SEX, CHILDREN, AND MARRIAGE: Lynn Gazis-Sax replies to Eve

[quotes from Eve's post are in bold]

Being married to a chronically ill husband, I'm really big on the "mutual care" and "in sickness and in health" aspects of marriage. And that sort of influences my view on *how* (not whether) sex is involved in setting the boundaries of marriage.

"So why can sexual/romantic relationships set the boundaries? Why not sexless but deeply committed relationships?"

Sexless but deeply committed relationships are still marriage, as long as both husband and wife are willing to stay together for better or for worse, for richer or for poorer, in sickness and in health. I don't think it's the government's business to look at whether people are actually having sex, or are willing to have sex. Given that married people are expected (and, I think, should be expected) to not have sex with anyone else, people are surely going to want to be able to have sex with whomever they marry, but it's not up to anyone else whether they do.

"Should sex be part of the norm of marriage, or should the norm be restricted solely to commitment and care? Should we encourage people to marry even in situations where we think it's best that they care for one another, but we do not think it's best that they have sex?"

On the other hand, sex should very much be part of the norm of marriage in the sense that it should be expected that it is OK to have sex with your spouse, and that we shouldn't be marrying people for whom it is not OK that they have sex (and, in fact, I can't think of any case where we now do so, though there seem to be some cases where we allow marriage even if we don't think it best that people have children--that law Andrew Sullivan reported about first cousins being allowed to marry if they're beyond fertile age comes to mind).

"If not, these seem to be parallel arguments to the arguments that marriage is how we link children to mothers and fathers. And yet those arguments were found, by SSM advocates, insufficient to define the boundaries of marriage. Why is sex/romance more central to marriage than childrearing?"

Personally, I don't think we should simultaneously marry people and try to discourage them from rearing children together. If we came to the collective conclusion (which seems unlikely to me at this point) that same-sex couples should be offered every right opposite-sex couples have *except* the ones related to childrearing (no adoption, no access to fertility clinics, no right to be presumed the parent of your spouse's kids), then I'd say that whatever we'd be granting them, it wouldn't be marriage, and I'd prefer it be called a different name. (That's the one case I can think of where I might join the "please call this a civil union rather than marriage" group.)
posted by Eve at 7:58 PM | link

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