Why "Traditional Marriage" is an Illusion

What is this “traditional marriage” phrase people keep throwing in our faces, anyway? The phrase gets used as shorthand for “not gay,” but it must mean more than that. "Traditional marriage" is supposed to be the most important institution in the world, the thing that upholds civilization and protects the lives of children. There are plenty of heterosexual marriages that clearly don’t deserve those kinds of plaudits — even James Dobson would hardly hold up Britney Spears’ infamous drunken Vegas nuptials, or Who Wants to Marry a Millionaire, as society’s salvation. So what do people mean by “traditional marriage”?

Curiously, if you start searching around conservative websites, you’ll find a remarkable dearth of definitions. Lots of people use the phrase, and there are plenty of wild-eyed rants about why they think marriage matters. But they all just parrot the same tired arguments we’ve heard (and debunked!) a million times before: marriage is best for children (wrong! Loving parents are best for children), and man-woman marriage has been around for centuries (oh, so wrong! At least not in its current version).

ProtectMarriage.com, however, goes a little further. This is the group that brought us Prop 8 and then defended it in Federal Court, so they get some cred as the official voice on this subject. And on their Why Marriage Matters page they present two documents, most notably a paper by Monte Neil Stewart, President of the Marriage Law Foundation, a non-profit set up specifically to defend man-woman marriage in court. Mr. Stewart presents six reasons he considers to be factual, free from emotional bias, and unquestionable for why straight, “traditional” marriage is important.

The first three are actually about raising children and therefore have no place in a marriage argument (see above — not only is childbearing a completely different issue from civil marriage, but straight couples are no better at parenting than gay ones). Another says that straight sex upholds society and limits the size of government, a claim which completely escapes me. Is this yet another reference to the fact that straight sex sometimes produces children? Is it an exercise of civil liberty? Either way, as an anti-gay marriage argument, it doesn't hold water.

Mr. Stewart's last two "facts" are the important ones.

Reason #4 says that heterosexual marriage is society’s only good way of “bridging the male-female divide.” So … men and women are intrinsically at war? I thought we got over that idea several decades ago, when the original Women's Movement started achieving some of its goals and middle class white men had to face the fact that they weren't demigods after all. I also thought that Oprah and Dr. Phil and their legion had opened our eyes to the idea that we all have lots of tools for overcoming our differences. If men and women are intrinsically "divided," they can certainly work through that without the heavy hand of Big Brother taking control.

Finally, Mr. Stewart claims that marriage is the only mechanism for converting men into husband-fathers and women into wife-mothers. Gosh, I didn’t realize we still looked at males as ravening, uncivilized beasts, or at women as worthless unless they were pregnant and slaving away in the kitchen. What decade is this, anyway?

ProtectMarriage.com and the Marriage Law Foundation are living in a fantasy right out of Father Knows Best, and they're trying to impress that antiquated, unworkable worldview on the rest of us. “Traditional marriage” in this sense doesn’t exist. In fact, we have precious few common traditions of any kind here in the U.S. We’re too young as a country and too disparate as a population to have developed them yet.

The desire for tradition is natural. It reminds us where we come from and gives us a sense of belonging. But when we try to impose an artificial idea of “tradition” where one simply doesn’t exist, we end up reinforcing bigotry, driving wedges between people who might otherwise find they have a lot in common, and fomenting hatred.

Those are the real “traditions” that are getting nurtured by this “traditional marriage” idea as promulgated by ProtectMarriage.com and its cronies. And that’s not just sad, it’s dangerous for us, for our society, and for our children.

Photo credit: Teunie