The Fall of France: What gay marriage does to marriage.

Mr. Frum is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute.

The argument over gay marriage is gradually ceasing to be a theoretical one. Over the past decade, Canada, Denmark, Greenland, Hungary, Iceland, the Netherlands, Norway, and Sweden have created one form or another of domestic-partnership arrangement for the benefit of homosexuals. On Oct. 13, France joined the trend by enacting a law that confers the legal advantages of marriage on cohabiting homosexuals. In doing so, it demonstrated in the most spectacular way possible just what it is that opponents of gay marriage are so worried about.

What France has adopted actually and inevitably falls a little short of full wedlock for homosexuals. Only the Scandinavian countries have yet dared go that far, and they could do so only because of their peculiar religious situation. The Danish, Norwegian, and Swedish established churches are controlled by the state to a degree unmatched outside the old Communist bloc. The government promotes ministers to bishops, allots the churches their budgets, and even has power to legislate the contents of the prayerbook. When Denmark became the first country on earth to adopt gay marriage in 1989, the Danish Lutheran Church instantly knuckled under. The Norwegian Church acceded to the Norwegian state in 1993, and the Swedish Church did the same in 1995.

The French government possesses nothing like that sort of power over the French Catholic Church. Nor are the French people as highly secularized as the people of Scandinavia. So when the Socialist government of Premier Lionel Jospin took up the subject of gay marriage two years ago, it understood it had to tread warily. To apply the word "marriage," with all its sacramental associations, to a form of union condemned by Catholics might provoke a dangerous political reaction. France's increasingly numerous and assertive Muslims would probably not like it much either. So rather than confront religious sensibilities, the government-like those in the Netherlands and Canada-decided to avoid conflict through euphemism. It would create a new legal status for homosexuals, analogous to marriage, but not exactly the same, called a "civil solidarity pact." Couples linked in civil solidarity pacts would file joint tax returns, receive all the welfare and employment benefits of spouses, and enjoy the inheritance rights of husbands and wives. If a French citizen entered a pact with a non-citizen, the non-citizen would become eligible for citizenship in exactly the same way as the non-French husband or wife of a French citizen. In order to qualify for all of these advantages, a couple would need only to appear before a court clerk and sign on the dotted line. Either partner could end the pact by providing three months' notice in writing. Such pacts are obviously very convenient things, and it rapidly became evident that one way to mitigate political opposition to them was to make them available to just about everybody. After two years of haggling, the benefits of the pacts have been extended to cohabiting heterosexual couples, to widowed sisters living together, even to priests and their housekeepers. The French have crafted a grand new alternative to marriage, one that offers almost all of marriage's legal benefits and imposes many fewer of its legal obligations. Given French society's already growing distaste for the institution of marriage (about a million French heterosexual couples live together unwed), there is every reason to expect the new pact gradually to crowd out and replace marriage. It's a familiar story in the history of the evolution of law. Once upon a time, a contract became a contract only if it was sealed with wax in an elaborate ceremony. Then courts began to recognize less formal written and oral contracts as nearly equally binding, and soon the old form disappeared.

In this case, however, the disappearance of the old form imposes consequences on innocent third parties: children. Already, 40 percent of France's children are born outside marriage. The cohabiting couples who have these children may imagine that they are providing their children a home just as stable as that provided by marriage, but they are deluding themselves. In France, as everywhere else, the average cohabitational relationship lasts about five years. Apologists for cohabitation praise it as a less burdensome alternative to marriage; the truth is that it is a near-certain prelude to fatherlessness.

What has all this to do with gay marriage? Everything. The argument over gay marriage is only incidentally and secondarily an argument over gays. What it is first and fundamentally is an argument over marriage. Unless a government is sufficiently powerful and disdainful of religion to crush the objections of the local churches-and few governments are-gay marriage will turn out in practice to mean the creation of an alternative form of legal coupling that will be available to homosexuals and heterosexuals alike. Gay marriage, as the French are vividly demonstrating, does not extend marital rights; it abolishes marriage and puts a new, flimsier institution in its place. Proponents of gay marriage freely borrow analogies from the civil-rights movement. But we are not talking here about throwing open the country club to people of all races; we are talking about bulldozing the country club and building something entirely different in its place.

The gay-marriage argument is only the latest round in an argument over marriage and the family that began some 35 years ago. It pits defenders of marriage against those who condemn it as stultifying and oppressive. It pits the wishes of adults against the needs of children, the urgings of the self against the obligations of family. As such, the argument is a much more evenly matched battle than a gay-straight fight would ever be. The battle has been lost in France and Scandinavia. It is well on the way to being lost in Britain and Canada. And it is very much in danger of being lost in the United States.