Belonging(s): Plural Marriage, Gay Marriage and the Subversion of "Good Order"

Drawing the Line

Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Orrin Hatch told the Senate on Monday that same-sex couples should be able to live together like married people, should have insurance and estate benefits like married people, and should be able to visit and care for each other in hospitals like married people.

But Hatch, R-Utah, said he draws the line at actually declaring them married. "We ought to be able to solve those inadequacies in the law without changing a 5,000-year-plus definition of marriage," Hatch said.

—Deseret News, "Hatch Draws the Line," July 13, 2004

Before you gay-rights folks land on me with both feet, I would like to remind you that I have been supportive of your movement for many years. [. . .] I cannot support same-sex marriage, however, because it flies in the face of cultural and traditional family life as we have known it for centuries. And that's where I must draw the line.

—Ann Landers, Chicago Tribune, July 21, 1996

One of the curiosities of the gay marriage debate is the insistence that a single word, as opposed to the actual rights, privileges and benefits for which most advocates of gay marriage are aiming, should be the target of anxious proscription: "do not use that word for yourselves; we won't give it to you," seems to be the sentiment. Estranging the word with an adjective seems more unsettling than any civil protections could ever be (Orrin Hatch himself would recall the controversy that ensued when his own ancestors appended another adjective—"plural"—to "marriage"). The problem is not about word play, of course, and in what follows my aim is not to argue for any political position regarding gay rights, or what gay marriage should be called, but to examine a cluster of similar, though historically disparate, rhetorical treatments of non-normative marriage. My intention is not to reduce the problem of marriage to a question of the differentials of linguistic meaning, but to read those shifting and contingent meanings, and the impulse to draw lines and make sometimes vast cultural distinctions, as signs of more material disturbances that animate the need for comparatively empty and even redundant definitions, in law, of what "marriage" is. How or why is it imaginable that drawing a line at a word preserves the "sanctity" of what it refers to?

In the nineteenth century, in regard to what Mormons called "the Principle" of "plural" or "Celestial" marriage, and what the rest of the country called "polygamy," American anxiety was not over a word, but over the very existence of the practice within the nation's borders. The quoted phrase in my title is from Reynolds v. United States, the first anti-polygamy case to reach the U. S. Supreme Court. In its 1879 opinion, which ruled against practicing Mormon polygamist George Reynolds and his claims to freedom of religion, the court argued that the disestablishment clause of the first amendment deprived Congress of legislative power over religious opinion but was "left free to reach actions which were in violation of social duties or subversive of good order" (164). Unlike most other controversial 19^th-century civil rights decisions made by the court (such as Dred Scott), Reynolds, which drew a line between "action" and belief, was not overruled in the twentieth. Sarah Barringer Gordon describes the effect of this ruling for monogamous Americans as reassuring them "that the marital structure they inhabited was indeed the very marrow of the Constitution, the highest expression of civilization, and the essential building block of democracy" (121–122). Punishing polygamists made others feel they were better, truer Americans in the country's exceptionalist project. The legacy of this decision is difficult to overestimate. In deciding that "the establishment and free exercise clauses would not protect local differences in domestic relation," the court initiated a dramatic change in how constitutional amendments were viewed: as a "positive vision of the moral limits on the American federal system [. . .] cloaked in a comforting layer of familiarity" (122). To assert this...