Ricochet is the best place on the internet to discuss the issues of the day, either through commenting on posts or writing your own for our active and dynamic community in a fully moderated environment. In addition, the Ricochet Audio Network offers over 50 original podcasts with new episodes released every day.
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
I agree. The one sticking point is going to be full-faith-and-credit, i.e., will non-SSM states be required to recognize marriage licenses from out of state?
That’ll likely be complicated, but the stakes are a lot lower than with what the justices are (likely) doing.
I’m not ready to throw in the towel yet, but I can definitely see a time where I think this would be better than zombie marriage continuing to stumble around eating our brains. For guys like you and me, though, we can retreat to sacramental-only marriage. Where is the rest of the secular world going to turn?
If states don’t have to recognize each other’s gun licenses or professional licenses then I don’t see why marriage should be different.
Except they do generally recognize them. That might be more a matter of convention than legal necessity, as you say.
Will we see common law marriage ensnare unsuspecting couples? “Sure, you may not have been common law married in your old state, but in this state you are common law spouses.”
Not CPA licenses. They will recognize an out of state license if the requirements are roughly the same.
Even still: they aren’t required to recognize, are they?
I’m not a lawyer, but it seems to me this issue has already been in front of the Supreme Court in the DOMA case. DOMA defined marriage for federal purposes as one man and one woman and said the states were not required to recognize a SS marriage from another state. The Court struck down the first provision but left the second. They could have struck down both parts, but they didn’t, so it would appear they believe it was constitutional. They may revisit that decision, but for moment, the full faith and credit clause does not appear to be an obstacle to letting the states experiment.
Are you arguing against sexual exclusivity as a defining feature of marriage?
People just want to gloss over the “comprehensive” aspect of marriage. No one denies that gays would benefit from long term, mutually supportive relationships.
But because they lack the two halves of a whole human reproductive system, their relationship doesn’t carry the same social weight — they are not “similarly situated” and therefore do not warrant “equal protection.” They are innately incapable of a comprehensive union — they’re not equal — and not protected in the same way (as a couple, although always as individuals — they may still marry someone of the opposite sex).
I’m making an argument from definition. SSM supporters are making an argument for social engineering. That always works out well…
Sadly, they’re coming for us since we’ve taken on the responsibility of ourselves and our families and thus have jobs. They’ll pillage our wages to subsidize their quests for the ultimate orgasm. Let’s face it, that’s what this whole thing is really all about.
As for getting government out completely, I’m coming to the conclusion that government promoting only a tiny part of the definition is more harm than help. It creates distortions and incentives that lead us to where we are today with the highest court in the land debating the definition of a word the whole damn world already knows. Changing it is a willful act, not achieving a higher level of understanding of humanity.
I think this misconceives the problem. What marriage has always held in place is the fact that the best thing for most kids is to be born to a mother and father who raise them together and have a loving relationship with each other and the kids. That is the assumption that marriage operates under. Redefine marriage and that assumption dies; marriage becomes something different from the standpoint of the law, which can no longer privilege that arrangement in any way. Individuals might still think it, but it will not be an understood truth under the law. Hence we get “parent A” and “parent B”. It then becomes bigoted to assume that good old Mom and Dad are best, and third party reproduction is just a given. Everything has changed. Your hierarchy then legally means nothing, and that filters into society. Try telling a bunch of lefties that a gay couple should not find a surrogate and have a child who is deliberately deprived of mother, father or both. Some might sympathize with you now, but many won’t. They think gay couples have a “right’ to a child, no matter how they get that child. There might be a few cases where children are not adopted by mother and father where a gay couple would be a better option, but not very many, and yet here we are basing our whole public policy toward children on the assumption (necessary under redefined marriage) that to have two moms or dads is just as good.
I’d go even farther and say that complementarity isn’t just sexual biology. Men and women are different in ways other than their wedding tackle. We only rob from society when we deny biological complementarity, but we rob from humanity when we deny the other differences that separate the ladies from the gentlemen (and not just by creating bathroom confusion either.)
It’s a mark of how far we’ve come that many people now think you’re a bigot if you believe it’s important for a child to have a mother.
It is entirely possible that I’ve misconceived the problem, but I agree with virtually all of that. The challenge is that unless we are going to legislatively require that only married people are allowed to procreate, people will continue to do so outside the bounds of marriage and I would strongly oppose any law that homosexuals are not allowed to raise children.
But, I have repeatedly argued on Rico that SSM is a symptom of the decline of the family in this country, not its cause. We would not be taking SSM seriously if we were not well down the path towards the destruction of marriage and family in this country.
That’s true, but enshrining those misunderstandings in law (through the legalization of SSM) can still feed back into the negative loop and further the decline.
There is no question about that it my mind. That was exactly my entire point in my comment that Merina said misconceived the problem.
On average, yes. And most of us are more average than perhaps we’d like to admit.
Yes, it is a bit odd to be raised by, say, a mother who’s not stereotypically nurturing and a father who’s not stereotypically masculine. To the extent that traditional notions of masculinity and femininity guide the natural differences between the sexes toward more constructive ends, being without parents who embody both sides of that tradition could be confusing to children, especially during their courting years.
Yes, my siblings and I did go through a period where we quietly resented the fact that our mother was more “mannish” than our father. But we got over it. And as my sister likes to remind me, we didn’t turn out so bad in the end.
If all else were equal, opposite-sex parents sound like a better bet than same-sex parents. But by how much, especially since we live in a world where all else isn’t equal?
Massive shrug.
It was a little odd that coming from me with my anti-feminine wife and I do all the cooking. But, in the ways that count, I think we are more average than the lack of makeup in our house attests to.
The argument for polygamy in any of its forms will be “equal protection under the law.”
Like King Prawn, I think being a not-overly-feminine female has really brought home to me how many things really are innate, in subtler ways than one might immediately realize. Having kids made me reflect that being a woman does mean something, even if one has many more-masculine interests and a temperament that’s not so common in women. It matters. It certainly matters to my kids to have Mom and Dad as the cornerstones of their lives, even if I do like football and not, say, quilting.
I think for many of us, exploring sexual complimentarity and parenthood opens whole new insights into the subtleties of masculinity and femininity.
Agree. At least national fiat will end the political pain at a local level. I want a national fiat to prohibit SSM. We need moral clarity.
I knew someone would say this…and if I’d thought about it, I probably would have guessed it was you!
What might happen is an increase in tolerance for homosexuality in those cultures? I think it is possible that tolerance for lesbianism (not male homosexuality) increased after WW1 in England. Even the Nazis could care less about lesbianism. (There—I did it again!) (The whatchamacallit rule…)
The process is hugely important. Bad case law begets bad case law.
Connecticut’s law which prohibited people from using contraception was profoundly stupid, but the ensuing supreme court decision that over threw that law created a terrible precedent that was used to justify Roe Vs Wade.
The proper process would have been the voters of Connecticut electing representatives and a governor who would repeal the law.
Process matters.
I won’t marry people unless they say it, and unless I think they understand it! (I’m a very sepulchral officiant…)
Hey—me too! That is, I agree with all of this except that my sexually-complementary (and, on a good day, complimentary) marriage ended the old fashioned way. Then my kids were stuck with just me and no dad. This is not a good thing either, but it wasn’t the result of “anything goes” or a refusal to commit that caused it. Because getting parted-by-death actually happens (next week I’ll be in DC with a representative modern sampling of this “single-parent” form) human beings have found ways to work around it.
Being raised by one man, one woman, two men or (especially) two women isn’t particularly new—though they were more likely to be Aunt Sponge and Aunt Spiker pressed into service rather than a pair of eager lesbians.
I have a question: what were the arguments made by Mormons in favor of their polygamous marriages?
And: why isn’t polygamy a religious freedom issue? (I’m interested, not snarking!)
The Mormons made that case when Utah was being admitted to the US. There was a Supreme Court decision on the topic, Reynolds v. US. As I vaguely recall, there are some elements of that decision that will need to be overturned to find for SSM, but I will need to read it again to recall what they are.
I’m glad you’re taking a stand in that way, but I don’t know what difference it will make. They’ll just find someone else who will accept their vows handwritten on a cocktail napkin that can essential be translated into “until the buzz wears off.”
Not to divert into the theology too much, but when Jesus explained what marriage really meant even his own disciples replied “[expletive] that!” (That’s a loose paraphrase.) His response that the other option was to be a eunuch was probably not for comedic effect. Marriage is a pretty serious thing.
I wonder if anyone has ever done a historical analysis of the frequency of various kinds of family structures in, say, Europe over two hundred years?
It seems as though we are usually comparing the way things are now to the way things were in, say, 1960 rather than 1860 or 1760. As I read a lot of history (and the Bible, too, of course) I notice an awful lot of people pop up in the historical record who weren’t raised in traditional bio-mom, bio-dad, bio-kid arrangements, usually because of death but sometimes because of abandonment, or seafaring, or illegitimacy.
Leonardo da Vinci is the newest on my list—his mother was a servant, possibly a slave and possibly (get this!) North African or Arab! Being born on the wrong side of the blanket wasn’t an insuperable obstacle to acceptance and achievement except in Leonardo’s father’s family business, law/notary. Hard to consider this a disaster, since had it been otherwise, Leonardo would have been, in effect, a bureaucrat and we wouldn’t have his Last Supper. He ended up with step-parents and half siblings and all the things that are supposed to completely trash the lives of children.
And he wasn’t alone—when the Pope made an official visit to an Italian city, it was considered polite and charming to send a contingent of Noble Bastards to greet him.
Marriage is a serious thing, and one that has always been difficult to do well. Worthwhile but difficult! This is why the waitresses at Applebees, who will sing cheerily enough for a sixty-year-old’s birthday will go completely nuts (four part harmony, anyone?) for a sixty-year-long marriage! A long, happy marriage is a triumph over the forces of entropy. (My mother reminded me that she had an aunt who was married for close to seventy years. For about fifty of those years, the two of them didn’t speak to one another if they could help it. They ate supper every night, one at each end of a long table, in eerie, angry silence.) (People are crazy.)