Elizabeth at the Family Scholars Blog writes:
This is the problem. I’m not opposed to SSM because of the couples who want to marry. I understand their desire. I know what love is. I know what it means to want to grow old with somebody. I know the fear of being alone.
My problem is that I don’t want all marriage and family law, across the nation, to be rewritten in gender neutral terms that make the law unable to affirm that children, whenever possible, need to be raised by the mother and father who gave them life.
First of all, I’m happy that Elizabeth calls me her friend – and I’m quite sure she has feelings. :-)
As for gender neutral marriage, we’ve been moving in that direction for quite a long time; more wives and mothers work, stay-at-home-Dads are increasing (although still a small group), and coverture laws are an archaism. I’m curious to know if Elizabeth would like to undo any of the previous legal steps towards gender-neutral marriage, and if so, which ones.
Elizabeth goes on:
Here’s how I’d sum up the argument in the above paragraph (Elizabeth was nice enough to confirm by email that my paraphrase is accurate):
- If SSM is allowed, society will be less able to affirm the importance of being raised by two bio-parents.
- This will likely result in more heterosexual parents either never marrying, or marrying and then divorcing. (This is what Elizabeth means by “more [children] will grow up lacking that key security”).
- Therefore, we should not allow SSM.
For the sake of this post, I’m going to ignore my disagreements with statements 1 and 2 (and trust me, they are legion). Instead, I want to point out that something’s missing from Elizabeth’s argument. 1 and 2 do not logically lead to 3. There’s something missing – a step between 2 and 3 which justifies the conclusion in step 3.
For example, let’s look at one possibility – let’s call it 2.5.
2.5 Whatever leads to more bio-parents not marrying, or getting divorced, should not be legal.
If we add that, then 1 & 2 logically lead to 3. 1 & 2 together establish that SSM will lead to more bio-parents not marrying, or getting divorced; 2.5 establishes that everything that leads to more unmarried bio-parents should not be legal. Once that’s established, then Elizabeth’s conclusion – that same-sex marriage shouldn’t be allowed – logically follows.
But it’s fairly obvious that Elizabeth – like most opponents of SSM – does not really believe in statement 2.5.
After all, if “whatever leads to more bio-parents not marrying, or getting divorced, should not be legal,” then Elizabeth should logically want to refuse to legally recognize divorce. She should logically favor coverture. She should also be against legal interracial marriage, since interracial marriages are among the most likely to divorce.
It’s safe to assume that Elizabeth doesn’t favor banning divorce, or banning interracial marriage, or bringing back coverture laws. But if Elizabeth doesn’t favor those things, then Elizabeth doesn’t beleive everything that makes it less likely that bio-parents will get married and stay married should not be allowed by law. Which means that she can’t fill in the gap in her argument with statement 2.5, or anything like it.
I think Elizabeth must be using some method of categorization to fill in the gap in her argument. Some things – such as the Marriage Initiative, which I think Elizabeth favors – are acceptable ways of promoting marriage. Other ways – like refusing to legally recognize divorce – are not. And, in Elizabeth’s view, legally recognizing same-sex marriage falls into the “acceptable” catagory.
Putting aside the SSM question for a moment, my guess is Elizabeth’s categories look something like this:
| Category A – Things the government MAY NOT do to discourage unmarried bio-parents | Category B – things the government MAY do to discourage unmarried bio-parents |
|---|---|
| *refuse to recognize interracial marriage *refuse to recognize divorces *bring back coverture *refuse to recognize marriages of the infertile and the elderly *refuse to recognize second marriages which create stepparents (that is, non-biological parents) *throw non-resident parents into prison *refuse to recognize marriages to prisoners |
*create marriage education programs *create legal benefits for married people *allow marriage to create American citizenship *use the “bully pulpit” to talk up marriage *supply free marriage counseling for couples in trouble *support research into what makes marriages strong |
There’s a genuine pattern here, I think. Elizabeth and others would like to use the government’s powers to make it more likely that children will be raised by their own, married, biological parents. However, there’s a general consensus – even, I think, within the marriage movement – that some ways of doing this (category A) are unreasonable and shouldn’t be pursued. No one at the Institute for American Values (Elizabeth’s employer) is suggesting that we bring back coverture or outlaw divorce, for example.
So what differentiates category A from category B? The general principle seems to be that although the government should encourage childrearing by married bio-parents, in the name of the common good, it shouldn’t do so at the expense of removing civil rights or endorsing outright discrimination.
Instead, the government is allowed to use the methods in category B: the government can cajole, the government can persuade, the government can educate.
Here’s what puzzles me: I’m sure that Elizabeth would agree that the government should be doing a lot to encourage a society in which more children are raised by married bio-parents. I’m sure that she would also agree that some means of doing this are acceptable, and some are not. I suspect that if she made a list of acceptable and unacceptable methods, it might look pretty similar to my two lists above.
It seems obvious to me that refusing to recognize same-sex marriage belongs in catagory A, similar to refusing to recognize divorce, refusing to recognize interracial marriage, and so forth. But Elizabeth must think it belongs in category B, similar to providing tax breaks and marriage education programs. And I genuinely don’t understand why.
This is, I think, the issue I’d like to see Elizabeth address – the missing piece of her argument. She clearly doesn’t favor everything the government could do to reduce the number of divorced bio-parents – for instance, she doesn’t favor the government refusing to legally recognize divorce. So I’d like to know the rules she uses to catagorize things which are, and things which are not, acceptable ways for the government to encourage married bio-parenting; and why refusing to recognize same-sex marriages belongs in the “acceptable” category.
P.S. Many thanks to “Alas” reader Tina for emailing me a solution to my table formatting problem!
Monica:
See above, my December 3, 2004 02:31 AM post about it being a professor,
See my response to that post. He’s not a professor, he’s a student. Read your own link. And he hasn’t published anything except a book review in a philosophy journal.
The same goes for the rest of your latest post. I tire of having to correct your errors over and over again.
You mention your Australian Institute for Family Studies link again. I haven’t addressed that document specifically yet. Perhaps I’ll do so later. But I can only assume that you stopped reading it at the end of the text you quoted in your earlier post, and didn’t bother reading the remainder. Like your other citations, it does not support your claims. I suggest you read it again, all of it, and more carefully this time.
Just to settle this part of the argument, I went to the website and checked, and unless the University’s website is wrong, Don is correct: Terrance Sullivan is a graduate student, not a professor. Monica made an error, like we all do from time to time; it’s not a big deal.
Let us now consider this minor question (Terrance Sullivan’s position) settled.
Monica:
Aside from the above quoted contradictions in studies
You haven’t cited a single study that contradicts the findings of Daly and Wilson and others. Not one. You’ve cited a tiny Swedish study that failed to reproduce their results with respect to homicide, and a couple of other studies whose findings are inconclusive for stepparenting because of the failure to distinguish stepparents from adoptive parents.
a big problem is that a lot of child abuse doesn’t get reported.
One of the reasons Daly and Wilson focused on homicide statistics was to control for the potential confounding factor of abuse reporting discrepancies. Homicides are subject to intensive police investigation, and the probability of a disproportionate number of false attributions of abuse to stepparents in official statistics is therefore greatly reduced for that crime. As I have explained, the results were dramatic: stepparents are fifty to one hundred times more likely to kill their children than biological parents. D&W also analyzed the data to control for all other serious confounding hypotheses that have been proposed. Even if certain methodological problems remain, it is highly implausible that they could account for anything more than a small proportion of the dramatic difference in abuse rates that D&W found.
Monica:
Further investigation reveals that Terrance Sullivan (the student author of the paper in your first link) is even more idiotic and/or dishonest than I had previously thought. The first alleged problem he identifies in Daly and Wilson is their use of official reports of abuse that may be subject to reporting errors, a criticism you have repeated yourself and that I have addressed in previous posts.
It is ironic that Sullivan would make this argument given that the Gelles and Harrop study he cites as a supposed “contradictory study” to D&W is based on telephone interviews in which parents were simply asked whether they had abused their children. It is difficult to see how Sullivan could reasonably argue that self-reports of child abuse solicited by telephone are less likely to suffer from false reporting than official records representing the opinions of professional medical staff, social workers and police agencies. In fact, the idea that calling people up and asking them if they have abused their child is a remotely reliable way of compiling abuse data is absurd. I wonder if Sullivan really didn’t know that this “study” was based on such worthless data, or whether he knew but hoped no one would notice.
Sullivan’s claims about the other study he cites (Malkin and Lamb) are similarly ludicrous. I won’t bother to go into the details here. You can find them in this rebuttal from Daly and Wilson themselves.
Yeah, ok, he’s doing a PhD and has only taught as an assistant, not a Professor. Sorry for that error, everybody, I mistook mere teaching for professorship, we don’t make that distinction in my native language so I got confused. Big deal. I don’t see how that changes anything, unless you think someone with 4 degrees is just an idiot. Anyway, even in that case, the point is not what this guy thinks or does or says, he may well be a complete moron, but the reason I linked and quoted guy’s paper is that it cites studies by *other* people in the same field as Daly and Wilson, and which do contradict Daly and Wilson and raise issues of methodological problems…. *I* didn’t list them or cite them here – apart from the excerpts where they are referred to – because I they’re all cited in the paper I linked to, as well as in the other two links! You can tell me they’re worthless til you’re blue in the face, but leaving the poor ignorant English PhD student aside, the Australian national Institute for family studies and the Center for Law and Social Policy, which I doubt is formed only by “students”, do on the one hand report some of the statistical findings that point to a higher risk for non-biological parents (that is precisely why I quoted them, no, I didn’t “stop reading” at any point, because my interest was precisely to highlight the contradictions, not to argue in terms of binary extremes!), they also point to contradicting results and clearly warn against drawing *any categorical conclusion* on the issue of whether non-biological parents pose such a massive greater risk for children, I would think it’s at least worth considering ALSO that part. If instead other people want to take Daly and Wilson as the only worthy authoritative voices in this debate, good for them. I beg to have a different concept of how research in any social field, from child abuse to gender studies to the impact of same-sex marriages in Scandinavian societies, should be treated, as I happen to think these are all matters in which a) things vary a lot from nation to nation, not to mention within nations – where I live, official statistics show the major incidence of child abuse is within the family by biological parents or relatives; b) these are heavily politicised issues where ideological bias is very high particularly in the current climate when there’s such a debate on “traditional values” and family structures, and I find it dishonest to pretend that bias is not there in the selective interpretation and focus on certain findings above others as “indisputable evidence”. I am perfectly happy at leaving others to think differently, but I am not happy about my position being misinterpreted.
so, for the 100th time, I didn’t make any “claims” apart from that: I am not going to take the conclusion of any one study limited to one country as a *universal truth* about children raised by non-biological parents. And I’m not going to waste any more of my time on discussing a wacky belief about some genetic sixth sense that would make hypothetical siblings who never met and don’t look alike and don’t know they’re related “feel” that they are. It’s obvious to me it’s a wacky unsupported belief, if it’s not as obvious to others, again, good for them, not my problem. Also, I don’t consider evolutionary psychology approaches as *the* ultimate authority on anything, since there are huge disagreements on its theoretical and methodological foundations, and for instance, pardon me for being so unashamedly not american-centric, it’s certainly not credited with being a very serious approach in my part of the world.
Finally, my interest in child abuse is from a social, cultural and political point of view, I don’t have any interest in refuting or supporting any particular theory per se, because I see it as a matter in which cultural practices and mentalities, as well as economic factor, have a lot of influence, and that’s the are where intervention can have an effect because mentalities can and do change. That’s what I mean by culture and social attitutes and practices and policies being more important than biology, in these matters.
I’m not going to bother any further, I would only kindly ask to stop twisting and misreading my comments, what I’ve written is there and anyone can read it for themselves. Thanks.
Monica:
The three “studies” Sullivan cites are so flawed that they are essentially worthless. For a detailed critique of all of them, see this paper, by Daly and Wilson.
My friends and I have come up with the idea of re-naming ssm. Having some legal term for same-sex couples so they don’t have a hard time living together and what-not. People (chistians and bible followers) are sensitive to the word marriage because of it’s roots in the Bible, and it’s definition in the bible. Having another term for ssm, I believe, will clear up everything!
Sarah
My friends and I have come up with the idea of re-naming ssm. Having some legal term for same-sex couples so they don’t have a hard time living together and what-not. People (chistians and bible followers) are sensitive to the word marriage because of it’s roots in the Bible, and it’s definition in the bible. Having another term for ssm, I believe, will clear up everything!
Sarah
Sarah-Beth:
The only reason they want to call it something else is to stigmatize it, to enshrine in law the message that even the best same-sex relationship is worse than the worst opposite-sex one. That’s unacceptable. Civil unions or domestic partnerships may be acceptable as a temporary compromise on the path to equal marriage rights, but only true equality under the law is acceptable to me as a final goal.
Sarah, I hope your friends and you are not law students, because if so, your career prospects are bleak.
Marriage is a legal term, not just a social one. Call it something else and you MAKE it something else, or you subject it to the death of a thousand lawsuits over whether local law X or state policy Y really applies to civil unions as well as marriages.
And if you need any more evidence that this belief is still alive and kicking in today’s society, just turn on Jerry Springer sometime. Each episode is one shocking paternity revelation after another. And the key to the shock value is the promiscuity of the mother.
Actually, that’s Maury Povich. Jerry is all about cheating and infidelity. And incest.
I don’t think Sarah-Beth’s idea is entirely wrong; I’m a big proponent of getting the state out of the marriage business and offering only civil unions. If marriage truly is sacred, leave it to the churches. Let people take their sacraments to no legal effect; after all, when you get bar mitzvahed or confirmed, your religion views you as an adult even if the law does not. Why should marriage, the religious rite, have any bearing on one’s legal status?
Besides, if religion is removed from the process, the equal-protection argument is clearer.
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Well, it’s not necessarily illogical to support some efforts to keep child-rearing in the hands of bio-parents and to not support other efforts.
I mean, if one supported the 55 mph speed limit on the grounds that it reduced the number of accidents and dependence on foreign oil, that doesn’t mean one should necessarily have supported a speed limit of 0 mph, which would really have cut down on accidents and oil consumption.
However, in this case it’s certainly odd to have a sudden interest in the virtues of bio-parenting to emerge in a general corner of opinion (I do not know if Elizabeth shared these other views, but then she’s not the only bio-parent advocate) that for so long has been advocating adoption as the alternative to abortion.
They’d be on stronger grounds if they expressed a concern that children should be raised by both a woman and a man rather than by one sex alone. But the number of children raised by single parents vastly exceeds the number raised by gays, and some of those causes of single parenting should have anybody concerned about this issue up in arms.
In particular, the lengthy deployment of the military in Iraq is causing great numbers of effectively single parents, and that’s even not counting the troops who don’t come back at all.
We also have the interesting fact that prohibiting gay marriage isn’t preventing gays from raising children.
You’ve got two paragraph tags before that table. I think that accounts for the big space. One at the end of the sentence right before the table and one in front of the table.
Tek – Nope, that’s not it – I got rid of the tags and it doesn’t help.
Simon – I agree. But one should be able to explain why one favors the 60mph limit and not the 10mph limit. If one can’t explain why the distinction between the two, then one’s argument is lacking.
Every time I pop in on your blog, you make the most reasoned, logical arguments on this issue. I wish more people were hearing things worded the way you say them. They are the kind of calm, rational arguments that often cause someone with the opposing view to stop for two seconds and realize that they hadn’t thought of it that way. Nicely done. From now on, when someone asks me my opinion on this subject, I should just say, “Go read what this guy has to say.”
By the way, I think it’s possible you have the “May” and “May Not” in your above table reversed. Unless I’m REALLY not understanding your argument. :)
Aren’t Category A and Category B switched in the table?
Thanks, Dylan and Amy. I’ve made the correction. :-)
The problem isn’t one of rejecting or accepting SSM. The problem is a philosophical one: do we embrace an essentialist view of marriage and family, or a constructivist view?
If we have a constructivist view, then there is no particular reason to reject (or accept) homogamy; if people want to do it and get utility thereby, they should do it, otherwise not. I gather that people want to do it, so in constructivist-world, there’s no need for further discussion.
If we embrace the essentialist view, then there is similarly no discussion. Marriage is by essential definition the union of a man and a woman, the end. It doesn’t matter if you want to do it or not or what the social matrix says or does; fish don’t fly.
So the conflict seems to be between people who have a constructivist view and people who have an essentialist view. The discussion always bogs down and gets nowhere, because no logical argument that a constructivist makes changes the philosophical impossibility of SSM to an essentialist. All the logical arguments made by essentialists rely in the end on a bedrock appeal to a perceived reality in which the essentialist position is necessarily true; no constructivist is moved by such arguments.
About the only time a conversion is made, it’s of someone who doesn’t have a firm anchor in either philosophical approach. A weak essentialist who never really bought the crux of the matter will be persuaded by the happy experience of her gay friends that SSM is OK; a waffling constructivist comes around to the notion that some things are built-in and immutable, and reluctantly concludes that SSM doesn’t fly. (That’s me.) These are marginal conversions, however; they are available to only a sliver of the population.
Constructivists cannot convince essentialists, and essentialists cannot persuade constructivists. The only peaceful solution is exile or segregation.
The missing 2.5 is really, when you dig under the nicey-nice language, a pretty far-reaching and ugly variety of sexism. That is, the assumption that traditional gender roles are a) unchangeable and b) so important that NO same-sex couple can possibly meet a standard that is allowed for ANY opposite-sex couple.
There is really no other explanation for Elizabeth’s blessing of a legal scheme that allows marriages we absolutely know to be harmful to children, and blesses those marriages in every state in the union, as long as they are opposite-sex; yet points to nonexistent evidence of ‘harm’ to say that same-sex couples may not marry.
It’s kind of you to give Elizabeth the benefit of the doubt, Amp, but I don’t see any point in crediting her for her mushy insistence that she “understands” what same-sex couples want out of marriage. She’s still insisting that their civil rights be sacrificed purely for her to preseve the warm, fuzzy feeling that a Mars-and-Venus worldview bestows upon her.
Of course, if Elizabeth *does* support returning to coverture, abolishing all no-fault divorce, and so on, I owe her an apology.
Marriage is by essential definition the union of a man and a woman, the end.
The problem with this is I have never heard a good argument for WHY marriage is “essentially” the union of a man and a woman. Especially not an argument that has any place in the discussion of a government-sanctioned licensing process. “Because it just is,” is at best a weak argument. Even the language in the Bible on the subject is sketchy, and this is a book written almost 2000 years ago, so I’m not sure why we continue to use it as a measure of how to live modern lives.
But then, as you may have guessed, I fall into your category of constructivists. :)
I think you’ve done an excellent job of pointing out the real question, which is how to draw the line between Category A and Category B.
Speaking of drawing lines, I think the table will show up properly if you get rid of all those <br /> tags in it–dunno about your browser, but mine assumes that any line breaks inside a table must be inside a cell, which must be inside a row, and inserts extra cells and rows accordingly.
I think you’ve done an excellent job of pointing out the real question, which is how to draw the line between Category A and Category B.
Speaking of drawing lines, I think the table will show up properly if you get rid of all those <br /> tags in it–dunno about your browser, but mine assumes that any line breaks inside a table must be inside a cell, which must be inside a row, and inserts extra cells and rows accordingly.
Oops–sorry about the ddoouubblle ppoosstt..
I just wanted to say thank you, thank you, thank you for the use of an ARGUMENT–with premises and a conclusion! :-) I’m a grad student in philosophy and thus I firmly believe in the power of logic and arguments. Unfortunately I find that many other people don’t seem to hold much respect for these at all. Thus I doubt Elizabeth or most SSM opponents would be impressed with your analysis–but I certainly am!
Outstanding post.
On the space before the table, what Q. Pheevr said. After the lead-in sentence, the code includes currently includes eight “br” tags — each one adding a single-spaced line.
Well, Amy, I can’t really give you a constructivist rationale to defend an essentialist position. ;)
However, I’ll take a stab at it anyway. Hubris, thy name is Bob.
Marriage is an institution that evolved to protect the vulnerable members of human society: pregnant women and children. In the primitive state, pregnant women and/or young children are not independently viable social units. They require additional support. That support could come from a larger community, but such communities require social capital that might not always be available. The resource that is always available is horny males. Marriage creates incentives for horny males to modify their behavior and to become individually supportive of women and children instead of exploitative. The institution evolved through prehistory and history, always attempting to create good incentives for males to align their behavior with the family instead of the individual.
Marriage evolved with male:female duality as its central theme, not from intentional discrimination, but for reasons of biology. Gay people have reproduced throughout history, but always in the context of male:female; there were no test tubes in the Paleolithic era. Thus, the existence of homosexual attraction and its mainstreaming into the institution of male:female pairing are both part of the evolutionary history of marriage.
Male:female is essential, therefore, because until the present time, male:male or female:female bonding partnerships were nonviable in terms of propagating the species, and thus did not signify in the evolutionary process. Only the survivors signify, and historically the only survivors have been male:female and the product thereof. Marriage evolved as a bonding between males and females, and thus as it stands, it is essentially a male:female institution.
Wow, what a great post.
I also like Simon’s point regarding the “biological father/mother” thing coming from folks who hold up adoption as a great option. I’ve often wondered about that.
I *do* happen to think adoption can be a good option for everyone involved, but then, I don’t put much stock in the bio-mom / bio-dad bit.
Sara.
Bean, polyandry and polygamy have (and do) exist, but they still go to male:female. Nobody said “one man, one woman”; please don’t drag in other arguments, it just makes it impossible to have a discussion.
I’ve never seen any reliable report of historical gay marriage. Please provide cite. I hope you’re not talking about Boswell. His work is interesting but hardly shows SSM; even if it did, those relationships would be part of the dead branch of marriage’s evolutionary tree, because the tradition he studied died out.
As for the purpose of marriage – well, it is true that avoiding the expenditure of time and energy on offspring not one’s own is sometimes part of male reproductive strategy, but not always: I’m currently raising two kids to whom I have no biological tie, despite being married to their mother. In any event, marriage provides no protection in this arena, so providing that protection cannot be marriage’s function. A woman can be impregnated by multiple males whether she’s married or not.
A woman can be impregnated by multiple males whether she’s married or not.
Ah, but under marriage laws, the children born of the marriage are presumed to be the husband’s. I agree with bean; marriage evolved to protect men. And their stuff. After all, originally the wife and kids were considered the property of the husband, and with coverture, the woman essentially entered a legal non-existence similar to that of a child. Unfortunately, since for most of history there were few other options for women, it was marriage, the convent or their parents’ home. Marriage at least conferred some status and worldliness.
The key word, though, is “evolved.” Marriage has not been static over the years, it has evolved and changed, something the anti-SSM forces conveniently refuse to acknowledge.
One thing I haven’t seen in either Amp’s response or the comments is a response to Elizabeth’s fundamentally flawed premise: that marriage is for families with children. That’s just wrong. Marriage is a legal bond between adults; that children born to that marriage receive some benefits does not change the basic fact that marriage, in and of itself, does not exist for the benefit of children.
I don’t put much stock in the bio-mom / bio-dad bit.
Nor I. Oregon had a couple of notorious cases of “traditional” men murdering their wives and children just in the last year or two. Who knows how many less sensational cases of abuse and murder never even make the paper or the six o’clock news ? There is nothing that grants inherent virtue/superiority to the patriarchal model of mating and childrearing. To suggest that anything does strikes me as both clueless and collossially arrogant.
Robert:
There is ample evidence of a long-standing practice of female-female marriages amongst the Nuer tribe (Sudan/Kenya) that involved sexual relations. A google search should turn up a bit more on this. I’ve seen suggestions that there were/are many other African tribes with woman-woman marriages, although the Nuer seem to come up the most often.
Indeed, Anthropologists have presented a wealth of historical evidence of same-sex marriage from various cultures around the world. If you haven’t examined it and found it lacking, you should probably be pretty cautious about assuming it doesn’t exist.
Of course, if very recent history counts as history, it exists in much of Canada and Europe, and they seem to be surviving.
Another note: if you view marriage in evolutionary terms, the evidence is pretty clear it’s evolving in western culture to include SSM. Essentialist and evolutionary views of marriage don’t exactly go together, since evolution implies change and growth, as we’re currently seeing.
Really good post
My question is how SSM opponents can maintain this argument of bio-mom + bio-dad = best and not shame those of us who have heterosexual relationships and children outside of the marital bond. For that matter, should marriage be accessible to heterosexual couples who choose not to have children?
Whether they like it or not, families like mine will continue to exist, and I’m not sure how they can rationalize this argument without speaking from a place of moralizing shame. And shaming my family structure does my son and I no favor, no matter how they try to frame their editorializing.
:::shhh::: No using that nasty, vile l-o-g-i-c. , you’ll only make the poor conservatives go foamy about the upper orafice. PS Check your mail. TheCO
historical gay marriage
Again: it’s not “gay marriage”. It’s same-sex marriage. The idea of ‘gay’ is a modern one. I’m not going to get into poststructural gender analysis here, but let’s note that the idea that everybody has to pick one (1) gender with whom to be sexually and emotionally intimate, always forever and that’s how you are, has hardly been universal.
Good replies to my points. Thanks for the civility, btw. Your excellent rebuttals do show why the essentialist case can’t really be made well in constructivist terms.
If I can ever stop posting comments on other peoples’ blogs long enough to get caught up with my academic work, I’ll post something self-contained over on my blog, from an essentialist pov. I’ll let Amp know and if he deems it link-worthy we can start a good old-fashioned blog war.
Thanks, Robert, I’d certainly like to know why you take the essentialist position here. It makes sense to take some aspects of reality as given, but to put the meaning of words in this category makes no sense to me.
Robert wrote:Marriage is an institution that evolved to protect the vulnerable members of human society: pregnant women and children. In the primitive state, pregnant women and/or young children are not independently viable social units. They require additional support.
Robert, there are countless instances in both the primitive world and the animal kingdom where pregnant females and mothers-and-offspring survive quite well without the help of the males, thank you. In fact there are many natural childrearing arrangements in the animal kingdom where females or groups of females are the parents raising offspring, while the males of the species live separately except during mating season – essentially functioning as separate social units. ;)
I’m not arguing we should do away with male-female marriage, of course – but I’m pointing out that there have been myriad natural “alternative lifestyles” extant for ages – and the Noah’s Ark myth of the universal dyadic “momma-poppa-baby” arrangment simply isn’t so universal.
There are a multitude of “natural” family situations observable in the field, but history has shown that the reason traditional marriage evoloved was not for the protection of the ‘weak’ females and children, but rather for the purpose of ensuring that a male had certitude his offspring would share his genetics, as well as to provide legal ownership of both his wife (or wives) and children and patrinlineal succession.
Protection of women and children would seem to have been a secondary somewhat more self-interested consideration, as in many cultures the “paterfamiliias” had the power of life-or-death over wives and children, and had authority to punish or kill them at will – hardly a provision designed for the protection of women or children.
While I concede these are examples of the harsh extremes of traditional marriage, and certainly not exemplary of male-female marriage as a whole, in modern society the essential economic hunter-gatherer provider-childbearer roles of the genders are not that relevant – or useful – any more.
I think it is this fact – perhaps more than any other anti-gay sentiment, per se – that disturbs anti-SSM folks the most.
If you want to argue that the essence of marriage is to “protect” women, then the Bible is not your friend. The story of Onan makes it quite clear that the essence of marriage is to provide a man a method of bearing him an heir. (That tool is called a wife, aka a womb on feet.) A man married his dead brother’s wives whether he wanted to or not, and definitely if they wanted to or not, because the need to produce a legal heir for the dead brother outweighed all other considerations, demonstrating that it was the most important part of marriage.
The Biblical argument against gay marriage is a solid one, logically. Women were made *for* men as servants, companions, and tools to bear a man’s children. Therefore marriage is male/female because it’s the method of having your rightful access to a servant/womb/companion without degrading her family by calling her a concubine or a slave.
I am beyond annoyed by all the back-bending illogical arguments from people who should just come out in support of patriarchy but don’t want to because they know that it is repellant to the modern view of democracy.
Amp, I am just curious…in your experience, have any of your rational, well-reasoned arguments on this subject ever changed someone’s mind?
I’m not saying it’s impossible, I’m just saying the “sides” are so entrenched here, I have yet to see such a thing happen.
Jasper-
I don’t think anyone’s mind is ever changed by a single argument (or anyway, it happens incredibly rarely, at best).
I do think that people’s minds are sometimes changed by an accumilation of arguments and discussions over the course of time. If someone finds it harder and harder to defend their positions with conviction, or feel more and more that what they’re saying is untenable, they’ll eventually switch. Not in a sudden, “you’ve convinced me!” sort of way, but in a “well, I’ll talk about other subjects for a few months or years, and then come back to this subject having gradually rethought my position” sort of way.
People usually need a period of separation from the arguments to be able to rethink their position; otherwise pride tends to get in the way.
I’m also aware that most of the people reading arguments on the internet are lurkers, some of whom (perhaps) are fence-sitters. So I try and put on a good argument for the sake of any fence-sitters that may be reading.
That said, I have of late been losing faith in the whole endeavor. Many people don’t make decisions based on trying to think about positions with clarity; they don’t even pretend to. They just go with their guts, and they don’t care if what they’re saying makes sense. Obviously, I’m not going to be persuasive to someone like that, no matter how hard I try.
For me, the bottom line is this: I didn’t choose to have what talents I have. I’m pretty good at logical argumentation, so that’s the way I try to contribute. I figure, since that’s what I can do, that’s what I should do.
(I do other things as well, like volunteer work, for whatever good that does).
http://www.lgsz.com/profile.asp
http://www.tjwatch.com
A very good post. You’re such a kind and generous person, Amp! I’m a bit more cynical, at least this morning. My reaction to
“No one at the Institute for American Values (Elizabeth’s employer) is suggesting that we bring back coverture or outlaw divorce, for example.”
is “yeah, not this year anyway, or at least not on the record”…
One argument against the essentialist view of marriage, it occurs to me, is common usage. People have no problem understanding same-sex marriage; if I say “I have these two friends who are gay guys and they went to San Francisco and they got married”, no one will say “what do you mean?”, and the only people who will suggest that I’m misusing the word “marriage” are a very few people with a theoretical axe to grind. *8) People may say “that shouldn’t be allowed” or “they’ll burn in hell for eternity unless they repent”, but no significant number of people will fail to understand what it means. This suggests that same-sex marriage is easily understandable as marriage, and that the different-sex bit isn’t inherent to the meaning of the word.
Just a thought…
The assumption of that flawed “argument” is also that the purpose of marriage is to rear children. It’s not so, and the law does not require it to be so.
So we do have heterosexual marriages with no children. No one suggests we ban marriage for people who do not want or cannot have children and call that “civil union” instead, right?
On the other hand we have same-sex couples who do rear children who are either biological children of one of the partners, or have been adopted where the law allows it.
So, even if Elizabeth thinks it’s such a bad thing not to be raised by both your own biological parents, it’s not enough to argue against SSM, because SSM couples who raise children already exist, even without being married.
What does she suggest be done about it?
What I find most unpleasant is that idea of biology above all. As if biological parents were automatically good parents. As if raising children was more a matter of stamping your own DNA on them than caring for them. It’s insulting to adoptive parents of any sex as well as to the adopted children – and I thought that kind of mentality was something of the past.