ARE ALL COUPLES ALIKE: Maggie responds

I sort of like Ben's formulation: "Bridging the gender gap is admirable, but having such a gap is a vice straight couples must overcome."

Maybe your are right Ben. Maybe being attracted to the opposite sex is a kind of handicap to be overcome, and marriage is a kind of special crutch developed over the millenia to help these sexually challenged people. The thing is we all need men and women to fall in love, get married and make babies if the culture is going to survive over the long-run. So maybe, both out of charity and self-interest, you should leave marriage to the people who need this crutch.

If you look carefully at what you said, Ben, you will see that for you marriage is mostly a word to describe an emotion, which both gays and straight have. I think you are wrong there.

I also think you are wrong to imagine there will be two separate social institutions: gay marriage with their culture and straight marriage with their culture. There will be one thing, called marriage, when we are done. What it will then be (in its public, shared form) is, as you suggest, a word for celebrating emotions of love, that for some reason we attach some legal marriage benefits (and/or marriage penalties) to. Not nearly enough I think to get its most crucial job done.

posted by maggie at 5:47 AM | link

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