When President Bush recently described marriage as a "union between a man and a woman," he was no doubt being careful to pay lip service to the "protection" rationale for last week's "Marriage Protection Week." Bush went on to say that his administration was working to "encourage marriage," invoking, as conservatives often do, the idea of strong marriages as sound public policy. But by continuing to feature marriage protection and marriage promotion side by side -- as if they are the same thing -- conservatives appear oblivious to a central paradox in their argument: If two-parent families are really the best way to raise children, shouldn't we want all parents -- including gay and lesbian parents -- to get married? And if so, isn't marriage protection, as conservatives define it, incompatible with marriage promotion, at least for the not-insignificant number of parents, biological and adoptive, who are homosexuals?
This paradox (which Prospect contributing editor E.J. Graff documented last year) was on full display when Sen. Rick Santorum (R-Penn.) delivered a speech titled "The Necessity of Marriage" at The Heritage Foundation in late September. Santorum argued that marriage is a key foundation of healthy societies and that government ought not to remain neutral on the question of whether people should get married. (You can view the full speech here and read an uncorrected transcript here.)
The benefits of marriage, Santorum said, can be demonstrated via empirical evidence. He noted that children living with two parents are less likely to be physically abused and less likely to suffer emotional neglect than those living in other arrangements. He went on to say that children in two-parent families are less likely to drop out of high school and tend to stay away from alcohol, tobacco and illegal drugs.
And, Santorum contended, the benefits of marriage extend to husbands and wives as well. He argued that mortality rates for married women and married men are lower than for their single counterparts, that married women are more likely than single women to rate their health as "excellent" or "good," and that married women are less likely than single women to suffer physical abuse. Husbands, the senator noted, are less likely to be incarcerated than single men. He also made an economic case for marriage, saying that while "women gain more financially from marriage than men do," married men have higher incomes than single men.
Santorum's argument for the virtues of marriage is, of course, oversimplified (as Theodora Ooms and Isabel Sawhill argued in the Prospect last year). But even conceding Santorum's basic point that marriage is, as he puts it, "an inherent good on a very practical level" for society, where does that leave homosexuals -- particularly those with children?
Following Santorum's Heritage speech, I asked him the following questions: "If our answer to single women for financial stability and welfare is to get married, or that marriage will help them out, what do we tell single gay women? Isn't that kind of painting a bleak future for them?"
Here was his response:
Well, what I would say is that marriage is a healthy relationship for a man and woman to be involved in to have children, and that is shown by the evidence. If someone is not involved in a relationship where children are a possibility then the dynamic is completely different. So I would just make the argument that what we're focused on here in welfare policy -- the direct objective here is women with children and how we establish stable relationships so we can nurture children, and, therefore, have a more stable society going forward. And I'm not suggesting that single men -- heterosexual, homosexual -- [or] single women -- heterosexual, homosexual -- without children should get married. I mean that's -- if they want to get married, if that's the time of their life they want to do that, that's fine. And I'm not suggesting that it's financially better or worse for them. I'm suggesting that if you have a child, that you have that additional responsibility -- and its additional burden. It's tough; raising children is tough. I've got six at home; I can tell you, it's tough. That having a partner there that's a nurturer and -- that provides the critical role that men and women -- and it's a different role. I can tell you as a father I provide a whole different set of values, if you will, to my children, than my wife does, just from being a man, and she being a woman. So I think that's important for the nurturing of children, for the stability of them going forward, and that's why I would suggest that it's appropriate for them in those cases.
The shaky logic of Santorum's response shows just how uncomfortable conservatives are with the corner they have backed themselves into on marriage protection and marriage promotion. First, Santorum retreats to the argument that the virtues of marriage only apply to couples with children. This ignores the fact that many gays and lesbians do have children, either biological or adopted. No one knows exactly how many people fall into this category, but, according to the 1990 census, 20 percent of same-sex female households contained a child under the age of 18; the same was true for 5 percent of same-sex male households. The 2000 census placed the number of same-sex cohabiting couples in the United States at about 600,000 -- meaning that the number of children being raised by same-sex couples is at least in the tens of thousands, and perhaps more. (For more details, see this report from the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force.) All of which is to say that Santorum's reasoning -- marriage is only important for couples with children, and couples with children are by definition heterosexual -- is deeply flawed.
But even if you ignore the reality that children are being raised by people in same-sex relationships, Santorum was flatly contradicting an argument he made earlier in his speech: that marriage is beneficial not only for children but for husbands and wives as well. Faced with the issue of gay marriage, Santorum suddenly seemed to be arguing that the benefits of marriage only accrue to couples with children, and that he didn't care whether childless people -- no matter their sexual orientation -- tied the knot. Earlier, he had claimed that married men had higher incomes than single men and that "women gain more financially from marriage than men do." In response to my question, he explained that he was "not suggesting that it's financially better or worse" for men or women to get married -- even though he had just implied in his speech that marriage carries financial benefits.
Seeking to twist his way out of his own convoluted reasoning, Santorum went quite a bit farther down the slippery logical path to gay marriage than he probably would have liked. One of the classic challenges liberals pose to conservatives on gay marriage is whether marriage without the possibility of procreation is, in fact, always a sin -- and if it's not a sin for sterile heterosexuals, why should it be a sin for same-sex couples? Conservatives usually answer these queries by arguing that there is something in the natural order of humanity that makes the marriage of, say, an 80-year-old heterosexual couple acceptable but the marriage of a homosexual couple sinful.
Not so for Santorum -- apparently. In fact, in his response to my question, he lumped childless heterosexuals together with homosexuals, drawing no distinction between the two. If, as he argues, it's all about the children, Santorum either believes that heterosexuals unable to have children should be banned by law from marrying or that we should throw open the floodgates of marriage to homosexuals as well. Which is it?
Well, Gary Bauer, cover your eyes, but Santorum came frighteningly close to endorsing gay marriage. By the time he got to these two lines of his response, the force of the logic he was employing to escape the paradox of marriage promotion and marriage protection had acquired an intriguing momentum of its own: "And I'm not suggesting that single men -- heterosexual, homosexual -- [or] single women -- heterosexual, homosexual -- without children should get married. I mean that's -- if they want to get married, if that's the time of their life they want to do that, that's fine." So there you have it. Rick Santorum on gay marriage: "That's fine."
Thomas Lang is a Prospect intern.