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Gay Cosmos

Family Values and the Value of Homosexuality

A common heterosexual fantasy is that of the primitive human scene. Some heterosexuals have little difficulty in picturing a heterosexual couple, their little hut or cave, and perhaps a few mewling infants crawling about. Old Testament myth encourages this view of the beginnings of humanity as one man and one woman. Americans have also their pioneer myths to encourage this vision, and throughout the Cold War a common fantasy supposed the only survivors of a nuclear war were one's self and one's romantic ideal—whose task would be, of course, to repopulate the earth as quickly as possible. A number of motion pictures have set an isolated modern family against some grave peril, which of course they overcome by sticking together.

The families of these myths and modern fantasies are, of course, like the modern urban ideal family: one breeding pair and their minor children. The glue that holds this modern family—and the fantasy families—together is supposed to be the romantic love between the adult male and the adult female. This family, known also as the nuclear family, is supposed to be the basic unit of modern society and the keystone of the modern kinship system. In modern reckoning, the bonds between husband and wife and between parent and child are the primary, preeminent, and predominate kinship relations.

One might be tempted to define the modern home as the place where the modern family lives, yet in the urban situation the home might be better described as where the family sleeps, and perhaps, eats and watches television. Children leave the home to attend an educational institution; at least one of the parents is employed outside the home; if very ill a family member is likely to be removed to a hospital; religious exercises and rituals are likely to be conducted in a religious institutions outside the home; recreational activities are organized in parks, amusement parks, gyms, community centers, and so forth; and family members, more usually as individuals than in their roles as family members, belong to clubs and associations that meet outside the home.

The modern form of the family is relatively new, hardly being any older than the industrial revolution. The constellation of the modern family: husband, wife, and their minor children, clearly would not have been very successful in primitive conditions. Of course some rugged pioneer couple may have survived in a similar constellation, or some shipwrecked pair might have populated some isolated tropical paradise, but as a model for the survival of the human species in primitive times the modern family will not do. If father is trod on by a mammoth or eaten by a saber-tooth tiger, not only is his life lost, but also the survival of the whole group is imperiled. Mother might die in childbirth, and if she does so without producing a daughter, the game is up for the group. Even Old Testament myth is rather vague as to who might have been available for Cain and Abel to marry.

Human beings survive best in communities. The earliest human communities may have been relatively small bands in which everyone was more or less closely related, but they certainly were larger and more diverse than modern families. Indeed, the modern family could not survive in modern times if it did have many other institutions to call upon for assistance.

The traditional family and the traditional homestead were very different from the modern family and the modern home. The homestead was the principal place of economic production. The homestead was the enterprise of the whole family and the source of the wealth of the community. It was also the hospital, the church, the school, and the old people's home. Many functions served by specialized institutions in industrialized urban cultures were wholly or mostly performed at home.

The bonds holding the modern home together are supposed to be first the romantic attachment between the breeding pair and then their affection for their children. If husband and wife fall out of love, there is no reason for them to remain married except possibly for the sake of the children—and perhaps not even then. The income of the family does not depend upon the couple remaining married (although of course how that income is shared does). The children may be unhappy if their parents divorce, but the children's receiving an education usually will not depend upon whether the parents remain married. If the family breaks up, the various members may sleep, eat, and play elsewhere, but they can expect to continue to have jobs or school, medical care, associations, and so forth just as if nothing had happened to the home.

At the traditional homestead, things are very different. If for some reason the homestead breaks up, the members of the family may all be in great peril and the whole community will be somewhat impoverished, as much as if some small enterprise in a small town fails. The homestead is where those who worked did their work. It was not only where food was eaten but also was where the food was produced and stored. It was where children acquired the skills of life. It was where the ill were cared for. Not merely the people who lived on the homestead depended upon it, but also the whole community had a stake in its survival. For this reason, the homestead could not be allowed to depend upon anything so fickle as heterosexual romantic love.

There was romantic love before the advent of the modern family, but romances were generally supposed to be consummated in extra-marital circumstances, if consummated at all—the ideal of courtly love which is at the root of many modern concepts of romance was chaste, although that the ideal and the practice always coincided is not to be expected. It was hoped that husband and wife would develop the sort of mutual regard that partners in any enterprise develop, but whether husband and wife loved each other romantically was not considered—no more than we expect to find that sort of affection between business partners.

Although kinship was an important force in traditional society, marriage was not the determining link of kinship. In some systems husband and wife might not even be thought of as related, although they might become related through their children. A person was more closely related to his parents and his children than to his spouse. The kinship group—that is the people who reckoned themselves most nearly related—and the family—that is the people who occupied the homestead—were not necessarily and not often the same.

The details of kinship systems varied widely in traditional cultures. In some cultures a boy belonged to his father's family; in others he would be considered related to his mother's brother and not at all related to his biological father. Of course, that some societies trace kinship or pass property on the female line says nothing about the status of women in those societies, but says only that some societies took notice that maternity was easier to determine than paternity.

The people at the homestead were more numerous and diverse than the people in the modern home. Of course there would be husband and wife (or wives). But there would also be surviving grandparents, perhaps aunts and uncles and various cousins. Children might remain at the homestead until they married, or even for sometime after marriage. The homestead might include some hangers-on; in traditional societies it would usually be possible to trace or to imagine some distant kinship relation for such people.

In the modern family, a spare brother-in-law on the sofa is a great burden. He is a total drain on the family resources. If he had a job, he would have a place of his own, but since he has no job he has virtually nothing to contribute to the family even if he is inclined to do his bit. The modern home is not a wealth-producing enterprise. The chores the brother-in-law does around the house may make things a bit more cheery, but this is unlikely to outweigh the economic disadvantages of his midnight raids on the refrigerator.

The situation is quite the opposite at the traditional homestead. With an extra hand more land may be cultivated, or the land that is cultivated may be cultivated more efficiently. Hunts that might occasionally add animal protein to the family's diet can be undertaken more often and may be more successful. The brother-in-law may have the skill to produce some nonfood products that otherwise the homestead would have to trade for; if he knew no more than a novel pattern for the homestead's pots, still that might enhance the pots' value in the market. The homestead is the principal place of economic production and, within reasonable limits, the wealth of the homestead will increase as the labor available to it increases.

The differences between the modern and the traditional family can lead to some surprising but perfectly logical differences in culture. For example, there is the matter of adultery. The modern husband is a cuckold if his wife commits adultery. He may be put in the position of having to rear another man's child. In the modern family, the child is merely a dependent. The child absorbs sustenance for eighteen or twenty-one years and then moves. In case of the wife's adultery, the husband certainly is the injured party. But some traditional societies take the opposite view: the injured party is the wife's lover. In traditional societies children are not a burden. Children are dependent for a while, but even at a young age they may begin to contribute to the homestead. A child is a real economic boon to the homestead, and he will not merely enrich the lives of his parents metaphorically, but also he can be expected to enrich the homestead materially before he leaves it. The lover and the lover's lineage lose the rights to the child; the husband is pater of his wife's children. The husband, the husband's lineage, and the husband's household gain the child. The lover is the loser and the fool. He and his lineage may want the child badly enough to attempt to ransom it. The husband holds all the cards. In both cases the pronouncement is "Thou shalt not commit adultery," but in the second case the advice is no more a moralism or a platitude than the commandment, if it existed, "Thou shalt not shoot thyself in the foot."

Clearly, values appropriate to one kind of family are not necessarily appropriate to the other. If the basis of the modern marriage is the romantic love of husband and wife, then it may very well be appropriate to dissolve the marriage if that love no longer exists—indeed, if there are no minor children to consider, there is no reason at all to preserve a loveless marriage. But in traditional marriages, there are virtually no reasons strong enough to justify divorce.

Those who now advocate so-called family values almost always, intentionally or not, blur the distinctions between traditional and modern families. Standards appropriate and reasonable in the traditional setting may be inappropriate and may lack a basis in reason if applied to modern families. Sometimes there is an attempt to create an image of family which is a blurry compromised, a kind of family that never existed, with a combination of the more attractive attributes of both the traditional and the nuclear families. The combination of attributes may be impossible in reality. For example, the family-values advocate would like to picture a family that is based on the romantic love of husband and wife yet has the stability of a traditional family. This is, of course, a contradiction. One of the sources of stability in the traditional family was that it was not based on romantic love, but was based on considerations more reliable and more reliably enduring. This contradiction does not bother the family-values advocate. Either he does not see the contradiction himself or he supposes, perhaps correctly, that his audience is composed of blockheads who will not know enough or will not reason far enough to perceive the contradiction.

Although the traditional family and the modern family as I have described them are merely idealized models and real families approximated these models to greater and lesser degrees, the line between the two is relatively sharp. The modern family came into being with the rise of urban industrialization. It was then that the workplace and the home became two separate places. That separation smashed the basis of the traditional family; the homestead became the home and the home was not longer the principal wealth-producing institution. Economies of scale available in the urban setting gave rise to specialized institutions that gradually replaced many of the functions of the home. Children could be educated more efficiently in schools, the ill could be cared for more efficiently in hospitals, and so forth.

Urban institutions deal best with individuals, only a few can deal with whole families. This is not altogether a bad thing, for there sometimes are advantages in being identified as an individual rather than as a member of a family. The demise of the traditional family is not so much the story of the rise of the nuclear family as it is the story of the rise of the individual as the basic unit of society. Whether this is regarded as a good thing or a bad thing, it is the inevitable result of the separation of the principal place of economic production from the homestead.

What a family value is then, really depends upon what kind of family one is speaking of. Values that served the traditional family do not serve the nuclear family, and values that serve mythical, fantastic, and chimerical families cannot be expected to serve any family in the real world.

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The first naive objection to the idea that homosexuality might have a genetic basis is the question of how homosexuality might be passed genetically. The theory of this question seems to based upon either or both of two simple-minded beliefs: first, that if homosexuality were genetic it would die out immediately because homosexuals would not have biological children and there is no other way it might be passed to the next generation, and second that homosexuality is of no value to society.

In one sense, homosexuality does have a genetic basis. The human sexual apparatus is determined by human genes, and that apparatus is such that human beings have a capacity for homosexuality lower animals do not have. In this sense, all human homosexuality is genetically based. The sexual biology that provides the capacity for human homosexuality costs something in terms of reproductive efficiency, yet the direction of evolution in human beings has clearly been away from animal procreative efficiency and towards a human sexuality, which includes among other things a capacity for sterile heterosexual relations as well as a capacity for homosexual relations. Without necessarily knowing what the advantages are, we can say that because human evolution has proceeded in this direction, it clearly is the case that this seemingly inefficient human sexuality has some greater advantages for the survival of the species.

Naturally one would like to go beyond this and provide some plausible ways in which the capacity for homosexuality might enhance the viability of groups that expressed it.

The more usual question about homosexuality and genetics is whether there may be in some individuals a genetic predisposition toward homosexuality. We don't know the answer to this. No good evidence of such a genetic predisposition has ever been produced.

That some individuals might have a genetic predisposition to homosexuality is now a popular theory among some gay activists. Unfortunately, the theory's popularity may be owing to the wrong reasons. The theory that homosexual behavior in some individuals is caused by their genetic predisposition to such behavior is often offered as if it were an excuse. But to offer an excuse for homosexual behavior is to grant that homosexual behavior is blameworthy. Those who do not consider their homosexuality blameworthy do not feel the need to excuse it and are willing to accept responsibility for what they are.

Very often a gay spokesperson will say something like: "Of course homosexuality is not a choice. Who would chose to be gay?" With testimonials such as this it is little wonder that oppressive elements of society have an easy time putting over the idea that there is something wrong with homosexuality and homosexuals. The truth, of course, is that many gay people would chose to be gay. What they would change, if they had the choice of doing so, is society's homophobia. Young gay people who say they wish to be heterosexual may mean merely that they wish to have the advantages that heterosexual people are afforded by the majority culture.

The reason that the "helplessly gay" position is offered so often by unprincipled gay organizations and spokespersons is that it seems to work fairly well in limited situations. The position says nothing threatening to straight society, and is in fact very flattering. It says to the majority culture: "We would be just like you, if we could. But we can't. So we are making the best of our inferior situation. Won't you please cut us some slack." This plea will not work on very extreme elements of the right, but it is music to ears of mainline heterosexual culture. It does not challenge the mainstream Christian view of "God's plan for men and women," but asks for mercy for those who are too damaged genetically to participate in the plan. It makes issues of gay people in the workplace little more or less than another aspect of the "Hire the Handicapped" campaign. The gay person, him- or herself, can escape responsibility for sexual behaviors, and may find it easier to say to friends and family, "I can't help myself."

But it is very doubtful that encouraging gay people to view themselves as victimized by genetics is a good thing. Although—perhaps—sexual preference cannot be controlled by force of will, certainly sexual behavior can be. Perhaps one is not responsible for his or her sexual preference, but it is essential that everyone take responsibility for his or her sexual behavior. The "helplessly gay" line would not seem to be very helpful in encouraging someone to accept responsibility for his or her sexual behaviors. Someone in the habit of saying he cannot help being gay may find it all to easy to say he cannot help having anal sex without a condom.

Notice also a peculiar contradiction in the positions of the gay spokespersons who forward the "gay gene" excuse and consider it politically correct. In defense of the right of gay people to raise their biological children, they muster statistics to show that children raised by gay parents do not become homosexual more often than children raised by straight parents. They can't have it both ways. If there were a gay gene, children of gay people would be gay more often than children of straight people. This sort of political correctness is also know as opportunism: making whatever argument seems most effective at the moment without regard to whether it is true or not. The truth is: there is no credible evidence that any gay gene exists.

If it ever is proven that a gay gene exists, we may expect heterosexuals to demand a prenatal test for it. No doubt some who are now religiously opposed to abortion, would discover a religious obligation to abort gay fetuses. And of course funding would pour forth to find some gene-splicing cure for homosexuality. A gay gene, if it is discovered, will be considered a genetic defect by the majority culture, and anyone who thinks differently has not learned much from history.

The answer to the question of how a gay gene, if it exists, survives is very similar to the answer of how the human genetic capacity for homosexuality survives. To provide that answer, however, we must go a few steps beyond the average heterosexual's understanding of genetics.

The straight thinks of procreation as a matter of reproducing himself, although he must recognize that something of his spouse will be mixed up in it. If he believes in evolution or at least in eugenics, then he is likely to think that is all up to him to pass his superior genes on to a new generation. If he were to end up childless, he would feel that his evolutionary dynasty had come to a dead end, for he attaches a particular exaggerated significance to his blood line. This is all very vain and foolish.

What is reproduced in sexual reproduction is genes. What counts in evolution (and eugenics) is not the particular experience of any individual's gene, but the aggregate of the experiences of all the identical genes in the population (or gene pool). The identical genes are, well, identical; the gene pool does not know the difference between Ted's blue-eyed gene, Mark's blue-eyed gene, or Mary's blue-eyed gene. Genes do not have pedigrees; they do not come with little family trees. Frank's blue-eyed gene is no better than Bill's.

That the gay gene—or the genes that give humans beings the capacity for homosexuality—may be passed from generation to generation is nothing to wonder at. Gay people are not sterile. In the 1950s and 1960s a common sort of pro-gay propaganda was a list of great homosexuals in history. Most of the names on these lists were names of people who produced children. Gay people can, and in the past often did, have children, their own biological children. This seems a contradiction to some modern heterosexuals who suppose that marriage has always been based on a romantic and erotic attraction between the principals, while in fact this form of marriage has developed only very recently.

But to assume, for the sake of argument, that gay people do procreate at a lesser rate would not necessarily imply that the gene that made them gay—if there was one—would lose ground in the gene pool and eventually die out. It is not the experience of the gay gene in the gay person that determines the fate of the gay gene, but rather it is the overall experience of all the gay genes in the gene pool.

The classic illustration, at this point, involves a hand grenade. Suppose a family is gathered at a picnic table. Everyone is brown-eyed except for one blue-eyed son. Some madman throws a live grenade into the group from a passing car. The blue-eyed boy throws himself onto the grenade, thereby extinguishing his life, but preserving the lives of the rest of the family. Is this the end of the blue-eyed gene?

No. For the son to have been blue-eyed, each of the brown-eyed parents must have had one blue-eyed gene. If so, two-thirds of their brown-eyed children, on average, will possess one copy of the blue-eyed gene. Depending upon the size of the family, the blue-eyed son's actions might have been a good deal for the blue-eyed gene—that is, by throwing himself on the grenade, the blue-eyed boy may have preserved more copies of the blue-eyed gene than he might have saved if he had jumped away from the table and let the grenade kill the rest family. Although the blue-eye boy never had any children and could not pass the blue-eyed gene to the next generation sexually, perhaps he contributed more to the survival of the blue-eyed gene by saving his brothers and sisters, most of whom have blue-eyed genes to pass on to their children.

Likewise, an individual in whom a gay gene was expressed would not necessarily have to have children him- or herself for the gay gene to survive. People who carried the gay gene, but in whom it was not expressed, could ensure the survival of the gay gene by passing it to their children. If groups in which the gay gene was relatively common survived as well or better than groups in which the gene was rare or non-existent, the gay gene would maintain its place in the gene pool. It would not have to be a very large place in the gene pool to account for the numbers of gay people we see in society today.

Groups in which the gay gene was relatively common would survive as well or better than groups in which it was rare, if there was something about producing a few gay people that enhanced the chances of the groups' survival. So how a gay gene might survive comes down to: how might gay people enhance the chances of the survival of their communities?

This is not precisely the same question as how a capacity for homosexuality might enhance the survival of a group that had it, but it is near enough.

Of course if the primeval human group were, as in the heterosexual's fantasies, a family like the nuclear family. the capacity for homosexuality would be useless, and a gay gene might be worse than useless since the breeding couple might never breed, or might do so too infrequently to produce the optimal number of children. But if early human communities were even slightly more diverse, the advantages of a capacity for homosexuality and of producing some homosexual individuals becomes clear.

We have seen that far from being a useless couch potato, the visiting brother-in-law is a valuable addition to the traditional homestead. If he has a close male companion, so much the better. They will contribute to the homestead, without draining one of the wealth-producing assets of the homestead, namely marriageable daughters.

(Contrary to popular belief, most traditional societies do not sell women when a bride-price is paid. What is sold is not the woman, but her procreative powers. The group that pays the bride-price acquires the right to consider her children theirs. If there is a default in the payment of the bride-price, the children revert to the bride's homestead.)

The brother-in-law and his companion will not only not expect a bride from within the homestead, but homestead will not have to raise the price of brides for them. Besides being two more hands for the economic production of the homestead, the homosexual lovers are two more bodies for the defense of the homestead. Moreover, whether traveling for trade or for hunting, the lovers may range more widely than heterosexual males who either have to do without sexual companionship on long expeditions or must accept the drawbacks of pregnancy and childbearing.

Clearly, on this very small scale, the homestead with a male homosexual couple has significant advantages over other similar homesteads that do not have such a couple. If some of this advantage could be preserve through the generations, homesteads that tended to have such couples would come first to dominate and then to replace homesteads that did not ever have such couples. But how could the advantage be preserved from generation to generation?

Of course, either or both members of the couple might marry a woman. That would reduce the advantage by so much as the bride-price, but overall the situation might still be advantageous. In a traditional marriage the husband is not expected to be the lover of the wife, yet he might produce children by her and pass whatever homosexual tendency that might be genetic to his own children.

But if neither of them marry, the wife of the homestead, who is the sister of one of them, is likely to have—although unexpressed in her—whatever gene might tend to produce homosexuality. Because the couple contributes to the homestead, because they range widely while hunting and thus more often bring back meat, because they trade with distance places and may obtain exotic medicines, the wife—the sister of one of them—may produce more children and at any rate the children she does produce will have a better chance of survival. Many of those children will have inherited the gay gene—if there is one—from their mother.

A recurring problem in the formation of community is that of holding the different clans together. Homosexual relations can provide some of the necessary cross-links. Communities must pass from generation to generation vast stores of knowledge; this process would be surer if master and pupil were bound to each other by affection. Besides being especially suited to sailing, hunting, and trading, homosexuals would be auspicious choices as diplomats, as spies, and what was often the same thing, as hostages.

If instead of individual homosexuals, we speak of the more general capacity for homosexuality, we can see that same-sex affections could produce even more of the necessary cross-clan links. More than a couple of sailors in a small craft, we can suppose a fleet of ships: the availability of homosexual outlet might make long voyages more tolerable to many who would not necessarily seek homosexual relations on dry land. Strong affection between unrelated men is generally admired and is recognized as a force that contributed to the triumph of civil society over clan association—except that some cultures profess to be horrified to discover that strong affection ever has a genital dimension. But for all the characterization of male sexuality as a adolescent, love-'em-and-leave-'em, hypermacho thing, love and sex are not entirely disconnected in the male mechanism, and where male homosexual behaviors are common, the bonds of male affection will be common too.

The objection always is that small communities must, if they hope to survive, procreate at the greatest rate possible—and there is some truth to this, for hard as it is to believe from our present perspective, the problems of underpopulation characterize most of humanity's time on this planet. But homosexuality never was and never threatened to become the limiting factor in the expansion of human populations. In the past women did not control their procreative potential. Whether all women were lesbians or none were, pregnancy—usually so often as was biologically possible—was compulsory. Male homosexuality never was a threat to human procreation, for there was always a superabundance of semen available for conception. Human populations were limited by the frequency of death in childbirth and by the prevalence of fatal diseases of infancy and childhood.

In cultures of which we have historic knowledge the advantages of the general capacity for homosexuality are clearest in those cultures which fit the pattern of serial bisexuality. In such cultures, men did not become heterosexually active until their fathers were quite old; this minimized the chances of men encountering their fathers as rivals. By the age of heterosexual marriage the sex ratio was often favorable even for polygamy and there would be no cutthroat competition for wives, particularly as one's potential rivals would be his former lovers. These societies seldom acknowledged a distinct class of homosexuals, eliminating even that possibility for devisiveness. Men did not become heads-of-households until they had reached a mature age, a clear advantage when the household was a more essential institution than it today. I have noted several times, and almost everyone else notes, that such a society could field an army of lovers. But of course the same availability of able young people that could make an army could also be put to more creative use: civic improvements, navigation, far-ranging pasturing, long commercial expeditions, organized community cultivations, and professions requiring lengthy apprenticeships.

In historical cultures the case for the advantages of producing homosexual individuals is not quite so clear in cultures with berdache or role-invert traditions. Of course in such traditions, only the effeminate homosexuals are visible. Their partners are invisible in the population of masculine men. At the very least, role-invert traditions provide productive places for individuals who would otherwise go to waste: not only the effeminates, but also their masculine partners who can continue to be accepted in their male roles because they have a socially acceptable outlet for their homosexual impulses. But berdaches roles are usually more positive. Hard as it for a materialist to say so, the contributions of berdaches—even where they are not supposed to have special powers—to the cultures in which they occur are primarily spiritual. Besides these spiritual advantages, historical berdaches seem to be, out of proportion with their numbers, outstanding individuals, sometimes at once both more manly than most men and more womanly than most women.

We know the capacity for homosexuality exists in human beings, that capacity is based in the facts of human biology, and that human sexual biology is genetic in origin and is passed from generation to generation. Because the biological basis of human homosexual capacity has replaced animal sexual biology and because it persists in the human genetic make-up, we can supposed the biology that provides the human capacity for homosexuality is adaptive. We cannot know what advantages or combination of advantages actually did provide for the survival of the human capacity for homosexuality, but we can easily suggest some ways in which the human capacity for homosexuality might have been adaptive. We do not know whether there is any genetic basis for the development of homosexuality in particular individuals. Yet we can provide a plausible mechanism for the survival of such a gene in the gene pool, because we can easily think of situations in which homosexual individuals, for reasons related to their sexuality, could make special contributions to the survivability of their nearest kin.

In looking at this question we have taken a broad and deeply retrospective view. It remains to be said that as the world is changing so must homosexuality be changing if it is to survive. In tradition societies, romantic love was not a premise for marriage and a thoroughly homosexual man or woman might perfectly fulfill the roles of spouse and parent. Obviously, that does not mean that modern heterosexual marriage is appropriate for present-day homosexual people.

Should homosexuals aspire to marry homosexually? Nothing said here really answers that question. Modern marriage is based on the romantic love of the partners, and as homosexuals may love each other romantically, there is no reason they should not marry. But as marriage more and more is nothing other than an agreement between romantic lovers to live together, there is less reason that homosexuals should desire to marry, as they may love each other and live together in any event. It is only in the artificial privileges that society attaches to married status that any significant advantage of marriage is found.

Likewise, that some societies clearly have employed the human capacity for homosexuality in organizing their militia does not really say whether a modern nation should admit homosexuals to its armed forces and certainly is silent as to whether modern homosexuals ought to want to join a modern military service.

The advantages of the human capacity for homosexuality are not altogether things of past, nor are the benefits restricted to those who exercise their homosexual capacities. Surely heterosexuals are walking around today who would not exist if their parents had not obtained a loan to get married from a gay uncle or lesbian aunt, or who avoided being strangled at birth by their own umbilical cords through the skills of lesbian midwives, or who have been saved by the intervention of an alert gay nurse, or who have been cheered and encouraged at some critical moment by the work of a gay artist, and these are trivial examples on a small scale of the contributions to human survival that are made by those who do not themselves participate in procreation. Moreover, sexuality is directly related to some of these contributions: the gay uncle or lesbian aunt had the money to make the loan because they were gay or lesbian, and so forth.

Family values are not and never were what modern advocates of family values say they are. Divorce is now much more common than it once was. But this is not because homosexuals have cheapened the institution by demanding the right to marry. Rather, the form and function of the family has changed so that an increase in divorce is inevitable, and the only way to reduce the incident of divorce to its previous low levels would be to reestablish marriage as a loveless institution. The proportion of unwed teenaged mothers is now much higher than it was 40 years ago. But it is not the case that safe sex education has encouraged teenagers to be more sexually active. The rate of teenaged pregnancy has hardly changed. The only difference is that the proportion of shotgun marriages has declined.

The advocate of family values decries the godlessness of public schools. Yet anyone old enough to have experienced enforced prayer in public schools knows those prayers were very seldom the occasions of profound religious experiences. Could it be that religious instruction has suffered more from changes within the heterosexual's family home—the home where the principal object of worship is now subject to a remote control device. And so it is with each complaint, the old family values are gone because the old family is gone. The old family cannot be brought back because the material conditions that permitted its existence have changed. Even so, it is not really the old family that the advocates of family values wants to bring back, but a kind of family that never existed—much in the same way that economic conservatives long for a bygone day of laissez faire that never existed.

Unfortunately, principled responses to the cry for family values are seldom or never made. Rather than say that the family of "family values" is a fraud, the cry is that we are families too. This is not the sharpest line that might be taken against patriarchy—and an idealized, benign-faced patriarchy is all that family values is about. Let us not be beguiled by nostalgic greeting-card Christmas dinners. The family as it actually is on the verge of the Twenty-first century is nothing to claim or to emulate.

This is, if you will listen to him closely, what the advocate of family values is saying. He is saying the family can no longer shape society, but is reduced to reacting to it. He is saying that the family that once was the mainstay of society can hardly be maintained today although the beneficiary of as many props as society can devise. He is saying the family, as it is, is moribund. And all that is true. What is untrue is his claim that feminists and homosexuals are responsible for the state of the family and his belief that his program can restore his mythical family to its leading place as a social institution.

Of course loving people can and do continue to live together in loving ways. But family has nothing to do with it.

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