IS THIS ABOUT HOMOSEXUALITY? Mark Barton replies to Eve, part two: culture, government, and honor

Eve: 2) Perhaps cultural support of and honor for homosexual relationships are what's being asked for.

Mark B.: Indeed, legal conveniences are only part of it.

Eve: I think homosexual relationships could be treated as equal in cultural honor to (not the same as) sisterhood, or a more accurate and exalted understanding of best-friendship, without SSM. I'm not a
Barnesian liberal, but this seems to me to be the cultural approach such liberals should prefer.

Mark B.: Obviously a particular "liberal" could decide to award that amount of cultural honor after weighing various considerations, but it makes no sense as a point of departure. Because of the conspicuous analogy with marriage, especially from the participants' point of view, the natural amount of honor to start with is the same as that for marriage. If some good cause would be served by downgrading that, then
fair enough, but parity with best-friendship is already a considerable come-down which would have to be justified.

Eve: 3) Second, I strongly take issue with the belief that marriage exists so the government can bless and praise your romantic relationships.

Mark B.: But historically in the US, this is exactly what civil marriage was for. The social consensus was that no romantic relationship other than marriage (in a religious sense) was acceptable, and government
was given the bookkeeping role. The understanding
was that people would do their best to destroy any romantic relationship not having the government stamp.

The goal of ensuring that children were properly cared for was part of the reason government blessing came to be required. But in the days before reliable contraception, such a heavy-handed scheme had a lot going for it. The only reason we can take more libertarian alternatives seriously now is that times and circumstances have changed.

In the long term, I'd like to get even further away from a blessing model and towards a faciliation model. But this is not the long term. This is a period in history where most of the opposition to SSM is not from "liberals" like Elizabeth or faux-"liberals" like Eve. It's from unabashed "social conservatives" for whom
an even more fundamental reason for civil marriage law was to enforce religious conceptions of sexual purity, of which well-brought up children were only one spinoff. In the traditional picture, gay relationships not being classified as marriage was cheerfully intended as licence for people at large to use social coercion (shaming, shunning and the like) to break them up. And the reason social conservatives are quite so beside
themselves is precisely because they keenly appreciate that, between Lawrence and Goodridge, their implicit licence to act against gay relationships is under direct attack. Eve is kidding herself if she thinks that she can invoke one set of more traditional ideas about marriage without dredging up these monsters as well. And thus paradoxically, she's helping to make being able to get a government "marriage" stamp on my relationship all the more important to me.
posted by Eve at 10:25 PM | link

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