Gays and Infertile Heterosexual Couples

Citing political scientist Susan Shell, here's this from my post, "The Secular Case Against Gay Marriage":

American citizens should not have the sectarian beliefs of gay-marriage advocates imposed on them unwillingly. If proponents of gay marriage seek certain privileges of marriage, such as legal support for mutual aid and childbearing, there may well be no liberal reason to deny it to them. But if they also seek positive public celebration of homosexuality as such, then that desire must be disappointed. The requirement that homosexual attachments be publicly recognized as no different from, and equally necessary to society as, heterosexual attachments is a fundamentally illiberal demand. Gays cannot be guaranteed all of the experiences open to heterosexuals any more than tall people can be guaranteed all of the experiences open to short people. Least of all can gays be guaranteed all of the experiences that stem from the facts of human sexual reproduction and its accompanying penumbra of pleasures and cares. To insist otherwise is not only psychologically and culturally implausible; it imposes a sectarian moral view on fellow citizens who disagree and who may hold moral beliefs that are diametrically opposed to it.

This really gets to the heart of the gay marriage debate. Radical gay rights secularists are trying to ram down their views on everyone else. William Murchison, for example, decisively argued yesterday against "The Gay Marriage Fantasy." That is, there's really no such thing, logically, as same-sex marriage.

And what about infertile heterosexual couples. Well, in response to National Review's editorial, "The Future of Marriage," check out Andrew Sullivan's latest hissy-fit:

National Review's new editorial comes out firmly against even civil unions for gay couples, and continues to insist that society's exclusive support for straight couples is designed

to foster connections between heterosexual sex and the rearing of children within stable households.

This is an honest and revealing point, and, in a strange way, it confirms my own analysis of the theocon position. It reaffirms, for example, that infertile couples who want to marry in order to adopt children have no place within existing marriage laws, as NR sees them. Such infertile and adoptive "marriages" rest on a decoupling of actual sex and the rearing of children. The same, of course, applies much more extensively to any straight married couple that uses contraception: they too are undermining what National Review believes to be the core reason for civil marriage.

And note that point: "much more extensively." Or, fundamentally radically.

No matter how you spin it, and especially no matter how hard gay radicals attempt to repudiate traditionals as "theocons," the shift to gay marriage is a radical departure from the situation of infertile heterosexuals couples who are married. People like this, when they adopt children, and when they live their lives in the context of society's historically accepted normative institutions, are not revolutionary. To say that gay marriages are indentically co-equal to marriages between infertile heterosexual couples raises the question once again of how we are to define society's social regimes. Look, as Shell notes:

A society could abolish "funerals" as heretofore understood and simply call them "parties," or allow individuals to define them as they wish. Were the "liberationist" exaltation of individual choice pushed to its logical conclusion, would not a public definition of "funeral" as a rite in honor of the dead appear just as invidious as a public definition of "marriage" as an enduring sexual partnership between a man and woman?

No scheme of demonization concocted by Andrew Sullivan can change the fundamental fact that marriage AS AN INSTITUTION is established for the regeneration of society. Infertile heterosexual couple who marry are not trying to overturn that norm. Same-sex couple who demand marriage are.