[Cross-posted on Family Scholars Blog, Alas, and TADA.]
Robert George recently published “What Is Marriage,” an argument against same-sex marriage. Or perhaps I should say, the argument against same-sex marriage; conservatives say that “What Is Marriage” is “required reading… a definitive defense of the institution of traditional marriage”; “one of – if not the best – argument there is”; even calling “What Is Marriage” “‘Momentous’ is not an overstatement.”
Robert George and co-authors Sherif Girgis and Ryan Anderson have written a paper that’s too long and detailed to be responded to in a single blog post, so in this post I’ll concentrate on just section I.B.1, “Comprehensive Union.” This section is, I believe, the core of George et al’s argument. (For ease of typing and reading, I’ll just refer to “George” from now on, rather than “George et al”).
George’s argument is that only opposite sex couples can truly be “married,’ because only opposite sex couples can form a “bodily union” (a phrase used 27 times in “What Is Marriage”). So what is “bodily union”? George’s explains:
Marriage is distinguished from every other form of friendship inasmuch as it is comprehensive. It involves a sharing of lives and resources, and a union of minds and wills—hence, among other things, the requirement of consent for forming a marriage. But on the conjugal view, it also includes organic bodily union. This is because the body is a real part of the person, not just his costume, vehicle, or property. Human beings are not properly understood as nonbodily persons—minds, ghosts, consciousnesses—that inhabit and use nonpersonal bodies. After all, if someone ruins your car, he vandalizes your property, but if he amputates your leg, he injures you.
This is a little too simplistic. I can agree with George that my body is part of me, while still making the distinction that my mind — which is a process taking place within my brain — is central to my personhood in a way no body part apart from the brain is. My toe is part of me, but if a doctor has to amputate it I’m still myself; but if a doctor amputates my entire brain, I am dead. (Even in the case of Terri Schiavo, Shiavo’s parents didn’t argue that she was alive despite brain death; they argued that the diagnosis of brain death was mistaken).
Anyway, George’s point is that people are composed of both body and mind. He continues:
Likewise, because our bodies are truly aspects of us as persons, any union of two people that did not involve organic bodily union would not be comprehensive—it would leave out an important part of each person’s being. Because persons are body-mind composites, a bodily union extends the relationship of two friends along an entirely new dimension of their being as persons. If two people want to unite in the comprehensive way proper to marriage, they must (among other things) unite organically—that is, in the bodily dimension of their being.
Okay, so in order to be a real marriage, two people must “unite in the comprehensive way,” which (since people are partly bodies) includes “bodily union.”
Again, I wonder. Suppose two people — a man and a woman — are each paralyzed from the neck down. They meet in the waiting room of their doctor’s office, fall in love, get married. George would presumably say that theirs could never be a real marriage, but I don’t agree.
But what is it about sexual intercourse that makes it uniquely capable of creating bodily union? People’s bodies can touch and interact in all sorts of ways, so why does only sexual union make bodies in any significant sense “one flesh”? Our organs—our heart and stomach, for example—are parts of one body because they are coordinated, along with other parts, for a common biological purpose of the whole: our biological life. It follows that for two individuals to unite organically, and thus bodily, their bodies must be coordinated for some biological purpose of the whole.
Okay, so by bodily union, they mean something that can only be created by sexual intercourse (“Sexual intercourse, also known as copulation or coitus, commonly refers to the act in which the male reproductive organ enters the female reproductive tract.” —Wikipedia.)
It’s true that our organs are parts of one body; they are physically joined, and together with other body parts form a single individual. But it’s not true that every part of our body is “coordinated… for a common biological purpose… biological life.” The hair on my forearms, too sparse to provide warmth, serves no such purpose; neither do my skin tags; neither does the small benign growth in my left ankle. These things are not coordinated with my body for any biological purpose (they could all be removed at no biological cost to me), yet they’re part of my body.
George continues:
But individual adults are naturally incomplete with respect to one biological function: sexual reproduction.
In other words, reproduction in humans requires men and women to collaborate; no woman can reproduce without a man, and vice-versa.
In coitus, but not in other forms of sexual contact, a man and a woman’s bodies coordinate by way of their sexual organs for the common biological purpose of reproduction. They perform the first step of the complex reproductive process. Thus, their bodies become, in a strong sense, one—they are biologically united, and do not merely rub together—in coitus (and only in coitus), similarly to the way in which one’s heart, lungs, and other organs form a unity: by coordinating for the biological good of the whole. In this case, the whole is made up of the man and woman as a couple, and the biological good of that whole is their reproduction.
If you’re like me, you had to reread that passage a couple of times to make heads or tails of it. And that’s because George’s argument doesn’t make sense. Let’s put it in a simpler format:
1) Individual adults are naturally incomplete with respect to sexual reproduction.
2) Reproduction can only be begun via coitus between a man and a woman.
3) Thus, during coitus, a woman and a man’s bodies are biologically united and become one flesh.
How does #3 follow from #1 and #2? Answer: It doesn’t.
Biologically, the man and the woman are never one flesh; they remain two separate entities, even during coitus. This can be easily confirmed with DNA sampling (albeit at the cost of dire embarrassment for both the couple and the lab technician assigned to gather samples). In fact, they are two separate entities engaged in the act of rubbing together.
In another essay, Robert George clarified that when he says “the spouses become one flesh” he doesn’t mean it “in some merely metaphorical sense.” But there is no non-metaphorical sense in which the spouses become “one flesh.”
Outside of metaphors, collaboration does not transform two beings into one. For example, I collaborate with another artist when we create comic books (I do the drawing, he provides the colors), but that doesn’t make us one artist.
This is important, because George’s claim that men and women in coitus become “biologically united” and “in a significant sense, ‘one flesh'” is the foundation of George’s entire argument. Every positive argument George gives for why marriage must be opposite-sex fails, because his key concept of “bodily unity” — which he mentions over and over in this essay — is not true.
Maybe what makes male-female couples alone marriage material is that coitus is a means to another end, that end being children? But George himself denies this:
Because interpersonal unions are valuable in themselves, and not merely as means to other ends, a husband and wife’s loving bodily union in coitus and the special kind of relationship to which it is integral are valuable whether or not conception results and even when conception is not sought.
And again:
This is because in truth marriage is not a mere means, even to the great good of procreation. It is an end in itself, worthwhile for its own sake.
George continues:
But two men or two women cannot achieve organic bodily union since there is no bodily good or function toward which their bodies can coordinate, reproduction being the only candidate.* This is a clear sense in which their union cannot be marital, if marital means comprehensive and comprehensive means, among other things, bodily.
But no union can be “comprehensive” in George’s sense, because it’s never the case that two bodies “achieve organic bodily union” during coitus (except metaphorically, which isn’t the sense he means). Since comprehensive union — two bodies non-metaphorically becoming one flesh — never happens, it follows that no union, ever, has been marital. So George’s logic leads to the conclusion that no couple, hetero or homo, can ever be married.
Now, George might respond that he doesn’t mean bodily union to mean that the couple is “biologically united” and “one flesh” per se, nor does he mean it to be a mere metaphor; perhaps he means it in some third, as yet unexpressed, sense. But in that case, his claim to having expressed a “clear” sense in which straight couples, but not gay couples, form unions is untrue. The only clear distinction George makes in “What Is Marriage” is his mistaken claim that during coitus heterosexual couples are biologically united as one flesh.
I largely agree with George that a marriage, in nearly all cases, requires a physical, sexual union to become complete. (There may be individual couples who are exceptions, but for the overwhelming majority of couples, it will not feel like a true marriage without a sexual union.)
Of course, two people in love, when they collaborate in really wonderful sex, frequently do feel they’ve become one flesh in a significant (although metaphoric) fashion. They feel increased closeness, lowered barriers, and valuing the other as much or more than the self. For most couples, this fosters an important way in which the two do become one — the two people become a couple, the individuals become an “us.” (In the context of a long-term, committed relationship, this is associated with important physical benefits, including fewer colds, faster healing, lower blood pressure, and better pain control.)
So there’s an important sense in which couples do experience a sexual, bodily union, distinguishing the married relationship from a celibate friendship. But this would suggest that same-sex couples are similar to opposite-sex couples, and able to marry. Anticipating this argument, George writes:
Pleasure cannot play this role for several reasons. The good must be truly common and for the couple as a whole, but pleasures (and, indeed, any psychological good) are private and benefit partners, if at all, only individually. The good must be bodily, but pleasures are aspects of experience. The good must be inherently valuable, but pleasures are not as such good in themselves—witness, for example, sadistic pleasures.
George’s reductive, simplistic view of sex — if it’s not coitus, then it has no content at all, beyond simple pleasure felt individually — has little relationship to the variety and value of sex as many couples actually experience it, and is thus deeply unsatisfying to anyone who thinks arguments should be based on reality. There are literally thousands of witness-participants (both hetero and homo) who have reported having deeper, more meaningful, and more useful sexual experiences than George’s argument credits. How does George account for them all being so very wrong about their own experiences — are they all experiencing false consciousness? Are they all liars, engaged in some bizarre conspiracy? Or is George simply mistaken? Occam’s razor suggests that George is mistaken.
Saying “pleasures are not as such good in themselves–witness, for example, sadistic pleasures” is a little like saying “childbirth is not as such a good in itself–witness, for example, the birth of Hitler.” For any good, one could imagine an instance of the good being used for negative purposes; yet if “can never be used for negative purposes” is the definition of good, then absolutely nothing on this mortal Earth is or ever can be good. That’s silly. In the right context (i.e., not Hitler), childbirth is a good; and in the right context, sexual pleasure is also a good.
* * *
There is no evidence in “What Is Marriage” — none — for the proposition that heterosexual coitus involves a biological fusion of two bodies into one flesh, what George calls “bodily union.” The reason there is no evidence for that is that the proposition is simply, obviously, and clearly not true.
“What Is Marriage” is an attempt to set out a secular argument against same-sex marriage, and it succeeds insofar as the word “Jesus” is never actually used. But at heart, “What Is Marriage” is a faith-based argument. George believes, as a matter of faith (all he has, since he lacks evidence), that there’s something called “bodily union,” a biological merger of male and female bodies, that occurs only in coitus. This “bodily union” is an essential part of reproduction, and yet distinct from the ability to reproduce, which is how George squirms around the problem of infertile heterosexuals marrying.
But basing laws on Robert George’s faith in a mythical “bodily union” is no better than basing laws on my faith in Mork from Ork. Robert George and his fellow-travelers may have faith in magical bodily unions, but they would be morally wrong to force that faith on us through the legal system. Yet without faith in “bodily union,” George’s entire argument for hetero-only marriage collapses. (George also presents a negative argument against SSM, which I will address in a later post.)
If “bodily union” is not a literal claim, then (despite Robert George’s claim that it’s not a metaphor) it must be a metaphoric claim. But now we’re treading on even more bewildering territory. Do we want a society in which people’s civil rights are decided, not by what is just, not by what is pragmatic, not by what is fair, but by a metaphor? Metaphors, unlike facts, can change arbitrarily. Suppose that George chooses to believe in a different metaphor next year — a metaphor saying that comprehensive unity can only be achieved by dog owners, for instance. Would we then be obliged to change marriage laws to exclude cat owners?
If this is really the best possible argument against same-sex marriage, I feel very optimistic for the future of equality.
This reminds me of a notion (which may be a standard idea that I haven’t seen discussed) that once you set up an idea of one sort of thing in a category as being ideal or the only real version, it becomes a tool for bullying everything else in the category.
Yeah, he loses his coherence with the “bodily unity” argument, since the only way in which “two become physically one” would be in the flesh of the child, but then, heterosexual infertile couples (like me and my husband) can’t marry, so he’s stumped. Worse, like you pointed out, he’s excluding heterosexual couples who love each other deeply, and want to be together forever, but don’t actually have sex (for any reason). He’s tying himself up in amazing pretzel shapes trying to cover all his bases (I can mix metaphors with the best of them!), but he simply can’t succeed.
It brings to mind the infamous “Ladies Home Journal” editorial (which I actually own a copy of, since I collect old ephemera) that said women couldn’t truly enjoy sex without conceiving and bearing children, because the act of birthing was essential to true womanhood (and all the rest of us are just filthy sluts in it for the money, I guess). The writer even went so far as to suggest that women could not orgasm unless they were impregnated.
When all they have is hate and fear on their side, they’re going down. Not without a fight, but their fall is inevitable.
Wait. “One flesh”? What does he mean this is a secular argument? The entire thing depends on a literal (or “literal”) understanding of Matthew 19:5. If one believes all individual words in the Bible are “literally” true, then het marriages literally make the partners into One Flesh (TM). That’s proof enough for the author and the intended readership. George doesn’t have groundless faith in “bodily union”; he’s referencing–quoting, even–the Bible, just without citing it, and readers of the article are supposed to ‘get it’.
The entire argument is hilariously like something you might have seen in the medieval schools. Someone should tell George this style of argument went out with the Reformation…
They’ve already lost. They lost at least 5 years ago and everything we’re seeing is just the slow process of extinction of the position. When the first pro-marriage equality rulings & laws showed up, I felt like I was seeing a momentous change in society. It hasn’t all changed overnight, but five years later I think that I was correct.
I just feel like so much of the writing on this is trying, desperately, to find some way, any way to overcome the naturalistic fallacy … and of course, failing.
This is not different.
—Myca
Pleasure cannot play this role for several reasons. The good must be truly common and for the couple as a whole, but pleasures (and, indeed, any psychological good) are private and benefit partners, if at all, only individually.
I find this line disturbing. Doesn’t he have any idea that pleasure might be reciprocal? My partner’s pleasure increases mine and (I hope) vice versa. Indeed, the majority of people (again, I hope) would refuse intercourse that did not result in pleasure for both partners. The mutual pleasure of sex (and other things like conversation, playing video games together, and even giggling at each other’s housecleaning techniques) bring the partners closer together, strengthen the relationship and make the family more stable for any children who may be part of the family.
Do George and co-authors see their partners’ pleasure as optional and unimportant? I certainly hope not.
I think some of this goes back to Kant’s idea that sex is inherently immoral because it always involves turning the other person into a means to your end. I disagree, of course, and I think reciprocity is part of the way Kant gets it wrong.
Ironically, Robert George is closer to right than Kant, since he recognizes that sex isn’t something one person ‘does to’ another or ‘gets from’ another, but rather something that is created collaboratively between them. Where he goes wrong is in thinking that sex requires some kind of further justification beyond the shared experience. After all, if physical, biological unity of purpose is acceptable to him, then surely mental unity of purpose, which we have direct control over ought to be just as important.
But no, that would lead to conclusions he finds unacceptable, so his tortured logic must suffice.
—Myca
Another question: Why are we giving people who are prejudiced against GLBT and want to withhold basic human rights from them any more respect than we would give racists who want to withhold basic human rights from people based on skin tone? The arguments are much the same, except somewhat more mainstream in the case of homophobes.
“Suppose two people — a man and a woman — are each paralyzed from the neck down. They meet in the waiting room of their doctor’s office, fall in love, get married. George would presumably say that theirs could never be a real marriage, but I don’t agree.”
That’s the traditional view. A marriage isn’t complete until it’s consumated, and can be anulled until that happens. You can do an ‘isn’t that outrageous’ example from the other side. You marry the girl of your dreams, and she refuses to sleeps with you and then you split up a year later. Would you rather the marriage end through (a) divorce – and her walking off with a portion of your assets and an entitlement to a portion of your future income – or (b) anullment and it being as it the marriage never happened. I think most people would say (b), and that it was never a proper marriage.
First of all, it’s extremely unlikely that she’d be entitled to future income after just one year, unless the year we spent together was a year she worked day and night to pay for my law school tuition — in which case, it would be fair for her to get some anyway.
More on subject, I’d say you’re talking about a marriage that’s a bad mistake. If we’re married a year and then break up because she wasn’t willing to have sex with me ever and I wanted to, then clearly we were never on the same page in the first place.
But let’s go back to the couple from my example. Suppose they’re together blissfully for 20 years. No physical sex, as neither of them are able to, but they consider themselves married in every way, love each other romantically, are on the same page, and act as a married couple. Then, after 20 years, one of them falls in love with another person. My intuitive response is that they need to get a divorce, not an annulment, and an annulment — “you’re out on the street, I owe you nothing, none of the assets are yours because they’re all in my name” — would be terribly unjust.
Because they ARE more mainstream. Acting like their views are too ridiculous to be given the time of day only works on non-mainstream views, imo; mainstream views need to be addressed and rebutted.
But that’s just talking “in general.” There’s no reason any particular person needs to be polite to them if they don’t want to be. I treat them with respect 1) because my personal preference is for conversations in a respectful tone (which is the main reason Alas is moderated so heavily, compared to most blogs), 2) because I think some lurkers are more likely to find a respectful tone persuasive, and 3) I have a talent for maintaining a respectful tone.
But that’s just me. If someone else, on their own blog space or whatever, wants to curse people like Mr. George out in every way they can, I don’t object to that. Especially if that person is lgbt, then I think it’s entirely understandable if they don’t accord Mr. George or his fellow thinkers any respect at all.
Good for you for taking the time to respond to this crap. While it is so very transparent to us, clearly there are some for whom it is convincing. For them, it needs to be rebutted.
The entire argument is hilariously like something you might have seen in the medieval schools. Someone should tell George this style of argument went out with the Reformation…
Totally! This is right up there with “God is omnipotent, and if God didn’t exist, he wouldn’t be omnipotent, therefore, God must exist.”
And … I cannot read these florid and incoherent descriptions of whatever is supposedly so uplifting and spiritually unique about married, hetero sex without wondering about the author’s sex life. Very immature of me, I’m sure, but I just keep thinking, “Really? I mean, really?”
I also find it kind of interesting that this post appears soon after the “sex is overrated” post resurfaced. That thread, which was new to me, evolved, in part, into a discussion of the purpose of sex in relationships. As a married straight woman with a couple of kids (by which I don’t mean to argue from authority (okay, maybe a little), but just to provide context), I think pleasure is the most important purpose of sex, and it’s not remotely individual or selfish. That mutual exchange of pleasure is, as several people said in that thread, a pretty good way to reset and feel well-disposed toward your partner when you’ve been together a long time. But of course, that purpose of sex is just as available to gay couple as to straight couples.
I’m willing to give George a little more credit on the “intercourse makes you one flesh” argument, but in a way that doesn’t help their case against SSM. They define “one flesh” as “Our organs—our heart and stomach, for example—are parts of one body because they are coordinated, along with other parts, for a common biological purpose of the whole.” If we take that very literally, and discard any outside ideas of what constitutes one-flesh-ness (e.g. “having the same DNA,” as in Amp’s counterpoint), then one flesh just is a coordinated biological system. By this definition, an individual body-mind usually (but not always!) constitutes one flesh. And during reproductive intercourse, the two participants are forming one coordinated biological system. I think by this sort of systems theory definition allows for degrees of one-ness rather than a simple yes/no demarcation (after all, even an individual body-mind is not fully coordinated, as any guy with erectile dysfunction can tell you). And I think that *by this definition* it makes perfect sense to think of two artists who are effectively working together on a project as being “one artist” (after all, we’re referring to the three authors of this paper as a single entity!)
But the attempt to make reproductive intercourse the *only* way that two people can form a coordinated enough system to deserve the title “one flesh” falls apart when we try to use the systems theory definition to evaluate onenness of systems, rather than importing religious ideas. Two people effectively working together to bring each other deep pleasure seem much more coordinated than, say, a rape in which a sperm happens to get through and fertilize an egg. It’s true that reproduction is more “biological” than pleasure in the sense that you can create a pregnancy when the participants don’t want it (bodies doing their own thing). But discounting pleasure as mere experience requires leaning heavily on the mind-body dualism — and George made a point of *refuting* the mind-body dualism in order to claim that bodily union is a necessary criterion of full union.
In either case, if it’s reproduction that makes you one flesh, it’s unsupportable to claim that things that have only the outward form of reproduction still “count” as making you one flesh. One could make a *pragmatic* argument that it’s better to let infertile het couples get married than to have the government administering fertility tests to everyone. But on a philosophical level, a het couple who are infertile — who have sex that doesn’t achieve pregnancy — are failing at full biological coordination. A husband’s low sperm count causes his body to fail to coordinate and unite with his wife’s to achieve that particular purpose, just as much as her girlfriend’s lack of any sperm at all would cause their bodies to fail to coordinate.
I cannot read these florid and incoherent descriptions of whatever is supposedly so uplifting and spiritually unique about married, hetero sex without wondering about the author’s sex life.
Eh, every time I read someone like Paul Cameron talking about how gay sex can’t be allowed because it is “too pleasurable” I can’t help but want to say, “Oh, please, just come out of the closet already! We’ll all be happier if you do.” Not that all or even the majority of anti-gay marriage advocates are closeted (possibly even to themselves) gays, but really…Gay sex is more pleasurable if you’re gay. Straight sex is more pleasurable if you’re straight. If you can’t enjoy intercourse with a member of the opposite sex if you have other options then you shouldn’t be involved with a MOS. It’s not fair to either partner or to any children who may come from the relationship.
Amp @11: Your arguments are persuasive and my personal style of commenting (I’m too lazy to blog) doesn’t necessarily lend itself to Comrade Physio Prof style cursing. However, the more I read anti-same sex marriage arguments and argue with the authors of these arguments, the more I find them (both the arguments and, I’m afraid, the authors) creepy. There seems to be no real logic or coherence to the arguments, just a series of desperate attempts to hang on to some way of saying that they’re right. In short, simple prejudice trying to justify itself. And I long for the day when we no longer have to address this argument seriously.
The distinction between something being ‘not literally true’ but ‘not a metaphor’ is often lost in conversations that are based in religion, try getting a good explanation from a Catholic about why the difference btw transubstantiation and consubstantiation is so important and they will tell you that the bread and wine does not literally, physically become the body of christ but it’s not a symbol, either. I’ve never received a good explanation of exactly what that means, just sputtering and general apoplexy.
AFAICT, George and his coauthors fall down by assuming that there is a single answer to the question “what is marriage?” and that anyone who denies that marriage has a single definition bounded by necessary and sufficient conditions is simply a “revisionist” who believes that marriage is nothing but a constructed fiction. (They also assume that “constructed fiction” is a redundancy, instead of realizing that the two terms in that phrase in fact have different meanings.) If you let go of the idea that all marriages have to have a core set of concepts in common, the argument quickly devolves into nonsense. Marriage is a hard-to-define family-resemblance category that nevertheless is extremely useful for recognizing, on both a social and legal level, that existing relationships have risen to the level of a committed unit. Those relationships don’t necessarily have to have anything universally in common beyond that (though a lot of them look quite a lot like each other in a lot of ways, and some of these similarities are instructive), and the idea that the government should be taking an interest in what specific kind of sex the people in that committed unit are having is so unbelievably skeevy that I can’t believe anyone’s actually arguing it.
Marriage has always been a social institution, period. Social concepts are notoriously harder to define than biological concepts; for one thing, they evolve much faster. I can see therefore why somebody searching for a universal and reasonably simple definition of marriage would be tempted to look to biology rather than sociology, but that doesn’t make “marriage” a biological thing. Trying to define marriage in terms of biology without discussing its social aspects at all seems as silly as trying to define weather in terms of interactions between individual molecules without ever talking about clouds, wind, or rain.
I realize that the full paper does make some social arguments, but all of the arguments about the social utility of marriage ultimately appeal to their biologically based definition. Rather than assuming that the social realities of marriage must have some underlying biological function behind them in order to have arisen, we need to recognize that the social aspects of marriage are fundamentally what marriage is. And socially, there is absolutely no reason to deny any couple the right to marry on the basis of sexual orientation. None.
There seems to be this idea that if you acknowledge something as a social construct, you are somehow devaluing it or delegitimizing it, so they’re trying to create this biological construct that is pretty flimsy. But saying something is a social construct isn’t saying that it’s unimportant or not valuable. We’re social animals who create culture and are in turn shaped by that culture. Social constructs have a lot of force, and social constructs can even be good and beneficial.
But the attempt to make reproductive intercourse the *only* way that two people can form a coordinated enough system to deserve the title “one flesh” falls apart when we try to use the systems theory definition to evaluate onenness of systems, rather than importing religious ideas. Two people effectively working together to bring each other deep pleasure seem much more coordinated than, say, a rape in which a sperm happens to get through and fertilize an egg.
This sparked the thought in me that a person giving another person mouth-to-mouth resuscitation and CPR form more of a biologically-coordinated system under this definition than two infertile people having sex, but I don’t see marriage “defenders” arguing that this makes it spiritually significant or a feature of marriage.
Why do they never ask the bisexuals? If anyone would know whether sex with an opposite-sex partner was different to sex with a same-sex partner, we would. Assuming we’re acknowledged to exist and to have meaningful experiences. Oh, wait…
I’m kinda boggled by the lack of recognition of pleasure as a mutual bodily good. Well over 90% of the time it’s the sole reason people have sex. While there ARE people who think all those sexual encounters that lack reproductive intent are bad and wrong, they now seem reluctant to argue that. It’s a little like anti-abortion arguments that dodge contraceptive issues; we all know that many of the people making those arguments hate contraception too but they don’t have a way to make that view mainstream any more, so are trying to tug the Overton window back towards the far-right before mentioning it.
Amp gave the example of a paralysed het couple; what about a het couple in which the female partner had vaginisimus and enjoyed sex in general, but not PIV sex? Does having vaginisimus mean you’re not really married, even if you ARE having heterosexual sex?
Thene: I presume having vaginismus means she should just deal with the pain and think of England.
Kathleen F. says: “…the idea that the government should be taking an interest in what specific kind of sex the people in that committed unit are having is so unbelievably skeevy that I can’t believe anyone’s actually arguing it.”
In fact, the Roman Catholic Church has had an interest in what specific kind of sex people are having for many hundreds of years. The Church teaches that men who have had a vasectomy are allowed to marry, but men who are unable to ejaculate semen are *not* allowed to marry. The Church bans contraception as well as (heterosexual and homosexual) sodomy. George is imply seeking to impose his church’s teachings as the law of the land.
Of course, the USA has a tradition of separation between church and state. But the Roman Catholic Church has been around for much longer than the USA has been, and likely gives no regard to traditions that have existed for “only” 230 years….