Oh no they didn’t

Oh yes, they did.

The advocates of Proposition 8, which bans gay marriage in the state of California, argued in court last week that the reason Teh Gays shouldn’t be allowed to get married is because they can’t make babies.

Yeah, they went there.

You can probably tell that this is a bit of a hot button for me. Just as I bristle at the retro (but still out there!) idea that none of a woman’s other accomplishments matter unless and until she has a wedding ring, I’m infuriated by the notion that a relationship only has meaning and value if it includes children. It’s no huge secret that I’m childfree, or childless by choice, or however you prefer to refer to it — I use both terms interchangeably — and I would still very much like to find a partner with whom to build a shared life. For the sake of simplicity, I’ll call that shared life “marriage.” But by the logic of the Prop. 8 supporters, I don’t deserve all the legal benefits and protections of marriage, because I’m audaciously shirking my reproductive duty.

This notion, of course, has a long and ancient pedigree. Back in Imperial Rome, for example, citizens were supposed to knock up their wives within a year of the wedding. It was your duty to populate and spread the empire, and if you didn’t meet your quota with one spouse, it was your duty to find another and try, try again. In fact, if a couple couldn’t produce an actual or incipient baby by their first anniversary, the authorities had the right to declare the marriage null and void, if they so chose — and they often (though not always) did so choose.

We do not, however, live in Imperial Rome. Nor do we live in Elizabethan England, where Shakespeare’s bachelor Benedick succumbed reluctantly to love in Much Ado About Nothing while admitting, “The world must be peopled!” The world is plenty peopled by now — maybe even a bit too much so. More to the point, though, what are the opponents of gay marriage actually saying with their argument? Are they going to force my friends struggling with infertility to split up? Are they going to forbid weddings between people who are past childbearing age? How about women with health conditions that would make pregnancy dangerous? And what about those of us who don’t want kids?

Do they really want to return marriage to its true original intent, a license to breed? Because if you take the “marriage is about making babies” argument to its logical extreme, no marriage license would be issued without proof that the bride was pregnant. And that would require premarital sex. Which — oops! — right-wing religionists also oppose. Although I’m sure they’d find some way to justify it.

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