Gay marriage is a hot topic these days. Articles and letters to the editor both for it and against it are flying around. This isn't one of them. When I read
an essay against it by the author of
one of my favorite books,
Orson Scott Card, I felt an obligation (compulsion?) to write about it from the tangential view I have of the situation. Let me be clear, this post is not arguing for or against gay marriage. Rather, I take the stance that those who use certain arguments against it have missed a much greater shift in the culture that may, in my opinion, make gay marriage a moot point anyway.
To get in the spirit of the topic, I've included a few quotes from Card's column, quotes that will flow into my comments later. Of gay marriage, Card writes "every American who believes in democracy should be outraged that any court should take it upon itself to dictate such a social innovation without recourse to democratic process" and that by having gay marriage as part of our American society, "we will be performing a potentially devastating social experiment on ourselves."
So we know he's opposed. Card goes on to say the following:
...You have to change the meaning of "marriage" to include a relationship that it has never included before this generation, anywhere on earth.
Just because homosexual partners wish to be called "married" and wish to force everyone else around them to regard them as "married," does not mean that their Humpty-Dumpty-ish wish should be granted at the expense of the common language, democratic process, and the facts of human social organization.
Homosexuals, according to Card, "commit themselves to a reproductive dead end" and their parents should not be expected to be happy about it. Card expresses the fear that, among other things, persons with traditional family values will be ostracized and accused of hate speech for supporting stable heterosexual marriages. He makes predictions that, like himself, many "people still cling fiercely to civilized values and struggle to raise civilized children despite the barbarians who now rule us through the courts." In protest, these people such as himself, will "simply stop regarding the authority of the government as having any legitimacy."
OK. I'm clear where Card stands. He wants to foment revolution a bit. Got it. The courts are out of control on this issue and every issue. Got it. He uses a version of evolutionary psychology warped by oversimplification to explain the folly of gay people marrying each other and harming the rest of the culture in the process. Got it.
The reason I think gay marriage is moot (most particularly for lesbian couples) is that the advances in assisted reproductive technology (ART) during the last 20 years have done far more to break the bonds of kinship, the evolutionary rules, and the norms of culture than any amount of divorce or gay marriage ever could.
For instance, one custody case the courts here in California heard recently had to decide which of the five people who parented a child should get custody of the child after her parents divorce. That's right, five people:
1) Mother
2) Father
3) Sperm donor
4) Egg donor
5) Surrogate mother
I heard of this case in July of 2003, when PBS aired a special, called Bloodlines, that presented information about some of these shifts in culture that are finally winding up in court. Perhaps by now the case has been decided, but I do not know who was awarded custody. All five people had legal precedent for claims on the child. The surrogate mother wanted her as did the biological mother, the divorcing mother and divorcing father. Odds were for the biological mother and the surrogate mother, even though the child had no biological relationship at all to the surrogate mother.
The fact is, many lesbian couples order sperm off the internet and have their own biological babies with anonymous men. Gay male couples who want children have fewer options. Some adopt crack babies and children no one else will take.
Let me not focus on gay couples. The fact is that when I look at my friend's children, especially the children who arrived when these friends, the parents, were over 35, I wonder who the biological parents really are. Let's just say I've looked the situation over in recent times and it has made me look at my friends and their children in a whole new way.
If I wonder about the true biological situation of procreation in my sets of coupled friends, those who have or will have kids -- these are career women and men, 9 out of 10 of whom have stable marriages -- at least I don't have to wonder at all about gay couples. It is very clear that at least one set of genes came from somewhere else.
Card's views on culture and evolutionary biology in his anti-gay marriage anti-establishment essay are more than a bit simplistic. As men's sperm counts dwindle and as more women become infertile (as trends are showing), there will be an ever growing business in sperm and eggs donations. That means that, for couples who use these ART procedures, at least one member of the couple will be raising a child and investing a lot of resources in a child that is not carrying any of that person's genetic material. Why do it? Who knows? Perhaps the social pressures to fit in as contributing member of society no matter the cost motivates people to raise children who bear no relation to them other than proximity and perhaps a remnant of genes of someone they happen to like. Often, the appearance is (or could be) that the couple had the child on their own. How do these couples keep resentment and disappointment out of the marriage? It would be very difficult when the joys of parenthood set in and those bills and obligations mount ever higher. The courts are bound to see more and more of these complex custody cases. I even imagine that the judges think that custody battles in gay marriages are perhaps even easier to settle than in heterosexual parenting situations.
For society, the use of ART poses a much greater change than gay marriage ever could. All these pairings happen in secret. Even the donors' identities are secret. In all situations where the parentage is not as it seems, even in those marriages that survive and are functioning reasonably well, when will the children find out? Do the parents tell the children when they are young? Do they wait years down the line, for when the child is grown and could absorb the news in one big shock? How many children will never know? My cynical side says that the majority of the children will never know and that the anonymity of sperm and egg donors will not endure.
People do not talk about the fact that it is now commonplace for children to be fathered or mothered by someone other than the parents who raise them. These situations used to be taboo, one sign of bad judgement and a weak character. Now, these mystery parings are acceptable. For all a man knows, the mailman may really be the true father of his child, but it could also be his doctor or his boss.
Even though Orson Scott Card holds heterosexual marriage in high regard, and puts a lot of stake in arguing that traditional marriage and cultural systems survive the longest, I say no times were ever so simple. Cheaters have always abounded: women who cuckhold their husbands, men who sleep around. All the secrecy and mystery of origins of life for those around us that we have lost to genetic testing and birth control, we have restored and expanded in the ART industry. True parentage is more complex and more mysterious than it ever has been.
Gay parentage (with or without benefit of marriage) is actually more open than what the heterosexuals have going these days.
