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In Defense of Two In Marriage
In many debates about same-sex marriage, traditionalists argue that marriage cannot be rationally defended as a relationship between two people once it is opened to same-sex couples. Those who favor state recognition of SSM — among whose number I count myself — generally blow off this objection, but provide little reason for their dismissal, let alone attempt a refutation.
I’d like to correct that omission and offer an argument for why civil marriage can and should remain restricted to couples, regardless of whether one favors or opposes SSM. I believe traditionalists are right to worry about legally-recognized polygamy and share their opposition to it. However, I believe that position can be more easily defended than is generally assumed. In short, I think this is an important battle that we can win.
What Is The Purpose of Civil Marriage And Why Does Government Have An Interest In It?
This has been the subject of considerable debate on Ricochet. Despite the furor, the debate has been more about emphasis than substance. While individuals may have other reasons for marrying — e.g., romantic love, religious conviction, etc. — the state is ill-equipped to evaluate them, and may not be directly interested in them anyway. However, the state can and should recognize marriage because it promotes the following:
- A nurturing and stable environment for children born to, or adopted into, that marriage;
- An emotionally and physically beneficent environment for sex;
- A well-tested and effective framework of mutual support and growth, be it financial, emotional, or personal.
Though most people would agree with these principles, significant differences emerge over their relative importance, and those disagreements generally determine one’s stance regarding SSM. Traditionalists, for instance, greatly emphasize the marriage’s role in procreation, while reformers tend to go with a more balanced approach, placing more emphasis on the spouses’ relationship to each other.
These three purposes work in concert, regardless of how they’re ranked, and with a great deal of positive feedback. Talking through daily trials makes both spouses feel better about, and closer to, each other and can help them become more productive; that happiness and stability can foster a regular and fulfilling sex life and positively influence them to have and effectively raise children. One can draw similar causalities at almost every intersection of these factors (though jokes about the challenges of enjoying an active sex life with small children around are also appreciated).
The state should have an interest because a society with successful marriages requires an infinitely lighter hand to govern. Marriage facilitates citizens taking care of, assuming responsibility for, and coordinating with each other. And while there’s obviously a good deal of self-selection going on — those who are uninterested in sexual exclusivity or assuming responsibility for others are less likely to marry — reason, anecdote, and data all confirm that marriage generally improves people.
How Polygamy Undermines Marriage’s Purpose
There are lovely people who enjoy polygamy, who thrive in it, and who would benefit from having their marriages recognized by the state. There are — to be sure — some benefits to be found in polygamy. Recognizing it, however, would cause far more harm to our society than good for reasons that are intrinsic to the practice.
First, the demand for polygamous marriages is probably much more elastic than for homosexual ones; i.e., a lot of people who might not otherwise might seek these polygamous unions would as a result of the legal change. Indeed, many people already live this way, with one (usually high status) man openly having relationships with — and several children by — multiple women concurrently. This is hardly a phenomenon exclusive to breakaway Mormon sects.
Second, these relationships are highly unstable. Jealousy is a major and persistent obstacle among the polyamorous. Moreover, each additional spouse fundamentally undermines the ability for spouses to find mutual support in each other. Reciprocality is vastly more difficult among three parties than between two. If a man’s wife is in need, he can — and is encouraged to — prioritize her concerns over all other obligations, including work, friends, and family. However, both of one’s wives can’t be his top priority at any given time, and their needs and desires may be in opposition to each other. While this is true in homosexual relationships, it is especially true for heterosexual ones.
Third, to the extent polygamous marriages are successful — as some no doubt are — they inevitably lead to the permanent exclusion of some men from marriage. Creating a surplus of men who are literally unable to find a wife is a known recipe for social tension with the potential to lead to all kinds of dangers. This unavoidable externality alone makes polygamous marriages fundamentally different from both traditional and SSM-friendly marriage regimes.
In short, polygamous marriages directly compete with monogamous ones, have inferior outcomes in comparison, and adversely affect those outside of them. Even if one argues that recognizing same-sex marriages will have negative effects on society as a whole, the harm is both much more restricted and far less direct.
Conclusion
People have the right to order their lives as they see fit, according to their own needs, desires, and understanding of their situation. Properly understood, government only has the power to prohibit its citizens’ actions when they can be shown to directly harm others. Even if I am correct that polygamy is dangerous, its harms are too indirect and diffuse to warrant prohibition. If people want to live polygamously, they have every right.
Whether their relationships — or any relationships — should be recognized, sanctioned, and promoted by the state is a separate matter. To the extent the state engages in social engineering, it should be limited only to those activities that have proven themselves successful through tradition and experience. Any changes should be subject to careful, informed conjecture about possible effects. Regardless of the merits of SSM, polygamous relationships have neither a positive history nor a good prognosis, and should therefore be opposed.
Published in General
Wait, wait, wait! I thought this was primarily about letting people do what they want to do. Not what is beneficial for society. So tell me why I can’t tell two men they can’t get married, but I can tell three men they can’t get married? Because two men married is better for society and three men married? or two men and a woman? Or two women and a man? Or five women and Fred Cole? So all I need to do is believe that the one is better than the other, and that becomes my justification for limiting what some folks can do?
I find your short list of the goods of marriage to be arbitrary and don’t see how state involvement improves any of them except for the raising of children, because using the state to force fathers to take responsibility for and support their children makes sense. Using the state to enforce, “emotionally and physically beneficent environments for sex” and “frameworks of mutual support” seems asinine and something, especially from a libertarian standpoint, completely beyond what we should be asking our government to do.
Tradition? Experience?
Sorry. That wall has been breached.
That is precisely the argument SSM opponents make. You can’t reject their arguments and accept it as a reasonable defense of your own.
And your example of long term successful societies with SSM? That is, equal to the several millennium of heterosexual marriage? (There are longer term examples of societies with child marriage, an equally if not more hideous perversion.)
People can do what they want; the question with civil marriage is what relationships warrant state recognition.
And yes, on I’m a statist on marriage, at least under current conditions (I can imagine circumstances under which it should return to the private sector, but keeping it recognized by government works well enough, causes no harm, and costs next to nothing). Outside of strict anarcho-capitalism, everyone’s a bit of a statist.
Just to clarify Polygamy isn’t illegal, Bigamy is. So maybe instead of using the legalization of polygamy as the argument against SSM, we should use bigamy, since there are no laws (that I know of, if there are please enlighten me) against polygamy. I’m just thinking out loud here.
There are even long term examples of societies with, ahem, polygamy.
I agree, and there’s a good reason for it: I think SoCons argue these matters correctly, but start (IMHO) with some mistaken premises.
I disagree because I don’t think these arguments work as well against SSM as they do against polygamy, which has — I think — much more destructive and direct negative externalities than does SSM (see my three arguments above).
If I have it wrong, show me where.
Which are among the better cases against it.
Not enforce, promote, through an institution that has been proven to do just that.
While I’m philosophically in favor of SSM, it’s politically less of an issue. I’m in favor, but neutral to whatever actually happens. I want gays to have the benefits because it’s symbolically and monetarily really important to them. It’s also symbolically very important that we don’t have SSM to a lot of other people I care about, which is why I hate that we must insist on a political answer to this question. Someone’s got to get hurt that doesn’t deserve to, but as far as oppression goes, not being allowed to marry civilly is pretty low on the range of government atrocities.
As for polygamy, while I’m in favor for the same philosophical reasons, I’m completely neutral on the political outcome. I expect allowing it really is the logical conclusion to the system we have, but polygamous couples are so few, and so inherently unstable, that worrying about them at the national political level seems like a tremendous waste of time and resources. As far as I’ve seen, long-lasting polygamous relationships are extremely rare outside of religious adherence. Which would make for stranger bedfellows. The (strong) relationships will tend to be of the extremely religious conservative variety. Is that certain to gain the long term backing from the secular left when the time comes?
This sort of hateful, bigoted, and polyphobic rhetoric has no place in civilized society! I call on the founders of Ricochet to immediately strip Tom Meyer of his title as editor, and to remove this posting from the main feed!
Okay, promote. But once you say it’s okay to allow the government to be interested in the type of environment you have sex in and whether you’re living up to your promise to emotionally supportive of your partner, you’re giving them a lot of very creepy implicit and explicit permissions about peoples lives. Giving them that permission in the service of protecting children makes sense, giving them permission to show that interest for something other reason doesn’t make sense to me at all.
This court has examined those arguments and found no rational basis to them, therefore we must conclude that you are motivated by animus towards those groups that traditionally have practiced polygamy, such as Muslims.
Tom,
I agree with you that marriage provides civic benefits aside from those which arise from procreation. However, where I disagree is that these benefits justify state recognition absent procreation.
This is where I’m asked why sterile couples or old couples are allowed to get married.
The first response I give (now) is that the institution of civil marriage arose and developed in a time absent our level of scientific knowledge of fertility. Now that we have the ability to accurately determine this for individual cases, what should we do? One response is to do nothing – the system works as is and people are still free to live as they wish. Another response would be to test people and deny the institution to the infertile; this is likely wildly unpopular and would require an increased level of intrusion and cost that make it undesirable to me. Still another response would be to open up the civil institution to all comers, snipping any pretense to legitimate purpose while simultaneously expanding the institution’s reach; I think this zombie-institution would be even more prone to illegitimate tinkering, now being unmoored from any rational basis or limiting factor. And then there’s the other popular approach on Ricochet: good, the government has no justifiable interest in this anyway so let’s take this opportunity to end the whole thing.
The second response I give is that the test is applied at the broad level of sex (for various reasons) and there’s little benefit to be gained from sussing out John P. Doe’s specific sperm count or Susie Q. Madison’s crimped tube. We’ll get the benefits anyway on average. There is no sussing required at all for same sex couples, and there’s no civic benefit to be gained by allowing them the institution.
Katievs and others here can give other responses grounded in philosophy and still others responses grounded in religion. I’m sympathetic to these, but I generally haven’t relied on them in my own conversations on the topic.
I would say that one of the biggest reasons not to adopt polygamy is because it changes the assumptions about marriage and its purposes, which, come to think of it, making marriage genderless also does, actually in a much bigger way than bigamy. Especially factor in the huge changes to “politcally correct” thinking about gender as in, it doesn’t exist. Everyone chooses their own. Make it up.
Oh, bultte points don’t work either. Sorry for the huge mass of words in #15.
It’s a lovely notion, but I don’t think it’s going to get a lot of traction in this environment. I can hear it now: “If a child has three, four, or five parents, it creates a bigger group of people for the child to rely on. There are more people for the state to go after for child support. A bigger family is so much better for children. A big family creates more intellectual stimulation. Can you prove that three parents is a worse situation than two? Show me your statistics on child outcomes. Because of the high divorce rate, children already have somewhere between one and an infinite number of parents.” And on and on. This is where SSM, Hollywood, and the feminists share powerful and huge common ground.
One thing we have totally lost in the last twenty-five years in western civilization is the notion that biological parents are usually better because they will care more, in part because they have more pride in, their children. We now believe fervently that caregivers are interchangeable parts. No one is intrinsically better than another. There is no such thing as biological paternal or material bonds.
The public will say, “The more, the merrier.”
Marci, you have family newspeak down to perfection. Which shows that you understand how deeply untrue it is.
But the interest isn’t in citizens sex life: it’s in the outcomes that marriage produces.
It’s worth noting in this context that government has no means to enforce one’s marriage, though it does regulate the conditions under which a marriage can dissolve. If two marrieds want to sleep around or invite a third into bed with them, that’s their business because only a spouse can initiate a divorce.
This is only a significant issue if polygamous marriages become common. In a majority Christian society with a long tradition of monogamous marriage, presumably most people would continue to believe polygamy violates their personal religious views and would continue to engage in two-person marriages.
So what we are really talking about here is whether society should recognize and protect the traditional institutions and practices of small, vulnerable minority groups. There is a long, well-documented history of persecution of Mormons including a mob killing founder Joseph Smith and the whole group fleeing the United States for safety only to find themselves back in US territory after the Mexican-American War. Utah would not be admitted to statehood until after the LDS Church renounced polygamy, and the handful of splinter groups that still practice polygamy are outcasts even within the Mormon mainstream.
Then of course we have Muslims, who as we are all no doubt aware are victims of widespread Islamophobia throughout the Western world and are blamed for the actions of a tiny minority of terrorists who mis-interpret the Religion of Peace.
Legalizing polygamy is about granting equal protection of the laws to these historically oppressed minority groups, and demonstrating that we are now a tolerant multicultural society that no longer privileges the Christian view of marriage above all others.
Not prove, but I think history has shown pretty clearly that polygamy is a vastly inferior model than monogamy. We don’t yet have enough information on SSM, though we will in a few decades.
Conceded, though — again — I think there is a demand for it and that that demand is likely to increase if it were given legal sanction. I admit I don’t have a lot to back that up, but I’m certain that it’s much more elastic than it is for gays.
Polygamy encourages biological parenting.
Men are not naturally monogamous. Men are hard-wired to find fertile women attractive, and when a man’s wife reaches middle age he will naturally desire a younger mate. In monogamous societies this has led to many a divorce, with bad effects on the children.
In contrast, polygamy permits a man to court and marry a younger woman and bring her into the home while remaining married to his first wife. Divorce is unnecessary, and the father remains in the home to help raise all his biological children.
Like a crack in a dam, the number “two” has already been breached. It took the form of multiple legal parents in California. As I have argued elsewhere, redefining marriage redefines parenthood. The inspiration for California’s innovation came from a “SSM” custody dispute.
If/when three or more legal parents in California decide they want to marry, what is the rational to stop them? For example, here’s a statement from Kennedy in Windsor:
You realize I didn’t say that, right? I’m just anticipating what people will say to the idea of an unlimited number of parents. :)
This is so true. And I don’t think we can put it back together again.
Jennifer, this lies the problem with those who argue for SSM under the presumption that it will not have an effect on traditional marriage. Many don’t think through the legal consequences that come with changing the definition of what marriage is. This is uncharted territory for any society so we should tread lightly before advocating for something that may have massive detrimental results.
Okay… so what do you want to do about it? SSM is in advance everywhere, both through legal imposition and popular votes. If you want to go die on that hill, you won’t be around to fight on this one. If you really think this position is so indefensible, save yourself the trouble and surrender already.
I feel your frustration Tom, but your position is susceptible to the exact same forces and arguments you say are on the move against SSM. You also won’t convince either the get the government out of marriage or give it to all crowd or the mariage is whatever consenting units say it is crowd or the marriage is not about civic benefits crowd. Jennifer is just pointing out that those forces are already close to the top of your hill too.