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Katha Pollitt and Andrew Sullivan

the breakfast table
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from: Andrew Sullivan

Headline

Posted Thursday, April 23, 1998, at 4:23 PM ET

Katha,
Yes, I'm a skeptic about marriage and its idealizers. To my mind, the best marriages are rooted in friendship, not romantic love, or, very rarely, in romantic love which somehow manages to evolve into friendship. (That's a good deal of what my next book is about). It's often a miracle when it works, especially given our culture's bizarrely high expectations of the institution. So it seems to me to behoove those who believe in the virtues of marriage to be more effusive in their praise when a couple manages to carry off this difficult relationship (especially when it involves children) as well as the McCartneys did. But Paul and Linda's countercultural roots are an embarrassment to the Right; and their traditional adherence to fidelity and bourgeois bliss embarrasses the Left. So the McCartneys are without their champions. But they are surely more admirable in their modern embrace of traditional values than, say, representative Bob Barr.

As to equal marriage rights, it is very frustrating to see people on the right and left completely equate the right to marriage with the duty to marry. I think it has to do with the fact that it is so inconceivable to most straight people that they couldn't have the right to marry that it is literally unimaginable to put themselves in gay people's shoes. Right now, unlike you, Katha, I do not have the option of choosing against marriage, or embracing the non-traditional forms of relationship you seem to like. I'm stuck with them whether I like it or not. You cannot spurn marriage if you cannot also choose it. And you can't reject marriage if it has never been offered to you. What I'm arguing for is a simple equality in that choice. Where marriage can work for gay people (and successful marriages will be as rare, I think, as they are for straights), then we should rejoice and be happy. Where marriage doesn't fit people's needs or desires, then there's no reason for people to feel constrained to be a part of it. It's a free country, after all. But the right to choose such a thing, even if that choice will make you miserable for the rest of your life, is so fundamental to our culture's and constitution's definition of the pursuit of happiness that to deny it to anyone, for something they cannot change, is a grotesque and deep injustice. I can't think of a deeper denial of civil rights in this country, can you?

Which is to say that just as gay people should have the right to be as boring, and as traditional and as conservative as everybody else; so too should they have the right to be as miserable in their relationships. Or, in the rare case like the McCartneys, very, very happy.

best
andrew

the breakfast table
entries
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from: Andrew Sullivan

Headline

Posted Thursday, April 23, 1998, at 4:23 PM ET
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Katha Pollitt is a columnist at The Nation. Andrew Sullivan is a senior editor at the New Republic.
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