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A Pointed 104 Seconds on the Marriage Debate
Here at Stanford this past spring, the Anscombe Society braved threats and intimidation of all kinds to host a conference in favor of traditional marriage. In this video one of the speakers, the marvelously articulate and completely fearless Ryan Anderson, replies to a questioner. Watch the video, if you have 104 seconds to spare, and then note, if you would, my questions below:
Without quite realizing it, I saw when I listened to this exchange, I’d been sliding toward at least a grudging acceptance of the libertarian position on marriage—namely, that we should get the government out of the business of defining marriage altogether. Which leads to:
1) Anderson is right, isn’t he, that such an approach leads inevitably to viewing marriage as merely a subset of contract law? If a man wants to marry a man, fine; let them draw up a legally binding contract. If one man wants to marry six women; or two men, two women; or one woman another—again, fine. Let them simply draw up the proper contracts, and let the government enforce them as it would any contract.
2) This really won’t do, will it? Marriage between one man and one woman really is different, and the state needs to recognize that reality, or—what? Or chaos. Yes?
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Yeah, but definition number 2 is in there to cover dictatorships, which is a form of government. Just not one we want.
I do not believe 1.2 applies only to dictatorships. The government of the State of Georgia is hardly a dictatorship but clearly regulates and controls the actions of the people of the state.
I think you were referring to the legal benefits, which is only a subset of the benefits of marriage.
As a result of being married, my wife and I (implicitly) agreed to a wide variety of obligations to each other and our future children. We’re each responsible for each other’s happiness, welfare, and future in a unique and very specific way that go far beyond the legal obligations of marriage; these are enforceable through our selves and social opprobrium, as well as through divorce.
Shorter version: even irreligious couples benefit from marriage by signing up for the host of responsibilities that — if not met — subject him to “Dammit, your can’t treat your wife/husband like that!”
So, you found out a word has multiple meanings. Yes, government can mean either the state itself or the act of governing (anything by anything). But which does it usually mean here? More importantly, those two meanings are not synonymous, yet you apparently wish to conflate the two. Why?
Extending that conflation, why not say statistical mechanics is part of our government?
And if these legal obligations were embodied in a contract rather than a license, would you feel any differently about the wide variety of implicit obligations? ;-)
None of the definitions I offered relate to the state itself. The definitions I provided are all related, that is why they are numbered as they are.
These types of arguments were made ten years ago, but liberals rejected them summarily by stating that because having children was not necessary to have a marriage, then it must be irrational to cite children as part of the state’s interest in preserving one-man-one-woman marriage. “What about infertile couples? Or intentionally childless couples??!!” The existence of married couples without children doesn’t mean that the state doesn’t have an interest in promoting the ideal of marriage for children who do exist (since children do best with their natural, married parents) but courts have rejected the argument as based in animus.
Correct, I disagree with the conclusions he draws that this somehow abolishes marriage. Marriage exists independently of government sanction. The government’s only interest is in resolving the property rights that arise from living arrangements. I’d go so far as to argue the government has no reason to promote child-bearing except for the ever-expanding welfare state that requires more and more people to pay into it.
I would also disagree with Peter that we need to jump from saying we will bestow rights to people under a civil contract to saying we have to accept them as married. The entire idea of a civil union contract is that we are bestowing a set of rights normally associated but not limited to marriage to people who are not married as marriage has a distinct definition they do not meet. This is why a civil union could be done between family members, friends, lovers, whatever the relationship may be.
My point has been, though, that this is largely academic because the SSM movement is not about rights but legitimacy and using the government to force acceptance on everyone else.
I’m not saying that no one was making that case, but the overwhelming majority of SoCon commentary was emphatically not of the tenor that KC presented. A lot of folks, for instance, opposed civil unions on the grounds that they’d smooth the road for the eventual passage of SSM: not a crazy idea, mind you, but certainly not in accord with what KC wrote.
Additionally — and this is what I had in mind — KC wrote:
Unless I’m misreading him here — KC, please correct me if I have you wrong — this is an implicit acknowledgement that at least some homosexual relationships deserve social and legal sanction. Stipulating that opposition to SSM is not coextensive with homo
Also, I can’t help but point out that Virginia’s marriage amendment not only banned SSM, but also anything that “approximates the design, qualities, significance, or effects of marriage”; i.e., civil unions were constitutionally prohibited inVirginia until just this year. I believe the Commonwealth was an outlier in this, but wow.
I live in VA, and I think the amendment went too far, especially considering many of these benefits are already available individually apart from marriage. I did vote for it as it was the only option presented to me to halt the continued assault on the definition of marriage by the Left. As it is a reaction to the aggressive tactics of the Left, it’s not surprising it erred too far the other way. We’re not going to get government out of the equation as long as one side aggressively tries to use the government to force their agenda on everyone else.
Do marriage traditionalists favor civil unions that offer all of the same legal rights? My impression has been an emphatic “no”. However, there is a strain that would accept civil unions as a compromise as long as they merely recognized a common bundle of life and property settings, for efficiency’s sake. Marriage in all but name only doesn’t seem to be popular anywhere.
Your followup question, then, is still important: in which ways is marriage actually privileged? In which ways is marriage more than an efficient bundle of life settings primarily focused on the benefit of the participants rather than the benefit of society? Admittedly the great damage to marriage has been done decades ago through no fault divorce and the erosion of the expectations and other trends we’ve discussed before. My remaining opposition to SSM rests in a desire to preserve marriage as a distinct thing with the hope of perhaps restoring its teeth some day. Otherwise I think that Anderson is correct: if marriage is whatever the participants want it to mean then there is no basis for privilege or meaning in either law or common culture. As Whiskey Sam has been arguing, there isn’t anything left to be identified as “marriage” unless “marriage” is to come to mean an unspecified array of efficient or custom life settings. There is no hope of coming back from the latest change, even if there is only a slim delusion of a hope to restoring civil marriage to better health and effectiveness.
I referenced the poll we did last year on Ricochet. At least on this site, traditional marriage supporters do overwhelmingly.
If you’re referring to DocJay’s poll then my recollection was a bit different, but I wouldn’t bet lunch on my recollection, let alone the farm. More broadly, my impression is that by “civil union” most traditionalists aren’t referring to “marriage in all but name”.
Government is a clumsy, sledgehammer like tool to try and use to normalize something in the culture.
SSM advocates won the culture with Will & Grace. Your counter has to actually engage the culture in order to be effective, not attempt to control it by fiat.
Marriage and government exist independently of each other. If either one is older, it’s marriage. Government recognizes the role of marriage and inevitably gives favorable treatment to it in some ways. Unmarried people get jealous of those favored benefits and demand them for themselves. A similar example is people with children getting tax deductions for them. What if a childless person said “Hey, that guy gets a tax deduction for his child. I want one for my dog. If you don’t give it to me, that’s inequality.” That would be easily refuted because the benefit is clearly for a child, and people wouldn’t see dogs and children as of equal importance. So the problem with SSM is that people have no idea that marriage exists because of children. Thus the inability of the audience member to answer the speaker’s question: if we abolish the gender requirement, why not the number requirement?
I’m not trying to use government to normalize culture (though I don’t agree that government can’t be an effective and powerful tool for normalizing culture). I believe that marriage relates to more than the choices of the participants and so I see the value of imposing expectations on and offering protections to the participants through law. What I’m trying to do by opposing SSM is to prevent the obliteration of marriage as a distinct and specific concept rather than merely an infinitely variable bundle of life settings.
Government is a trailing indicator. You have to win the culture wars on SSM. Which means, you have to engage the culture in some way shape or form. Simply telling people through laws that they must conform to a standard they don’t agree with is a surefire way to get them to elect people who will change those laws.
If it comes to granting SSM, I say force the laws to call it “Civil Union” out of, yes, pure spite. If someone asks, “Are you married?”, they can respond, “Well, yes .. no, Civil Union.”
Why you ask? Because, in part, this entire issue about “Me. Me. Me. Look at me. Over here. I have rights too. Here I am ..” mind set.
That’s true for both sides of the argument, and I’m a supporter of states deciding for themselves how this is to be handled. And I’m not suggesting that we impose any standards by fiat and all that. I’m advocating for a particular answer to the question: what purpose does the institution of civil marriage serve?
It’s a contract and little bit more. Like a Trust, LLC, C Corp or S Corp, marriage creates a legal entity. A civil union would create a new type entity.
Perhaps Will & Grace and Queer Eye For The Straight Guy won the culture on homosexuality, but my opposition to SSM has nothing to do with homosexuality per se while it has everything to do with what I think marriage has been and ought to be (and eventually will be again once reality and necessity reassert themselves). I’m one of those marriage traditionalists who would compromise on civil unions assuming they were limited to common bundles of life/property arrangements while marriage more robustly imposed expectations and offered protections to its participants. I’d even compromise on SSM if in exchange we were to make marriage more robust rather than infinitely toothless. Unfortunately I think the cultural engagement on this has been neck-breakingly shallow.
How does that change the fact that culture drives policy and not the other way around?
What all of this debate tiptoes around but doesn’t want to admit is that the government was founded with a default Judeo-Christian ethos which took a number of things for granted, one of them being marriage was between one man and one woman, and that there were certain benefits that automatically accrued to marriage unchallenged as being natural aspects of marriage. Some of those benefits have been individually extended to others over time weakening marriage’s unique status. As the population of America has changed, we no longer have the default ethos this country was founded with, and so now we have no explicit legal reason to continue the preferred status. It’s more tradition than anything.
Is the answer to remove government from the equation entirely? That would seem to be the solution that does the least damage, but I’m not sure that leaves us better off as a society. I’m not sure that it doesn’t also further weaken the ethos the country was founded on and which may be necessary for our government to function properly. Can we separate the workings of government from the ethos which defined its role and limits?
It is not as much of a one way street as you’re making it out, otherwise the Left would not have spent the last century getting imposed through the courts would they could not get through the legislature which is much more directly responsive to the culture.
I actually agree that this was the case, but how long do you think the government can run on a Christian ethos as Christianity declines in practice and influence?
Perhaps we should focus on protecting minority rights, and keeping government confined to its essential roles; principles that can work no matter what The US religious demographics look like in the future.
This has more to do with the left’s impatience with American government being designed to change slowly than with support at the polls.
Don’t accept the premise that “the government has an interest” in conjugal marriage. Society has an interest; government is just society’s enforcement institution. Society has no interest in buggery except to ban it as a perversion, if we are so inclined to show respect for human nature. Buggery certainly has no claims on society. The people in such relationships probably have some claim to be left alone, but the argument has yet to be made that the claim is equal to that of a corporation, a church, or a social club.
That’s the underlying question. Can we focus on those things successfully without the original underlying reason for them? The ethos underlying our nation’s founding was that God had imbued man with certain inalienable rights that could not be trumped by men, laws, or kings. If we remove God from that equation then on what basis do we now have those rights, and for what reason is government to be constrained?