EXCEPTIONS: Mark Barton replies to Eve

Eve: Okay, as you might guess, I have a bunch of problems with Sullivan's recent post on procreation and marriage and stuff. I could yap about how procreation is obviously not the sole guiding standard of marriage law, since, if it was, polygamy would be a-okay (boy can those folks procreate!), so perhaps something more complex is going on, hmm?

Mark B.: The general principle here is potentially valid, but the example is broken, on two related but different counts. First, Sullivan nowhere commits himself to the idea that there couldn't be a valid reason for denying marriage to a couple, so giving an example of such a case is irrelevant in general. Second, because he did not assume any such thing, it's unlikely he was tempted to commit the fallacy of affirming the consequent as in the example. What Eve needs is not an example of a consideration that recommends the same result (denial of marriage) as the non-procreativity consideration for something besides a same-sex couple, but one that recommends the opposite result and recommends it sufficiently strongly as to override non-procreativity for something besides a same-sex couple. Actually she needs more than an example--she needs to just plain spell out what the consideration is for each of the standard examples: a couple infertile through choice, a couple infertile through disease and a couple infertile through age.

Eve: But this same approach could "prove" that marriage isn't really about care, or sexual fidelity, or personal loyalty, in any interesting sense, given that we obviously let couples marry with no proof of any of the above, and even in the teeth of the evidence.

Mark B.: Well, yes. To the extent "about" means "so fundamental to the institution that we can't possibly afford to let in anyone who doesn't exhibit it," which is how it's being used in the anti-SSM context, then indeed marriage isn't about procreation, or these other things, and rarely if ever has been.

Of course if Eve finds that conclusion unpalatable, it serves her right for endorsing a fallacy of equivocation. In most contexts, "marriage is about procreation" means something close to the opposite of the above, along the lines of, "procreation is so fundamental to the institution that we can't possibly afford to have it happen anywhere else." In that sense, marriage was certainly once considered to be about procreation, although society has long since abandoned all seriousness about it.

Unfortunately this sense doesn't make for a good anti-SSM argument. Even to the extent marriage is still considered to be about a monopoly on procreation, and to the extent that this still represents a genuinely worthy goal, it's irrelevant because opening marriage to same-sex couples does precisely nothing to prevent procreation happening outside marriage.

And these two are by no means the only senses. 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. And if I've missed a sense, I'm sure Eve will let me know.

posted by Eve at 9:46 PM | link

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