Gay Marriage And The Pure Relationship - Road to the Middle Class

WHAT WOULD legalization of gay marriage mean? Is it just a matter of human rights or does it interfere with the institution of marriage, that is the union between a man and a woman? Or even further, the basic equilibrium of society?

NRO’s Stanley Kurtz has written a number of articles on the subject, attempting to show that, based upon the European experience, gay marriage is part of a general movement to loosen the institution of marriage and to divorce the identity between marriage and children.

But here in the United States the advocates of gay marriage argue that it would strengthen marriage, since it would regularize gay unions and encourage long-term relationships among gays.

Now Kurtz has taken a look at the theorists behind the movement away from marriage. He’s provided us with a booklist that makes the case for sexual relations between any kind of partners for any kind of reason.

Most notably, Kurtz offers the work of Anthony Giddens, and his The Transformation of Intimacy as Exhibit A.

Anthony Giddens is no extremist. He is Director of the London School of Economics and a major influence on Tony Blair.

By looking at the implication of Giddens’ main argument, the idea of a secular movement from conventional marriage towards a “pure relationship,” Kurtz sees that the gay marriage advocates are either mistaken or dissembling.

Giddens’s point is that modern marriage is slowly being divested of connections with anything beyond the purely emotional bonding of adults. It used to be that the love of husband and wife was only part of the picture. Men and women were held together by love, but also by economic interdependence, and a shared commitment to parenthood. But gradually, says Giddens, the marriage alliance is becoming less and less about a shared project of prosperity and parenting. Increasingly, marriage is being reduced to a strictly emotional connection between two adults: “the pure relationship.”

If you look at the psychological model of Spiral Dynamics you can see that this approach is characteristic of the orange, creative level, where people experience life as a game to be won, and rules as something you make up as you go along. For instance:

[M]onogamy, Giddens says, should be adopted, if at all, as a result of negotiation and understanding between two particular partners, and not because of some institutional obligation embedded in marriage itself.

Leave aside Kant’s notion of the categorical imperative, that you should ask the question: What if everyone did this? We already know what happens when a society implements this kind of radical individualism. It stops having children.

The reason is pretty straight forward. If you have no children, or one child, you can create an individual “lifestyle” in which you balance all your interests and activities. But if you have two or three children, then what you have is a life raising children.

The problem with gay marriage, with the pure relationship, and with “lifestyles” is that you devote your life to tangents instead of the mainstream of life. Which is generation. The generation of the next generation.

It is curious that our lefty friends, the ones pushing the elimination of conventional marriage are the ones who demand we live simply so that others may simply live, the ones who want organic, natural foods. They are also the ones who are most likely to be childless. What is so natural about that?

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Christopher Chantrill blogs at www.roadtothemiddleclass.com. His Road to the Middle Class is forthcoming.