Within Reason

via The New Republic

This piece by Sam Schulman at the Weekly Standard appears to be the newest case against gay marriage that doesn’t have anything to do with either Biblical or secular accusations about the immorality of homosexuality. It’s a variation on the “damaging the institution of marriage” argument in which—get this—homosexual marriage is so inherently romantic that it will irrevocably damage the kinship system by diminishing the proper role of heterosexual marriage as its centerpiece.

The kinship system has never, apparently, adapted to new kinds of relationships before and is hanging by a thread. It is also the only thing standing between children and prostitution.

To say that this argument trades on Byzantine views of female (and male) sexuality and marriage would be being rather unkind to Byzantium. Schulman has Jurassic views of female sexuality and marriage.

Some of the highlights after the jump:

A same-sex marriage fails utterly to create forbidden relationships.

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.

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.

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.

The last two paragraphs (the second of which I quote below) are particularly special for the invocation of a pretty warped version of communitarianism and a self-congratulatory plea for gay people to take one for the team:

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. If gay men and women could see the price that humanity–particularly the women and children among us–will pay, simply in order that a gay person can say of someone she already loves with perfect competence, “Hey, meet the missus!”–no doubt they will think again. If not, we’re about to see how well humanity will do without something as basic to our existence as gravity.

Wow.