Here come the grooms?(Book Review)

Gay Marriage: Why It Is Good for Gays, Good for Straights, and Good for America By Jonathan Rauch Times Books, 224 pages, $22

If homosexual marriage is ever democratically (as opposed to judicially) legislated, it will be because of the case made by individuals like Jonathan Ranch. In Gay Marriage, Ranch eschews legal and liberationist assertions and instead argues on the merits that homosexual marriage is, as his subtitle maintains, good for gays, good for straights, and good for America.

The book's great virtue is its straightforwardness. Ranch's first chapter asks: What is marriage for--why does society privilege marriage legally? His threefold answer is: to provide a healthy environment for children, to settle the young (especially men), and to provide reliable caregivers (especially in the case of catastrophe). Ranch assumes such interests are severable--that is, raising children can be separated from marriage as a domesticating and care-giving institution. This allows him to leave children out of his definition of marriage: the legal recognition of two people's lifelong commitment to care for each other.

For obvious reasons, Rauch emphasizes domestication and care-giving in his case for same-sex marriage. Gay marriage, he asserts, would make gay men grow up. Within a generation or so, he believes, most would abandon the current culture of libertinism and adopt the conventional view that love, sex, and marriage go together. The possibility of marriage would elevate gay men's expectations (Rauch says little about lesbians in this context) and open them to the idea that security, happiness, and health are found in stable, committed, life-long relationships.

Not only would gay marriage be good for gay men, Rauch maintains that it would be good for marriage itself. By adopting same-sex matrimony, society could normalize the expectation that all couples should marry, thus de-legitimizing cohabitation. We could uniformly adopt what Rauch designates"Rule 1 ": If you want the benefits of marriage, get married.

The obvious rejoinder is that it is not so clear that children can be removed from our core understanding of marriage without fundamentally undermining the institution. Marriage, no doubt, is in a state of crisis, but not primarily because couples are failing to marry, as Rauch suggests. The decline of marriage coincides with society's acceptance of the separation of sex from procreation, and marriage from parenthood. The former made sex before (and outside of) marriage easier; the latter made cohabitation and divorce tolerable. Marriage started to fall apart, in other words, when couples started to think it was primarily about personal commitment and mutual ...