The language of "equality" and "dignity" is a powerful touchstone in the American liberal tradition, and has been effectively adopted and deployed by same-sex marriage proponents.

How Will Future Historians

Treat Same-Sex Marriage?

by Patrick J. Deneen

Future historians will probably marvel that LGBT activists--a small, well-organized, and wealthy segment of the population--successfully deployed civil rights language for material benefit, especially at a time when national economic inequality only continues to worsen.

Recently at Inside Higher Ed, historian Steven Mintz argued that historians influenced the Supreme Court's majority opinions in the Windsor andHollingsworth cases (two societies of historians filed briefs with the Court). As these briefs suggest, many historians currently think that marriage is a socially-constructed, historically-contingent institution. These briefs, Mintz claims, successfully described "marriage as an evolving institution and helped convince five justices that opposition to same-sex marriage is best understood as part of a long history of efforts to deprive disfavored groups of equal rights and benefits."

History hasn't always been written from this perspective. We might ask, then, how some future historians might portray these cases.

What will historians in the mold of the English historians Eric Hobsbawm and E.P. Thompson or the American historian Christopher Lasch have to say about the same-sex marriage movement? These and similar historians have emphasized the role of class as a dominant driver in political affairs and national narratives. Lasch was particularly sensitive to the way that elites used the language of grievance to reinforce their position, often while disparaging the backward views of the lower and middle classes. With the distance and detachment born of time's passage, will historians of this sort note how much the gay marriage movement has been centrally about acquiring government benefits and protecting the wealth of an influential, prosperous, successful, urban elite during a time of deepening national inequality?

Historians concerned with economic class were once suspicious of narratives that appeared to mask the class-based interests of the wealthy to marshal and even co-opt support from the middle- and the under-class. Consider the stories of Horatio Alger or (in the case of Lasch) arguments about the promise of the new meritocracy. These suspicions have been put aside as LGBT activists and supporters--including historians--have unabashedly assumed the mantle of the black civil rights movement, even using charged language in which supporting "traditional" marriage is tantamount to supporting laws against miscegenation.

The language of "equality" and "dignity" is a powerful touchstone in the American liberal tradition, and has been effectively adopted and deployed by same-sex marriage proponents. Yet at the same time, even today's historians acknowledge that, aside from forms of public recognition, substantial material interests are at stake. According to Mintz, "marriage's foremost public function" is not to promote "equality" or "dignity" according to the briefs submitted by professional historians; rather, it is "to distribute benefits, such as those involving health insurance, Social Security, and inheritance, making it all the more [materially] valuable for same-sex couples."

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