The Marriage Buffet

A week ago, the writer Andrew Sullivan issued on this very page a challenge to political conservatives: Now that the Supreme Court has declared that homosexuality can no longer be considered a crime, what do you think it is? If homosexuality is not a crime, on what grounds can conservatives justify denying homosexuals any of the rights they seek, including the right to marry a person of the same sex? In short, there is a demand that conservatives state some kind of "policy" on homosexuality.

Something like 25% of the American population describes itself as "conservative." That's nearly 75 million people. It would be hazardous to generalize about what this large population thinks or does not think on the subject of homosexuality. Some no doubt think it a terrible sin. Others surely regard it as a harmless preference. A good many of them are no doubt homosexual themselves. But if I had to guess, I'd guess that the very large majority of American conservatives have for many years regarded homosexuality as something that just is, and that should be tolerated in the same spirit of live- and-let-live with which they tolerate all the other variations of the human species.

But for some advocates of change, "live and let live" is not enough. They are riding a very fast train, and it does not halt at any stops between the criminalization of homosexuality and full state recognition of homosexual relationships. But there are many such stops, and marriage is the most important of them.

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Let's start with a basic premise: The gay marriage debate is perceived by many as a debate about gays. It is not. It is a debate about marriage.

As always seems to be the way, we've come to understand the importance of marriage at exactly the moment that the institution is approaching the verge of collapse. A generation of social scientists has documented the benefits to children of growing up in a father- mother household; yet today, an American child has less than a one-in- two chance of reaching the age of 18 in the same home as both of his or her parents. That fact should concern us all. And any changes in family policy ought to be directed at one supreme goal: improving children's odds of growing up in a stable home.

Allowing same-sex marriage would reduce those odds. That's not an assertion; it's an empirical observation. In the past decade, same-sex marriage or something like it has entered the law of eight countries: Denmark, France, Hungary, Iceland, the Netherlands, Norway, Sweden and, most recently, Canada. Each has its own distinctive approach to the matter. But in all of them, the push for same-sex marriage has had the same result. Rather than get into a fight with religious organizations for whom the term "marriage" refers to one of their own sacraments, governments try to mollify everybody by creating a new legal category very similar to marriage, but not exactly the same. France, for example, has enacted into law something called a Pacte Civile de Solidarite, a registered partnership that grants any two people who live together a bevy of rights while holding each responsible for the other's rights and obligations.

Compared to marriage, a civil pact is harder to get into (some of its benefits do not arrive until a couple has been together for two or even three years) and much easier to get out of. That is very appealing to couples nervous of marriage -- and these days, who isn't nervous? It's been estimated that some 40% of the couples entering "civil pacts" are heterosexual.

Something similar is going on in Canada, only there the categories are even blurrier. A couple that simply lives together for two years automatically and without any formal act acquires many of the rights of a formally married couple. The exit from a relationship is just as blurry as the entry: In one famous case, a Canadian court ordered a man who had divorced his wife before he became wealthy to pay her an increased settlement based on the income he had begun to earn after the marriage ended.

Now think about what this means. Marriage used to have a bright clear line: you were married or you were not. It was a serious commitment -- and most people understood that if they weren't ready for this commitment, they ought to postpone having children until they were.

Today, in France and Canada and other places, marriage is a continuum, a series of gradations between true singlehood and formal matrimony. A woman who is cohabiting with a man in Canada or is pacted in France might well be deceived into thinking that her family situation is stable enough for her to have a child. But she would be wrong. The average cohabitation in Canada lasts only five years. Her government has told her that she is the next-best-thing to married; but from the point of view of her children, the next best thing is no good at all.

Many American advocates for homosexual marriage understand all this, and for that reason oppose "civil pacts" and "domestic partnerships" and "common law marriages" just as fiercely as any social conservative does. They want to restore the bright line too -- only with same-sex relationships on the farther side of it. But if that has not happened even in Sweden or France, where organized religion is powerless, it certainly will not happen in the U.S.

The much more likely outcome in this country would be the spread of a crazy-quilt of differing systems of "marriage-lite" across the country: California might have a domestic partnership law that grants virtually all the rights of marriage to registered couples; Michigan could have one that treats partners as married for inheritance purposes but not tax purposes, while Oregon did the reverse. Some states might require domestic partners to do some affirmative act: sign a book, buy a license, etc. Other states might just treat any couple that lives together for two years or three or five as if it had registered. Still other states might do both.

And then there would be the question of federal rights: immigration, Social Security, federal tax law, and so on, just to make the whole problem more complicated.

It is highly unlikely that these proliferating domestic partnerships would be offered to same-sex couples alone. That might even be unconstitutional, a deprivation of equal protection, but certainly it would be politically impossible. Every American city and state that offers domestic-partnership benefits offers them equally to heterosexuals and homosexuals. The result of a national trend toward same-sex marriage would be that the young people of the country would be presented with 50 different buffets, each of them offering two or more varieties of quasi-marital relationships. In such a world, the very concept of marriage would vanish.

It would become impossible to tell young people "Don't have children outside of marriage," because they would not even know -- until it was too late -- whether they were "inside" a marriage or not. The rich and the smart would protect themselves of course. They could hire lawyers to draft personal contracts, itemizing and detailing their responsibilities to each other and to their children. The non-rich and the non-smart would stumble into trouble, and their children would begin life even more severely disadvantaged than they already are.

You need a very strange definition of progress to regard such an outcome as a progressive reform.