CULTURE WATCH
A New Word, a New Day
Where ‘gay marriage’ is leading us

DAVID FRUM

‘Heteronormative": There’s a word to add to your vocabulary. Very, very soon you’ll be hearing it a lot.

On February 26, Jada Pinkett Smith, wife of Hollywood star Will Smith, sparked a fierce little controversy at Harvard after receiving an award. In her thank-you speech, Pinkett Smith told the story of her life. She described how she had grown up as the child of two teenage heroin addicts and overcome adversity to build a successful career and a happy marriage. She concluded:

"Women, you can have it all — a loving man, devoted husband, loving children, a fabulous career. They say you gotta choose. Nah, nah, nah. We are a new generation of women. We got to set a new standard of rules around here. You can do whatever it is you want. All you have to do is want it."

What could possibly be offensive about this message?

According to a complaint issued by the Harvard Bisexual, Gay, Lesbian, Transgender, and Supporters Alliance, as reported by the Harvard Crimson, Pinkett Smith’s words "implied that standard sexual relationships are only between males and females." "Our position is that the comments weren’t homophobic, but the content was specific to male-female relationships," said one of the Alliance’s co-chairs. The other added: "I don’t think [Pinkett Smith] meant to be offensive, but I just don’t think she was that thoughtful."

The organizers of the award ceremony agreed to apologize for the offensive remarks. PC silliness from an out-of-the-mainstream campus? Possibly. But then there’s this: On March 3, the Boston Globe took Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney to task for "insisting that every child ‘has a right to a mother and a father . . . ’" In today’s context, the Globe argued, praise for the traditional family can be understood only as "ignorance" or "mean-spirited politics."

And finally, this: Prodded by its famously high-handed courts, Canada is now amending its laws to accommodate same-sex marriage. The province of Ontario has passed a law deleting the words "wife," "husband," "widow," and "widower" from every statute in which they appear. The federal same-sex-marriage bill now before the parliament voids the term "natural parent" wherever it occurs in Canadian law and replaces it with the term "legal parent." Should the federal bill pass, motherhood and fatherhood will have been deprived of all juridical meaning in Canada — and children will belong to any adult or group of adults to which the state may wish to assign them.

These three events, which are simultaneously comic, grotesque, and sinister, add up to an important glimpse into our future.

For years, advocates of same-sex marriage have pledged that their big idea will have little or no effect on the 97 percent or so of the population that is not gay. All they wanted, they said, was that marriage rights be "extended" to a very small minority: What possible difference could that make to anyone else? But as same-sex marriage advances from slogan to reality, we are learning that it will make a very big difference to us all.

Same-sex marriage does not extend marriage. It transforms marriage.

To make same-sex marriage a reality, as the Canadians are demonstrating, the law must abolish the concept of "husbands," "wives," "mothers," and "fathers." The law does not abolish these concepts just for a previously excluded few. The law must abolish these concepts for everybody.

True, marriage in its old form will continue to be consecrated for many years to come. Priests, ministers, and rabbis will pronounce their ancient words over eager young brides and grooms. But the old words will not long disguise the new realities.

Andrew Sullivan, that endlessly ingenious advocate of same-sex marriage, tells us that he and those who think like him aspire only to alter something they call "civil marriage," implying that there exists some distinction between marriage as it is recognized by the state and marriage as it is recognized by the church. But of course, while North America has long had civil ceremonies, it has never till now witnessed attempts by governments to substitute a new and antagonistic definition of civil marriage for marriage as it has been defined by Western religious traditions.

At minimum, state recognition of same-sex marriage amounts to an astounding act of self-repudiation, of digging up and discarding the roots that have nurtured and still sustain Western liberal democratic societies. Very possibly, same-sex marriage will provoke dangerous conflict between the deepest beliefs and the controlling laws of Western society, with a new generation of same-sex activists agitating to remove tax-exempt status from churches and synagogues that "discriminate" against same-sex couples.

To what end?

One of the most important lessons to be learned from the Canadian experience is that, despite all the passion they bring to the issue of marriage in the abstract, very few homosexuals wish for marriage for themselves. There are about 24 million Canadians between the ages of 18 and 65. It’s a reasonable guess that some 750,000 of them are gay. In June and July 2003, the two largest English-speaking provinces, Ontario and British Columbia, began issuing marriage licenses to same-sex couples. Within the first six months, some 300 Canadian same-sex couples had been married in B.C. Within the first year, about 4,000 Canadian couples had been married in Ontario.

Since then, the number of same-sex marriages seems to have dropped off. Current statistics are hard to come by, but it’s a good guess that nearly two years after same-sex marriage arrived in Canada some 98 percent of adult Canadian gays have chosen not to avail themselves of their new legal right.

Which raises the question: Why bother? Why make a revolution for a prize for which so few of the revolutionaries feel any personal enthusiasm? The question takes us back to that vocabulary word with which we started: "heteronormativity."

I am sure that the vast majority of those who today advocate same-sex marriage would ridicule the attack on Jada Pinkett Smith as a case of academic PC gone insane. And I am sure that they would be perfectly sincere. But sometimes it is difficult for those who passionately espouse a position to think logically about where their own commitments are leading them.

For the story of Jada Pinkett Smith is not some weird excess of the demand for same-sex marriage: It is the logical, predictable, and necessary consequence of that demand. The demand for same-sex marriage is not really a demand for a practical solution to practical problems. If it were, we would not hear so much talk about how the defense of marriage is like the defense of racial segregation; we would not hear so much anger and abuse; we would be talking about powers of attorney and tenancies-in-common rather than about discrimination and exclusion. Those amazingly candid Harvard students have made explicit the unspoken truth: This is not a debate about extending an institution, it is a debate about overthrowing a norm; not about reconstruction, but about destruction.

For once, an academic PC power play was neither comedy nor horror story: It was instead a public-service announcement.

Mr. Frum blogs daily at www.NationalReview.com. His most recent book is An End to Evil: Strategies
for Victory in the War on Terror, with Richard Perle.