ANDREW'S CHALLENGE: Maggie Gallagher replies to Andrew Sullivan

About Andrew's challenge: a very brief and incomplete response, followed by a question.

Andrew writes: "If non-procreative, companionate marriage is the civil norm, then you simply don't have a case against gay couples having marriage licenses. And if you keep this standard for straights, while forcing gays alone to bear the burden of your battle against four decades of marital evolution, then you are being deeply, deeply unfair. So which is it? A new standard? Or equality now?"

Let us note that Andrew and I both agree about one thing: If marriage is importantly related to regulating childbearing (or, as I have put it elsewhere, if marriage has as a core public purpose managing the sexually based phenomenon also known as "procreation") then marriage's historic restriction to opposite-sex sexual unions makes sense and is not discriminatory.

Or to put it another way: to get to gay marriage as a civil right or social justice issue you have to first disconnect marriage from childbearing. Andrew argues that is is already so disconnected. The evidence he offers (some married couples have no children and we do not require vows of fertility from married couples) is pretty thin. Carlson's essay shares the false central assumption that the legal incidents of marriage ("benefits") are there to incentivize procreation. This is a thin notion of how the law might and does regulate a social institution it does not and cannot create, like marriage.

But I'm more concerned right now about reaching the agreement on the main point: If gay marriage, then marriage not about childbearing.

Are we agreed?

Here's the question: Andrew introduces a new phrase: "civil norm" as in "non-procreative companionate marriage the civil norm."

What is a civil norm? Is is the same thing a shared public norm? (As opposed to what: a private norm?) Is it a legal norm? Is it a non-religious norm? What can he mean?

Fascinating.

posted by Eve at 5:01 PM | link

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