How Gay Marriage Became Thinkable for a Generation of Young Americans

With the legalization of gay marriage in New York yesterday, I think it's worth reflecting on how we arrived at this point. How did something so unimaginable for the Silent Generation become thinkable for the Boomers and their children?

The answer, in my opinion, is that acceptance of gay marriage is the logical conclusion of a series of changes in the American moral universe. We might refer to this as a change of moral paradigms. This paradigm shift has involved three types of cultural changes: a new view of sex and marriage, a new view of law and morality, and a new view of customs and symbols.

How Americans View Sex and Marriage

There have been two major relevant changes in how Americans view sex and marriage.

The first change came in how Americans view the purposes of sex and marriage. Sex in early America was thought to be strictly for procreation, not for pleasure or romance. As a result, all non-procreative sex, such as anal sex, oral sex, or sex using contraceptives, was considered immoral. Similarly, marriage was considered a political, financial, and reproductive arrangement rather than a primarily romantic one. Of course, there was plenty of erotic romance that went on behind closed doors, but such behavior did not have public moral sanction. This all began to change in the nineteenth century, when the Protestant preacher Henry Ward Beecher helped popularize a romantic view of marriage. Attitudes toward sex didn't change on a large scale until the sexual revolution of the 1960s, when the Supreme Court struck down a ban on contraceptives, and even conservative Christians came to approve of sex-for-pleasure between married heterosexuals. Today, American Christians and non-Christians alike think of marriage as primarily a romantic relationship within which all forms of consensual sex-- including oral and anal-- are permissible. This raises the question: why shouldn't gays get married, if they love each other? And if straight couples can have anal sex, why can't gays do the same?

The second change in Americans' view of sex and marriage is that they came to be seen as expressions of self-determination. In the nineteenth century, marriage for women was a bit like sexual slavery. A woman was literally the property of her husband. She had no possessions of her own, no right to refuse him sex whenever he wanted it, and no control over whether or when to have children. Nor was the single life a viable alternative, since women had not yet really entered the work force. Other minorities experienced a lack of freedom with respect to marriage, as well. Black slaves who married were often separated from their spouses, and even after Emancipation most states enforced anti-miscegenation laws until the 1950s. American attitudes toward sex and marriage changed during the civil rights era, when self-determination in these areas came to be seen as one of the inalienable rights granted in the Constitution. Most famously, Loving v. Virginia in 1967 declared that marriage is a "right". With the widespread acceptance of this view, it has become increasingly difficult to deny self-determination to gay couples who want to be married.

How Americans View Law and Morality

Another fundamental shift in the American moral universe has occurred in our thinking about the relationship between law and morality.

In early America, it was taken for granted that one of the purposes of the law was to maintain a moral society. Moral and religious education were commonplace in the public schools, and the illegality of blasphemy and profanity was taken for granted. The fundamental political divide was between those who felt moral issues should be arbitrated by the federal government and those who felt they should be arbitrated by the state governments. This was a mere jurisdictional dispute, in which the common assumption of both sides was that government is the guardian of moral order.

Today, the political discourse has shifted. The view of government as the guardian of moral order has been increasingly challenged by a view of government as the guardian of individual rights. This can be seen in the 1947 Everson v. Board of Education decision erecting a “wall of separation between church and state,” as well as in the series of court decisions throughout the twentieth century establishing a “right to privacy” in matters of sexual behavior. For many Americans, it has become axiomatic that you can legislate rights, but “you can’t legislate morality.” Murder can be forbidden because it deprives another person of his right to live, but the private use of contraceptives hurts no one and is therefore off limits to the law. Today, the fundamental political divide is increasingly between proponents of individual moral sovereignty and proponents of collective moral sovereignty rather than the old jurisdictional dispute between the federal government and the states. This means that for an increasing number of young Americans, the gender of someone’s spouse just isn’t any of the government’s business.

How Americans View Customs and Symbols

In some ways, the most radical shift has been in how educated Americans view values, customs, and symbols. Cross-cultural research and the shrinking of the world due to globalization have made us more aware of the extent to which our views and the ways we express them are products of a particular historical moment.

We have learned that Judeo-Christian doctrines and morals, for example, are far from the self-evident truths we once thought. Americans are increasingly conscious of the fact that Christianity dominated Europe at the point of an imperial sword and America at the point of a republican gun, littering both continents with the bodies of pagans and heretics along the way. More impactful even than this historical consciousness is our growing awareness of the billions of good people in the world with religious and moral worldviews different from our own. It is difficult to maintain a moral absolutism on sexual issues in an America where even the majority of evangelical Protestants believe that many religions can lead to eternal life.

Similarly, the ways we conceptualize and categorize things in our environment turn out to be surprisingly relative. Linguists know that words are just social conventions with improvised definitions; no word has just one, true, unchangeable definition. The terms “conservative” and “liberal” have meant so many different things over the course of American history that it would take an entire book to describe them all. In the same way, our concepts of "gender" and "marriage" reflect a particular cultural perspective on the world rather than the way the world really is. The relativity of language means that the “traditional” definitions of these words pose no obstacle to novel uses of them. In this light, the fight over the word “marriage” feels more like a trademark dispute than a conflict over moral values.

A Paradigm Shift

What most intrigues me about the developments I’ve described above is that even conservatives mostly take them for granted. There are vestiges of older ways of thinking in conservative rhetoric on gay marriage, but rarely do they explicitly argue that sex for pleasure is a sin, that marriage isn’t primarily a romantic union, that spouse-selection isn’t a “right”, that words have only one true meaning, or even that they should be able to impose their religious values on others through the law. The paradigm shift in the American moral universe is already too complete, too entrenched in our national culture for conservatives to even try to turn back the clock. Instead, they’re trying to stave off the logical conclusion of the new paradigm through constitutional amendments and emotional appeals.

As historian Timothy Weber has explained, such is only to be expected after a paradigm shift. A new paradigm means that conservative leaders can no longer trust people to draw the right conclusions. “When people start ‘responding to a different world,’ leaders must be certain that followers keep looking in the right places and finding what they are supposed to find.” The old paradigm can be saved only by hedging it in via laws, propaganda, and punitive measures. Frankly, though, it’s a losing battle. The thinkability of gay marriage is here to stay.