I guess now that the President has come out in favor of a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage the issue will gain significant purchase in the upcoming election. That is, it'll be an important issue unless the Democratic candidate also supports the amendment. I have gone back and forth on this, as some may have noticed, but the fish in the milk seems to be the attitude adopted by social liberals that marriage is an entitlement. It is not.
Marriage may perform a number of functions, but its primary function is to stabilize heterosexual relationships during critical child rearing years. (Note: this is significantly different from "procreation.") Marriage obviously has value for other people, for couples who don't have children and for the elderly, but those are not only ancillary, they also help support the institution's primary role. They help to set the standard of "stability." I was willing to allow experiments in gay marriage in order to determine if that new ancillary role might end up supporting the primary role, but there simply doesn't appear to be a way to roll things back should the experiment fail, and there may not even be a way to keep the experiment from becoming a universal expectation.
Andrew Sullivan recently posted the following on a related topic:
Our society is now astonishingly diverse in terms of different kinds of families. From two-income childless yuppies to arranged Muslim marriages to lesbians with kids to seniors on their second marriage to suburban single dads and more traditional nuclear families: can we feel a bond to each of these arrangements as if they were our own? My own view is that radical cultural diversity can only be managed in the long run by ratcheting back what the government can do, by limiting its moral authority, by restricting its distributive take. (So marriage becomes less explicitly religious as a social institution and more explicitly civil. At least that's the limited government argument of "Virtually Normal.") But we are currently expanding government and demanding a more coherent "politics of meaning," even while cultural and moral diversity explodes. Something has gotta give.
Which raises a pertinent question. If it's OK to make marriage more civil, what's wrong with the concept of civil union in the first place? I mean, what "special cachet" does marriage have that is not directly conferred by an intense and largely religious tradition? And why would it be wise to water that down, making it more civil in nature? It is already sectarian, which is the level and type of "diversity" that seems appropriate to the American Ideology, or Americanism.
The bond that Americans feel for one another is not mystical, nor is it based on a common ethnicity, or even a common "kind of family" as Andrew suggests. It can tolerate a pretty broad diversity of family types and traditions because it's based on a common ideology that rests on Lockean classical liberalism and religious sectarianism. The latter encompasses and defines the social role of marriage, and one would be hard pressed to find a coherent and prominent religious tradition anywhere on the planet that promotes marriage between gays. The bonds that collectively define us as a nation are enormously elastic, but they have their limits... and we may have found one.
Posted by Demosophist at February 24, 2004 12:06 PM | TrackBackYou raise some good points. What strikes me about Sullivan's argument is the word play he engages in -- specifically in making marriage a "civil" institution rather than a religious one, which he says is a "limited government" approach. It seems to me that government action is necessary to extend marriage to gay couples -- some would argue that that's a fairly drastic expansion of state power.
Posted by: Bill at February 24, 2004 05:42 PMYours have been among the most insightful posts I've seen on this topic, but I want to take issue with your limit, excluding procreation. Both reproduction and a stable environment for nurture of offspring are core attributes of the idea of marriage.
If it is generally true, and I think it is, that for tens of thousands of years of the history of our species, some form of marriage between opposite sex persons arose and was legitimated by the prevailing culture, why? I go all Darwinian, or evo-bio, here, and say that it's a species-survival tactic of societal organization, hardwired. How else to explain universality? Maybe biology is destiny. (I wonder how many marriage ceremonies pay some service to fertility.)
We're coping, as you note elsewhere, with the decoupling of sex from procreation, the resultant change in sexual mores, the mitigation of the need for a strong protector for child-bearing women and children, hugely increased longevity--I could go on, but I don't think society has worked through the effects of these changes, and changes in normative attitudes that seem to accompany them. I look at the below-replacement demographics of much of Europe, and wonder if there's a connection, and if so, what, if anything, can or should be done about it.
What is society's (and derived therefrom, government's) stake in the formation of either "family" (procreative and nurturing) or "pairing" (loving and committed) bonds? The former, as contributing to survival (the next generation) may well be legitimate; benefit of promoting stable but non-reproductive bonded pairs is marginal at best.
I think this whole debate is standing proxy for a deeper problem, and that the underlying issues, and the unease many feel, need to be addressed. For discussion purposes, I offer: marriage for family-formers (which could include two-parent adopters of the same sex), and recognition of kinship in civil unions of bonded pairs.
Posted by: Alene at February 28, 2004 09:19 AMAlene:
Yours have been among the most insightful posts I've seen on this topic
Well gosh, thanks for the compliment and feel free to elaborate all you like. Tell your friends.
but I want to take issue with your limit, excluding procreation. Both reproduction and a stable environment for nurture of offspring are core attributes of the idea of marriage.
Well, some tension between these two roles has developed recently. The more offspring produced by a family the less individual attention the kids get, which has an impact on IQ and other developmental "risk factors." So it's now a matter of quality vs quantity. Our post-industrial society has a much stronger interest in the former than the latter. So I'm all for changes in the societal definition of marriage that reflect that priority. And, as you point out, there's also the problem of dwindling replacement and cohort asymmetry, which would place at least some emphasis on quantity. I don't know what the optimization between the two might be, but whatever it is there might well be an important role for adoption by gay couples. I just think we need some purchase on these issues before rushing in.
So I definitely agree that we need a societal "family discussion" about these issues, and we're probably right on target, raising the issue now.
What is society's (and derived therefrom, government's) stake in the formation of either "family" (procreative and nurturing) or "pairing" (loving and committed) bonds? The former, as contributing to survival (the next generation) may well be legitimate; benefit of promoting stable but non-reproductive bonded pairs is marginal at best.
Well, I wouldn't characterize it as "marginal." If elderly parents stay together to reach their "golden" it's certainly an object lesson for their kids, and there's probably a similar but weaker exteral benefit produced by couples without offspring. But obviously the issue of greatest moment concerns couples who are actively reproducing, and the critical period there is up to age 3 of their youngest child. It might be prudent to place severe restrictions on divorce for couples with children in that category, and to get rid of disincentives and enhance incentives for such couples to stay together. This will be a really hot topic within a few years.
I think this whole debate is standing proxy for a deeper problem, and that the underlying issues, and the unease many feel, need to be addressed. For discussion purposes, I offer: marriage for family-formers (which could include two-parent adopters of the same sex), and recognition of kinship in civil unions of bonded pairs.
Could you elaborate, or at least sort out the modifiers? I'm not sure I grasp the latter concept, although I approve of the gist.
Posted by: Scott (to Alene) at February 28, 2004 12:08 PMScott:
Let me take the easier one first. When I say "recognition of kinship bonds" in civil unions, I mean that a medical care provider would be safe (as against a challenge from say, a parent) in recognizing a partner to a civil union as next-of-kin. Inheritance rights would resemble those of a married couple, in the event one partner died intestate. And one of the reasons I threw out a suggestion regarding full marriage rights for same sex adoptive parents is to provide both with full access to school records, to permit either to be contacted in emergencies, or to take a child out of school for a doctor visit, etc. In some cases, at present, only one parent is legally related to a child, a situation fraught with difficulties. Whether "marriage" is the best way to overcome this problem I'm not sure, but it would be one way.
The cases of, say, a new marriage of 60-year-olds, or the continued marriage beyond children's reaching adulthood, or heterosexual marriage without intent to have kids, are not inconsistent with the core purpose as I perceive it, although for the first and last situations, civil union would suffice.
I am reminded of a class about the rule against perpetuities, wherein we learned that an eighty-year-old woman would be treated, by the law, as if she could have a child. Much cognitive dissonance--but the purpose served was to make the rule effective (and thus allow reliable drafting of trusts), regardless of particular circumstances. It is at least true with respect to the parties in the above situations, that at some time in their lives they had the capacity to procreate, and despite the dissonance, that's where they differ from same sex couples.
Kinship rights would not create entireties property, and joint tenancy should suffice. Neither would such rights require that survivor benefits be conferred, by government or by private pension plans. I haven't looked at every "incident of marriage", but what I see is a need for relationships to be respected, but no reason to confer financial support.
As to what I think the SSM debate stands proxy for, at the risk of sounding antidiluvian, I think the introduction of the pill released the tension on the restraint side of the most powerful biological drive, and that we have taken that new freedom and run with it. By no means would I want to put the genie back in the bottle, even if that were possible. I do think the concept of sexual liberation has been celebrated, and the possible consequences ignored. I have no data, but I suspect that in addition to a dividing line on SSM between followers of traditional religions and others, there may be another, somewhere around age 55, between those for whom the possible consequences of sexual intercourse were ever present (even within marriage), and those who came of age in this time, when fear of pregnancy is not a factor.
Posted by: Alene at March 1, 2004 10:38 PMThanks for the clarification and info! I have no problem with next-of-kin recognition, and I see the need for some accomodation of parenting rights in two-parent same-sex households. The problem, of course, is that making that an exception to the marriage rule creates an incentive to have children that may have nothing to do with the desire to have and care for children for their own sake.
The case that Fukuyama makes, regarding the influence of the pull, is asymmetric. He is less concerned about the liberation of women, per se, than the liberation of men. And basically what he says is that it shifted responsibility for pregnancy, so the men no longer felt accountable. From a crassly empirical standpoint, it vastly reduced the incidence of "shotgun weddings." I think this fits with your theories concerning a different attitude toward sex for those over 55, but the primary instrumental effect is gender-specific. Well, I guess it's that one gender's "liberation" also forced a shift of responsibility away from the other gender. And the effect on the children of those women who weren't well-heeled was devastating. Liberation, it was not.
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