EXCEPTIONS: Eve replies to Mark Barton

Mark replied to a post where I was trying more to raise questions than to provide my own answers; nonetheless, I don't think I expressed myself well. I'll try to make the questions clearer in the Question of the Week, to be posted forthwith (and I know "week" has become something of a term of art here, but work with me, people). For now, here are two points that may help clarify my admittedly quite convoluted post:

1. I think it's a huge mistake, and damaging to our culture, to skip from "some married couples don't have children, some don't want children, and some can't procreate" to "marriage isn't about children or procreation." (I also find it really weird that couples who don't want children get lumped in with couples who can't procreate: Don't a lot of us know either couples who changed their minds and now do want children, or couples in which the woman got pregnant accidentally?)

2. All married couples can provide a mother and father to any child they create or adopt. SSM would treat intentionally motherless or fatherless families as identical to man/woman couples. If you think that's a problem, it's obviously a fairly large difference in kind--not just in degree--between the "exception" of childless married couples and the "exception" of same-sex couples. So the fact that there are exceptions to the rule of "mom, dad, and kids" doesn't mean that a) we need to replace that basic mental and cultural template with "two adults," or b) all exceptions are equivalent.

On a point tangentially related to #1, Mark says, "Sometimes 'marriage is about X' is used to mean 'marriage was designed to facilitate X,' in which case the last thing that marriage is about is procreation. Procreation is the trivial bit for most people and needs a brake more than it needs facilitation--it's what comes next that's hard and could use a bit of a hand." I wonder if he'd care to revise that statement in light of the many industrialized nations whose citizens are now having babies at below replacement rate.

posted by Eve at 9:53 PM | link

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