The thing which worries me about gay marriage is that the norms surrounding gay long-term relationships will be imported into the concept of marriage.
(The above is a media write-up of a study that found that in a study of 566 gay couples, only 45 percent had made the promise to be sexually monogamous. This is an example of a different moral norm surrounding gay long-term relationships.)
(In the above link is a NYTimes piece arguing that homosexual marriage could modernise (that is import different norms into) marriage as an institution.), specifically; “The traditional American marriage is in crisis, and we need insight,” he said, citing the fresh perspective gay couples bring to matrimony. “If innovation in marriage is going to occur, it will be spearheaded by homosexual marriages.”
The importation of a moral norm like the one above surrounding gay long-term relationships would destroy the institution of marriage for heterosexuals who wish to pursue a long-term mating strategy.
I don’t know many men who would sign up to an institution where the partners are expected/morally obliged to be emotionally faithful but not sexually faithful. It is much easier for women to get casual sex than men, so any man signing himself up to that deal would be signing himself up for cuckoldry and cuckoldry is the absolute worst thing that can happen to a man pursuing a long-term mating strategy, (and it is the evolved moral norms surrounding the long-term mating strategy which marriage as a cultural institution is/was developed around/for.)
Of course, if people became more knowledgeable about evo-bio/evo-psych and instead started calling marriage essentially what it is, the social-codification of the long-term mating strategy in humans, then this concern wouldn’t really matter. (No worrying about importing norms anti-thetical to the reproductive interests of one party in the relationship and subsequently which disincentivises the pursuit of the strategy from that party as its definition is strictly evo-bio/evo-psych.)
(On a side note, the reason I’ve given above is also why I think a lot of religious people are against gay marriage, they fear that it will change the institution and expose them to cuckoldry. This wouldn’t be the first time that religious norms have been developed to prevent cuckoldry/ensure paternal certainty;
See link.
Of course, I doubt these fears will be allayed as doing so would go against the feminist establishment’s desire to create a matriarchial/matrilineal cad society where all men are cuckolds (if they aren’t cads that is), but that’s a whole different issue.)
…I’m going to propose several assumptions that will be used in a hypothetical. We need not debate these assumptions as I am just using them to illuminate a particular form of logic that would occur when deciding a legal case. These assumptions and the hypothetical will also be used to illuminate the existence of a moral system behind laws which the law attempts to divine (or which Judges at least attempt to) but which doesn’t always map directly onto that moral system.
Assumption 1) Marriage exists as the social codification of the long-term mating strategy in humans.
Assumption 2) The long-term mating strategy in humans consists of men exchanging their own exclusive physical investment for a woman’s exclusive sexual investment. If the man diverts his physical investment to another woman, this is at a cost to the original woman he promised it too. Likewise if a woman directs her sexual investment to another man this is at a cost to the original man that she promised it to.
Assumption 3) Cuckoldry, that is the diversion of a woman’s sexual investment to one man while she is in a long-term relationship with another man is the worst thing that can possibly happen to that man who is in a long-term relationship with her. In a system where cuckoldry is rampant, male monogamy is not expected to evolve or exist, ergo the male long-term mating strategy is not expected to evolve or exist.
Here is a hypothetical for you dealing with the penumbra.
Let’s say we live in a legal system that protects the long-term mating interests of both a man and woman in a long-term mating relationship. Let’s say this society calls this long-term mating relationship, marriage. Let’s say that the underlying justification for this ‘marriage law’ is the evolutionary principles surrounding mating.
Let’s then also say that a group to which this ‘marriage law’ does not apply, suddenly want to be included within the same legal construct.
A married couple in this society want to get divorced. The woman has been adulterous, so the man wants to retract his physical investment in her, which means no providing resources or protection to her. Given that this legal system protects his long-term mating interests, and given that the underlying justification for this protection is the evolutionary principles surrounding mating, the judge allows him to retract his physical investment to the woman.
Now let’s say that the group to which this ‘marriage law’ does not apply is Gay Men. And let’s say that Gay marriage is passed and they are suddenly allowed to marry.
And let’s say that the justification for this allowance into the institution is ‘equality’.
Now let’s also say that because these are gay men we are dealing with, that they do not have the same mating psychologies as heterosexual men and so are perfectly okay with sexual non-monogamy. There is no rule proscribing sex with others outside the marriage within gay long-term relationships.
Now here is an instance in the penumbra. A gay couple has married, but they want to get divorced. One of them has been adulterous. However, it is argued in court that the norms surrounding gay long-term relationships do not proscribe adultery. Should this adultery factor into the division of assets, the supply of alimony? The exchange of physical investment from one of the men to the other? Is there even an exchange of physical investment? If the underlying basis of ‘marriage law’ are the evolutionary principles surrounding mating, how do you integrate a group of people whose mating behaviours violate those very principles into a system that has been designed to protect the interests conceived of via those principles? It doesn’t make sense to say that in a gay couple one partner can cuckold the other partner. So how can you apply a rule that retracts the physical investment from one party to another, when the basis for the existence of that rule, cuckoldry, doesn’t occur?
It’s plausible that an exception could be made. Kind of like the whole, we have freedom of speech except you can’t yell fire in a crowded theatre type kind of exception. The law does this all the time. For instance a statue against cruelty to animals might exclude mice, rats, and pigeons from the definition of animal for the purposes of the statute, as a way to allow lab experimentation or pest removal, even though we all know that they are still animals in reality.
But it’s also plausible that because the basis for the anti-cuckoldry rule does not occur in gay couples, that the rule won’t be applied, and it will be left at that.
What then happens if another married couple come along, a heterosexual couple, and they want to divorce? The woman has been adulterous and so the man argues that he should be allowed retract his physical investment to the woman, i.e. no giving her assets he paid for, no giving her alimony due to there being anti-cuckoldry laws. But the woman is clever. She knows that gay married couples don’t have the anti-cuckoldry law applied to them, and she knows that gay marriage is to be treated as equal to heterosexual marriage, and so she argues that since anti-cuckoldry laws aren’t applied in gay marriage, then they shouldn’t be applied in heterosexual marriage as the two forms of marriage are equal. They are the same. Indeed, it is a conceptual error to even consider them two separate forms of marriage. There is only one form of marriage and thus by establishing that a gay couple divorcing don’t have anti-cuckoldry laws applied in their divorce, a heterosexual couple divorcing shouldn’t have anti-cuckoldry laws applied in a divorce either.
Now all of a sudden, this institution, which has protected the long-term mating interests of men and women for centuries, has suddenly undermined a vital protection to the long-term mating interests of one of the parties by treating two separate categories, which have separate moral rules surrounding them, as if they were the same category. If you equalise the categories, then you need to equalise the rules surrounding the categories to make them equal.
Now it is possible that the categories could be equalised, and they decide to just throw an exception in in those instances where it would be unjust to allow equal treatment, as a way to resolve the issue and allow gays and heterosexuals to marry while retaining the different moral rules for each category.
But it’s also possible they won’t. And heterosexual men’s mating interests will be crushed within the crucible of rigorous logic…
Now ask yourself, the people on the left pushing gay marriage. Do they have a history of trying to erode and dismantle the nuclear family, do they have a history of trying to erode and dismantle anti-cuckoldry laws and norms, do they have a history of trying to erode and dismantle Patriarchy? To answer the question is to illuminate their agenda with respect to gay marriage and the plausible direction that such equality will take.
