MARRIAGE AND BENEFITS: Mark Barton replies to Maggie

Maggie in the Weekly Standard: "For many same-sex-marriage advocates, marriage is basically a legal ceremony that confers legal benefits, a rite that gives rise to rights. In this spirit, the majority in Goodridge describes marriage as if it were a creature of the state: 'Simply put, the government creates civil marriage,' which is a 'wholly secular institution.' This reductionist vision of marriage also drives other advocates of family diversity, like the authors of the American Law Institute's 'Principles of Family Dissolution,' who call marriage merely 'the sum of its legal incidents.' 'From the point of view of family law,' they say, 'the distinction between a full-blown domestic partnership, like Vermont's domestic unions, and a lawful marriage is merely symbolic.'"

Mark B.: The quoted remarks don't support Maggie's thesis that SSM advocates have a reductionist view of marriage. The claims are all trivially true, regardless of whether one has a reductionist or holistic view of marriage. The government does create "civil" marriage. "From the point of view of family law," the difference between marriage and civil unions is purely symbolic. To suppose that this is all marriage is or could be or should be is as ridiculously narrow a view as Maggie suggests, but this SSM advocate doesn't hold it, and is not aware that anybody else does either. In fact, in a section just before the above quote, Maggie tacitly concedes that the package of legal benefits is not the whole story to advocates of SSM marriage and explains (correctly) why they emphasize that particular aspect among others: "This focus [Mark B.'s emphasis] on the 'legal benefits' of marriage allows them to make one of their strongest arguments: Withholding legal benefits is a form of immoral discrimination." (People might differ on whether it's immoral discrimination, but fortunately it's even more plainly and more relevantly illegal discrimination.)

SSM advocates believe that there are real people out there in real same-sex relationships that have the same internal dynamics as conventional marriages, and that it's valuable to recognize and facilitate these relationships in the same way as for conventional marriages.

Moreover, mutatis mutandis, this is identical to Maggie's position vis a vis traditional marriage (TM). As a legal matter, to TM advocates, TM is "nothing but" a non-transferable license to have sex (and raise the resulting kids). Maggie is refreshingly candid about this:

Maggie: "The law helps sustain the institution of marriage by (a) defining [Mark B.'s emphasis] who is married and (b) maintaining the basic norms of what marriage means, including sexual fidelity, mutual responsibility for children, and permanence. [...] More important, by sustaining a public way of determining who is married and who is not, marriage law helps other more important players--families, communities, schools, churches--to sustain a marriage culture. Because we know who is married, we know who is committing adultery, and who is having a child out of wedlock."

Mark B.: Maggie talks of an "institution of marriage" but then tacitly
concedes that as a matter of actual practice it has no substance independent of the law--the law does the "defining" of who is married and (at least in Maggie's nostalgic fantasy) the law and the community target their shunning and shaming and sanctions accordingly.

Maggie has been at pains to try to justify a license-for-sex model in terms of broader, nobler goals, and I try to take her arguments seriously. It'd be nice if she'd extend the same courtesy in return. When it comes to TM, even though she typically emphasizes benefits to children, Maggie is not shy about claiming benefits to individuals: "When family scholars and marriage advocates speak of the benefits of marriage for men and women [Mark B.'s emphasis], for children, and for society, we are talking about the good things that happen when husbands and wives are joined in permanent, public, sexual, emotional, financial, and parenting unions." SSM advocates believe (typically from personal experience or direct observation) that analogous benefits accrue to same-sex couples. Yet Maggie goes to striking lengths to avoid acknowledging such benefits. But it looks like Maggie hasn't even noticed that her opponents are proceeding on the same paradigm as herself, of taking institutions that are perceived to have value by virtue of providing intrinsic benefits and reinforcing them with additional external benefits. And that's pretty offensively out of touch.
posted by Eve at 8:48 PM | link

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