The Supreme Court ruling in Iowa a few days ago in support of same-sex marriage has since gotten me into more than a few blistering arguments. Why should a private agreement between two consenting individuals I neither know nor care about have anything to do with me, and why exactly should I feel compelled to disagree with it on principle? Intuition is slanted toward the proponent of same-sex marriage, and the opponents implicitly seem to recognize it.
The savvy opponent is likely to begin by offering a litany of his own intuitionist critiques: same-sex marriage contradicts my religion; it violates tradition; it deprives children of a proper parental cross-section; it isn't natural; it makes me feel uncomfortable. But why are any of these legitimately within the purview of the legislator? Maybe gambling violates my religion; should we ban it? Divorce and one-night-stands often functionally deny children of one or both of their parents, and do so in much larger numbers; should we ban them? Heart transplants aren't natural; should we ban them? Soulja Boy makes me very much more than uncomfortable, and is offensive to the aesthetic sensibilities of every single person I've ever met; should we ban him? Because it's protocol in this country not to concoct tyrannical, ad hoc laws to satisfy the whims of even a majority, these arguments are the easiest to dispatch.
The opponent might then argue—à la Rick Santorum—that legal same-sex marriage leads to legal polygamy, bestiality or any of the other usual silly conjectures. But this is a patent non sequitur. It isn't as if marriage has some kind of universal taxonomical tree denoting its structure, on which a marriage of two men or two women is an intermediate between a marriage of a man and a woman and a marriage of a man, a woman, four goats and a toaster. In reality, same-sex and opposite-sex marriage differ only in that one is already accepted and that one isn't, and opponents have just slipped in a preexisting norm as a piece of its own evidence. Even if there actually were that empirical suggestion of causation—which there isn't, by the way, not the faintest whisper—would this be a reasonable basis to begin restricting rights that are, by hypothesis, otherwise legitimate? Of course not. After all, legal marriages in general are themselves also a prerequisite to legal polygamy, but no reasonable person would argue to ban the former simply to rid ourselves of the possibility of the latter.
In lieu of all of those arguments, the opponents of same-sex marriage are likely to assert that gays can change their orientation, a fact which is neither straightforwardly true nor relevant. They might argue that it leads to the breakdown of the family, a curious assertion to make in a country with a fifty percent divorce rate. They might argue that procreation is the true warrant for marriage, which can only make us question where they place the infertile. They might even support the civil union “compromise,” a seemingly pragmatic position that has gained ground on both sides in recent years but is actually entirely arbitrary and self-evidently unnecessary if it has been properly defined.
But in the end, they are forced to recognize that their position is not rooted in fairness or the earnest happiness of man but rather some kind of selfish predisposition, and that while they might well be decent, ordinary people who don't support visiting gays with violence, they still provide ideological cover for those who do. At any rate, both public policy and public opinion in the United States and elsewhere are clearly moving in the right direction, and, as this proxy war begins to draw to a close, we can realize that although the ruling in Iowa is a big victory for gays, it's a bigger victory for the rest of us.
