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16 May 2008 02:22 pm

Conservatism and Marriage

Doug Kmiec writes:

It is often asked, as Marty's helpful post does, how the acknowledgment of same-sex marriage harms marriage between a man and a woman.  The inability to give a simple, secular answer to this explains the California victory in favor of same-sex marriage more than the reasoning of the opinion.  That doesn't mean there is not an answer.  There is a religious answer and it is anchored in the creation story recorded in the book of Genesis. 

The religious answer has a secular side, but it is less articulable.

Traditional marriage  has been accepted without argument for so long that the words custom and history substitute for analysis.  When more searching inquiry is made it is often related to the genuine belief that the institution of marriage and associated natural procreation should be (and has been for millennia) interrelated and very much worth preserving.  The story of the declining populations and cultures of Western Europe is debated, but troubling.   No one wishes the same for the United States, though it is hard to deny that marriages are occurring later and with less frequency (with a con-commitant rise in cohabitation and its various adverse instabilities and risks for children).  A smaller youthful population with a sizable graying demographic has many negative economic and social consequences manifest in everything from what does or does not get accomplished in schools to the coming bankruptcy of the Social Security system to much else that depends on the constant influx of new people, responsibly prepared to take up for the work of citizenship and community.

I love it when secular arguments are "less articulable" than appeals to Genesis. But there is an obvious secular, non-bigoted case against marriage equality. It's the conservative, Hayekian resistance to any social change in a vital social institution with inherently unknowable future consequences.

But conservatives also realize that as societies change, institutions cannot remain frozen in time. Change is sometimes necessary and conservatives should see to it that such change is as careful not to disturb existing institutions any more than necessary. That's why I've backed marriage equality for two decades (my first piece making this case was in 1989). By not creating a new institution, like civil unions or domestic partnerships, we disturb the social order less. By including gay couples in an existing institution, civil marriage, we integrate them. By following a federalist approach, we allow individual states to lead the way as laboratories of social reform.

I refuse to have this approach described by any other word than "conservative." It is, in my view, the only authentically conservative position in this debate.

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