by Beth Frieden
COLUMNIST

I believe without any reservations that my best friend from home should be allowed to marry her girlfriend of three years when they decide they’re ready. A lot of people don’t believe this. A lot of people believe that allowing these two educated, loving young women to pledge lifetime commitment to each other and have children will have such a negative outcome for society as a whole that it should not be allowed. I’ve been on a quest this week to find out whether or not these people are right.

One of them is Stanley Kurtz. Kurtz believes firmly in and has written at least four articles explaining what he calls “the demise of marriage” in Scandinavia for the National Review Online. He believes that same-sex marriage redefines marriage in a way that removes its status as the only acceptable situation for
child-bearing.

“Once marriage is redefined to accommodate same-sex couples, that change cannot help but lock in and reinforce the very cultural separation between marriage and parenthood that makes gay marriage conceivable to begin with,” Kurtz writes in “The End of Marriage in Scandinavia.” The social problem that he believes springs from this “cultural separation” is a greater proportion of children being born out of wedlock, and thus a greater proportion with single parents (statistically, cohabiting couples are twice as likely to break up as married couples).

Kurtz equates same-sex marriage to cohabitation, which seems unfair, because to queers who can’t get married, there’s a huge difference (it also sucks that he pretends gay people don’t want to have children). The interesting thing is that in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark, it’s not even called marriage. It’s separate but equal: registered partnership. The culprit of Kurtz’s “meaningless marriage” appears to be the actual idea of marriage being no different from cohabitation. In which case, the real problem isn’t with gay people who want to make a covenant with each other and have or adopt children; the problem is with heterosexual couples who decide that they don’t have to get married to have children and then break up.

Kurtz warns that even considering allowing same-sex marriage leads more people to equate marriage with cohabitation, thus leading to more children born out of wedlock. That makes people like my parents, who have been married for over 20 years, have raised three children and who believe that my cousin should be able to marry whomever he loves, the actual cause of the decline of “marriage.” Only social conservatives in long term marriages are actually “supporting marriage.” I’m sorry, Mr. Kurtz, but that is bullshit.

Another opponent of same-sex marriage is Orson Scott Card, whose article “Homosexual ‘Marriage’ and Civilization” at www.ornery.org is truly a masterpiece of paranoia. (Think I’m just trashing his conservatism? Read it.) People like Card are upset because in order to allow us to marry any consenting adult we choose, we would “have to change the meaning of ‘marriage’ to include a relationship that it has never included before this generation, anywhere on earth.”

Well, actually, Mr. Card, marriage already includes that relationship in the Netherlands, Belgium, and Spain. Are you saying that people there aren’t actually married? Because they are. A lot of them are. The point is that Mr. Card’s objection lies deeper. He doesn’t actually want the U.S. to sanction same-sex marriage because he believes that such a move would encourage children to be gay, that it would tell them that gayness is an acceptable choice for them.

He is very upset with liberal Americans for calling people like him a bigot; he just hasn’t accepted yet that the rest of us aren’t just being politically correct. We do actually believe that homosexual love is just as valid as heterosexual love, and that gayness is just as acceptable as straightness (not to mention those of us who don’t look at the sex we have as defining who we are). He’s fighting a tide of civil rights that isn’t going away.

I am willing to accept that I will be theoretically placed at higher risk of bearing children out of wedlock if my friend is allowed to marry the woman she loves. I support an America where marriage means “a life-long monogamous commitment between two people who love each other.” If that’s not what marriage means, then I’m not sure I want my best friend to get married either.