Civil unions: Just do it, and move on

Now that gay couples can legally marry in Massachusetts and various pro and con measures on gay unions are wending their way through other states’ courts and legislatures, minority opposition will stridently increase. Even though there are many more important things to discuss, the ultra-vocal ultra-conservatives will hang their hats on this issue and on abortion. The ill-advised blathering and grandstanding of Alan Keyes is merely one example. This shrill minority will insist to others that recognizing civil unions is somehow grossly, intrinsically wrong and that the concept would be irrelevant if not for those pesky gay activists who get so much play in the media. They’re wrong. This conversation has been coming for a long time.

From the moment American women first gained widespread access to reliable birth control, a discussion about gay marriage was inevitable. Don’t see the connection? Let me back up a bit.

The moment American women began to take charge of their reproductive lives, they began to take charge of the rest of their lives as well. A social revolution regarding the role of women in society has been happening ever since. There’s no putting that genie back in the bottle, thank heavens: this is a change that, all in all, very few women regret. In the process, women demonstrated and society came to openly recognize something that married and unmarried heterosexual couples have long known: that there are very good reasons besides procreation for sex within a relationship.

Sex is part of the glue that helps to keep romantic partnerships, including marriages, together. If this wasn’t blindingly obvious before birth control pills appeared about 35 years ago, it is now. Given that, the government would be foolish to argue otherwise.

Meanwhile, there is a corollary: perhaps having children is not the only — or even primary — reason for getting married these days. Sure, creating a family might be a reason for marrying, but that family need not include children. That is, it need not include anyone but the two spouses. After all, there are plenty of women past childbearing age who still find reasons to marry, as do women who can’t have children and women who choose not to have them. Same goes for men: to some, maybe kids aren’t the point. And on a planet with more than six billion people straining its resources, the choice of marriage without kids has to be given at least some reasonable consideration.

Marriage today is about two people making a public, legally recognized statement about a very personal, loving relationship that is rooted in loyalty and exclusivity: we’re in this together, folks, and everyone else please butt out. Children may or may not result, but they’re clearly not obligatory. What is this public act and the legal recognition attached to it supposed to give the two people involved? Emotional, psychological, and, sometimes, financial security. Legal protection. One very special person whom the other can lean on, each in his or her turn, when times get tough. A safe haven against the madness and confusion of the world. Someone to grow roots with. Most important, a relationship in which both people can thrive, not just survive, if they put their minds and hearts to it. In short, family.

It is in society’s best interest to help preserve such stable relationships. The often harsh realities of modern life assault us from all sides. We change jobs more often than we used to, even careers. Wages have stagnated for three decades in many fields while costs have increased, and our incomes — if we have any these days — are no longer worth what they were. Higher education and literacy are no longer guarantees of employment. We move more often, sometimes cross-country, uprooting ourselves and our immediate families and truncating in the process nearly all other relationships.

There is more to know, more to learn, and a greater amount that is known than ever before, and the rate of change is accelerating everywhere in too many aspects of our lives. We exist in an era of terrorism and have lived for more than half a century in the shadow of the nuclear dilemma. All it would take is a few bombs exploded at the right time, in the right place, at the right height in the atmosphere for the fallout to go worldwide and imperil the earth itself. We don’t even need bombs — we could poison the earth for centuries with nuclear waste or chemical threats alone. Frankly, we have one hell of a lot more stress than we used to, less time to cope with it, and no chance that it will go away any time soon.

And what helps human beings survive this monumental stress, this staggering rate of change? What reminds us that there are good reasons for being and staying alive, for maintaining that social glue among us? Our relationships, particularly the most intimate ones. They remind us of what is most redeeming about our humanity: our capacity for love, for wisdom, for justice, for mercy. Our ability to better ourselves and the world in which we live, for our own sakes and for those to come after us. Our adaptiveness and resilience under duress. Our ability to reason, to learn from our mistakes, and to change in response to what we have learned. These are essential to our survival, for the great reality of the universe is change.

Society has another area of interest that involves self-preservation: public health. We have been visited by AIDS and HIV for more than 20 years now, and we are no closer to curing it than we were when it first appeared. AIDS is and always has been a mostly heterosexual phenomenon in Africa, the continent of its origin, and is so now virtually everywhere else. That it affected homosexuals first in North America was a fluke of circumstance. Any society that wants to survive has powerful reasons to try to reduce the spread of AIDS and other perils like it.

Abstinence is a nice idea, but, as with other sexually transmitted diseases before AIDS, not bloody likely on a large scale. Nature has been at her tricks millions of years longer than humans have exercised free will, and the biological imperative toward sex is damnably strong. Consider this: if even one entire generation had been able to keep its collective pants zipped, we would have eradicated syphilis, gonorrhea, and genital herpes a long time ago. No such luck. Thus, the more realistic emphasis on safe sex. That’s not foolproof, however, and so that strategy must be coupled (no pun intended) with another: encouraging stable, monogamous romantic relationships in the hope that these will greatly reduce the rate of infection with AIDS and other potentially lethal microbes.

Of course, one of the human communities most damaged by AIDS is the homosexual population. And here is a very relevant point: if you want to know what the ultimate example of testosterone-driven biological imperative looks like, consider the rampant promiscuity of young gay males. It’s not only been culturally accepted over the years within that subgroup that these young men will have a high number of sexual encounters, many of which will be about sex for its own sake with strangers, it’s expected and even celebrated. This even now, despite the fact that such practice could easily be a death sentence. Post-AIDS this should have changed, but it hasn't changed enough: there are still people who, remarkably, refuse to practice safe sex. The only cultural counterforce to such indiscriminate, stupidly dangerous promiscuity is the existence, proliferation, and support of monogamous, stable, committed relationships among gays. Society has a public health survival interest in recognizing and encouraging such long-term partnerships.

Add the public health argument to the other reasons, and opposing legally recognized gay unions becomes infantile, absurd, and irresponsible. Not enough that some virus or bacterium may be at the top of the food chain instead of us — we also have to shoot ourselves in the groin, as it were.

And don’t even mention religious prohibitions against homosexuality. The state has no business deciding and is in no position to decide which faith, if any, has the correct take on this. Besides, that’s irrelevant to civil law, and dangerous. Throughout human history and prehistory, religion has been used to preserve the status quo and protect the despotic few at the expense of the many. It seems like only yesterday that religion justified slavery, wars of aggression, caste systems, feudalism, polygamy, imperialism, the selling of child brides into unwilling marriages, bigotry, genocide — the list goes on. Today, a few flavors of religion attempt to justify suicide bombings and other terrorism, all in the name of beliefs that are simply unprovable. Do we really need to say more?

If the term gay marriage is too inflammatory for you, fine — don’t use it. Call them civil unions, or domestic partnerships, or whatever else you want, so long as they are recognized under the law and give the participants legal rights equal to those recognized for heterosexual married couples and common-law marriages. Long-term relationships of all kinds have survival value to the human race. It’s time to recognize that and move on to other things. Like surviving the nuclear age, globalization, outsourcing, world-wide terrorism, and itty-bitty microbes that just could kill us all. Oh, and while we’re at it, could somebody please keep an eye out for that rogue asteroid that might be headed our way? I, for one, have my hands full with too many other things and not enough time to deal with them all anyway ...