ARRANGED MARRIAGE AND SSM: Daniel Moloney

[Daniel Moloney is a writer living in Indiana.]

I'm wondering whether there's a definition of "marriage" that's big enough to include both gay marriage and arranged marriage.

As many as two billion people are in arranged marriages, mostly in Asia and Africa. Perhaps as many as 90% of marriages in Pakistan are arranged, and even in contemporary Japan, some people estimate that between one-quarter and one-half of marriages are arranged. The details don't matter so much as
the fact that arranged marriage is an extraordinarily common form of marriage.

Supporters of gay marriage claim (1) that marriage is not essentially ordered towards procreation, but (2) it is essentially about being allowed to make a permanent commitment to the person you love. Most of the fights center on the first claim; arranged marriages seem to be a counter-example to the second.

Some people think that marriage is something we ought to define by looking at actual marriages and then discerning something about the nature of the practice of marriage. The advocates of gay marriage often take this tack--certainly this was the approach of the Massachusetts court in Goodridge.

The argument looks something like this: if marriages were primarily about having children, then the infertile would not be allowed to marry. So marriage must not have a necessary link to procreation.

If we're going to take this empirical approach to the definition of marriage, we ought to examine what arranged marriage tells us about marriage. The assumption in AM is that marriage is not based on love, but on a willingness to work together towards the common ends of marriage. Love follows often enough, but it is married love, which seems to be quite different from the "dating" love that is the topic of rock music.

I have no direct evidence for this claim, but I
would be surprised were there large numbers of gay men who would willingly allow their lifelong partners to be chosen for them. Yet hundreds of millions of straight men do just that.

This seems to be a difference betwen gay and straight approaches to marriage. What should we make of it? One might draw the conclusion that in heterosexual marriage, the sort of love associated with dating is optional, while in
gay marriage, it is essential. I could imagine that being an important difference.
posted by Eve at 4:18 PM | link

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