Contracts Don’t Make a Family Any Less Natural by Martha Ertman
Oscar Wilde famously quipped that the only thing worse than being talked about isnot being talked about. Paradoxically, much of the testimony in his 1895 trial for “gross indecency”—which was reported in papers throughout the world—concerned his relationship with Lord Alfred Douglas, the very person who coined the phrase“the love that dare not speak its name.”
A little more than a century later, that love is on everybody’s lips.
In the United States we’re waiting to see how the Supreme Court decides the marriage cases it’s reviewing, and Wilde’s home country just became the first in the world to extend marriage equality to same-sex couples by popular vote. Freakishly smart and always happy to grab the spotlight, Wilde would likely have been one of the many Irish expats who traveled home to vote “yes” on the marriage referendum and probably would have taken delight in eviscerating the arguments put forth by nay-sayers, like Michael Brendan Dougherty, who claim that same-sex marriage is “unnatural.” Wilde would be right. It’s clear that when defenders of what they call “traditional marriage” have to justify their position, none of their arguments stand up to scrutiny.
Marriage opponents’ first error is historic. Dougherty imagines a past where genetic parenthood determined legal and social parenthood. But that past does not exist. To the contrary, both law and society have long recognized that love comes in different packages. Some are more common—heterosexuality, marriage, parents raising kids conceived with the fun, free stuff lying around the house—but that hardly makes them “natural.”
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