going to figure it out.

Society needs marriage because women need marriage. Women need marriage because they need a social system to bind the father of their children to them. This gives them two advantages. It protects them from sexual predation, and it provides resources for their children.

The last century has been an outlier, as women emerged from millennia of subsistence living, when all their effort was focused on bearing and raising children. Their first impulse was to liberate themselves, the “victims of the species,” from their enslavement to the three Ks, kuche, kirche, kinder.

They liked the welfare state; they liked the benefits; they liked the idea of getting away from an abusive husband. Then they liked the idea of getting away from a spouse that wasn’t sensitive to their needs for conversation and companionship.

One day soon we will see this century-long tide crest and start to recede.

Because you can make a pretty good argument that, objectively, women get treated best by a system of lifelong, monogamous, heterosexual marriage. Right now educated, professional young women are beginning this trend. Before too long it will penetrate down into the mass culture. More and more women will start to say, regarding children, that “three is the new two,” and that careers are for the birds.

If you want three children, then you need a husband.