THE excitement over the Supreme Court arguments on gay marriage has probably died down until the court comes back with a decision. And what with a majority of senators now in favour, it certainly looks like, whether by judicial or legislative action, gay marriage is on a fairly rapid road to acceptance across America. So this moment, when fewer people are paying attention and it can't do too much harm, seems like a good time for people who support gay marriage to admit that there are a couple of arguments for it which they've always thought were wrong. Alexander Borinsky's article in N+1 takes up the issue from the perspective of a 20-something gay man who's not entirely comfortable with marriage advocates' campaign to show that gay people's sexual preferences are inborn and involuntary, and to present gay people as non-threateningly monogamous. Sexuality, he feels, is in part something you actively construct as part of the bildungsroman of your life, and that journey for a lot of gay people involves a bunch of sex with strangers. After the dissolution of a relationship led him to a period of screwing around, he writes:

...my promiscuity served a purpose. Abandoning myself to alcohol and flirtation felt like a salvific, if reckless, kind of machismo. Uncommitted sexual encounters meant self-reliance. I vividly remember leaving the house of a waifish, doe-eyed dancer from Devon who grinned and giggled and wore a ripped army jacket. It was around four thirty in the morning. The sex had been terrible, but outside was a lovely, warmish night. As I waited for the night bus I felt disappointed, embarrassed, and a little frightened. I also felt brave, dangerous, and grown... The urge to prove that I could stand on my own two manly legs came, in part, from the language of helplessness that pervades most messages of gay acceptance: “It’s okay that you’re gay, because you were just born that way. It’s no one’s fault.” Binging and [having sex] made my gayness into, yes, a “lifestyle” choice—not just a hormonal tic I couldn’t help. I was a person making choices, not a sexuality unfolding itself.

Right on. And this kind of sentimental education isn't exclusively or even particularly gay. Who hasn't left the house of a waifish, doe-eyed dancer at 4:30 in the morning? Now, as a heterosexual, I enjoy the privilege of being able to declare that I greatly enjoyed the relatively few such evenings I experienced in my 20s and wish there'd been more of them, without worrying that anyone will then try to deny me the right to get married. But what I was doing, on those evenings, was just as much a volitional construction of my own sexuality and masculinity as what my gay friends were doing at the same age. Mr Borinsky forthrightly notes evidence that gay men are, on average, a lot more promiscuous than straights, which certainly comports with anecdotal experience. And so what? There's no logical or ethical need for proponents of legalising gay marriage to argue that gay men are just as monogamous as straight men, or to imply that being non-monogamous is in itself bad. There may be a political necessity to make that argument, but that's another story.

So there's one aspect of the pro-gay-marriage brief that deserves a mental asterisk. A second argument that has always been a bit weak has been the attempt to minimise the extent to which allowing same-sex marriages will change the definition of marriage for straight married couples. When conservatives have argued that gay marriage would "devalue traditional marriage", the response has often been to ridicule the idea that straight people's marriages will change at all. ("OMG! Marriage is now worthless!") This isn't a serious response. Obviously the legalisation of same-sex marriage represents a major change in the institution and in the meaning of the word, much as the meaning of phrases like "all men are created equal" changed significantly when they began to be understood to include, say, women. For people who have a strongly gendered understanding of their own marriage, this is a paradigm shift. The government is now saying it understands marriage as a long-term legal commitment between two people who are assumed to have a sexually attached relationship to each other. Gender is irrelevant; marriage is simply a paired relationship. It's a big deal when social institutions change this way, and if conservative heterosexuals feel their marriages are affected, they're right, even when the way they phrase their complaints is wrong.

Which brings us to moderately off-the-mark argument number three. One of the assumptions that gay marriage calls into question, for many conservatives, is: why pairs, then? If not man-woman, then why not man-woman-woman, and so forth? Again, the response of gay-marriage proponents is generally ridicule. I don't think this is a ridiculous question. "Why can't you marry your dog, then?" is a ridiculous question; marriage, in our society, is between consenting adult persons. (Though states where girls can marry below the age of legal adulthood violate this premise, and show the traces of a premodern understanding of marriage as a reproductive contract between extended families that few Americans would say they support today.) But "why only two?" isn't a ridiculous question. It's easy enough to show that gay marriage does not empirically lead to pressure to legalise polygamy; that hasn't happened anywhere that gay marriage is legal. But this is different from explaining why opening up the boundaries of the 20th-century understanding of marriage shouldn't raise the possibility of legalising polygamy. Why shouldn't it be legal for more than two consenting adults to marry each other?

There are, obviously, a whole lot of societies in the world where polygamy is legal and normal. In fact the anthropological record suggests that the overwhelming majority of human societies have allowed men to have more than one wife simultaneously. I don't want to be taken to be making a creepy dirty-old-man argument in favour of polygamy. But the reflexive belief that polygamous marriages must be evil and oppressive even in societies where they are traditional is basically an expression of cultural prejudice. I would never want to be in a polygamous marriage myself, because I've grown up in the West and it seems freaky and inegalitarian to me; but for people who grew up in Yemen, or in Swaziland, or in Vietnam before the 1950s, that is not necessarily the case. Women in polygamous societies may decide to become a rich man's second wife rather than a poor man's only wife, and do not necessarily feel oppressed by that choice. Their children usually turn out well-adjusted. To take the typical paradigm-upender, if you imagine a Sudanese man with two wives (and children by each of them) who wins the Green Card lottery and is told he has to divorce one of his wives before coming to America, you have to wonder whose interests the government thinks it is defending.

And yet modernisation in almost every country seems to entail a shift from polygamy to monogamy. This is actually something of a puzzle, according to "The puzzle of monogamous marriage", a paper published last year by Joseph Henrich of the University of British Columbia, Robert Boyd of UCLA, and Peter Richerson of the University of California Davis. It's particularly confusing, they note, in that in any polygamous society, the most powerful men are likely to be the ones who benefit from polygamy. How does a society make a shift in norms that greatly disadvantages its most powerful members? Their argument is that in the case of Europe, the dynamic that led pagan, polygamous Germanic tribes to shift to monogamy and Christianity was competition between proto-states at the group level. In polygamous societies, high-status men marry a disproportionate share of the women, leaving low-status men to fight and scramble for the rest. Monogamous European societies outperformed polygamous societies economically and on the battlefield, the argument runs, because low-status males in polygamous societies were more often engaged in debilitating violence against each other. So monogamous Christian societies defeated and converted polygamous heathen ones, and monogamy gradually spread.

Now this argument may well be wrong. But any other plausible explanation is likely to be similar in that it explains the transition in terms of enhancing the economic welfare and institutional reach of monogamous cultures and states. Monogamy thrives in the service of power. Having grown up in a monogamous society, we respond instinctively to its myths: the brilliant state-building legend of Romeo and Juliet, "one girl, one boy"( to quote the Leonard Bernstein version), the might of the sovereign ("the Prince expressly hath forbidden bandying in Verona streets!") decreeing that marriage as a tool of clan alliance or rivalry will make way for marriage as a pairing of two autonomous individuals in a romantic attachment, answerable to no one but the law. This is the way the state will recognise sexual bonding, because this is the codification of sexual bonding that makes for the strongest state. We absorb these norms, we learn to embrace them, we thrill to them from the age when we watch our first Disney film. Today, gay men and women want to have their sexual bonding embraced within the same norms, to achieve equality, and that's their right. But my guess is that the real answer to the conservative question "why not more than two people, then?" is that we will stick to pairs because marriage is a creature of the state and pairs are the form that makes the state strongest. Nobody, though, gays or conservatives, finds this way of thinking about the issue very appealing, so it probably won't get much play.

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