AUDASE

Marriage Proposals for Republican Candidates

By Amy Davidson The New Yorker

Kenji Yoshino, a professor of constitutional law at N.Y.U., writes in his new book, "Speak Now: Marriage Equality on Trial," that when he and his husband, Ron Stoneham, were getting ready for their wedding, in 2009, they learned that, these days, most couples leave out "that tremulous moment where the official states, ‘If any of you can show just cause why these two may not be married, speak now, or else forever hold your peace.’ " The phrase in its traditional form, from the Book of Common Prayer, is actually "why these two may not be lawfully married," and it is meant to allow for the discovery of, say, a wife in another town, and not, outside of a romantic comedy, for the groom’s brother to announce that he thinks the groom really loves someone else—or, God forbid, for a filibuster by Ted Cruz. But Yoshino and Stoneham asked Judge Guido Calabresi, who officiated at their very lawful Connecticut wedding, to keep the line in, as "a subtle reminder to ourselves and our guests that many of our fellow citizens felt they had just cause to object to our marriage." Yoshino adds that he was quite sure no one would jump up, "though I did think wildly of that scene in Jane Eyre, when a stranger declares: ‘The marriage cannot go on.’ "

Perhaps the various Republicans considering a Presidential run, who have lately been asked if they would attend a same-sex wedding, have been engaging with similar thoughts. The question—which Jorge Ramos, of Fusion TV, first posed to Marco Rubio, and was then picked up by the conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt—is a good one, as evidenced by the answers, which have ranged in tone from dogmatically alarmed (Rick Santorum) and sourly crimped (Cruz) to contorted (Scott Walker), upbeat but vague (Rick Perry), genial (Rubio), and fairly forthright (John Kasich), and have been consistently revealing. Perry said that he would "probably" go to one, but that he resented being asked what he and others have called a "gotcha" question—a description that is accurate only if "gotcha" has become a synonym for "requires candidate to think." More than that, the question requires politicians to think about what both their rhetoric and our laws mean in real life. It says something about Cruz, for instance, that he first dodged and then attacked the question, saying that liberals were trying to "twist the question of marriage" into a matter of "emotions and personalities"—something presumably distant from the institution. Liberals were also claiming that conservatives "must hate people who are gay," Cruz said, adding, "As you know, that has nothing to do with the operative legal question." Asking a politician how he thinks people should be treated is a pretty basic one; Jeb Bush, Rand Paul, and Chris Christie have avoided it this week, but they should make a point of saying how they would R.S.V.P.

For Santorum, a Catholic, attending a gay wedding is out of the question, because it would be "a violation of my faith." The puzzling thing is that, as a wedding guest, he wouldn’t be required to do anything but watch; he wouldn’t even have to deliver the flowers, which has been the complaint of gay-marriage-opposed florists pushing for "religious freedom" laws in various states. If just witnessing behavior that he views as dishonorable is against his religion, how did he ever manage to spend so much time in the halls of Congress? The question that Hewitt put to him was whether he would attend, specifically, the wedding "of a loved one or a family friend or anyone who you were close to"—not a casual acquaintance. Surely, Santorum has attended weddings of people who are not Catholics without feeling that the vow cast a spell on him, or induced him to engage in heresy. (Marco Rubio, who in response to Ramos’s question said he would show up, pointed out that, although he is Catholic, he goes to the weddings of divorced people all the time.) And yet it is the speaking of vows that seems to be the focus of anxiety: Scott Walker told reporters that, when one of his relatives had a same-sex wedding, he and his wife went to the reception, but he made a point of saying that they had skipped the ceremony.

Advocates of same-sex marriage might say that the centrality of the vow is precisely the point. The vow—the lawful vow—is the important thing to witness. Marriage is a state that is different from being unmarried, and it transforms and shelters a family, both parents and children, legally and socially. That is why civil unions and even the state-sanctioned marriages that, before the Defense of Marriage Act was overturned, lacked federal recognition—what Ruth Bader Ginsberg called "skim-milk marriage"—are inadequate. People like Walker might be willing to dance to a same-sex couple’s music and eat their cake, but if one of the partners falls ill, for example, just having had a reception won’t get the other one into the hospital room, or give him or her full parental rights to children they might raise together. Those circumstances are why several of the plaintiffs in the cases that the Supreme Court will hear next Tuesday brought their suits.

　

And that’s why Rubio’s answer, though far more open than Cruz’s or Santorum’s, was only a starting point. Rubio said that "of course" he’d go to the wedding—weddings are for going to, after all—an answer that underscores his instinct for connectedness, which may be his greatest political asset. He added, "Ultimately, if someone that you care for and is part of your family has decided to move in one direction or another, or feels that way because of who they love, you respect that because you love them." He chose to say "who they love" rather than "who they are"—he has said that he thinks homosexuality is a behavioral choice, and strongly opposes same-sex marriage. It is good to know that, unlike Cruz, Rubio sees love as a factor in how you deal with people. But he is more likely to lead people who oppose gay marriage, and who saw the interview, to question their opposition than he is to moderate his own position. To an extent, that is true of all of the major Republican candidates (even when they attend events hosted by gay businessmen, as Cruz did on Monday). They are still fighting marriage equality.

When is a piece of wedding cake just a wedge of sugar and cream and conviviality rather than a wedge issue? As I’ve written before, one of the big things that the marriage-equality argument has on its side, besides basic justice, is that people like going to weddings. They are a good thing in life. (It is a tragedy of cultural timing that the masterful montage scene in "The Wedding Crashers," which came out in 2005, just a year after Massachusetts became the first state with marriage equality, includes no same-sex weddings.) An invitation sets in motion a logical and emotional process. Weddings make you think about what marriage means; is that something that Santorum and other non-attenders are afraid of? John Kasich told CNN that when a close friend who is gay invited him to his wedding he said that he had to think about it. That involved, sensibly enough, consulting his wife. He said he asked her, "‘What do you think? You wanna go?’ She goes, ‘Oh, I’m absolutely going.’ " Kasich still opposes same-sex marriage, but, as far as going to a wedding, suddenly it was "pretty simple. I care about him. He cares about me. He invited me to something. I’m going to go do it. It’s not that complicated." And so, Kasich continued, "I called him today and said, ‘Hey, just let me know what time it is.’ " A time for him and the rest of us to mark in the calendar would be next Tuesday, at around ten in the morning, when the Supreme Court is called into session, and the Justices ask the lawyers what it means to be married. Afterward, there may be cake.