A Fine Romance

If heterosexuals were bailing out of matrimony in droves, at least there was another group standing by to repopulate the ranks, like a new wave of civic-minded immigrants eager to move in and spruce up abandoned neighborhoods with fresh coats of paint and small business loans: soon it becomes the hip place to be and the middle classes all want to move back in.
- Laura Kipnis in Against Love

I find Kipnis' gentrification metaphor to be intriguing but problematic. If same-sex couples are the eager new arrivals, the implication is that the religious conservatives unhappy with these "newcomers" to marriage are the "holdouts".

This plays into the fallacious idea that there's only so much room in the Marriage neighborhood, and that letting homos in will leave less room for heteros. Kipnis herself disavows this assumption later, calling for a more "imaginative" response to the LGBT community's demands for marriage equality. However, Kipnis does not grapple directly with the gentrification metaphor she invokes, instead half-heartedly mocking the outcome of the controversy using the idiom of space (conservatives wanting to "Keep gays out. Keep heterosexuals in, with electrified fences if necessary"), but ultimately leaving unquestioned the relationship between neighborhoods' residents' responses to gentrification and "conservative" responses to demands for recognition of same-sex marriage.

A more apt metaphor might have been one of "white flight," which is a sort of inverse gentrification, where (at least to liberal eyes) the moral opprobrium attaches not to the phenomenon of the financially and socially more powerful groups entering a socially marginalized neighborhood, but rather to those with social power who would flee the neighborhood when they notice its character changing.

Rather than constructing religious conservatives as victims and holdouts (which is the rhetoric they use), then, they can be compared to those property owners who couch their racism in the language of "devaluation" of their property by the "wrong kind of people" moving into their neighborhood. Indeed, it is clear from conservative rhetoric that they see marriage as their property, something to be granted or withheld from same-sex couples as they see fit. The metaphor of property values is the one where talk of same-sex marriage "undermining" heterosexual marriage makes sense (after all, who your neighbors are matters, in a racist and homophobic world). Rather than feigning ignorance ("I don't see how same-sex marriage will devalue heterosexual marriage"), let us acknowledge that we know why this "devaluation" is happening, but also call it out as homophobia that drives it.

To pretend that there is no risk that property values will drop when "the wrong people" start acquiring homes in a neighborhood is rather foolish. To acknowledge that the reason that they might drop is racism (or xenophobia, or homophobia), and that the mere fact that property values might drop is insufficient justification to place barriers in the way of would be entrants to the neighborhood, now that is political integrity.

Photo: The "G" Word by IntangibleArts