Grow or die (in defense of marriage?)

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At a meeting with my investment club earlier this week (we are in the beginning stages and drafting our charter), I pointed out that if we didn't have a method for adding new members, eventually our group would die. Anything that is closed off to growth dies. It's called entropy.

Add that to the recent events in New York and it seems timely to write this post that I've been thinking about for a month or three now.

One of the reasons I often hear for keeping same-sex marriage extralegal (if you will), is that to allow same-sex couples to wed would damage "the sanctity of marriage."

The longer I live with this idea, the more difficultly I have accepting it.

Consider the following:

a) We as a society already don't treat marriage with much sanctity. Almost half of American marriages end in divorce. No matter the breakdown between legitimate divorces and lazy divorces, no matter who's at fault and who's a victim, the sheer number of divorces suggests we don't view marriage as terribly sacred.

b) Marriages are not only ending in divorce, but they're getting less common period. Fewer people are getting married. And they're getting married later.

So straight people aren't exactly doing the sanctity argument proud. So really the only question is how would letting them gays git hitched make things any worse?

The argument I used to hear all the time (and which I suspect is still in a lot of people's minds) is that gay people are in it for the sex and are incapable of settling down with one partner for long. Even assuming that's true, let's just remember the hetero track record (see above) before we start throwing stones. But (the argument continues) they don't take marriage "seriously"! Well, why should they? What's their motivation to take it "seriously"?

As it ends up, those arguments are problematic anyway as it's pretty clear gay people want to get married. They want to make the same till-death commitment that differing-sex couples want to make. So what would happen if they were allowed to? Here's one possibility:

Now we're about to get to the data that's the true impetus of this post in the first place.

Ultimately, I think what is meant by the word "sanctity" in the phrase "sanctity of marriage" is "seriousness" --- "seriousness of marriage". People want marriage to be treated as a serious thing. A big deal. And I completely agree with that desire. I have it myself. But I fear that limiting marriage to differing-sex couples is having the opposite effect.

Now keep in mind that all the evidence I'm about to present is anecdotal; nothing scientific at all with what I'm about to say.

At the high school I teach at, marriage has lost its seriousness among the student body. Now, granted, they're still kids and marriage is not something they're apt to be thinking about seriously anyway. And the casualness and ubiquity of declaring others one's husband or wife just struck me as an amusing piece of campus culture. But then I started picking up other undercurrents that make me think there's something rather important going on.

I should say that while among part of the Little Hill student body there is still some rabid homophobia, generally, the students here have left that behind. All sexualities are created equal (more-or-less). The idea that some people can marry who they want and others can't is patently absurd to them. Laughably hilarious. Like the way they chortle unbelieving at whites-only drinking fountains or how Athenians looked down on Corinthians. These biases are so far from their own understanding that they can't take them seriously. (I'm not joking. I observed a US History class once and when a photo like this went up, all the students, white and black and other, openly scoffed it and doubted its veracity, even though they were studying the Civil Right Movement; on the one hand, yay! progress!; on the other hand, srsly?)

Anyway, here's the thing. Because marriage as currently constituted makes about sense to these kids as not allowing a Corinthian to date your daughter, they just can't take marriage seriously. In other words, restricting marriage to those of differing sex is lessening the seriousness of marriage for the upcoming generation.

In other words, it is lessening the sanctity of marriage.

And here's the thing. If marriage is so all-fired important (and it is), then shouldn't we want its sanctity to grow? Shouldn't we want as many people to buy in to this society-bedrocking institution as possible? And isn't something that makes people dismiss marriage as a silly anachronism counterproductive?

Because I fear that will ultimately be the primary legacy of a long, drawn-out war against same-sex marriage.

Less marriage and less respect for marriage.

So if we want to preserve the sanctity of marriage, we need to fight this entropy. And what better way to do that than to get as many serious, committed people married as possible?

Either way of course we'll have unintended consequences. But the one's I'm seeing now are worrying.

What think ye?