Marriage isn't just a ceremonial toy

14 May 2004

An unfair request to those gay couples planning to marry on Monday and the days that follow: Please, treat it seriously.

Consider carefully whether marriage is right for you. Commit to make your union endure. Promise each other to labor through the inevitable bumps and hassles that fray relationships.

Make it work.

Barring some last-minute court machinations, in three days it will be legal for gays to marry in Massachusetts. City and town clerks across the state are preparing for what may well be a tsunami of marriage applications. Worldwide media attention will be intense and skeptical. And in the eyes of many, those marriages will become the measure by which all gay relationships are judged.

Is it unfair and unjust to make the union of two people bear such a burden? Absolutely. But it's almost inevitable.

Many others have faced the same unfair demands. For blacks and women especially, the first of anything - astronaut, police chief, CEO or baseball player - has subjected them to extra scrutiny. It's an unfortunate but true fact of life: Those who cross boundaries are treated differently. They become symbols for their race or gender.

And shortly, that will happen to gay couples.

For most, the attention will be fleeting. They will marry and then go back to the everyday matters of their lives - working, raising children, cutting the lawn and doing all of the other things that straight couples do.

Every misstep, however, will be a front-page story. Those who marry on a lark, those who treat marriage casually, and those whose relationships fail will find themselves poster boys and girls for the proposition that marriage should be denied to gays. Massachusetts is embarking on an experiment that, according to recent national polls, most Americans believe misguided and many would like to see fail. Opponents will seize on any evidence they can to stop gay marriage.

And the opportunities to stop it are certainly there. In November 2006, in all likelihood, voters across Massachusetts will decide whether to approve a state constitutional ban. Thirty-eight states and the federal government presently have in place DOMA laws - defense of marriage acts. Other states continue to debate them. Moreover, before the U.S. Congress now sits a constitutional amendment that would prevent gays from marrying everywhere.

Like it or not, the first few gay marriages in Massachusetts will profoundly influence the course of all of those debates and votes.

Beyond that, however, many might argue my request for gays to treat marriage seriously is unfair for another reason: It's hypocritical.

For all of the yammering over the last few months about the glories of this millennia-old institution, it has fallen into a sorry state of disrepair. A century ago, around 5 percent of marriages ended in divorce. The number today is somewhere between 43 percent and 50 percent. In the name of reform, most states adopted no-fault legislation that has ended up making divorce so easy that it effectively has trivialized marriage. Rather than pushing couples to stay together, those new laws made divorce cheap and easy, with the only issues being who gets the goodies and the kids. Far from treating marriage as something to be entered into "reverently, discreetly, advisedly and soberly," as a society we have increasingly belittled it, sometimes making it - remember Britney Spears - little more than the capstone to a drunken Las Vegas evening.

Given all that, gays and lesbians might reasonably ask, why hold them to a different and higher standard?

Yet maybe that's the wrong question. Maybe, instead, the right question should be: Why not hold all of us to a higher standard?

Some interesting facts. Nevada, which ranks first in the country in its divorce rate (6.8 per 1,000 residents vs. a national average of 4.0), is also a DOMA state - indeed, voters there enshrined their anti-gay animus into the state constitution. Meanwhile, Massachusetts, the only state to permit gay marriage, has the nation's lowest divorce rate (2.4 per 1,000).

Curious, isn't it? The state that most makes a mockery of marriage protests mightily against including gays while Massachusetts - derided for subverting marriage - seems to take the institution far more seriously.

Or perhaps it's not so curious. Perhaps people in Massachusetts know a little bit better than most that marriage matters. And perhaps that point has been driven home after having watched gays struggle to secure that right for themselves, much in the same way that battles by blacks and women for the vote made us appreciate that suffrage was not something to be taken for granted. If so, then perhaps Monday will be a different line of demarcation than most think: More than just the expansion of equal rights, it may be the beginning of a new understanding of the gravity and obligations of this tattered institution we call marriage.

Talk back to Tom Keane at tomkeane@tomkeane.com.