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William Saletan Thinks About The Definition of Marriage…
…for about five seconds. But you know, that’s something.
Over at Slate, Saletan kindly explains to us why Justice Alito and Charles Krauthammer (in an old column still making the rounds) are wrong to suppose that the arguments made in favor of same-sex marriage might also be used to justify polygamous marriage. What it boils down to is that there are basic, natural facts about human beings that make monogamy stable and salutary in a way that polygamy just isn’t. Basically, the problem is jealousy. When we give our lives to another person, we want that person to be equally devoted to us. If we invite threes and fours to the altar (or county clerk’s office, or whatever), that’s just not going to work out as happily for anyone.
Let me pause for a moment to bang my head against the wall a few times. Letting the ear-ringing die down now. OK, I’m back.
Is the state permitted to consider natural facts about human nature and relationship proclivities in deciding what to recognize as a marriage? Then there are some very powerful arguments for privileging male-female unions as the most stable, and the most suitable foundation for family. In particular, if you think that kind of evidence relevant, it is absurd to suppose that there could be a constitutional right to same-sex marriage. We can argue about whether or not same-sex relationships are similar enough to opposite-sex relationships to be appropriately regarded as “marriages.” But they aren’t obviously the same, and if that is indeed the sort of reasoning the Court should employ, then the matter should clearly be left to the states.
If, on the other hand, it’s not the state’s business who loves whom, or why, or for how long… then what’s jealousy got to do with it? If three men, or three women, or four men and five women, say that they care deeply about one another and wish to be married, then what difference does it make whether the odds are in their favor? That’s their business. It’s not the state’s job to tell us how to love.
I personally am very disappointed that Slate would publish someone with such an obvious grudge against polys.
Published in Culture, Law
Yes–exactly. I think of CS Lewis in this respect. People are always trying to tell us that what we think is real isn’t. In the Silver Chair, the wicked queen tries to tell Eustace, Jill and Puddleglum that a really bright lamp in a cave is the sun. That’s what’s going on these days. Everyone is trying to say that no, you don’t really understand the thing you thought you understood. This false thing is the truth. The only way marriage survives is in communities that know what marriage really is, teach it to their children and live it out in their daily lives.
SSM can only exist because of the way the state has already taken over many of the functions of the family. Before that happened, not being a member of a family, as traditionally defined, would be very dangerous. Who would take care of you when you were sick, very young, or very old? Now that isn’t an issue because the state or some state funded program, or insurance, can fill the gap. We’re in a holiday from history which may last a long time.
I’ve been a fan of a two-tier system of marriage and civil unions. Marriage is for people who want to raise a family or express a more permanent commitment. Civil Unions are open to just about anyone, and are more easily dissolved. Civil unions would have the same legal status as marriage, but they might not be eligible for certain benefits associated with being a married family, which are solely based on encouraging the most effective child-rearing strategy.
In order for this bifurcation to work, we’d also have to restore the individual obligations part of marriage. I’ve often conceded that a compromise involving SSM might be doable if we also then restored the expectations and enforcement of exclusivity and permanence.
That’s very likely. This may well all be a lead-up to Justice Kennedy explaining to us all how bigotry is the only possible explanation for traditional views of marriage. But I’m not totally confident that that’s the case.
That, sure, but the predominant response was that none of your reasoning against poly arrangements overcomes the reasoning being used to push SSM. Yours is simply a different part of the same hill the rest of us are fighting over.
More than the polygamy, I see the next barrier to come down as age restrictions on marriage.
What’s so discouraging about all the debate in the Supreme Court is that is centers on the substantive issue of why SSM is or is not a good idea. But the court’s only job is to apply the 14th amendment to the issue. So they shouldn’t even be talking about what they’re talking about. Those discussions belong in a legislature.
Regarding polygamy…
Why is polygamy chaotic and bad for society? Is polygamy chaotic because of what consenting adults are doing in the privacy of their bedrooms. No, not in direct sense.
I would argue that the chaos caused by polygamy is chaos because of how it impacts children, of how it creates chaotic family structures.
Some seem to think that because polygamy is not (yet) codified, this means that the polygamous structure doesn’t exist. The polygamous structure exists! It is asserting itself in the name of freedom and liberty. Examples:
http://clashdaily.com/2015/02/meet-new-polygamy-perhaps-new-patriarchy/
http://www.ruthblog.org/2014/06/25/masha-gessen-five-parents/
Furthermore, the Left has codified three or more parents in California, and it was due to SSM.
http://articles.latimes.com/2013/oct/04/local/la-me-brown-bills-parents-20131005
If three legal parents decide they want to get married, what is the logical argument to stop them?
The polygamous structure is already here and it is already fully accepted by most of society in the name of liberty. It’s only time before the structure itself is fully codified.
I’d disagree here, because the reason most of those states legalized SSM in the first place was because Anthony Kennedy judicially declared that the only possible reason to be against it was “animus.”
Kennedy caused this switch in the first place, when he assured us that his reasoning in the Lawrence case couldn’t be used to justify gay marriage. That lasted about half a second, when Massachusetts almost immediately began performing gay marriages and used Kennedy’s decision as justification. It was only after he had made them possible in the first place that he turned the logic around and said that denying SSM was “animus.” (Really? If so, why didn’t you say so in Lawrence, when instead, you assured everyone that your reasoning couldn’t justify SSM?)
This is another judicial bait-and-switch, just like when Griswold was followed by Eisenstadt. The first case, Griswold, argued that banning contraception was a violation of the sanctity of marriage. A few years later, the same Court decided that equality demanded that the same freedom belonged to non-married people. So much for marriage sanctity. That was a plain bait-and-switch of reasoning, as this is.
Polygamy is my academic subject, and I have to tell you that in many ways polygamy and human nature are completely compatible, particularly for men. If the spouse decides on some tit for tat, you’ve got polyamory, and there isn’t a lot to stand in the way currently. How strong an argument is “someone might be jealous”?
We got into this extensively on another thread, to wit: Polygamy is inherently destabilizing because the gender distribution in society tends to be 50/50. So if one woman has six husbands, five women have no husbands. More ominously, given the way marriage is said to “socialize” men, if one man has six wives, five men are left wifeless. Rich men unfairly corner the market on reproductive opportunity (see Nathan’s rebuke to David in 2 Samuel 12) and poor men are left unhappy, un-socialized, horny and angry. For a more intimate glimpse of what jealousy looks like in polygamous marriages, I recommend…surprise! The Bible! Sarah, Abraham and …Hagar. Jacob, Rachel and…Leah (et al)! It’s pretty hard to find a happy-ever-after un-jealous polygamous marriage in the Bible, but maybe Marina has seen some cheerier more modern examples that polygamy proponents might point to? A few faddists are likely to find out for themselves that it’s hard enough to be married to one person let alone two, three or more. You really want four mothers-in-law? Four sets of strange relatives, four versions of Uncle Frank who picks his nose at the table and insists Ho Chi Minh was misunderstood, four hipster nephews with neck tattoos, four grandmothers-in-law arguing over whether Jesus approves of putting sausage in the stuffing?
This is intended as comfort, by the way, but I have learned from my apocalyptic environmentalist friends that gloomy prognostication provides its own, strange comfort, so please don’t let me interrupt your laments.
This is a hammer. It is so because I want it to be and because I say it is. I will now attempt to drive nails with it. Prove to me using the logic used to justify SSM that I am wrong.
The reason why we restrict marriage to one man and one woman is because that’s the only arrangement from which children come. Ancient polygamy proves it.
You have to grasp the distinction about what polygamy means. In the traditional form of polygamy, one male made contracts with many women, each of which he either had, or intended to have, a child with. Each contract was a separate marriage. And most tellingly, the mother of one child had absolutely no rights nor responsibilities toward the children of other wives. They were separate marriages. None of the women had any duties to each other. Polygamy isn’t a group marriage; it has nothing to do with how the participants all feel about each other.
Polygamy shows that the ancient definition of marriage was simply a contractual arrangement for a man to provide for a child and her mother. He could marry as many women as he could support. Although their mutual love was helpful, it was legally irrelevant. The contract itself was to take care of mother and child.
Of course, if we redefine marriage to ignore children (“accessories”) and say that it’s only based on how each spouse feels about the other(s), then there is no logical reason to restrict it to opposite sex or any number.
Jealousy? History shows that the wives of polygamists got along quite well, so long as they and their children were taken care of. After all – that’s why they married.
KC, as someone earlier noted, marriage is wholly irrelevant now because Uncle Sugar will take care of the women and children.
Kate, everything you say is true and unrelated to legalization. I don’t think most people would like to see polygamy legalized, but when the cases are brought, I can’t see that the courts under the new “what adults want” regime will have much of a case against it. Would it be terrible for the nation, for children, for those unable to find a spouse? Absolutely. But as Jennifer points out, it is already here in numerous ways. Sometimes there really are slippery slopes. I hope I am wrong, but I suspect I am not. Marriage was a bulwark against polygamy when we had a definition that had the weight of tradition and history behind it. That is why Mormons were brought to heel on this issue over 100 years ago. Custom, tradition and definition argued against them. No more. It will be funny when, as I suspect will be the case, Mormons are the ones arguing against polygamy as the courts seek to legalize it.
As I don’t think I said this explicitly, I want to go officially on the record as rooting for the states and against national judicial imposition of SSM. It’ll be Roe all over again.
You have to grasp the distinction about what polygamy means. In the traditional form of polygamy, one male made contracts with many women, each of which he either had, or intended to have, a child with.
That was the traditional form of marriage, period—though I think the assumption that people in the olden days didn’t care about feelings (or have feelings) is a bit presumptuous (C.S. Lewis had something to say about that, didn’t he?) and there is certainly plenty of evidence that people’s feelings were hurt in the Bible. Leah isn’t exactly tickled pink by the fact that Jacob loves Rachel best (kids and material support notwithstanding), and ask Hagar, abandoned to die with her child in the desert, what Hell Hath No Fury Like?
But never mind—Whether feelings are a 21st century invention or not, we definitely pay a lot of attention to them now, and indeed base our marriages (for better or worse) on what we feel about each other rather than on the resources we expect to extract from one another. Silly us.
In our present, serial-monogamy form of polygamy, in which a man makes a contract with many women (and vv) but consecutively rather than concurrently, there are former “ex-s” who get along fine, just like Sister-WIves and Brother-Husbands, as long as everyone feels they’ve gotten what they bargained for in the way of alimony, child-support, visitation-rights etc.
More often, however, at least in my experience, serial monogamy is beset by the same issues as “traditional” polygamy—lots of jealousy, resentment, quarrels over status and resources, hate and discontent. But I don’t live in a place where full-on polygamy is practiced, so I can’t claim to have ever met a Sister-Wife (just lots and lots of ex-wives, former girlfriends, baby-mamas, etc…)
But if you root for the ends why do the means matter? It’s not like it’s being imposed by violence, at least not until it is enforced on religious objectors.
Agreed.
KC The contract itself was to take care of mother and child.
It depends on which “tradition” we’re talking about. Divorce was a male prerogative in the ANE, so when Jesus says “no divorce,” he is saying “you can’t abandon your wife and child” in society in which a man, in fact, could do exactly that.
I think it would be better to do it that way too. For the record.
This is the effect of taking out of play one of the three prongs of the definition of marriage: permanence. It didn’t seem like such a big deal when it was changed, but now we see the wreckage everywhere we look. Why should we expect a different outcome when we jettison complementarity? Once two of the three are gone, what rational objection can there be to maintaining exclusivity?
It’ll be interesting, Merina! Still, I suspect we’ll muddle through. Remember “open marriage” in the 70’s? (That is, have you read about it? I was too young, and you might not have been born yet). Psychologists (and a few ministers) opined about how natural and good it was, couples gave it a shot, and the result was, in short order, a lot of people with wounded feelings. There are always going to be eager souls who imagine they’ve solved The Problem, come up with a surefire, all-natural way to have your cake and eat it too…and they are, reliably, wrong.
Maybe not this time! Hope springs eternal! Maybe you and I will have to eat crow in 30 years when millions of polyamorous families are frolicking happily through what only we dour bigots presumed to be a natural vale of tears?
I’m probably the wrong person to talk to about permanence.
Because of the possible slipperiness of the slope?
Kate, my limited observation and reading of history leads me to believe that traditional marriage is a lot like our democratic-republic, it’s the worst system, except for all others.
Yes, it is silly if that’s all we think marriage is. It also reveals us as a culture that foolishly believes that the world began yesterday.
In 1968, the pope released Humanae Vitae, you know, what everyone now thinks of as the birth control encyclical. This was in 1968, not that long ago. The argument in that debate, whatever you might think of the conclusion, was that contraception allowed the spouses to have sex – i.e., foster their love – while preventing procreation.
In other words, marriage has multiple functions, and while procreation was no longer deemed the only important one, no one doubted that it was a necessary part of what marriage is.
Gay marriage is only possible if you completely eliminate procreation as a function of marriage. These days, many young people are astonished that anyone would even think that procreation is what marriage is about. History? Who cares?
The question isn’t whether marriage is all procreation or all relationship. That’s one-dimensional thinking.
Because means always matter.
Under extreme situations, one might conclude that they matter less than the ends, but the plight of gay couples in 2015 America is nowhere near extreme.
Hmmm. I admit this surprises me.
This is precisely my position, and on ricochet, that seems to make me a raging social conservative (though, in fairness, I suppose it is my belief that radically redefining the institution of marriage is not universally salutory that make me a raging SoCon).
Kate, I don’t know if you know this, but Rachel is my daughter, so I was alive and kicking in the 70s! I remember the communes and other hippie experiments, but there was a far stronger basic marriage culture then to combat the evils of those failed experiments. Here’s an interesting tidbit about Mormon polygamy. I would actually say it worked after a fashion because it was highly regulated by belief and strong community involvement, plus (for the day) generous divorce policies from the woman’s perspective. Men were discouraged from seeking divorce and women were, though discouraged, respected in their divorce requests. At first, Mormons were isolated and living with a household instead of a market economy, which made the practice of polygamy easier–many laborers made for more successful families. It didn’t fare very well once the railroad and market economy came to Utah however. Mormons fought for it, but young people were avoiding it for the most part. Polygamy did some things for Mormons though–it created large and intricate networks of family connections that served the community, and it assured that the most faithful produced the most children. So–I guess my point is that under certain circumstances these things kind of work.
What doesn’t work is the free-for-all we have currently, of which redefining marriage, both as genderless and, perhaps soon, as any number (the three parent legal option in CA should give us all pause here) are an integral part. I do think there is hope for saving marriage because the free-for-all option really doesn’t work. As communities that reject this fare well and everything else falls apart, we can hope that people will flock to the communities that understand what marriage really is.