THE LIBERAL CASE AGAINST GAY MARRIAGE: Susan Shell

[A fascinating piece. There are big flaws (some points I just plain disagree with; focus on "what marriage is" to the exclusion of "how SSM would change our marriage culture"; focus solely on generation without reference to mothers, fathers, or gender) but the piece is well worth reading in full. --Eve]

...Liberalism proceeds by taking its fundamental bearings from certain basic human experiences about which sectarians can reasonably be expected to agree--for example, the general human aversion to violent death and the claims to which that aversion naturally gives rise. Thus the first step in defining a liberal approach to marriage is to find a way of understanding marriage that is similarly true to the human situation and at the same time relatively impartial with respect to present-day sectarian conflicts.

A suitable account of marriage might begin as follows: Most human societies have honored the notion that special responsibility for children lies with the biological parents. This has also been the view of almost all influential thinkers on the subject--including "liberal" ones. No known society treats the question of who may properly call a child his or her own as simply "up for grabs" or as a matter to be decided entirely politically as one might distribute land or wealth. ...

...Beyond its other functions--limiting female fertility, transmitting property, or providing companionship, for example--marriage is a way of honoring this central fact, which limits one's ability to regard practices of marriage as either wholly dependent on belief in a particular divine revelation or as wholly "socially constructed."

But marriage is not merely a matter of biology. That children can be "illegitimate" suggests that the biological facts of parenthood are not enough for social purposes. Disputes over fatherhood, for example, or variations in parental attachment to their children, make it reasonable for societies to supplement and sometimes override the natural bonds established by and through the processes of human generation. Marriage is, before all else, the practice by which human societies mark, modify, and occasionally mask these bonds. Like death, and the funereal rites that universally accompany it in one form or another, human generation has a significance that is more than arbitrary, if less than obvious. Marriage is the primary way societies interpret that significance, and it is doubtful whether any other custom could substitute for it adequately.

Whatever else it may accomplish, marriage acknowledges and secures the relation between a child and a particular set of parents. Whether monogamous or polygamous, permanent or temporary, marriage never fails to address this relation--at least potentially. It establishes a legal or quasi-legal relation of parenthood that draws on, even as it enhances and modifies, the primary human experience of generation and the claims and responsibilities to which it naturally gives rise. A husband is, until otherwise proven, the acknowledged father of his wife's offspring, with recognized rights and duties that may vary from society to society but always exist in some form. And a wife is a woman who can expect a certain specified sort of help from her husband in the raising of her offspring. All other functions of marriage borrow from or build upon this one. Even marriage among those past child-rearing age or otherwise infertile draws on notions of partnership and mutual aid that has its primary roots in the experience of shared biological parenthood. ...

Many proponents of gay marriage generally seek a combination of legal, economic, and medical privileges ordinarily associated with marriage, as well as recognition of a certain civil dignity that current arrangements are thought to deny gays. Some advocates also specifically seek an easier road when it comes to adopting children. Few if any supporters of gay marriage, however, demand as a matter of central concern that each gay partner be automatically recognized as the parent of any child generated by the other. More simply, proponents of gay marriage do not seek the "essence" of marriage, as described above, in its most general and basic sense.

For example, Jonathan Rauch, in his recent book Gay Marriage: Why It Is Good for Gays, Good for Straights, and Good for America, defines marriage as essentially a legally enforced, long-term relation of mutual aid and support between two sexual partners. Marriage, he says, "is putting one person ahead of all others." According to Rauch, "if marriage means anything at all," it is knowing "that there is someone out there for whom you are always first in line." We can here leave aside how odd this definition will sound to any married couple with young children, partners whose first responsibility is not obviously spousal. The more crucial point to note is Rauch's telling claim that marriage is primarily directed toward relieving adult anxiety--an "elemental fear," as he calls it, that should catastrophe strike, "no one will be there for me" (original emphasis). This belief may well express Rauch's personal needs and longings, but it has little to do with parenthood. Rauch views marriage as a response to the fears of adults that they might one day be abandoned, rather than to the fears of parents for their children, let alone the fears of children that they might actually be abandoned here and now. Not every proponent of gay marriage makes the same arguments as Rauch. Still, few centrally insist upon the automatic parental rights and duties intrinsic to marriage as it is almost universally experienced.

Keeping the goals that advocates emphasize in mind, one can reach a principled and liberal public policy toward gay marriage. Most, if not all, of the goals of the gay marriage movement could be satisfied in the absence of gay marriage. Many sorts of individuals, and not just gay couples, might be allowed to form "civil partnerships" dedicated to securing mutual support and other social advantages. If two unmarried, elderly sisters wished to form such a partnership, or two or more friends (regardless of sexual intimacy) wanted to provide mutually for one another "in sickness and in health," society might furnish them a variety of ways of doing so--from enhanced civil contracts to expanded "defined benefit" insurance plans, to new ways of dealing with inheritance. ... Such partnerships would differ from marriage in that only marriage automatically entails joint parental responsibility for any children generated by the woman, until and unless the paternity of another man is positively established.

As for the having and raising of children--this, too, can be provided for and supported short of marriage. If two siblings need not "marry" in order to adopt a child together, neither need two friends, whether or not they are sexually intimate. Civil unions might be formed in ways that especially address the needs of such children. ...

...The requirement that homosexual attachments be publicly recognized as no different from, and equally necessary to society as, heterosexual attachments is a fundamentally illiberal demand. Gays cannot be guaranteed all of the experiences open to heterosexuals any more than tall people can be guaranteed all of the experiences open to short people. Least of all can gays be guaranteed all of the experiences that stem from the facts of human sexual reproduction and its accompanying penumbra of pleasures and cares. To insist otherwise is not only psychologically and culturally implausible; it imposes a sectarian moral view on fellow citizens who disagree and who may hold moral beliefs that are diametrically opposed to it.

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posted by Eve at 12:25 AM | link

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