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sexual marriage fall into two broad categories: (1) such marriages under-
mine the institution of marriage and thereby harm society at large, and (2)
such marriages violate the very meaning of a marriage as set out by the
Judeo-Christian tradition. These two lines of argument are in practice
interrelated as one writer puts it, the traditional view of marriage is
valid not just because it is in the Bible, but in the Bible because it is valid
(Hart 1996: 31). Nevertheless, the two arguments have different implica-
tions for toleration, so I will treat them separately.
Undermining the basis of the family?
The first kind of argument is that allowing gay marriages harms society by
undermining the basis of the family. The basic claim is that the foundation
of society lies in the heterosexual family with children, and marriage is the
means by which society solemnizes that relationship and through which it
confers upon it special benefits. Allowing gays to marry would harm the
institutional support for families. Put in this way, the argument rests on an
empirical claim about the effects of allowing gay marriages, and so it can
only be evaluated on the basis of those empirical claims. Typically, the
empirical claim is that allowing same-sex marriages will cause people to
take marriage less seriously, and it will thereby destabilize families in
general and undermine the stability that such relationships bring to the
community.
The evidence for this claim is in fact pretty thin. If marriage is a stabiliz-
ing force, one might argue, then homosexual marriages would equally sta-
bilize the gay and lesbian community (Sullivan 1996: ch. 3). At this point,
the claim is sometimes made that homosexuals are too unstable psycholog-
ically to maintain long-term committed relationships (Knight 1994:
115 17). But we rarely impose psychological tests on those seeking mar-
riages, and the thought of doing so for heterosexual marriages would
hardly meet with much support. But even if we did so and even if the tra-
ditionalists were correct that many homosexuals were unstable, there
would be no reason not to extend the privilege to those homosexuals who
did pass that test.
Sometimes, the complaint is that changes in divorce laws in the past 30
years have weakened family structures, so that now is hardly a time to
experiment with the institution (Commonweal editors 1996: 123 4;
Wilson 1996). But the problems in the family are part of a broader cul-
Trust and practices of public reason 123
tural trend, and an experimentation with same-sex marriage would do
little to affect that trend. Indeed, one might argue once again that encour-
aging every sexual relationship to be solemnized by marriage might help to
solidify the place of the family in our society; families based in marriage
could then be seen as the only legitimate place for such relationships. To
make a case against this reply, we must accept the argument made by John
Finnis (1995: 31 3) that sanctioning gay marriages supports a view of sex-
uality that emphasizes individual gratification rather than more transcend-
ent values. It would then undermine the whole idea of the family, he
argues, which depends crucially on the sacrifices that individuals make for
the transcendent good of the whole family.3 But, as Paul Weithman (1997:
241 4) points out, to the extent that sexuality is regarded as mere gratifi-
cation, that problem is neither caused by, nor promoted by, the idea of gay
marriage; other cultural forces are far more important. By placing same-
sex sexuality within the long-term relationships that marriage might
promote, granting homosexuals the right to marry may even have a posit-
ive effect on the general attitudes about sexuality though we have no real
evidence for this effect, one way or the other (Rauch 1996).
The real worry underlying the claims about stability, I think, is the view
that society itself is threatened unless we actively and exclusively privilege
heterosexual unions. Part of what lies behind this view is what is regarded
as the sacred nature of such unions, which I discuss in the next section, but
part of it is a claim about how best to nurture children. The worry is that
recognizing gay marriages will lead to the recognition of gay families,
which will harm the children who are a part of them. Often, this issue is
the one that produces the strongest gut-level response. People who are
unwilling to condemn a homosexual lifestyle (if such a thing existed)
and who think homosexuals should enjoy job protections and other civil
rights balk when children become involved.
Once again, however, the evidence that children are harmed in homo-
sexual families is quite thin. The alleged harm to children of homosexual
parents takes a number of forms.4 First, the charge is that children will not
develop properly, that they will have confusions about their sexual iden-
tity, or that they will become homosexuals themselves. What evidence
there is on these questions limited though it is suggests that children in
homosexual families do not develop in any significant way differently than
the children of heterosexual families (Patterson 1995; Flaks et al. 1995;
but see Belcastro 1993). Even if there were such evidence, however, we
should not rush to any conclusions. Poverty is certainly a more significant
factor in the poor cognitive and moral development of children, but it
would be morally repugnant to suggest that we should prevent the poor
from raising children. What evidence there is does not even suggest that
the children of homosexuals are more likely to become homosexuals them-
selves. But even if it did, that result cannot count as a harm unless it is a
harm to be a homosexual in the first place (Stacey 1996: ch. 5). Of course,
124 Trust and practices of public reason
the claim that it is a harm begs one of the important questions here, but it
is an issue to which we will return.
Second, critics claim that children will be harmed by the instability of
homosexual parents and their relationships. But however desirable it might
be to ensure the stability of both the parents and their marriages, being
heterosexual is hardly a guarantee of either, and being homosexual hardly
makes them impossible. Making homosexual marriages legal would actu-
ally insure that some children would have two parents, rather than one,
and so it might create more stability in the long run, since two adults will
be directly concerned with the child s welfare. At best, then, the argument
is that gay marriages are likely to be less stable than heterosexual ones and
that we are depriving a group of a right on the basis of a statistical
average a genre of argument we would not permit against any other
group. Besides, current statistics can t measure what positive effects the
option of marriage might have on the stability of homosexual couples.
Third, the harm is said to come because children will not have the prop-
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