GAYS DEFEND MARRIAGE

A June 10 report in the Health section of the New York Times headlined “Gay Unions Shed Light on Gender in Marriage” has led proponents of same-sex marriage to trumpet the news that same-sex marriage may actually be good for marriage as a whole. Comments about the article at the Web sites and print editions of the Human Rights Campaign blog, Marriage Equality News, the Washington Blade, the Volokh Conspiracy, the Huffington Post, Seattle’s The Stranger, and the comments section of this very blog have treated the article as the smoking gun that proves gay marriage is good for America after all.

It’s clear that the alleged differences pointed to in the article, that same-sex couples are “far more egalitarian” and “have more relationship satisfaction” are intended to show that admitting gay couples to the institution of marriage will help marriage altogether. Other very real differences that while perhaps beneficial, would clearly have no influence on straight couples, like the fact that lesbian couples often find their menstrual cycles in sync, or that gay couples frequently share an entire wardrobe of clothes, were not mentioned.

Now, if the experts cited in the New York Times article are reliable on ways same-sex couples are different that make gays look good, surely they are reliable on the ways same-sex couples are different that make gays look, well, less good. All three of the experts directly quoted in the article, Dr. Sondra Solomon, Dr. Esther Rothblum, and Dr. Robert W. Levenson have written other studies that the “marriage equality” movement would surely prefer nobody find out about.

For example, Solomon and Rothblum did a 2005 study together examining the attitudes toward sexual fidelity of couples that entered civil unions in Vermont – a status that provides all state benefits of marriage. More than 50 percent of the male-male relationships reported having arrangements with their partner that allowed for sexual activity outside the relationship. Do “marriage equality” advocates believe that Solomon and Rothblum’s findings about egalitarianism will spill over to the entire society but that their findings about sexual infidelity will not?

In addition, Levenson participated in a 2003 study that stated that compared to married male-female couples, both gay and lesbian couples reported more autonomy and more frequent relationship dissolution. I guess it’s possible that California same-sex relationhips have become more stable and interdependent now that the exact same rights and benefits the state grants are called “marriage” instead of “domestic partnership,” but I doubt it.

Now, it’s possible that some people want marriage to be more egalitarian as well as less monogamous and less stable. Personally, I want none of those things. As an Orthodox Jew, I expect any marriage I enter into to have a fairly traditional division of roles. But surely the expectation of the “marriage equality” activists in publicizing the article citing these experts is that undecided voters who want marriage to become more egalitarian should support same-sex marriage. My response is that their expectation is fine, as long as those voters also want marriage to be more sexually open and more likely to dissolve.

The other options are for gay-marriage activists to withdraw their argument based on the Times article, or to come up with some explanation why these academics are trustworthy in some of their research, but fraudulent in other parts of their research.

I’d like to close by citing Rothblum one more time. She said two years ago that these days the difference when a state grants marriage or a marriage-like status to same-sex couples is “largely symbolic,” which supports my question why the gay movement is spending millions of dollars on a symbolic issue in California when there are many, many actual and painful problems facing LGBT people, especially in states much less friendly than California, that we could be addressing. I have yet to hear a good answer to that question.