If we zoom out to a perspective of one hundred years from now, what has the gay marriage debate of the early 21st century really been about?
I think that historians of the future will see an underlying issue that connects gay marriage in our culture with such things as debates over Darwin in the classroom, psychedelic experimentation, marijuana legalization, pornography, the Internet, boob jobs, weight reduction surgery, African American civil rights, cross-dressing, transgender operations, libertarianism, Second Life avatars, and the broad acceptance of tattooing, birth control, and abortion. All of these are about self-fashioning. They are about the malleability of life and the self.
In other words, gay marriage, as well as the above list of things, is prelude to the great debates in the near future over two monumental things:
- whether we will merge our biological selves with robotics, becoming a largely cyborg species; and
- whether we will manipulate the human genome, taking over our own biological evolution.
Indeed, when those debates get their historians telling those stories, they will include the early 21st century and the things that came to the fore in our time (such as gay marriage).
If the historian of the future seeks even deeper roots for the great cyborg and eugenics debates that are coming, she may well start with Shakespeare’s modernist-anticipating joy at meditating upon the metamorphoses of class and gender through the putting on and off of roles and clothes. From so simple a beginning–staged dramas surrounding self-fashioning and metamorphoses–a new and secular world was anticipated. One cannot help but recall, for example, Miranda’s famous exclamation in The Tempest:
O, wonder!
How many goodly creatures are there here!
How beauteous mankind is!
O brave new world,
That has such people in’t!
And who is President Obama but the archetypal Protean man–the symbol of our fast-changing era, the supporter of gay marriage, and the lightening rod of the traditionalist right? It’s no coincidence that New Yorker writer David Remnick titled his biography of Obama The Bridge. I mean, look at him:
Dream. What limits are there to the human imagination and why must that imagination ever be thwarted? To the right, Obama is Frankenstein; to the left, he is Prometheus. Both are correct. He represents the syncretistic future, and it will be complicated by lots of pleasant and unpleasant surprises. In any case, it will not be business as usual. It will be unfamiliar, uncomfortable. Strange. As are all contingent processes of evolution and history.
Like President Obama, gay marriage focuses the mind. Gay marriage is the Promethean ballgame. Shall we steal fire from heaven and engage in the remaking of ourselves from top to bottom in acts of total self-fashioning? Shall we redefine everything according to our whim or will, or shall we accept the traditional places at the table set for us by religion and habit?
Once you say yes to gay marriage, how do you say no to tattooing, transgender acceptance, women’s equality, cyborgs, or rich parents buying access to genetic engineering (designer babies)?
Obviously, you don’t. It’s why there’s such a freak-out on the traditionalist right in the West and the Muslim world elsewhere concerning gay marriage. Religion and nationalism are broken wheels, and they’re squeaking the loudest because the world is moving away from God, strong nationalist identity, and static and essentialist “givens,” and entering into an era of international techno-urbanism where 90% of human beings will live in cities. Within the constraints of their individual circumstances there, the people of the future will insist on being Protean–on choosing in each moment their lives and identities. Utterly.
That’s what the debate over gay marriage is about.
Prometheus Unbound 
That’s what the debate over gay marriage is about. . . .
Actually, in my opinion, gay marriage is yet another ‘issue’ concocted by the political manipulators to keep the real problems facing the US off the agenda. Gay people are 4% of the population. Whatever kind of commitment they want to make is fine with me. And if people would use their brains, and not their prejudices (in the disguise of ‘religion’) they would realize no ceremony between unknown two people can possibly have an effect on their lives.
Of course, if gay marriage is being talked about, other things are not being talked about. But that doesn’t mean that gay marriage is a distraction issue (as is, for example, Benghazi and the IRS office in Cincinatti, both of which are largely right-wing manufactured scandals). Gay marriage is about the power of self-fashioning, and that’s important to everyone. And it anticipates the great self-fashioning debates of the near future: shall we merge our biological selves with robotics, becoming a largely cyborg species, and shall we manipulate the human genome, taking over our own biological evolution?
Interesting take on the subject! Left me ruminating on my reactions to the possibilities of human evolution…
Honestly, I have only read a couple of your posts. They really do intrigue me. I must say that at the same time, they seem to shock me a little. I wonder how someone so educated could be so ignorant to that fact that it is not that easy to draw this line in the sand between religion and any form of sensibility.
What is religion, but a group of people coming together for one same higher power? All religious people/organizations are not overzealous congregations trying to take away from any leftist view that takes away from tradition, and not all those who disagree with topics such as the legalization of gay marriage are religious zealots.
It seems that you are a big believer in critical thinking. I challenge you to take a second and step back from your views and truly analyze what they mean and whether or not you can continue to just draw this line in the sand of an ever-changing sea of this dynamic, flawed humanity.
I agree that cultural forms and their expression are complicated and varied. But isn’t it also true, in this instance, that religious fundamentalism is why gay marriage is not legal in all fifty states? Who else is really seriously worried about gay marriage but the religious right?
One reason anti-gay equality forces fared so poorly at the Supreme Court has to do with the fact that secular justification against gay equality is hard to argue. You can’t say–“For the Bible tells me so”–before the justices as a reason for opposing something. It’s not a reason in such a context, it’s a begging of the question.
–Santi
Again, I believe you may be missing the forest here. It isn’t about one political agenda compared another. I am simply making the point that all “religious” people cannot be lumped into one homophobic group or choose whatever liberal ideal to fill in the blank with.