The New Marriage

You know, a lot's being made of Rick Santorum's new book, particularly the many parts where the good senator's pen slipped and wrote something honest. Most of those parts have to do with the great evils of feminism, of female career advancement, of two wage families, of modern life. But -- and deep breath here -- that's okay. Dobson and Robertson and Falwell and Bauer like to pin the tail on the homo when fulminating against marriage's enemies. But that's silly. Homosexuals don't threaten today's marriage, they simply codify the defeat of yesterday's.

When Santorum slips and blames emancipated wives, he's actually being the most honest of the bunch. The fundamentalist conception of marriage as a duty demanded by God made perfect sense when it was an obligation imposed by society. Back then, partners were chosen for you, reproduction was required (the upper class would divorce the infertile, the lower class often only married the already-pregnant), and women were locked into the union, lacking both property rights and job opportunities. By allowing childless unions, marriages for love, and female equality, we destroyed traditional marriages. Indeed, it's only once we had watered marriage down to a mere social codification of love that gays and lesbians could even think the institution applicable to them, much less attractive.

Dobson and friends are fighting against a symptom, at least Santorum is going after the root. And that's a much better debate to have. Because what they hate isn't homosexual equality, but the equality that's transformed marriage, the equality that includes women, prizes individual choice, and places limits on sexual determinism. They hate that marriage is now controlled by individuals rather than God, or as He was colloquially known, the Church. Marriage has been taken out of their hands and put into ours, control over it rests with both genders, its purpose and conventions are revised with each union. That's what scares them and, though they think it politically inadvisable, it's what they really want to talk about. We should encourage them.