{"id":315,"date":"2003-08-06T18:38:13","date_gmt":"2003-08-07T02:38:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.amptoons.com\/blog\/archives\/2003\/08\/06\/rationalization-in-three-acts\/"},"modified":"2003-08-06T18:38:13","modified_gmt":"2003-08-07T02:38:13","slug":"rationalization-in-three-acts","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/?p=315","title":{"rendered":"Rationalization in Three Acts"},"content":{"rendered":"

Eve Tushnet yesterday blogged her brief against gay marraige<\/a>. 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.<\/p>\n

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:<\/p>\n

Marriage developed over centuries to meet several specific, fundamental needs: children’s need for a father. A couple’s need for a promise of fidelity (and consequences for breaking that promise). Young people’s need for a gendered transition to adulthood–a way to become a woman or a man. And men’s (and women’s, but mostly men’s) need for a fruitful rather than destructive channel for sexual desire–a way of uniting eros and responsibility. In other words, marriage developed to meet the needs of opposite-sex couples.<\/div>\n

(Maggie Gallagher<\/a>, 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).<\/p>\n

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).<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

Is there any reason to think this will cease to be the case if same-sex marriage is acknowledged?<\/p>\n

None that I’ve seen. Eve has promised<\/a> 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..<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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. … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[112],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-315","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-same-sex-marriage"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/315","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=315"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/315\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=315"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=315"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=315"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}