Politics and marriage (second part)

My first post on this subject was not meant to argue (all appearances, I now realize, to the contrary) that marriages with children are morally superior to marriages without children. It's just that Gallagher's position was attractive to me insofar as it reminded the potential groom or bride that "it's not all about you." And I think that to the extent that we can keep that sentiment alive in a consumer society constantly focused on arguing otherwise, it would be just dandy. But kids are actually not the central issue. Whether a marriage produces children or not, there is something morally valuable and noble (sorry to get all 19th-century on your postmodern ass*) about choosing to make a life-long commitment, to forgo certain guaranteed but momentary pleasures and joys on behalf of a deeper, more profound understanding of, and attachment to, another person. This is the sort of relationship that I saw my maternal grandfather and grandmother live through to the end of their lives. It is an inspiring life choice. There is no reason that I can plausibly entertain as to why this kind of relationship need be restricted to a heterosexual couple.

Only, this is not the sort of argument that gets made in the debate right now. Or if it is, I don't hear it. I also don't hear much about how allowing gay couples to marry might make for a better society: not just for gays, but for straights, since it might promote a more humane and inclusive attitude among the population as a whole, as regards sexuality (I think that this is actually an important element in the push for gay marriage. It's just not an idea that gets much play.) The central argument is one about individual rights, and I think that to the extent that one is committed to this argument, one must accept, unproblematically, a more general understanding of the individual enshrined in classic liberalism: an individual, that is to say, with no strong moral obligations to the wider world of which he or she is a part.

So who cares what you think, Trithemius? We live under the rule of law, here. The United States has a constitution. The government has to act according to the rules laid down in that document. And as you noted yourself in the first post, the constitutional argument seems pretty strong.

But I respond: it seems convincing only on the surface, only taken on its own claims. The problem comes with the idea of marriage, and with a fundamental misunderstanding of what a social institution like marriage properly is. My change of heart on this matter came when listening to my then-neighbor discuss the Massachusetts decision right after it came down. He was quite happy about it: it meant his sister would get to marry her long-time partner. Since I could see see where the guy was coming from on that score, and was pretty confused about this issue in any case, I didn't want to argue with him. I limited myself to asking his opinion as a lawyer, what he thought of the decision as law. He answered that the only reason one could give to opposing gay marriage was the unthinking, unexamined assumption that most of had about marriage being a partnership between a man and a woman. Which is entirely true. Had you asked almost any American 20 years ago to define marriage, I suspect that person would have included within the definition the fact that marriage joined together a man and woman. This is still the position put forth by some conservatives: marriage is by definition heterosexual. It seems like a pretty weak argument.

It's not. To say that we have assumed up to now that marriage means, "the legal union of a man and a woman," is simply to say that we treat the word marriage like any other word. All words mean something, and all meanings are derived in part from difference: from what they exclude as much as what they include. To allow gay people to marry would mean fundamentally changing the meaning of marriage, and our understanding of what it is supposed to do. It's not like changing the meaning of the word orange, so that it means the color of a lime. As an institution, the concept of marriage carries social implications. If it didn't nobody would bother arguing about it in the first place. And here is where I think that the analogy with marriage and other institutions starts to fall down. The reason that forbidding blonde people to drive sounds ridiculous is that the color of one's hair has nothing to do with the definition of legal driver. And I would say the same thing about banning inter-racial marriages. It was problematic from the get-go because the race of the couple was never a fundamental element to the definition of marriage. Some southern racists obviously thought that an inter-racial marriage was immoral, but that's the point: they thought it was an immoral marriage. Whereas for most of the country's history a same-sex union was not considered an improper marriage: it wasn't considered a marriage at all. It was something else.

All of which is to say: the question of changing our understanding of marriage is a political question. It is something that should be decided by legislatures, or by referenda, not by judges in courts.

*Or not, actually.