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Gay Marriage and the Miscegenation Analogy

It may be more potent than you'd think - but perhaps not in the way that you'd think.
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I agree with the bulk of Damon Linker’s latest column, which is about the absurdity of defenestrating everyone who opposes gay marriage when this was the default position of even progressive leaders a few scant years ago. But of course, agreeing is boring – so let me focus on two points of disagreement.

The first: on whether the oft-made analogy between opposing gay marriage and opposing miscegenation is tendentious. Linker says that, while he finds the arguments against gay marriage to be wrong,

[T]heir arguments are not frivolous — and certainly not as frivolous as rationales that were once used to justify racial inequality. Arguments in favor of traditional marriage — rooted in claims about the natural sexual complementarity of men and women — are also far more deeply rooted in human civilization the world over, and Western civilization specifically, than arguments against miscegenation.

He goes on to quote Ryan Anderson, the topic of his column, saying that basically no great thinker on the subject of marriage, from any religious or non-religious tradition, talks about race, whereas all talk about the complementarity of the sexes.

For the contrary view, I’ll cite Numbers 25:6-13:

And, behold, one of the children of Israel came and brought unto his brethren a Midianitish woman in the sight of Moses, and in the sight of all the congregation of the children of Israel, while they were weeping at the door of the tent of meeting. And when Phinehas, the son of Eleazar, the son of Aaron the priest, saw it, he rose up from the midst of the congregation, and took a spear in his hand. And he went after the man of Israel into the chamber, and thrust both of them through, the man of Israel, and the woman through her belly. So the plague was stayed from the children of Israel. And those that died by the plague were twenty and four thousand. And the LORD spoke unto Moses, saying: ‘Phinehas, the son of Eleazar, the son of Aaron the priest, hath turned My wrath away from the children of Israel, in that he was very jealous for My sake among them, so that I consumed not the children of Israel in My jealousy. Wherefore say: Behold, I give unto him My covenant of peace; and it shall be unto him, and to his seed after him, the covenant of an everlasting priesthood; because he was jealous for his God, and made atonement for the children of Israel.’

Now, I’m not going to pretend that this passage interprets itself. But when I read it in context, without bias, what I see is a straightforward condemnation of exogamy. The people of Israel want to intermarry with the Midianites, mingling their cultures and religions along with their blood. Members of a prominent Israelite and Midianite family boldly proclaim their union at the central institution of Israelite religion. A patriotic Israelite stabbed them to death (stabbing the woman through the belly, so as to symbolically cut off any possible issue as well). And God was pleased.

This is, of course, the foundational text of Western religion, and the importance of endogamy is not a trivial theme therein. And if we go outside of a Western context, endogamy is exceptionally important across Asia. All the major northeast Asian groups have a strong sense of consciousness of themselves as peoples, and strong taboos against marrying out, taboos which are only now being challenged in any serious way. Cousin marriage is a common norm across the Middle East. And Hindu India, with its caste system, raised endogamous preference to the level of art.

The Jim Crow South was indeed a very peculiar place with peculiar institutions – institutions we now anathematize for a reason. But we should not, as a consequence of our anathematization, delude ourselves that the peculiarity was the desire to preserve social separation from a less-favored group, including by prohibiting intermarriage. Because that desire is quite common, historically and still today.

Which brings me to my second point of disagreement with Linker. He says:

Versions of these traditionalist arguments were accepted by nearly every human being who’s ever lived until a couple of decades ago — and (supposedly) Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton until just a few years ago. Like them, I’ve come to reject those arguments. But saying they now seem wrong is one thing. Relegating them to the category of the foulest prejudice is something else entirely. It’s reckless to break so quickly with the past and jump so easily to moral condemnation.

Except . . . that’s precisely what we, as a society, did with respect to miscegenation. In a few years, objections to sexual relations between blacks and whites went from being an extremely commonly held opinion (and not just in the South), to one that was still extremely common but could not be admitted to in public without being deemed profoundly retrograde.

Think about the pace of change. Brown vs. Board was 1954. Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg was in 1971. In 17 years, we went from a society that promulgated racial separation and white supremacy from childhood onward, to a society committed to using the force of the law to undo and reverse what the earlier social and legal system had forcibly imposed, and to indoctrinate children in the opposite ideology. Loving v. Virginia was in 1967, a time when the defense of segregation was still active and violent. After Loving, how long was it respectable for a public figure to say that sexual relations between blacks and whites was wrong, and a threat to American civilization? Five years? Ten?

Considering the depth and longevity of official white supremacy in American history, we broke with the past with what one might call “all deliberate speed,” and moved quickly to moral condemnation even though huge numbers of people stubbornly refused to change their no-longer-respectable views.

Now, I’m not arguing that the analogy is a good one in all respects. In particular, the social and legal disabilities that gay people and black people suffered under in American history are wildly disparate in their operation and effects. I’m just saying that the end of legal and social support for miscegenation in America was radical. It didn’t radically redefine what marriage was – but it radically redefined what the United States was. It made it impossible to argue that the United States was a country by and for white people, and arguing that the United States was precisely such a country had a long, long history in America.

And, let me note that I am suspicious of claims that gay marriage radically redefines marriage as such. It seems to me instead that it’s a capstone achievement of the “Romeo and Juliet revolution” that treats marriage as rooted in love, and that sees its legal purpose as an institution for mutual aid and responsibility between individuals (particularly for child-rearing), rather than as a means of securing legitimacy for heirs and the continuity of extended family lines – and, not at all incidentally, of the feminist revolution that questions any distinction between “natural” male and female roles as likely to be a way of enforcing an inegalitarian distribution of power.

But gay marriage may, in fact, make it extremely difficult for traditional Christians to continue to think of the United States as a Christian country. Which, notwithstanding that equality for non-Christian citizens goes all the way back to the founding, we have a long, long history of thinking of this country as being. That, I think, is where the radicalism of gay marriage really lies, for America’s many conservative Christians. And if I’m right, then the potency of the analogy with miscegenation may not be so weak after all.

None of which means that we have to anathematize those who hold to the old dispensation. But then, maybe anathematization isn’t a liberal tool of persuasion at all, even when you are dealing with “rank bigotry” and “the foulest prejudice.”

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