People who favor gay marriage are fond of asking those who oppose: “how will gays marrying affect your marriage?” The answer is assumed to be: “not at all,” and therefore gay marriage will not affect anyone. But that’s not really the question that should be asked.
Gay marriage is such a new concept and so few gays have gotten married that the wider cultural effects of the redefinition of marriage are totally unknown.
But we do know that changes in other aspects of marriage and child rearing have had a profound effect, an effect that its proponents never envisioned. Let’s take the issue of what were once called bastards. At one time if a girl and a guy had sex before marriage and the girl became pregnant, the guy married her and they went on to form a family. Occasionally the girl went away for a long vacation and came back to take up her life and people pretended not to know. The actual incidence of single-parent families was in the low single digits.
But Feminists and other Liberals declared that “a woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle” and it was proclaimed that bearing a child out of wedlock did not attach a stigma to the single woman. In fact, it was celebrated a-la Murphy Brown. The question was asked “how will women having children without getting married affect your marriage?” The answer is now before us. It’s not affecting my marriage, but the question is stupid. The real question is how will large numbers of women having children without a father in the home affect society.
Nearly 40% of all births are to unmarried women. The rate in the Hispanic and Black communities is twice that. According to the CDC In 2007, 93% of births to 15–17 year-olds and 82% of births to 18–19 year-olds were nonmarital. The result is not simply the creation of a new definition of “family,” but the creation of a cohort of children who are largely doomed to poverty all of their lives and who have created islands of incredible danger to themselves and their neighbors (see Chicago).
Let’s take the new definition of “marriage” one step further. The idea that we can redefine marriage to allow gays to marry but shut the door to other arrangements is simply intellectual twaddle. If people who love each other can get married, irrespective of gender, what is the rational basis for limiting the number in that marriage to two?
If we can get rid of this taboo about "two" we can solve the Tiger Woods problem. Let’s talk about Tiger Wood first wife, Elin Nordegren. She finds out that Tiger has been sleeping around when he’s on the road, leaving her alone a lot. Instead of throwing a fit and getting a divorce would it not have been simpler for all concerned if she also married coal magnate Chris Cline? It would have been cheaper and easier for Tiger, Elin would have the financial resources of two fabulously rich men to support her, as well as their physical “attention.” And to make the relationship even more advantageous, Tiger could then marry Lindsey Vonn, creating a four-corned relationship that has many more sexual and financial advantages than if we arbitrarily limit the definition of marriage to the number two. And lest anyone complain that financial issues are not at stake, let me remind you that one of the cases before the Supreme Court is about exactly that: the financial consequences of a same-sex partner dying without marriage.
Think of the advantages of this re-definition of marriage to more difficult circumstances. It is not rare for one partner in the old-fashioned definition of marriage to become ill and be unable to perform the role that they have traditionally played. I had a friend whose wife left him after he developed multiple sclerosis. This was not just a breach of the marriage vow but a psychological blow. I’m sure neither party felt good about this. But under the new and improved meaning of marriage my friend’s wife could simply have taken a second husband, meeting her needs and sparing both of them from a painful separation.
And finally, re-defining marriage in this way could absorb large numbers of those unmarried single mothers. As men marry multiple times, providing male role models to millions of boys lacking that today, the possibility for good abound. In fact, I can foresee the possibility of a government program to encourage the creation of harems … uh, new families.
As Glenn Reynolds is fond of saying: "What could possibly go wrong?"
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