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Are Gays Too Late to Destroy Marriage?

Their influence may ultimately be nothing compared to what straights have done.

Take France, for example, a country regarded by many as socially progressive and secular, but nonetheless one of the most Catholic countries in the European Union. In 1999, the French National Assembly enacted a system—the Civil Solidarity Pact, or PACS—by which gay couples who were being denied traditional church marriage could still enjoy some of the protections of the state. The legislation's wording was intentionally ambiguous, and left-leaning partisans (a slight majority at the time) were able to secure its passage as an issue of fairness under the law.

But a lack of specifics in the law provided just the loophole straight couples had been seeking—a way to loosely bond and receive many of the civil benefits of marriage without having to invite the Holy Roman Catholic Church to weigh the merits of their relationships. Moreover, in the decade since its passage, the PACS has come to be used overwhelmingly by heterosexuals. One of every three heterosexual couplings is now registered as a PACS, according to government statistics. Tax law in France has been amended to incorporate such couples, and even the most elegantly appointed city-hall rooms once used for weddings are now routinely rented out for PACS "celebrations."

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Kevin Phinney reviews theater for this paper. He is the author of Souled American: How Black Music Transformed White Culture.

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The PACS offers many of the legal benefits of marriage, including affording its participants "mutual and material" assistance, particularly in reference to illness and employment. Basically, the partners (never more than two) must be 18 or older and must share a residence. In addressing these issues, the PACS closely parallels what Washingtonians have come to recognize as the "everything-but-marriage" law which may or may not come up for a referendum vote this fall.

But the closest corollary to the new state law is actually one that was already on the books: Washington state marriage law. The act, the approved SB 5688 that Referendum 71 seeks to put to public vote, merely added the institution of domestic partnership to currently existing laws about marriage on the state books. So if it is de facto marriage, why not just call it so and be done with it?

It appears that marriage as a social contract continues to evolve, but that has much less to do with gays and lesbians wanting to get married than with the desire to make marriage more relevant to the current social order.

As new options for committed relationships appear and rearing children outside a traditional relationship loses its stigma, there seems to be less peer pressure to get or remain married. And that, ironically enough, has raised the prevailing level of marital bliss. According to Foster, marital satisfaction has actually risen over the past century "due to the divorce rate which weeds out unhappy marriages. As a result, the couples who remain married seem relatively happy."

If changing antiquated notions of what it means to be married is what the religious right means by "destroying," maybe gays do have an ice pick in one hand and a blowtorch in the other. Change is, after all, an act of destruction as far as the previous order is concerned. Still, Coontz points out, "There has never been a bill proposed that would force a church to recognize a marriage that they felt they didn't want to. The movements to recognize same-sex marriages in churches are actually coming from inside the churches these days, and even very committed evangelicals are moving on this issue."

"Oh, you'll always have some bitter-enders, like the guys we found living in caves 20 years after World War II," Foster says with a chuckle. "But here's what's going to happen. The more gay people who get married, the more who will. So they'll marry, live their lives, and in some cases, divorce. It will seem normal because it will be normal."

Schwartz agrees, but predicts there may be more changes on the horizon for heterosexuals should same-sex marriage become an everyday occurrence. "People do change patterns of behavior, and certainly the fact that marriage today doesn't look like marriage 50 years ago is evidence of that. But they don't change based on statistics they see or some documentary on TV. They change because of the people they know and come into contact with. So as homosexual couples marry and make friends with heterosexual couples, that could have an influence in ways we haven't seen yet."

Could it be that traditional marriage, like communism, is an outmoded social contract straining under the weight of its own inflexibility? In the final analysis, it may not be same-sex marriage, but a simple insistence to self-determine, that's causing brittle institutions of church and state to crack. More and more, people are writing their own vows and arriving at a moral code that may not include what they consider antiquated notions handed down from the Founding Fathers or religious mores dating from the first century A.D.

What will it mean when we don't all agree on a God, or what a wedding should look like, or what should constitute a family? Take a look around: We're already there.

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Kevin Phinney reviews theater for this paper. He is the author of Souled American: How Black Music Transformed White Culture.

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