The gay marriage movement has always been a peculiar political animal. Like a griffin with the head of an eagle and the body of a lion, it has managed to seem both conservative and liberal/left at the same time, its exact political persuasion depending on which end you’re looking at. The arguments made by people on the liberal/left side of the spectrum were essentially that to be against gay marriage was to be against gay people. And there was plenty of anti-gay sentiment and legislation floating around (Prop 8 was just one example). Many liberals and lefties who were invested in the gay marriage cause likely did so both out of a genuine spirit of solidarity and because they feared being called homophobic: all the gay people they knew were, after all, reminding them to be for gay marriage. (Against Equality was frequently barred from speaking at various universities when their local LGBTQ organizations deemed that our radical queer critique of gay marriage was proof that we were in fact anti-gay).
That easy alignment of “Gay Marriage = Liberal/Left and Opposition to Gay Marriage = Homophobe” becomes vastly complicated when we consider the deeply conservative origins of the fight for gay marriage. To start, let’s look at the career and writings of the gay rights advocate and attorney, Evan Wolfson, considered by many to be the father of the gay marriage movement. Wolfson’s 2004 book Why Marriage Matters: America, Equality, and Gay People’s Right to Marry shares a title with the conservative Glenn Stanton’s 1997 book Why Marriage Matters: Reasons to Believe in Marriage in Postmodern Society. Put the two books together side by side and they are nearly indistinguishable in their proselytizing about marriage as not only an economic good (Wolfson and his cohort have spoken at length about the thousand-plus tax benefits) but as a necessity for a healthy society. Both speak, for instance, about how marriage makes for happier and healthier children, and both believe that marriage affirms love and commitment and mutual respect (while giving lip service to other arrangements, mostly it seems to just give lip service). Wolfson would freely admit he’s no queer radical, but the extent of his conservatism on a social issue like marriage has never been scrutinized or challenged. If he had been, say, a Director of Global Family Formation Studies at the Christian fundamentalist organization Focus on the Family (Stanton’s post), he would have been dismissed and ignored by straight society. But because Wolfson is gay—and because he has always been backed by wealthy gay lobbying interests (on the existence of which we could also write entire books)—no one has dared to question his vision of the world vis-a-vis the family, a vision that should perplex and alarm feminists across genders. Wolfson’s pro-normative-family proclamations tacitly reaffirm the importance of a particular kind of individualized care labor which tends to fall unequally on the shoulders of women or those who are deputed to stand in their stead.
