Why gay marriage matters to your marriage.

One of the arguments in favor of gay marriage is the argument from indifference - "what two other people do in their marriage doesn't affect me in my marriage."

The problem with this argument is that we collectively create social reality. Marriage is a natural reality, and as a natural reality, we cannot help but be aware of its true meaning and import on either a conscious or unconscious level. But marriage is also a social reality, and that social reality is always explicit and conventional; social realities are always formed as a common understanding communicated by social media, social convention and shared assumptions. Like money, which would have no value if people woke up one day and realized that it's all just colored paper, insofar as marriage departs from its natural reality, it's all just social convention.

So, what if everyone else's definition of marriage departed from your definition? Why, then, you would be "wrong" because the social reality of marriage is what everyone else agreed to. In which case, you would lose a tremendous social good, namely the way in which social convention reinforces individual norms.

So, how does that work out concretely in gay marriage? Well, it seems that "gay marriage" which would be nothing less than marriage itself, does not accept the norm of fidelity. No one less than self-proclaimed ethicist Dan Savage explains:

That, anyway, is what Dan Savage, America’s leading sex-advice columnist, would say. Although best known for his It Gets Better project, an archive of hopeful videos aimed at troubled gay youth, Savage has for 20 years been saying monogamy is harder than we admit and articulating a sexual ethic that he thinks honors the reality, rather than the romantic ideal, of marriage. In Savage Love, his weekly column, he inveighs against the American obsession with strict fidelity. In its place he proposes a sensibility that we might call American Gay Male, after that community’s tolerance for pornography, fetishes and a variety of partnered arrangements, from strict monogamy to wide openness.

Savage believes monogamy is right for many couples. But he believes that our discourse about it, and about sexuality more generally, is dishonest. Some people need more than one partner, he writes, just as some people need flirting, others need to be whipped, others need lovers of both sexes. We can’t help our urges, and we should not lie to our partners about them. In some marriages, talking honestly about our needs will forestall or obviate affairs; in other marriages, the conversation may lead to an affair, but with permission. In both cases, honesty is the best policy.

“I acknowledge the advantages of monogamy,” Savage told me, “when it comes to sexual safety, infections, emotional safety, paternity assurances. But people in monogamous relationships have to be willing to meet me a quarter of the way and acknowledge the drawbacks of monogamy around boredom, despair, lack of variety, sexual death and being taken for granted.”

The view that we need a little less fidelity in marriages is dangerous for a gay-marriage advocate to hold. It feeds into the stereotype of gay men as compulsively promiscuous, and it gives ammunition to all the forces, religious and otherwise, who say that gay families will never be real families and that we had better stop them before they ruin what is left of marriage. But Savage says a more flexible attitude within marriage may be just what the straight community needs. Treating monogamy, rather than honesty or joy or humor, as the main indicator of a successful marriage gives people unrealistic expectations of themselves and their partners. And that, Savage says, destroys more families than it saves.

Yes, it is dangerous for a gay marriage advocate to hold this view. But Savage would explain that it is the truth. Whether it is the truth or not, Savage's redefinition of marriage certainly does not reinfoce the social good of fidelity; rather, it redefines marriage as a social reality.Obstinate and eccentric individuals
can claim to so hold to their their own definition, and they are, but they will cearly be shoveling against the tide if Savage gets his way.