The Gay Marriage Paradox

Most Americans oppose gay marriage--polls generally suggest somewhere around 60 percent say they don't agree with extending marriage to homosexual couples. But most Americans-- to roughly the same extent--oppose amending the Constitution to make gay marriage impossible. A January ABCNew/Washington Post poll put it at 58 percent.

What gives? The numbers suggest that the issue touches Americans in significant ways. Marriage involves love, sex, children, intimacy, and care--all things Americans experience personally (unlike, say, tariffs), and about which they develop strong opinions. True, gay couples share these experiences; they can adopt (or, given the wonders of modern science, have) children, just as it is true that heterosexual couples can be childless. But try explaining that to someone who believes (and the majority of Americans seem to) that the mystery of sexuality was created by a God who believed that children should be brought into the world through an act of passion by a man and a woman deeply in love.

If they do not like the idea of gay marriage, why are so many Americans so resistant to amending the Constitution to prevent it? The Bible, that same believer will insist, was written by God, but no one claims He wrote the Constitution. While it has assumed an Scripture-like reverence, the Constitution is a political document written by real people in human time. It outlines a perfectly usable, if difficult to realize, process for its own amendment, and it has been amended from time to time on matters as morally serious as slavery. Surely, if we can change it to prohibit drinking alcohol, we should be able to change it to prohibit something people consider even more sinful. So why don't we?

One interpretation of the paradox is that opposition to gay marriage, while broadly shared, is not very deep. The president of the United States appears to buys this interpretation. If a politician wants to signal opposition to something while letting his or her inside-the-beltway audience know the opposition shouldn't be taken literally, the politician calls for a constitutional amendment. Out there in the sticks, the theory goes, his followers say he must really care. In more sophisticated circles everyone knows that the process of actually passing a constitutional amendment is so cumbersome that no one will be called upon to do much about it until the controversy fades away.

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