The City and the City

The California same-sex marriage decision gives me another opportunity to urge people to read David S. Crawford’s Communio article “Liberal Androgyny: Gay Marriage and the Meaning of Sexuality in Our Time”, which does the best job I’ve seen of answering the question “How does gay marriage harm ‘heterosexual’ marriages?”:

As we have seen, the liberal model effectively shifts the
ground of society away from the sexual correspondence of man and
woman (and all that their sexual difference implies) and toward a
system of “alternative orientations.” But the anthropological dualism
implied by this shift, as well as the reduction of “sexual orientation”
to indifferent alternatives, belies the fact that the liberal model entails
a basically “gay” (and disintegrative) anthropology. It merely grafts
the possibility for “heterosexuality” onto this anthropology as one of
its variations. Thus, the anthropologically fundamental starting point
of the sexual otherness of man and woman is in fact no longer
available; it is replaced by one of the possible “orientations”—so-
called “heterosexual marriage” or “opposite-sex marriage,” which
has at its core the very amorphous concept of “emotional commit-
ment.”

The liberal movement for an extension of the right to marry
to “same-sex partners” is therefore a tacit step toward the anthropo-
logical nullification of sexuality and gender altogether. Whatever the
new right to marriage would be, the one thing it cannot be is a mere
extension of the same right. Thus, the liberal model is inherently
unstable because it contains an internal contradiction: first, it asks for
assimilation into the existing institution of civil marriage, but,
second, its basic anthropology radically subverts or evacuates the
meaning of that institution.

Sexual relations are thereby abstracted in principle from their
deepest meaning and significance, and the human person is consid-
ered essentially androgynous. Because the implied anthropology is
androgynous, it does not encompass the intrinsic otherness of sexual
difference. Hence, all relations—including the man-woman
relationship—are in fact at the deepest level homosexual. They all
become in this sense essentially “gay.”

If radicals criticize current society as institutionalizing a
“compulsory heterosexuality,” the vision of society proposed as its
replacement may therefore be characterized just as accurately as a
form of “compulsory homosexuality.”

Will Saletan a while back in Slate had an article on the sources of popular opposition to gay marriage (which unfortunately I cannot find) which hit on this same insight: outside of elite circles, most men as men love their wives as women (and vice versa). They do not, as androgynous persons love their wives as androgynous persons, and they understand, even if they can’t articulate it, that these are two very different things.