You’ve perhaps heard some queer folks suggest that gay marriage is a heteronormalizing institution with dangerous strings attached for queer sexuality and its social capital. Now we have that proposition’s conservative counterpart! Here it comes, courtesy of British media philosopher Roger Scruton: gay marriage is homophobic!
The pressure for gay marriage is therefore in a certain measure self-defeating for in seeking equality with something unlike yourself the thing that you join to is no longer what you joined. What is needed here is equity that respects difference not equality that destroys it. Gay people have wholly legitimate demands and needs for not just acceptance but celebration and recognition and this needs to be recognised by all who oppose same sex marriage.
A free country should allow differences to be protected and articulated in groups and institutions that further the vision of each particular set of human beings
The “otherness for your own good” sleight of hand is rather obvious, coming as it does from a man who once wrote that “homosexuality is a perversion … because the body of the homosexual’s lover belongs to the same category as his own”. When people conflate equality under the law with a totalitarian effort to make everything the same, who does not roll their eyes? When people say that broadening access to a public insitution “deprives it of social meaning”, who is fooled? These are such shopworn, pub-grade arguments, and anyone can interpose new variables—say, Victorian women for homosexuals and college for marriage—and see what’s going on.
What’s remarkable, though, is the verbatim resemblance of Scruton’s lines to segregationist arguments from America’s “separate but equal” past. It makes one step back and think: is this a parody? But of course, it isn’t.