Why “Marriage” Matters
A couple of weeks ago, after I posted my unpublished same-sex marriage essay, Eve Tushnet and I had a nice e-mail back-and-forth in which she remarked, among other things, that given that essay’s overall argument it was pretty silly of me to claim at the end that the debate over marriage was nothing but a fight over a “mere word”. Two weeks later, thanks to Eve’s latest – start here, work down ‘til you get to the Christopher Logue excerpt, and don’t continue reading this post ‘til then – I’m up at midnight trying to hammer out a quick post on why that complaint was a hundred percent right.
I mean, the marriage debate is a debate over a word: but like a great many of our words, “marriage” isn’t a mere word, but rather a word that has a rather central place in our cultural self-understanding and so can’t change its significance without having pretty dramatic effects on many other aspects of that self-understanding, too. Hence Eve:
Gay marriage is a big deal for the same reasons given by its supporters!–it is a real change in the culture, a deeply significant change, and a change with far-reaching public implications. I don’t think you can write paeans to marriage as a public and cultural status, then turn around and say that gay marriage will have very limited public effects. Marriage isn’t designed to have limited public effects.
I think this is spot-on. How we understand marriage is a big deal, and the push for same-sex marriage is a push to have quite a lot of us – by which I mean: perhaps not those of us who attend fancy schools and live in DC or Berkeley, but still quite a lot of us – change our understanding of marriage in pretty dramatic ways. And the idea, which is trotted out with disturbing frequency given how transparently absurd it is, that the push for same-sex marriage is anything short of this, i.e. that it’s just a push for a change in the legal code that won’t have to have any wider cultural consequences unless people allow it to, is … well … transparently absurd. Note well the title of Eve’s post: the language we speak is an essentially public language, and politics and publicity just don’t come apart like that, which means that a change in how marriage is treated in our politics simply has to be a change in how it is treated by our culture; the only real question should be whether you think such a change would be a good one.
To repeat: the real question is whether you think such a change would be a good one. And I think it’s quite possible to argue that it would be: there are, after all, many cases in which things change for the better, and indeed if your view of history is sufficiently optimistic you might think that that is usually how it is, and so that there’s reason to assume that the normalization of same-sex marriage will follow a similar course, with homophobia and traditional gender roles going the merry way of racism the aristocracy. But then the point is that this is an empirical claim, and even if you’re not (as I’m not) the sort of person who gets all fearful about religious freedom or slippery slopes or All the Awful Things That Might Happen you still have to acknowledge the likelihood that some good things would be all-but-irretrievably lost as a consequence of such a change, that there would be some less than fully salutary effects of modifying our cultural self-understanding in the way that the push for same-sex marriage proposes that we should. Some changes are like the Wild Card and the invention of the forward pass, while others are more like interleague play and the BCS; and even if allowing same-sex marriage turned out to be a change like the first two there would still be at least some ways in which the self-understandings of future generations would likely be impoverished relative to our own.
Yes, Quine showed us that the meanings of words can and do change. And yes, such changes are often very much for the better – just think of how our concept of space, incomprehensible as it would have been to Aristotle or Newton, allows us to understand the universe in incredibly illuminating ways. (Though think also of how, having gotten beyond the scientific naïveté of the ancients, we often find ourselves at a loss when it comes time to account for the presence in a world like ours of things like mindedness or mind-independent value.) And, finally, yes, our public understanding of marriage has already changed in a host of dramatic (though as dramatic as this one?) ways in both recent and not-so-recent years. But all of that only sketches the background; it does not show where we should go from here. “Marriage” does not pick out a natural kind, but rather a kind that is created, and given that it is up to us to shape that word’s significance in ways that meet our deepest human needs. The challenge is to do this as best we can, and given that challenge’s obvious immensity the confidence of gay marriage proponents that they have an easy solution that can’t be called into question by anyone but bigots and homophobes strikes me as evidence of a deeply dangerous sort of hubris.
Addendum: In the morning light, this post looks to be worded a bit differently than I’d have put things if I wrote it right now. But such is the Internet; I’ve made some very minor stylistic alterations, but I stand by the content.
Filed under: marriage, philosophy
Would you say that the language change has already happened in the urban areas (Berkeley? You’ve advocated having separate terms for gay love in the past. Given what we see in France and Quebec for peoples preferences given a choice to marriage, is marriage over inclusive? Wouldn’t opening up options beyond just gay and straight meet an unspoken but quite obvious need in society? Challenging this broadening of meaning as some sort of challenge or violence against those that would be its gate keepers seems a stretch.
Yes, I agree that many of the relevant changes have already taken place in areas like this one – it’s just that I think there’s very good reason to question whether the effects of those changes have been entirely or even mostly salutary. And I have no problem at all with “opening up options beyond gay and straight”, but I simply don’t think this should be done in a way that prizes sameness over difference. Or to put it somewhat differently: the “broadening of meaning” you’re advocating would at the same time be a very radical narrowing, and I worry about what that would lose us. Does this make me a “gatekeeper”? I suppose, though every one of us is a gatekeeper in his or her own way; it’s best to be honest with ourselves and one another about what we’re up to and why.
I’d say the change is well established in Seattle. We often speak of partners vs. husband/wife. I’ve had multiple gay parenting friends. It’s hard to see a downside within my cultural context. What would you argue is the downside that you see in Berkeley?
What do you mean by valuing sameness over difference and narrowing? I’m not sure I follow that. Don’t you argue for different, more narrowly defined goods for different types of relationships?
I would argue that the downsides of such changes are manifold: we lose our handle on the distinctiveness of heterosexual (and homosexual, and …) love, and thus of heterosexual (and …) pairings; we lose our handle on what is distinctive about heterosexual (and …) sex; we harm our ability to see marriage as naturally oriented toward (though not always resulting in) the bearing and raising of children; we begin to see marriage (or partnership, or whatever) as a contract rather than a vow and a choice rather than a vocation; the understandings of marriage articulated in our great religious traditions seem foolish and irrelevant; and so on. And that’s just a start. Maybe you don’t think all these changes are bad changes, and maybe you think that those that aren’t bad are outweighed by other good ones, but such judgments can clearly be disputed.
Re: narrowing, my point is just that “broadening” a concept to include more things necessarily (or at least very often) requires stripping it of its original meaning; the concept then has a wider application but nevertheless a narrowed cognitive significance. If I tell you e.g. that by “the physical” I will mean whatever exists at all, then physicalism is true by default but that doesn’t matter much at all, does it?
OK, I’m not communicating.
I was trying to take what I think is your position: there should be different institutions to deal with different goods. My point was that there are obviously more than just two distinct goods. If you open partnerships up to different definitions, including traditional marriage, in France I believe they have three, people will better be able to choose what they actually wish. I’m not arguing here that there should be one institution that covers all, but that there should be a number of institutions that while providing identical civil rights never the less express different social content.
What would this look like on the ground? I’m somewhat familiar with the French policy, but can you spell out how exactly is it different from having, say, a choice between religious marriage, civil marriage, and “mere” civil unions, each providing the same set of civil protections but with the first two options restricted just to heterosexual couples and the second open to same-sex ones as well? And isn’t this the sort of thing that many states already offer, but gay marriage advocates deride as discriminatory?
Unions would have to have all of the same protections and it would have to be open to heterosexuals. I’d trade my marriage in for one, if one were available. I’m not aware of a State that offers this yet.
Well it’s unclear to me why such unions would have to be open to heterosexuals; if your goal is to maximize differentiation, shouldn’t you resist this? But anyway, here’s a rundown of civil union and domestic partnership laws in the US: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_unions_in_the_United_States. Is it really true that none of them fit your criteria?
In any case, the crucial point is that advocates for same-sex marriage are (for many understandable reasons) not willing to stop at the point you suggest.
“Well it’s unclear to me why such unions would have to be open to heterosexuals; if your goal is to maximize differentiation, shouldn’t you resist this?”
Well, we could have cultural designators for marriage “y” that entails the good when a one eyed Armenian hitches up with a one legged Croatian but it would have its practical drawbacks. There needs to be an option for “I’ll define my own relationship, thank you very much”. This would allow for all of the outlying, non breeding, or other breeding, to have a place.
Okay, that’s fine; you’re certainly right that the lawbooks can’t have a separate term for every distinction that an individual might want to make. The more important point, though, is that what you’re advocating here is something quite different from SSM, and as such is pretty much compatible with my overall argument. I think, however, that there are lots of good reasons why SSM proponents would be dissatisfied with it.
I can’t imagine what good faith problem the SSM would have with this, though ultimately their fight is not mine.
“Some changes are like the Wild Card and the invention of the forward pass, while others are more like interleague play and the BCS…”
I have zero clue what this simile means. I guess that’s what I get for not being into sports.
Okay, how about:
Does that work for you?
I assumed it was something like that; I just didn’t know which ones were good and which ones were bad. Thanks!
We could really help jocks and geeks bridge their communication gap if we made a program that translated sports metaphors into science fiction metaphors and vice versa.