BRADLEY THOMPSON: Marriage Nihilism.
It is often said of postmodern “marriage” that it does not affect the marriages of heterosexual couples. As The Boston Globe asked in an oft-cited editorial defending same-sex marriage, “How would gay civil marriage affect your lives, liberties, or opportunities, or your own marriages?” This is the million-dollar question that has left conservatives and Christians stammering for an answer. This simple and seemingly commonsense question is no doubt important, but it is also a disingenuous and trivial evasion of the nature and point of marriage.
On a superficial level, a same-sex “marriage” would not affect my marriage for the same reasons that none of the various forms of postmodern marriage (e.g., polygamous, polyamorous, bigamous, incestuous, pedophilic, or interspecies) would affect my marriage. If two men want to marry, if a man and five women want to marry, if ten men and women want to marry each other, or if a woman wants to marry a dolphin, none of these unions will have any effect on my marriage in the same way that no other heterosexual marriage affects mine. Why not? On one level, all these relationships are private matters that do not have any bearing on my marriage, which is also a private matter. The simple truth of the matter is that there are only two people in the entire world who could affect my marriage: I am one and the other is my wife.
On a deeper and more fundamental level, same-sex marriage will unquestionably affect my liberties and opportunities in innumerable ways; it will affect my marriage indirectly and in meaningful ways; and it will certainly affect the way future generations experience marriage. The postmodern view of “marriage” will impose a variety of “negative externalities” on society and therefore actually harm the institution of marriage—and my marriage with it.
By democratizing and disconnecting marriage from its metaphysical roots, the postmodern view of marriage will inject a major dose of subjectivism, egalitarianism, and moral relativism into America’s marriage culture. It is grounded in the subjectivist premise that marriage is simply about individual wants, feelings, and needs, on the egalitarian premise that marriage is about companionship and all companionships are equal, and on the relativist principle that we cannot rank, distinguish, or judge one form of romantic union from another. The postmodern view makes different things the same and it makes unequal things equal.
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