Who will pay the price for gay acceptance? This is not the question that manifestly motivates Stephen Macedo’s Just Married: Same-Sex Couples, Monogamy & the Future of Marriage, but I wish it had been. Instead, Macedo asks, why does justice require the legal recognition of same-sex marriage; why should the state be in the marrying business; and why should marriage be limited to monogamy (pp. 12–13). This last question might turn out to be the table manners version of the gay acceptance question, the point on which I will conclude. Macedo’s three questions correspond to three parts of the book; his answers are well-researched and well-argued, if ultimately unsatisfying.^{Footnote 1}

Part I is familiar territory for anyone versed in marriage equality debates, but also an important rehearsal of our nation’s often breathtakingly homophobic history. Macedo illustrates how even the more sophisticated opposition to same-sex marriage espoused by New Natural Law (NNL) proponents dissolves under the “constant tug of the demand for reasons” (p. 36). He counters too conservative claims that same-sex marriage unsettles gender norms (which were patriarchal and illiberal to begin with, pp. 62–63) and harms children (an argument from bad data, pp. 67–68).

Part II defends marriage as a “distinctive status in law,” challenging liberal and left critiques of civil marriage as a violation of “state ethical neutrality” (p. 80, 84). Combing data that document the myriad ways marriage benefits spouses, children, and democracy and praising the reciprocity and commitment entailed in companionate marriage, Macedo insists the state is just and right to license marriage.

Here is where I become skeptical. For once Macedo concedes that justice requires a fairer distribution of rights, obligations and benefits to singles and unmarried couples (p. 85, 140), I am not sure what is left of the uniqueness of marriage other than its symbolic power (p. 85)—expressed and encompassed in its “extremely public” nature (p. 91)—and its purported basis, love. But while Macedo argues that civil codification publicizes marital commitment far beyond the amplifying force of weddings, religious institutions, and Facebook, this surely is not right. Marriage’s publicity campaign does not need state backing, as so many institutions collude to broadcast that matrimony is marvelous.^{Footnote 2} So if we do not need the state to publicize marriage, and the legal incidents routed through marriage should be democratized, then we are left with the state drawing a distinction between “marriage,” premised on love (which it need not be), and everything else (“civil union,” “reciprocal beneficiaries,” etc.), premised on whatever (care, friendship, convenience). And that statutory distinction, between love and everything else, seems to violate “state ethical neutrality.”^{Footnote 3}

Part III pushes back hard against suppositions from both left and right that same-sex marriage will (d)evolve into the recognition of polygamy. Sympathetically, Macedo acknowledges that rejections of polygamy often harbor the very animus that underlie objections to same-sex marriage. Macedo searches for “general principled considerations” distinguishing same-sex marriage from plural marriage (p. 160), and indeed fares better than the antipoly polemics published in the wake of Obergefell v. Hodges, 576 U.S.–(2015), the Supreme Court decision holding state same-sex marriage bans unconstitutional.^{Footnote 4} Surveying the history of Mormonism and Mormon persecution, relevant case law from Canada and the United States, and the television series, Sister Wives, Macedo contends that same-sex marriage tends toward equality and fair opportunity, whereas polygamy tends toward relational conflict and patriarchy (pp. 162–66). He argues that data on the relational and social benefits of polyamory are too sparse to ground claims for state recognition (pp. 200–01).^{Footnote 5}

Still: are we prepared to tell an otherwise egalitarian, harmonious lesbian thruple—or even a stable, low-conflict polygynous group—that the history and available data on plural marriage (a history and data set far removed from our contemporary context) vanquishes outright any claim for statutory recognition, while we dole out marriage licenses to nearly any dyadic couple, no matter how dysfunctional, high-conflict or inegalitarian, because monogamy, abstracted as social form, is good for liberal democracy and social justice?^{Footnote 6} This ethical consequentalism seems especially callous when the stakes of marital union are as high—for spouses and for society—as Macedo sets them. Macedo’s earlier excavations in Just Married document that interracial, low-income, and Black couples experience comparatively higher rates of divorce (p. 74, 113, 115). Should we not by the same logic prohibit rather than promote these marriages since they tend toward conflict?

Neither Macedo nor any good liberal would ever sign on to such state overreach, as our premium on relational and intimacy choices absent demonstrable, not probable, harm, trumps consequentalist concerns. This calculus perhaps never has been truer than now, after Obergefell’s exuberant exultation of the right to marry.

And so Macedo’s line-drawing returns me to the price of gay acceptance. Macedo’s condescension toward polyamory (p. 72, 198), his patronizing characterization of gay promiscuity (p. 73, 116), and his alarmism around sexual (rather than sexist) publics (p. 47, 74) seem to symptomize a Kantian allergy to sex (notwithstanding Macedo’s objections to New Natural Law sexual ethics, pp. 42–44), as if sex itself—and not, say, eroticized dominance, social inequalities, or the maldistribution and privatization of benefits through the couple form—undermines our democratic and intimate commitments.

For the victory of gay acceptance that is marriage equality, as Macedo tells it, a who pays the price, but so does a what. The who are the poly folks, those challenging or at least not buckling to statutory and cultural valorizations of twoness. The what is sex. In this regard, Just Married, despite the measuredness of its criticisms, sometimes feels like a monographic version of Gayle Rubin’s (Reference Rubin, Abelove, Barale and Halperin1993) famous concentric circles of sexual normativity, wherein the inner “charmed circle” contains the sorts of sexual subjects about whom we watch romantic comedies (p. 13). The outer circle contains our sexual riffraff. Like pedophiles, homosexuals used to hang out in the outer circle. Over the past three decades many of us gays have relocated to charmed and charming, and Macedo redraws the circumference of moral cum legal permissibility just widely enough to include, well, me and him. But our entry to the inner circle does not require our desexualization (or more precisely, our desluttification), nor distancing ourselves from poly folks and other “bad queers.”^{Footnote 7} What if marriage equality instead invited ethical and political sensitivity to the variety of intimacy arrangements that stabilize and sustain all of us? Marriage equality might portend our opening up—slip-and-sliding our way down a slope, if not that slope—to possibilities of sexual and social flourishing, rather than to battening down the gay hatches. As it stands, the happy marriage Macedo officiates between liberalism and monogamy should make us worry about liberalism’s ulterior motives, its infidelities to us and to itself.

Just Married, because of its provocations, not despite them, deserves praise for challenging us to deliberate more diligently the promises and pitfalls of civil marriage.