WHAT IS MARRIAGE FOR? Dan Cere

A few thoughts triggered by the last Washington Blade piece.

Beneath the debates over the redefinition of marriage lie two very divergent conceptions of social institutions. On one side, marriage is treated as a public registry system to dole out a number of perks and benefits. In this view, marriage is an open legal basket containing more than enough goodies for everyone. This "won't-make-much-of-a-difference" attitude is exemplified in the sarcastic tease pitched by proponents of redefinition: "Do you think that the gays will use up all the marriage licenses and won't leave any for the straights?"

What does this marriage registry offer? In Canada most of the so-called marriage perks are already available to same-sex couples through federal and provincial legislation. However, recent court judgements have argued that one vital nugget is missing, namely the public trophy character of marriage. According to this view, a pivotal task of marriage is to confer a large public badge of worthiness or dignity to close personal relationships. Marriage is all about being discriminatory -- namely giving social approval to close relationships and declaring them "worthy" --or excluding them from approval and thereby stigmatizing them as "unworthy." If we define marriage as an institution that doles out public declarations of "relationship worthiness" then of course any restriction is an exclusion and an inherent declaration of unworthiness.

Now presumably, Canadian law will, for the time being, continue to exclude multiple-partner relationships and sexual bonds between siblings from this newly enlarged marriage basket. In doing so it will, according to this new logic, publicly stigmatize such relationships as "unworthy." But if marriage is just about approving or disapproving the worthiness of relationships, it will be interesting to see how long our judges will be capable of sustaining their moral finger-wagging against these alternative relationship lifestyles. I suspect that their moral generosity will soon get the better of them.

On another side of this debate, marriage is not about moral approval or disapproval of the worth of various types of close adult relationships. It is about a complex social institution grappling with the huge reality of male-female bonding and the child-creating dynamic of that unique sexual ecology.

Marriage is not about relationship worthiness. It is about participation in a unique culture of social-sexual life that is foundational to bringing children into the world. Opposite-sex bonding is the core requirement for this project. Individuals who enter into marriage (whatever their sexual idiosyncrasies, orientations or desires) embark on a unique social journey. The wedding is a pledge or promise to struggle to live out that journey; it is no affirmation of one's moral worthiness or capacity to fulfill the core purposes of marriage.

Opponents of the common human understanding of marriage always want to divert attention away from these primal features of human existence. But the evasions - like the shrill tiresome "Hey, what about those infertile heterosexuals?" - simply beg the big question.

They argue that this public redefinition of marriage as a badge of "relationship worthiness" won't make much of a difference to the social development of marriage. This argument betrays a flawed view of the nature of social institutions. According to social anthropology institutions consist of socially established structures of meaning and attitudes. These webs of public meaning give us our social bearings and shape our social practice. Change the core meanings of marriage (its opposite-sexness, its permanence, its procreativity) in major ways and you change the institution in deep ways.

To raise serious concerns about the ways in which this fundamental redefinition will encourage a further ideological depletion of marriage culture is not a "sky is falling" rant. Social scientists on all sides of this debate have been documenting the very real patterns of marriage destabilization in Western society over the last forty years. This is not an abstract semantic debate about definitions, it is a grave public controversy over the core social meanings of marriage.


posted by maggie at 11:27 AM | Link |

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