{"id":948,"date":"2004-07-05T05:56:24","date_gmt":"2004-07-05T13:56:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.amptoons.com\/blog\/archives\/2004\/07\/05\/making-distinctions-between-the-distinctions-we-make\/"},"modified":"2004-07-05T05:56:24","modified_gmt":"2004-07-05T13:56:24","slug":"making-distinctions-between-the-distinctions-we-make","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/?p=948","title":{"rendered":"Making Distinctions Between the Distinctions We Make"},"content":{"rendered":"

Chickpea Eater’s Bookblog<\/a>, commenting on Rauch’s arguments in Gay Marriage<\/i> (and via the invaluable Marriage Debate<\/a>), writes:<\/p>\n

Society benefits enormously by having heterosexual couples commit to stay together before having intercourse. This is because heterosexual intercourse often results in conception, and when conception occurs it is preferable that both biological parents are committed to taking care of the child. We give special status to committed heterosexual couples because we want to encourage biological parents to be committed to taking care of the children they’ve conceived. We don’t expect that every couple will produce children, but we want to make sure that those which do produce children are married.<\/p>\n

Sounds great. But there’s a snag. Rauch says that if we believe marriage is ordered towards procreation, then we shouldn’t allow post-menopausal women to marry. We might respond that they’re allowed to marry because prohibiting them from marrying would be too invasive– we don’t want the government administering fertility tests. But this seems like a really lousy answer. We do not want to say that post-menopausal women are only allowed to marry because we don’t know that they’re post-menopausal, because if we did then we’d be saying that post-menopausal women really shouldn’t marry, even though it’s legal, and that we should discourage infertile women from marrying.<\/p>\n

At first, this appears absolutely devastating to the anti-gay-marriage case. But on second thought, Rauch’s argument turns out to be an argument against making any distinctions of status, except on the strictest bases of merit. For example, if you say, “We call people ‘professors’ in order to indicate that their work is of a higher dignity than those people we call ‘teachers.’ This is because professors teach more sophisticated concepts and are do research.” But one could reply, “Yes, but there are some teachers who teach higher level classes than some professors. And teachers some teachers do original research. Lack of original research disqualifies all teachers but no professors. So what we have here is blatant anti-teacher bias. To correct this bias, we should allow all teachers to be called professors.” The point is that even though some professors contribute less than some teachers, we are still justified in making a general distinction of rank.<\/p><\/div>\n

Contrary to Ms. (Mr?) Eater’s analysis, we don’t call professors “professor” to indicate one who does original research; there are obviously many professors who do no original research, and also many non-professors (private-sector research scientists, for example) who do plenty of original research.<\/p>\n

We call them “professor” because that is a job title (one of several possible titles) of those who teach at colleges and universities. “Teacher,” in contrast, is a job title for those teaching at other sorts of schools. Calling each person by their correct job title is not, despite Ms. Eater’s claim, any sort of injustice.<\/p>\n

Aside from her badly-chosen metaphor, Ms. Eater’s logic – that if we object to any unfair distinction, we are making “an argument against making any distinctions of status” – is nonsense. If I say that a law forbidding Jews from owning property is unjust, I’m not arguing against all distinctions of status. Rather, I’m saying that this particular <\/i>distinction creates injustice needlessly and should therefore no longer be recognized by law.<\/p>\n

To say that teachers are not professors isn’t an injustice; it’s a statement about job categories. On the other hand, to forbid someone by law from teaching because they’re a member of a minority – for instance, to say that homosexuals are not allowed to be teachers – would be an injustice. Straights-only marriage more closely resembles the latter case than the former.<\/p>\n

Later in her review, Ms. Eater argues that Rauch is mistaken in his attempt to “pare marriage to its essential core.” I agree with Ms. Eater; marriage is complex and multifaceted, and cannot be sensibly pared down to a single essential core. To any honest observer, it’s obvious that marriage serves many functions simultaneously. As Rauch says, marriage “is two people’s lifelong commitment, recognized by law and society, to care for each other.” But it’s also, as Ms. Eater says, society’s attempt “to encourage biological parents to be committed to taking care of the children they’ve conceived.” And I’d add that “marriage is a family-making bond,” benefiting not only the couple but also any children they’re raising (not only “biological” children).<\/p>\n

Years before the gay marriage controversy encouraged many folks in the marriage movement to write op-eds declaring that children conceived through heterosexual intercourse is the sole purpose of marriage, some of those same folks had a more sensible view<\/a>. Asking “what is marriage,” they said that “marriage is…” a legal contract; a financial partnership; a sacred promise; a sexual union; a personal bond; and a family-making bond. This approach – recognizing the reality that marriage can, does and should <\/i>serve multiple functions, and can even serve different functions for different people – is far more intelligent and realistic than the “one purpose” analysis most anti-SSM folks have been forced into by their need to exclude homosexuals..<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Chickpea Eater’s Bookblog, commenting on Rauch’s arguments in Gay Marriage (and via the invaluable Marriage Debate), writes: Society benefits enormously by having heterosexual couples commit to stay together before having intercourse. This is because heterosexual intercourse often results in conception, … 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-948","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\/948","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=948"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/948\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=948"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=948"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=948"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}