I am as straight as an arrow and not particularly invested in this debate. Sorry for stating the obvious but 1/ is there any difference between straight and gay men in the number of extra-marital affairs? and 2/ do you have any data backing up your view that rejection of gay marriage would be linked to the extra-marital affairs of gay couples?
I have another explanation: there is a great ideological sorting taking place both on the left and the right leading to the “omnicause” and gay marriage is becoming part of that. I would argue that to avoid this, if it is in fact possible, gays and lesbians need to reject the TQ and all the attendant folklore such as rainbow flags and Pride and become part of a SLGB non-movement. - “S” being “straight” of course.
The distinction is that for most straight guys who cheat, they acknowledge it's cheating whereas for many gay men (and certainly the predominant view of the culture) there is nothing objectionable about having sex with others besides your spouse - so there's no such thing as "cheating." (unless cheating just becomes another term for lying)
Gay men and monogamy is practically non-existent. A rounding error.
Long before I learned what transgenderism was I had started to change my mind on gay marriage because it seemed like all the gays I knew were promiscuous hedonists, and I had come to not endorse promiscuous hedonism.
How many guys do you know who did not cheat on their wife? And frankly, do you care? As for gay guys being hedonists, if that word is actually apt for gay sex which I would dispute, again, why would you care? The point of marriage is not to prevent people having fun, it’s to legally organise a relationship and provide for its offspring.
Where do you actually hear people citing monogamy as the reason they're reconsidering support for gay marriage? I've seen LOTS of folks commenting along the lines of, "We supported gay marriage because...but then..." Yet what follows is inevitably a discussion of the excesses of QT+ wokism and down-your-throat commercialized Pride, with the most consistent specific objections all having to do with kids.
We made a lot of arguments about wanting normal marriages, but we also swayed a lot of fence-sitters by pointing to the foibles of heterosexuals. It's difficult to argue against gay marriage when divorce and extramarital sex are so prevalent among straights. Normie straights may not approve of non-monogamy, but neither do they want to make hetero non-monogamy illegal (again.) I saw many conservatives over the past 20 years say something like, "I think marriage should be this, but that ship has sailed."
I can't think of ever having seen someone for whom monogamy was the hinge on which their opinion of gay marriage swings. The utterly understandable issue at the moment is how much the QT+ crowd has plowed past heterosexual foibles into sincerely offensive, intolerant and downright creepy territory, especially around kids.
You say you have never seen monogamy be the basis for anyone's support for gay marriage, and I don't doubt that because you are looking at what people will say about it and what people are willing to say buries the convictions under the surface. But watch what you concede in the argument: you say we won the fence-sitters by pointing at their own hypocrisy (heterosexual divorce and adultery), an accusation that works only if monogamy is real and binding, so you are affirming the standard in the same breath spent denying it. You also state that straights would never make adultery an illegal act again, confusing a fact about enforcement with a fact about meaning.
Underneath these premises is really one idea: marriage is whatever practitioners today happen to do, a label for a cluster of behaviors with no fixed content. And that is the premise that can't survive the argument it is used to defend.
If marriage has no fixed content, there was nothing specific for us to demand entry into and "marriage equality" was a twenty year campaign for access to a word. We didn't make that case. We made (in Sullivan's voice) the case that marriage is a particular and demanding thing and we wanted it for its obligations, not despite them. We staked our claim on the institution having a definition and that we were ready to commit to that definition.
So the real issue is not whether or not the public will admit that monogamy motivates them. It is what marriage itself really is and the answer is the one thing my critics' entire argument is designed to avoid.
What is this thing called marriage? Marriage is not love. Love occurs before it and outlasts; people love each other without getting married; people remain married without loving each other. It is not the legal status; that is the state's acknowledgement of something already constituted, not the thing itself. Cohabitation, shared finances, children, companionship — these can all take place outside of marriage, and absent inside of it. Remove everything else that can take place either without marriage or within it, and what you're left—its irreducible core—is the vow. Marriage is constituted by a promise. It is the only human relationship that comes into existence by being spoken. Friendship evolves; kinship is given; marriage is vowed. This is not incidental to it. It is the thing.
Once you see that marriage is a vow, you'll see that the content of the vow is not negotiable but rather definitional. “I promise to forsake all others” and “I promise to forsake all others unless we agree otherwise” are not the same promise loosely worded. So the question “does non-monogamy undermine the promise” contains a category error. It declines to make it and makes a different one. An open marriage is not a union with weakened fidelity vow; it is a union formed by a different vow or by the absence of that particular vow.
Why must the vow be exclusive and not some other type of vow? Why not, “we tell each other everything and rank each other first”? The monogamous vow is the only one that that makes the other person irreplaceable. Every other arrangement, however honest, however loving, contains an implicit "and also", and the "and also" states that the spouse is among the goods which rank against other goods. To reserve one's body to one person is to say: you are not one of many, rankable against others; you are the category. Exclusivity is how the vow communicates irreplacability. The "honesty and primacy" version preserves rank but circumvents category — and rank is precisely what every other relationship already possess. My best friend is number one among my friends. Marriage claims to be a type of relationship that is not first-among-many, but ‘the-one’, and exclusivity is the only part of the vow that delivers that. Take it away and marriage becomes the most important of one’s relationships rather than a relationship different in kind. That’s a real thing people might want. It is not the thing the word has meant.
We did not argue that marriage was an empty vessel we should be allowed to fill as we liked; we argued it was a specific demanding thing and we were prepared to be bound by it. A vow that can mean anything means nothing, and a marriage that can be anything is not marriage. I broke the vow and learned the hard way it was real. Our movement made a promise about what marriage is, and keeping faith with that promise turns out to require believing the very thing the culture has decided to stop believing
"you say we won the fence-sitters by pointing at their own hypocrisy (heterosexual divorce and adultery), an accusation that works only if monogamy is real and binding"
On the contrary, it demonstrates they don't actually consider monogamy real and binding. They pay it lip service, but not only do they fail to live up to it, they've stripped it of all the consequences they possibly can. Actions speak louder than words, and most folks on either side of the debate know it.
The issue they actually made noise about--on which I always thought they actually had a point--is that marriage is about managing procreation. I've no reason to believe this reasoning was burying anyone's true convictions; this was the actual conviction, the reason why it was fundamentally between a man and a woman. Monogamy was a part of that conviction, but not the greater part--witness all the married couples who experience adultery and yet stay together "for the kids." What really undermined this narrative was no-fault divorce and the structures that built up around it to normalize shared custody between households. Marriage went from being about children to being about the loving bond between a couple. The failure of that loving bond--the desire of even one spouse to leave--is now seen as sufficient to dissolve it. That's what folks mean when they say the ship has sailed.
The view of marriage as primarily procreative now lives alongside the view of marriage as a loving bond, but the latter is far more powerful in our culture, even among many conservatives. And in any case, much like neither you nor I can point to anyone citing monogamy as a reason to be against gay marriage, neither can we point to anyone saying that marriage should be "whatever practitioners today happen to do." Love was absolutely at the forefront of the fight for gay marriage, because love is what the vast majority of Americans now think marriage is about.
"Marriage is not love."
Marriage is support and encouragement of love. Yes, love can exist without marriage, and marriage can persist without love. In the former case, though, life can be fairly difficult for a couple without the government recognition--that's why we fought for it. In the latter case, social reaction to remaining in a "bad" marriage is either "stay together for the kids" or "divorce." That is to say, it's either within the old procreative paradigm, or the new love paradigm. You're the only person I've ever seen argue that monogamy is in and of itself the purpose of marriage.
"The monogamous vow is the only one that that makes the other person irreplaceable."
Sorry, dude, this is where you're just wrong. You were closer to the mark when you said "we...rank each other first." The phrase I like to use to describe it is "as I love myself," which, despite God's command that we act thus towards everybody, in practice I have found is something most people are lucky to achieve with even one person.
When something happens to my husband, it happens to me, and vice versa. When my husband does something, it is I who am doing it, and vice versa. Even when we have disagreements, I am disagreeing with myself. It's difficult to describe, because it includes recognizing his individuality as my individuality--there are parts of my husband I can't access, and vice versa. Yet we act as one; I'd be half a man without him. He is adamantly not replaceable. My husband is the only person I've ever even come close to experiencing that with.
But if you want to talk about replaceable...if you'd drop your commitment to someone just because his penis touched a third penis, you consider that person replaceable. Period, full stop. You do not love him as you love yourself, you love him contingent on his sexual behavior. This is somewhat understandable in a procreative paradigm, because they're not concerned about replaceability, they're concerned about lineage. But when it comes to considering another human irreplaceable, it's all about love, and whatever serves love.
I know you've had your struggles with this; I don't mean to be harsh. But this is really the secret sauce for a successful marriage--not non-monogamy itself, but rather the loving bond that you're explicitly downplaying when you elevate monogamy in importance. My husband and I are not strictly sexually monogamous, because we honestly don't need to be to maintain that bond. But I can also honestly say, I'd be celibate for the rest of my life if my husband asked it of me, because of that bond.
I'm certainly not saying that sex is irrelevant to the marital bond--if there's incompatibility in needs or expectations, it can eat away at the bond. And monogamy is going to remain important among straights, in large part because it's an important need and expectation for women (for entirely understandable biological reasons.) It's also entirely valid as a need/expectation for you, and any man who seeks it--I don't mean to diminish it as an individual requirement. But in wider society, it isn't the defining element of marriage, either in the old procreative paradigm or the new loving paradigm. It's always been a secondary expectation underlying the primary expectation, and it's always yielded to the primary expectation.
If you think all those heterosexuals are out there secretly hinging their view of gay marriage on monogamy, and they're just burying this real conviction underneath what they actually openly argue, that's the sort of unfalsifiable view that only you can self-critically challenge. But when it comes to the reasons people say they're for or against gay marriage, it's nowhere near the top of the list of concerns people express.
I have been with my partner/ husband now since 1993. I was 33 and he was 28 when we met. We did split for a couple of months 3 years in. We do not have an open marriage and are almost never apart. Most of our close gay male friends are in very long term committed relationships -- all longer than our female counterparts. We also have single friends that deal with dating/ sex -- not easy as older people.
That said. I have zero issue with couples who have open situations. Maybe I'm looking at this from a place w/o kids in the house -- who cares what adults do? Now -- Cheating is cheating. Regardless of people involved that is going to have consequences
I'm glad I came out in my mid 20's. I had a very healthy sex life in my straight time and when I figured it out ... my gay time. I lived that part of my life and don't need a repeat.
How would straight people really know what is happening in the gay world ? I have heard the same thing -- more open relationships. I just don't see it in my life. I also don't see how this would have anyone thinking differently about "gay" marriage. I have never heard it as a subject and we are in straight settings all the time.
Andrew had an open marriage full of no condom orgies (he hates condoms and has GRIDS). He's divorced now. It feels like the marriage thing was always a front for just wanting gays to have more status in society. He didn't actually want to have a lifelong monogamous commitment to another person.
The moment for me that encapsulates it all is when "Bear Week" in his hometown of Provincetown, MA resulted in a post-vaccine COVID outbreak, and then they engaged in an entire second round of COVID lockdowns. Its fun watching my kids not be able to go to school because a bunch of gay dudes got high on poppers and raw dogged until they got the delta variant en masse.
Bigotry of all kinds has taken over the Republican Party, & Republicans & their right-wing allies have control of an increasingly large majority of the American news media, which they are treating as propaganda outlets. I think that is the main reason for any reduction in support for marriage equality. I think each of the other factors mentioned may have a minor impact in public opinion, but this is probably the main one.
Another factor may be that some of the most notorious villains in our current society are gay or suspected of having closeted homosexual impulses, especially on the right. And all these sex scandals are making a lot of people jaundiced about any matter relating to sex, which may tie in to the reason you give for this phenomenon.
I am as straight as an arrow and not particularly invested in this debate. Sorry for stating the obvious but 1/ is there any difference between straight and gay men in the number of extra-marital affairs? and 2/ do you have any data backing up your view that rejection of gay marriage would be linked to the extra-marital affairs of gay couples?
I have another explanation: there is a great ideological sorting taking place both on the left and the right leading to the “omnicause” and gay marriage is becoming part of that. I would argue that to avoid this, if it is in fact possible, gays and lesbians need to reject the TQ and all the attendant folklore such as rainbow flags and Pride and become part of a SLGB non-movement. - “S” being “straight” of course.
The distinction is that for most straight guys who cheat, they acknowledge it's cheating whereas for many gay men (and certainly the predominant view of the culture) there is nothing objectionable about having sex with others besides your spouse - so there's no such thing as "cheating." (unless cheating just becomes another term for lying)
Gay men and monogamy is practically non-existent. A rounding error.
Long before I learned what transgenderism was I had started to change my mind on gay marriage because it seemed like all the gays I knew were promiscuous hedonists, and I had come to not endorse promiscuous hedonism.
How many guys do you know who did not cheat on their wife? And frankly, do you care? As for gay guys being hedonists, if that word is actually apt for gay sex which I would dispute, again, why would you care? The point of marriage is not to prevent people having fun, it’s to legally organise a relationship and provide for its offspring.
I think marriage is more than just a legal recognition of a relationship. see my really long post below
But again, do you have hard data that confirms your intuition?
Where do you actually hear people citing monogamy as the reason they're reconsidering support for gay marriage? I've seen LOTS of folks commenting along the lines of, "We supported gay marriage because...but then..." Yet what follows is inevitably a discussion of the excesses of QT+ wokism and down-your-throat commercialized Pride, with the most consistent specific objections all having to do with kids.
We made a lot of arguments about wanting normal marriages, but we also swayed a lot of fence-sitters by pointing to the foibles of heterosexuals. It's difficult to argue against gay marriage when divorce and extramarital sex are so prevalent among straights. Normie straights may not approve of non-monogamy, but neither do they want to make hetero non-monogamy illegal (again.) I saw many conservatives over the past 20 years say something like, "I think marriage should be this, but that ship has sailed."
I can't think of ever having seen someone for whom monogamy was the hinge on which their opinion of gay marriage swings. The utterly understandable issue at the moment is how much the QT+ crowd has plowed past heterosexual foibles into sincerely offensive, intolerant and downright creepy territory, especially around kids.
You say you have never seen monogamy be the basis for anyone's support for gay marriage, and I don't doubt that because you are looking at what people will say about it and what people are willing to say buries the convictions under the surface. But watch what you concede in the argument: you say we won the fence-sitters by pointing at their own hypocrisy (heterosexual divorce and adultery), an accusation that works only if monogamy is real and binding, so you are affirming the standard in the same breath spent denying it. You also state that straights would never make adultery an illegal act again, confusing a fact about enforcement with a fact about meaning.
Underneath these premises is really one idea: marriage is whatever practitioners today happen to do, a label for a cluster of behaviors with no fixed content. And that is the premise that can't survive the argument it is used to defend.
If marriage has no fixed content, there was nothing specific for us to demand entry into and "marriage equality" was a twenty year campaign for access to a word. We didn't make that case. We made (in Sullivan's voice) the case that marriage is a particular and demanding thing and we wanted it for its obligations, not despite them. We staked our claim on the institution having a definition and that we were ready to commit to that definition.
So the real issue is not whether or not the public will admit that monogamy motivates them. It is what marriage itself really is and the answer is the one thing my critics' entire argument is designed to avoid.
What is this thing called marriage? Marriage is not love. Love occurs before it and outlasts; people love each other without getting married; people remain married without loving each other. It is not the legal status; that is the state's acknowledgement of something already constituted, not the thing itself. Cohabitation, shared finances, children, companionship — these can all take place outside of marriage, and absent inside of it. Remove everything else that can take place either without marriage or within it, and what you're left—its irreducible core—is the vow. Marriage is constituted by a promise. It is the only human relationship that comes into existence by being spoken. Friendship evolves; kinship is given; marriage is vowed. This is not incidental to it. It is the thing.
Once you see that marriage is a vow, you'll see that the content of the vow is not negotiable but rather definitional. “I promise to forsake all others” and “I promise to forsake all others unless we agree otherwise” are not the same promise loosely worded. So the question “does non-monogamy undermine the promise” contains a category error. It declines to make it and makes a different one. An open marriage is not a union with weakened fidelity vow; it is a union formed by a different vow or by the absence of that particular vow.
Why must the vow be exclusive and not some other type of vow? Why not, “we tell each other everything and rank each other first”? The monogamous vow is the only one that that makes the other person irreplaceable. Every other arrangement, however honest, however loving, contains an implicit "and also", and the "and also" states that the spouse is among the goods which rank against other goods. To reserve one's body to one person is to say: you are not one of many, rankable against others; you are the category. Exclusivity is how the vow communicates irreplacability. The "honesty and primacy" version preserves rank but circumvents category — and rank is precisely what every other relationship already possess. My best friend is number one among my friends. Marriage claims to be a type of relationship that is not first-among-many, but ‘the-one’, and exclusivity is the only part of the vow that delivers that. Take it away and marriage becomes the most important of one’s relationships rather than a relationship different in kind. That’s a real thing people might want. It is not the thing the word has meant.
We did not argue that marriage was an empty vessel we should be allowed to fill as we liked; we argued it was a specific demanding thing and we were prepared to be bound by it. A vow that can mean anything means nothing, and a marriage that can be anything is not marriage. I broke the vow and learned the hard way it was real. Our movement made a promise about what marriage is, and keeping faith with that promise turns out to require believing the very thing the culture has decided to stop believing
"you say we won the fence-sitters by pointing at their own hypocrisy (heterosexual divorce and adultery), an accusation that works only if monogamy is real and binding"
On the contrary, it demonstrates they don't actually consider monogamy real and binding. They pay it lip service, but not only do they fail to live up to it, they've stripped it of all the consequences they possibly can. Actions speak louder than words, and most folks on either side of the debate know it.
The issue they actually made noise about--on which I always thought they actually had a point--is that marriage is about managing procreation. I've no reason to believe this reasoning was burying anyone's true convictions; this was the actual conviction, the reason why it was fundamentally between a man and a woman. Monogamy was a part of that conviction, but not the greater part--witness all the married couples who experience adultery and yet stay together "for the kids." What really undermined this narrative was no-fault divorce and the structures that built up around it to normalize shared custody between households. Marriage went from being about children to being about the loving bond between a couple. The failure of that loving bond--the desire of even one spouse to leave--is now seen as sufficient to dissolve it. That's what folks mean when they say the ship has sailed.
The view of marriage as primarily procreative now lives alongside the view of marriage as a loving bond, but the latter is far more powerful in our culture, even among many conservatives. And in any case, much like neither you nor I can point to anyone citing monogamy as a reason to be against gay marriage, neither can we point to anyone saying that marriage should be "whatever practitioners today happen to do." Love was absolutely at the forefront of the fight for gay marriage, because love is what the vast majority of Americans now think marriage is about.
"Marriage is not love."
Marriage is support and encouragement of love. Yes, love can exist without marriage, and marriage can persist without love. In the former case, though, life can be fairly difficult for a couple without the government recognition--that's why we fought for it. In the latter case, social reaction to remaining in a "bad" marriage is either "stay together for the kids" or "divorce." That is to say, it's either within the old procreative paradigm, or the new love paradigm. You're the only person I've ever seen argue that monogamy is in and of itself the purpose of marriage.
"The monogamous vow is the only one that that makes the other person irreplaceable."
Sorry, dude, this is where you're just wrong. You were closer to the mark when you said "we...rank each other first." The phrase I like to use to describe it is "as I love myself," which, despite God's command that we act thus towards everybody, in practice I have found is something most people are lucky to achieve with even one person.
When something happens to my husband, it happens to me, and vice versa. When my husband does something, it is I who am doing it, and vice versa. Even when we have disagreements, I am disagreeing with myself. It's difficult to describe, because it includes recognizing his individuality as my individuality--there are parts of my husband I can't access, and vice versa. Yet we act as one; I'd be half a man without him. He is adamantly not replaceable. My husband is the only person I've ever even come close to experiencing that with.
But if you want to talk about replaceable...if you'd drop your commitment to someone just because his penis touched a third penis, you consider that person replaceable. Period, full stop. You do not love him as you love yourself, you love him contingent on his sexual behavior. This is somewhat understandable in a procreative paradigm, because they're not concerned about replaceability, they're concerned about lineage. But when it comes to considering another human irreplaceable, it's all about love, and whatever serves love.
I know you've had your struggles with this; I don't mean to be harsh. But this is really the secret sauce for a successful marriage--not non-monogamy itself, but rather the loving bond that you're explicitly downplaying when you elevate monogamy in importance. My husband and I are not strictly sexually monogamous, because we honestly don't need to be to maintain that bond. But I can also honestly say, I'd be celibate for the rest of my life if my husband asked it of me, because of that bond.
I'm certainly not saying that sex is irrelevant to the marital bond--if there's incompatibility in needs or expectations, it can eat away at the bond. And monogamy is going to remain important among straights, in large part because it's an important need and expectation for women (for entirely understandable biological reasons.) It's also entirely valid as a need/expectation for you, and any man who seeks it--I don't mean to diminish it as an individual requirement. But in wider society, it isn't the defining element of marriage, either in the old procreative paradigm or the new loving paradigm. It's always been a secondary expectation underlying the primary expectation, and it's always yielded to the primary expectation.
If you think all those heterosexuals are out there secretly hinging their view of gay marriage on monogamy, and they're just burying this real conviction underneath what they actually openly argue, that's the sort of unfalsifiable view that only you can self-critically challenge. But when it comes to the reasons people say they're for or against gay marriage, it's nowhere near the top of the list of concerns people express.
I have been with my partner/ husband now since 1993. I was 33 and he was 28 when we met. We did split for a couple of months 3 years in. We do not have an open marriage and are almost never apart. Most of our close gay male friends are in very long term committed relationships -- all longer than our female counterparts. We also have single friends that deal with dating/ sex -- not easy as older people.
That said. I have zero issue with couples who have open situations. Maybe I'm looking at this from a place w/o kids in the house -- who cares what adults do? Now -- Cheating is cheating. Regardless of people involved that is going to have consequences
I'm glad I came out in my mid 20's. I had a very healthy sex life in my straight time and when I figured it out ... my gay time. I lived that part of my life and don't need a repeat.
How would straight people really know what is happening in the gay world ? I have heard the same thing -- more open relationships. I just don't see it in my life. I also don't see how this would have anyone thinking differently about "gay" marriage. I have never heard it as a subject and we are in straight settings all the time.
Given the amount of cheating going on in straight marriages, it does seem a bit hypocritical of them.
Exactly.
Andrew had an open marriage full of no condom orgies (he hates condoms and has GRIDS). He's divorced now. It feels like the marriage thing was always a front for just wanting gays to have more status in society. He didn't actually want to have a lifelong monogamous commitment to another person.
The moment for me that encapsulates it all is when "Bear Week" in his hometown of Provincetown, MA resulted in a post-vaccine COVID outbreak, and then they engaged in an entire second round of COVID lockdowns. Its fun watching my kids not be able to go to school because a bunch of gay dudes got high on poppers and raw dogged until they got the delta variant en masse.
Bigotry of all kinds has taken over the Republican Party, & Republicans & their right-wing allies have control of an increasingly large majority of the American news media, which they are treating as propaganda outlets. I think that is the main reason for any reduction in support for marriage equality. I think each of the other factors mentioned may have a minor impact in public opinion, but this is probably the main one.
Another factor may be that some of the most notorious villains in our current society are gay or suspected of having closeted homosexual impulses, especially on the right. And all these sex scandals are making a lot of people jaundiced about any matter relating to sex, which may tie in to the reason you give for this phenomenon.