Sometimes you stumble across a piece of writing that is so brilliantly nutty, so rife with vocabulary that argues the precise opposite of what the author intends, that you simply cannot let it pass by unheralded.
Such is the case with an essay by Sam Schulman in The Weekly Standard called "The Worst Thing About Gay Marriage."
You must keep in mind, as you read these choice excerpts, that Schulman believes gay marriage is a terrible idea, but more importantly, he believes the entire concept will self-implode because it is not feasible. His reasons for believing this include:
Gay marriage is not burdened with a legacy of historical bullshit about the dominance of one gender over another:
This most profound aspect of marriage--protecting and controlling the sexuality of the child-bearing sex--is its only true reason for being, and it has no equivalent in same-sex marriage. Virginity until marriage, arranged marriages, the special status of the sexuality of one partner but not the other (and her protection from the other sex)--these motivating forces for marriage do not apply to same-sex lovers.
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That legacy of historical bullshit? That's a good thing. It's what motivates people to marry. Straight people, that is. But because gays don't have that motivation, they have no reason to marry.
That's just the setup. Now comes the mysterious usage of vocabulary, the place where you cannot help but say, "Dude, you keep using that word. I don't think it means what you think it means." See if you can spot that word in this passage:
Second, kinship modifies marriage by imposing a set of rules that determines not only whom one may marry (someone from the right clan or family, of the right age, with proper abilities, wealth, or an adjoining vineyard), but, more important, whom one may not marry. Incest prohibition and other kinship rules that dictate one's few permissible and many impermissible sweethearts are part of traditional marriage. Gay marriage is blissfully free of these constraints.
Did you spot it? The word is blissfully. It's sort of hard to imagine that Schulman truly thinks that all those gays whom we won't let get married are busy having blissful, constraint-free sex with their brothers, fathers, and cousins.
So what it surely must mean, then, is that Schulman wishes his options were free of such constraints. Right?
Spot the word Schulman doesn't understand the meaning of here:
Third, marriage changes the nature of sexual relations between a man and a woman. Sexual intercourse between a married couple is licit; sexual intercourse before marriage, or adulterous sex during marriage, is not. Illicit sex is not necessarily a crime, but licit sexual intercourse enjoys a sanction in the moral universe, however we understand it, from which premarital and extramarital copulation is excluded. More important, the illicit or licit nature of heterosexual copulation is transmitted to the child, who is deemed legitimate or illegitimate based on the metaphysical category of its parents' coition.
Now to live in such a system, in which sexual intercourse can be illicit, is a great nuisance. Many of us feel that licit sexuality loses, moreover, a bit of its oomph. Gay lovers live merrily free of this system.
No, the word is not licit/illicit or even legitimate/illegitimate. Schulman clearly understands what he's saying here, and doesn't care that we understand him to mean that he's still living in the Victorian era. No, the word here is merrily. If straight marriage is good and gay marriage is bad, then how can there be anything merry about it? If marriage is all about sex losing its oomph, then perforce gay marriage cannot exist, what with all those hot homos having merry sex that can never, ever be genuinely licit (and hence appropriately boring).
Or maybe Schulman really does understand what these words -- merry, blissful -- mean, and is jealous. Because his idea of what marriage is sounds a downright gloomy institution:
But without social disapproval of unmarried sex--what kind of madman would seek marriage?
There can, of course, be warm relations between families and their children's same-sex partners, but these come about because of liking, sympathy, and the inherent kindness of many people. A wedding between same-sex lovers does not create the fact (or even the feeling) of kinship between a man and his husband's family; a woman and her wife's kin. It will be nothing like the new kinship structure that a marriage imposes willy-nilly on two families who would otherwise loathe each other.
Gay spouses have none of our guilt about sex-before-marriage. They have no tedious obligations towards in-laws, need never worry about Oedipus or Electra, won't have to face a menacing set of brothers or aunts should they betray their spouse. But without these obligations--why marry? Gay marriage is as good as no marriage at all.
People in gay marriages will discover that mimicking the cozy bits of romantic heterosexual marriage does not make relationships stronger; romantic partners more loving, faithful, or sexy; domestic life more serene or exciting. They will discover that it is not the wedding vow that maintains marriages, but the force of the kinship system. Kinship imposes duties, penalties, and retribution that champagne toasts, self-designed wedding rings, and thousands of dollars worth of flowers are powerless to effect.
Few men would ever bother to enter into a romantic heterosexual marriage--much less three, as I have done--were it not for the iron grip of necessity that falls upon us when we are unwise enough to fall in love with a woman other than our mom.
Note the words and phrases he uses: madman, loathe, willy-nilly, tedious obligations. Duties, penalties, and retribution. Iron grip of necessity. Is he talking about entering into communion with the love of your life, or indentured servitude? Is he honestly meaning to suggest that the problem with gay marriage is that it doesn't make people miserable enough? (Though I imagine plenty of gays and lesbians could tell you how much they loathe their in-laws...) If so, isn't that an awesome reason to turn gay and get gay-married? How does he intend for his argument to support the contention that gay marriage cannot work?
Maybe he's unconsciously longing to give it a try, since straight marriage clearly hasn't worked for him. But he nobly soldiers on:
Can gay men and women be as generous as we straight men are? Will you consider us as men who love, just as you do, and not merely as homophobes or Baptists? Every day thousands of ordinary heterosexual men surrender the dream of gratifying our immediate erotic desires. Instead, heroically, resignedly, we march up the aisle with our new brides, starting out upon what that cad poet Shelley called the longest journey, attired in the chains of the kinship system--a system from which you have been spared. Imitate our self-surrender.
It's easy to see how Schulman could have attracted not one, not two, but three wives, what with him being so generous, heroic, and self-surrendering.
Though I think he doesn't really know the meaning of those words, either.
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