Marriage and its connection to romantic love and individual fulfillment, as we discussed in class, remains one of our most enduring and powerful socio-cultural myths. Wherever we may fall individually on the spectrum of marriage for ourselves, we relate to the concept of marriage in a manner almost as strongly as we relate to family, nation, and law. In other words, marriage is one of the cardinal directions of adult life, whether in acquiescence or refusal. This is one of the reasons as to why the debate over gay marriage is so vociferous and can seem, at times, like a lot of energy spent over something that, to the critical eye, seems rather exhausted if we think about the crises of heterosexual marriage in the modern period (divorce, dissonance, unhappiness).
Marriage, as mentioned in class, is not an ahistorical, transcendent state, but rather a human institution that has shifted in meaning and metaphor through time. The rise of romantic love in the 19th century and the association of marriage with feeling marked a decided shift from the proprietal and patrimonial notions of marriage before the industrial age. But like most tools of ideology, we don’t see these changes in marriage, instead thinking that marriage, like other ideological states (economy, politics, nation-state, race, etc.) is unchangeable and static, that people loved each other in marriage in the ancient world as we love today, which of course is patently untrue. But such fantasies are increasingly reassuring in a changing and scary world.
Social change can often happen rapidly and unexpectedly. The case of Loving v. Virginia (1967), which legalized interracial marriage, is an example of how long-held and legally sanctioned limitations and discriminations can change in an instant. And to a certain extent, “gay marriage” may or may not be such a moment. The desire for the legalization of marriage for LGBT people has been driven, largely, from the grassroots of non-organizational lesbians and gay men who believe deeply in their right to legally sanctioned relationships under the aegis of marriage (as opposed to other categorizations, such as domestic partnerships). This desire speaks, obviously, to the connection many LGBT people feel to parent culture norms, which in itself is not surprising, although may cause us to question differential socialization and the effects of discrimination on consciousness. Perhaps another way to go about talking about this is the phrase “Hope Springs Eternal,” and the efforts of LGBT people to legitimize their relationships before the state are an example of this optimism.
E.’s question in class over the role of the state in sanctioning certain relationships while discounting others remains at the heart of the debate over gay marriage, to a certain extent. Social conservatives claim that gay marriage threatens the foundations of society. Yet, the astute observer would note that heterosexuals themselves have made a mess of contemporary marriage, with little or no help from LGBT people. This “mess” would include divorce, unhappiness, legal and social battles around marriage, children, and property, as well as the problematic complex infrastructure of romantic love, capitalism, and consumerism, that surrounds both marriage and the married state for people of all classes. These crises of marriage are predicated on a number of factors that begin to shift gender relationships in the late 19th and early 20th century, including the greater economic and social emancipation of women, the rise of industrial economies and the move away from family-labor economic models, and media cultures that transmit meanings of marriage that obscured and transformed the meanings of marriage within a rising culture of economic individualism.
The desire to deny LGBT people the right to marry is, on some level, representative of the fantastical return to the past for many heterosexual critics. But like Pandora’s Box, there is no going back to some halcyon day of perfect marriage and love, which never existed anyway. The other question, for many LGBT critics of the desire to marry for LGBT people, is why would we want to invest in such a problematic institution anyhow? But feeling is rarely accountable to rational or political drive, and the desire to marry on the part of many LGBT people is just that, a feeling that in many ways is driving a movement.
The positive aspect of this "feeling movement" is that LGBT people may shift and change the meanings of marriage and partnership away from economic and socially-sanctioned procreative roles and property towards a more holistic meaning of love in the contemporary age, towards a more inclusive sanctioning, in other words, of diverse coupling and relationship dyads. The risk of course is that LGBT people will fall into the same problematic patterns of many heterosexual marriages, based in consumerism, fantasy, and ennui, and therefore become a more reactionary force.
We won’t be able to tell for awhile what the outcome of these debates will be, but in conclusion I would direct you to the eloquent and beautiful statement by Mildred Loving, one of the plaintiffs (along with her late husband Richard) in the landmark case Loving v. Virginia, issued this past spring on the 20th anniversary of the case. Change is possible, and change will occur. How that change happens is, to a large extent, within our own hands.
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