Heterosexual Offspring as Status Goods

Florida International law prof Jose Gabilondo has posted his new paper (to be published by one of Boston College's secondary journals), Irrational Exuberance About Babies: The Taste for Heterosexuality and Its Conspicuous Reproduction.  Here's the abstract:

Building on a behavioral economics game that I play with students in our law school's Women and the Law course, I argue for the existence of a pre-natal taste for heterosexuality in would-be parents using feminist theory and socioeconomics. I also argue that legal doctrine about heterosexual marriage and reproduction reflect and perpetuate a similar heterosexuality premium or gay discount in the context of two recent state equal protection cases - Hernandez v. Robles (N.Y. 2006) and Morrison v. Sadler (Ind. 2005) - which exclude homosexuals from marriage. I draw heavily on Pierre Bourdieu's theory of social reproduction to examine how heterosexual offspring serve as status goods for middle and upper-middle class parents. Although sympathetic to gay and lesbian scholarship and queer perspectives, my argument rejects post-modern approaches on these issues in order to ground the inquiry in more conventionally modern terms.

And here's an excerpt from the text:

What alarms me is making . . . the normative status of heterosexuality a social engineering project in need of legal subsidies, as though this majority orientation would perish but for our efforts on its behalf, and remaining in the dark about one’s role—as a heterosexual—in this dreary cycle of norm reproduction and enforcement. It is the patterned unreflectiveness of heterosexual reproduction which makes me want to grab some by the shoulders and shake them into sentience—the adults, that is, not the babies, who tragically get shaken enough as it is.  Our moral clarity about racism and anti-Semitism may one day extend to marriage discrimination. While we wait, read on for a textual contraceptive against the propagation of normative heterosexuality.

Putting aside the marriage question, norms of heterosexual reproduction could reflect "patterned unreflectiveness" and our desire for "status goods," or they could reflect the natural order -- i.e., the conditions long assumed to be necessary for society's very survival.  That possibility makes for less riveting legal scholarship, of course.