by David Orland

If you've ever tried to discuss gay unions with someone who supports them, you know how
difficult this can be. One is instantly branded a homophobe, a Christian reactionary, a right
wing yokel and there the conversation ends, at least as far as your interlocutor is concerned.
Unfortunately, such conversations perfectly mirror the national conversation about same-sex
unions; they are one-sided and deaf.
My first run-in with the emerging orthodoxy regarding gay unions often referred to by its
euphemism, "domestic partnership" occurred about two years ago. Reading the papers
over a pot of coffee one Sunday afternoon with my then girlfriend, I came across an editorial
on the subject. At this time, the "gay community" had just begun in earnest its efforts to force
state legislatures to confer a legal status on homosexual unions and the editorial, which
came out in support of these efforts, was overheated and impassioned in the way such
editorials nearly always are. I guess I chuckled to myself because my girlfriend asked what it
was. "Oh nothing," I remember replying with a smile and heavy irony, "just another article
about why the cause of gay "marriage" is so moral and important."
Her smile disappeared. I suspected indeed, I knew, somewhere in my belly that I had
made a serious mistake. "And what's so funny about that," she asked, her voice lowering in a
sinister and unprecedented way. "Oh, nothing much," I answered, trying to avert disaster, "it's
not so funny but it is kind of funny, you must admit." But she persisted: "why is it kind of
funny?" Something told me I had been here before, which is probably why, rather than
dropping the issue, I decided to defend myself. At first, I tried in a more or less incoherent
way to point out what I considered the inherent silliness of the editorial's moral posturing. But
with each attempt to sidestep a truly nasty argument, my girlfriend's indignation grew. Before
very long (as is the way with such discussions), I had been resolutely labeled a
"homophobe", an epithet which with the help of its pseudo-scientific Latin suffix
conveniently renders pathological all deviations from the orthodox. "I know what you're going
to say," she concluded triumphantly, smirking like a champion of dorm room contention,
"you're going to say that homosexuality is immoral!"
In fact, that wasnt what I was going to say. I knew that the argument that same-sex unions
are sexually immoral would be the last thing to convince my agnostic girlfriend. Besides, a
much different kind of argument had occurred to me. What, I asked, did the supporters of
domestic partnership hope to gain? Legal recognition on par with heterosexual marriage, she
answered. And what did such recognition entail, aside from some more or less vague sense
of legitimacy? A series of legal privileges and economic subsidies. You mean, I asked, that
couples involved in homosexual unions are seeking to secure for themselves a variety of
benefits which would distinguish them, like married couples, from all other individuals in
society? Exactly.
Perhaps she thought she had won the issue by these answers. At any rate, when I asked my
next question that is, why she thought homosexuals should ge the same benefits as
married couples she gave me the odd look reserved for slow learners. "Fairness," she
decisively answered. It was at this point that I laid my cards on the table. But fairness isn't
the issue at all, I said. Of course married heterosexual couples do benefit from the legal
status of marriage but to point this out which, as far as I could tell, was as far as the
argument in favor of domestic partnership went merely begged the question. The point

was, why should homosexual partners enjoy these benefits, too?

Or, to put it another way, what is it about married heterosexual couples that make their
benefits legitimate? For until supporters of domestic partnership could show that homosexual
couples met the same conditions, they could not claim to have been treated unfairly.
And this, of course, is precisely what has not been shown either by my girlfriend or, more
distantly, the policy wonks of the homosexual lobby. To justify giving privileges or exemptions
or subsidies to some particular group in society, the benefit of doing so for society at large
must first be shown. With heterosexual marriage, the case is clear enough. Heterosexual
marriage is a matter of genuine social interest because the family is essential to society's
reproduction. The crux of my argument, in other words, was that married couples receive the
benefits they do not because the state is interested in promoting romantic love or because
the Bible says so or because of the influence of special interest groups but rather because
the next generation is something that is and should be of interest to all of us. And, by
definition, this is not a case that can be made for homosexual unions. To that degree, the
attempt to turn the question of domestic partnership into a debate about fairness falls flat.
The more persistent supporters of domestic partnership will of course respond to this
argument by pointing to the case in which homosexual partners adopt children or, in the case
of lesbians, undergo artificial insemination. The intention here is to show that the nuclear
family is found even among homosexual couples and that, to that extent, homosexual unions
do indeed meet the same criterion of social interest as heterosexual ones and thus should
be granted legal status. It is a weak argument and one that ultimately back-fires on those
who employ it. This is for two reasons. First, adoption by homosexual couples is still
exceedingly rare and the law though many are surprised to learn this is aimed at the
general case. To confer legal benefits on the entire class of would-be homosexual spouses
just because some very small minority of this class approximates the pattern of the nuclear
family would be a bit like admitting all applicants to a select university on the grounds that a
few of them had been shown to meet the entrance requirements.
Second, the right of this small minority to the benefits of marriage is dubious in the extreme.
Homosexual "families" of whatever type are always and necessarily parasitic on
heterosexual ones. In both of these respects, then, the counter-argument from adoption falls
well short of its intended mark. Indeed, supporters of domestic partnership who employ this
argument inadvertently diminish their case. By accepting that benefits can only be accorded
for reasons of social interest, they exclude the overwhelming majority of their constituency
all of those homosexual unions which do not sponsor children while reaffirming as
legitimate the whole range of benefits accorded to heterosexual marriages.
Two years have passed since that Sunday afternoon with my girlfriend and, in those years,
the homosexual lobby has gained considerable ground, securing favorable domestic
partnership legislation in Hawaii and Vermont and pushing the question of homosexual
unions to the forefront of the legislative agenda in a score of other states. Domestic
partnership has also gained ground in the private sector. According to the National Gay and
Lesbian Task Force, "in 1990, there were less than two dozen companies offering [domestic
partnership benefits] today, there are more than 2,500." On June 8th, the nation's three
largest auto makers Chrysler Corp., Ford Motor Company and General Motors Corp.
joined this trend, announcing that from now on employees with same-sex partners would
receive the same benefits as married couples.
Observing these developments from the sidelines perhaps remembering that not very
pleasant Sunday two years ago I seem to find myself defending the unpopular side of the

issue more and more frequently. Though the argument of my opponents has remained the
same, the tenor of their denials becomes ever more fierce and sanctimonious. Indeed, the
perceived justness of domestic partnership legislation seems to have become so wellestablished that people have intuitions about it. "Though I can't refute you," I've been told
more than once, "I know you're wrong." All of which leads me to suspect that the inroads
made by the homosexual lobby have not just been in state legislatures and corporate
America but in the public conscience as well, which is bad news for those of us on the other
side of the issue.
Given the feebleness of the argument in favor of domestic partnership, this is a remarkable
development and yet further proof of the cultural left's best-tested strategy: moral exclusion.
As the gay lobby would have it, the cause of domestic partnership is firmly within the tradition
of the civil rights struggles of the 1960's and '70's. Gay unions, supporters claim, are simply
a matter of fairness, of applying the laws of the land equally to everyone. This selfcharacterization thoroughly bogus though it is has two important consequences when
allowed to stand unchallenged. In the first place, it allows the homosexual lobby to abrogate
to itself all of the pious sentiments so many feel for the civil rights movement. In the second
place, it conveniently demonizes their opponents, who again by virtue of the civil rights
analogy find themselves placed on moral par with George Wallace and the Ku Klux Klan.
Not the best platform from which to gain public support.
Those who uphold the cause of the traditional family do themselves a great disservice by
allowing their opponents to set the terms of the debate in this manner. By engaging the
homosexual lobby on grounds of sexual morality, not only do they appear politically
backwards but, what's worse, they actually assist the left in its effort to cast the pro-family
voice in American politics as morally intolerant and retrograde while representing itself as the
virtuous guardian of civil liberties. If the traditional families cause is to meet with success in
the future, the strategies need to be rethought. In particular, we will have to learn a lesson
from the left: that the best way to advance our interests is to identify these interests with the
public interest as such.
Friends of the traditional family do themselves a great disservice by allowing their opponents
to set the terms of the debate in this manner. By engaging the homosexual lobby on grounds
of sexual morality, not only do they appear politically backwards but, what's worse, they
actually assist the left in its effort to cast the pro-family voice in American politics as intolerant
and retrograde while representing itself as the virtuous guardian of civil liberties. If the cause
of the family is to meet with success in the future, its strategies need to be rethought. In
particular, strategists will have to learn a lesson from the left: that the best way to advance
the interests of the family is to identify them with the public interest as such.
In the case of the domestic partnership debate, this means that pro-family forces must reject
the terms in which the debate has so far been conducted and place the anti-domestic
partnership cause on a new footing. To argue that homosexual marriage is sexually immoral
will only convince those who already are convinced and alienate the rest, who see such
opposition as an attempt to return to the bad old days when fairness wasn't recognized as a
political value. Instead, a genuinely public case one which celebrates the benefits of
marriage to society while clearly distinguishing between marriage and other types of
relationship should be made. In this way, traditional family advocates may succeed in
shifting the burden of justification to where it should have been all along, squarely on the
shoulders of the left. If homosexual marriage becomes a legally recognized fact in the next
decade and it is entirely possible that it will this will only be because no one has talked
about it.