Eve Tushnet yesterday blogged her brief against gay marraige. It didn’t make a lot of sense to me – and, despite Eve’s effort to put her argument in entirely secular terms, I suspect it wouldn’t make sense to most atheists.
Eve’s first step is a “just-so” story – she asks what the purpose of marriage in our society. By an amazing coincidence, most of the answers Eve came up with imply heterosexuality:
(Maggie Gallagher, answering a similar question, said “The three classic goods of marriage in our common tradition are children, mutual caretaking, and sexual regulation, not necessarily in that order,” which I think I find a little more convincing).
Quibbles aside, I agree that marriage historically developed to meet the needs of opposite-sex couples; for most of the history of marriage’s development, after all, there were virtually no publicly acknowledged same-sex romantic couples. However, it’s also true that in the United States marriage historically developed to meet the needs of same-race couples. Eve could argue, I suppose, that miscegenation laws weren’t an important element of marriage considered over thousands of years. But in that case, we must acknowledge that in most of the world, marriage historically developed to merge a family between a subservient class with few legal rights (women) and the master class (men).
The fact is, the original conditions that marriage was designed for no longer apply. The races now intermarry with no harm to marriage. Women and men are – if not entirely equal classes – certainly much closer to equal than when marriage first evolved (at some cost to marriage, in that fewer women nowadays stay in marriage out of fear of starvation). Despite these changes, however, marriage still serves to provide children with stable families; to be a ceremony of transition to adulthood; and to channel sexual desire.
Is there any reason to think this will cease to be the case if same-sex marriage is acknowledged?
None that I’ve seen. Eve has promised to write a post describing “the “mechanism” by which same-sex marriage will weaken reg’lar old marriage”; I’ll be looking forward to it, since it seems to me this is the big “missing link” in the anti-gay-marriage argument..
Why in the world wouldn’t gay marriage encourage: “The three classic goods of marriage in our common tradition are children, mutual caretaking, and sexual regulation, not necessarily in that order.” Married homosexuals could provide homes to children who would otherwise be orphans (yes, that’s the choice. No one wants to take kids away from good straight couples and give them to queers). As far as mutual caretaking and sexual regulation, obviously gay marriage would further those goods. If we focus on these three goods, why don’t we support polygamy as well?
Not how I would define marriage.
The “need for a father” isn’t so clearcut as advertised. It may be nice to have one (assuming he’s a good person) but, for instance, matrilineal cultures typically have most of what we consider the “father’s role” assumed by an uncle. It’s actually a pretty good way of handling things; the father can be free to travel and work, bringing in money and building trade networks. That’s one reason why the Minangkabau of west Sumatra (Islamic and matrilineal both, btw) are so prominent in the arts and government, as well as business, in Indonesia despite being a rather small minority. You see similar things in other matrilineal societies, with their patrilineal neighbors often complaining that matriliny gives them a special advantage.
Actually, the primary reason marriage evolved, as is clear from the anthropological and ethnographic records, was to codify and institutionalize monogamy. And the reason for doing that was to minimize competition amoung men for access to women. Legal marriage historically has been an agreement between less powerful men and more powerful men, not between men and women. That is why polygamy is almost universally associated with despotic cultures and monogamous marriage with egalitarian ones. Children had nothing to do with it, except in the indirect evolutionary sense that reproductive success is what drives men to compete for sexual access to women in the first place.
Tushnet and Gallagher, who seem wholly ignorant of anthropology and science in general, but who are committed to Catholic anti-gay doctrine, want marriage to be all about children in order to give themselves a pretext for denying it to gay couples. But even if we accepted their flawed premise about the purpose of marriage, it wouldn’t justify their policy conclusion anyway, for the reasons their critics have described.
Speaking as someone who lives in a country, Denmark, where gays can be married (though not by the Danish church), I can’t see the damn problem. Trust me, gay marriages have had no affect on straith marriages in those 10 years or so they have been possible here in Denmark.
The big debate here right now, is about wether gay church marriages should be possible. Since the Danish church is a state church, there are pretty good arguments for it to be possible, as it otherwise descrimninates against a part of the Danish population that pays for it (here it is assumed that those who wants a church marriage pays church tax). The other solution is to revoke the Danish church’s status as a state church – something I’m very much in favour of.
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