Reasonable reservations about gay marriage

Reading Robin Williams' column Friday, I came to a startling realization: Apparently, the definition of "bigot" has now been broadened to include me. My crime? Believing that in the best of all possible worlds, every child would have both a mother and a father.

Robin is a friend, and he is articulate and humane. But his column on gay marriage reflected some widespread confusions that we could all profitably avoid.

For one thing, let's be careful when we talk about discrimination. Society constantly recognizes differences between people, with good reason. We draw the line between physically fit and unfit firefighters, between competent and incompetent teachers, between the best and the second-best candidate for a job. In each case, one might say, we discriminate. But we only call it discrimination when it happens without a good reason: racial discrimination in housing, gender discrimination in the workplace and so on.

The question is, Which kind of distinction does our current definition of marriage make? The good kind, like finding the best candidate for a job? Or the bad kind, like racism? Robin writes that Bush's call for a Constitutional amendment is like the decision to intern Japanese Americans during World War II or the "separate but equal" doctrine of Plessy v. Ferguson.

This amounts to a dogmatic assertion that preventing gay marriage is the bad kind of discrimination, but it doesn't add up to an argument. I'm still looking for one, because to me it seems obvious that men and women bring complementary strengths to the enterprise of raising a family. Beyond the matched differences in how mothers and fathers relate to their kids, there's value in knowing that every child can identify with one of his or her parents.

Granted, the LGBTQ contingent constitutes an exception to the rule. For the uninitiated, that's our school's elegant acronym for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgendered and queer students. There have always been some people who are naturally inclined to homosexuality, or who consider themselves to be other than the gender biology has made them. It would be unfair to blame these people for being the way they are, or to exclude them on account of their unchosen traits from any of life's greatest pleasures unless we have a truly compelling reason to do so.

But what's natural for a small part of the population is not the norm for the rest of us. The flip side of the some-are-born-gay token is that most of us are born straight. What happens when a boy is adopted by two women, or a girl has two dads and no mother? These situations could work out, just as single-parent families can. But we don't celebrate single parenthood. Instead, most of us think it's a fundamentally difficult situation that can sometimes, with great love and hard work, be made to turn out for the best.

If we begin celebrating gay marriage as a perfectly normal alternative, we're on track to have lots of adopted kids — most of whom will be straight, since most kids are — looking in the mirror and thinking, It doesn't take someone like me to make a family. Gay people most of all know how tough that situation can be, and it doesn't strike me as an obviously good idea to put more people into it.

I'm against the amendment because it overestimates the importance of government. If civil unions give all the same benefits as marriage, why should we amend the Constitution to restrict what we can call them? The social meaning of marriage exists outside the law and will accrue to gays when it becomes uncouth not to invite gay spouses to weddings, funerals and company picnics. Meanwhile, most of us won't be gay no matter what the law says. I'm with Mayor Daley of Chicago in thinking that no-fault divorce has done more to undermine our social fabric than gay marriage ever could, and it's a mystery to me why divorce doesn't easily trump gay issues on American social conservatives' list of concerns.

All the same, it seems to me that there are good arguments for keeping marriage as is. Beyond the parenting issue, it's fair to ask whether we'll have any basis to "discriminate" against polygamists or other new kinds of marriage once we extend the equal protection logic to gays. Even if some of the arguments for traditional marriage are bad, they aren't bigoted. Advocates of gay marriage will do credit to everyone, most of all themselves, if they rebut rather than dismiss the arguments of their critics. David Robinson is a philosophy major from Potomac, Md. He can be reached at dgr@princeton.edu.