MARRIAGE AND PROCREATION: Mark Barton replies to Eve

Eve: 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."

Mark B.: I'm afraid that not only doesn't this clarify anything, it conspicuously evades resolving the ambiguity I criticized: what exactly does "about" mean? If "marriage is about procreation" means that procreation is so intrinsic to marriage that it fatally devalues the institution for people to marry without a good-faith expectation of procreating, and the above types of couples are married in good standing, then the conclusion is not a mistake, it's a perfectly valid reduction ad absurdum. If Eve doesn't like the conclusion she has no choice but to give up one of the premises. I suggest the obvious one togive up is the first. In fact to my knowledge, nobody has ever suggested that marriage was about procreation in that sense except in the context of an anti-SSM argument. There are plenty of other senses in which marriage could be "about" procreation, including many with real historical support, and even some that I'd happy to go along with.

Eve: 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.

Mark B.: Since this started from critique of Sullivan, let's wrap that aspect up first. Eve's broad objection is essentially that Sullivan is being simplistic, but Sullivan is merely pointing to the simplistic way the argument has actually been made by real, live SSM opponents. The bald fact that gay couples can't physically procreate is commonly invoked asif it were an obvious trivial disqualification in its own right. It was the primary argument in Goodridge. Invoked in this simplistic way ("about"="basic qualifying condition") it's always been transparently hypocritical, and has always gone down badly in court. It's not acondition that the straight majority would ever dream of applying to themselves, and recent case and statute law has only made the hypocrisy more blatant. When Sullivan can even point to an FRC commentator acknowledging that that's how the argument has been getting made and that it's in "serious trouble" in that form, Eve is just shooting themessenger to attack Sullivan.

Moreover, Eve's attempt to refine and salvage the argument merely illustrates that it's probably unsalvageable. The refined argument amounts to, "Inability to procreate is fatally disqualifying except that it's not a problem if you could potentially be the supposedly ideal childrearing team of man and a woman." The concept of procreation makes an appearance, but it's no longer doing any actual work--it's a gear that spins without engaging anything. One might as well just drop the pretence and say that a couple can get married if and because they're the supposed ideal childrearing team of a man and a woman.

Eve: 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.

Having put the original procreation argument to bed, let's turn to what is the independent argument in terms of childrearing. This was the secondary argument in Goodridge. However I'm afraid I don't think that in 2004 we're obliged to respect as serious Eve's presentation of it above.

The issue has been studied. We have actual data. The studies are by no means the last word, but neither are they junk. Opposite-sex and same-sex couples cannot be credibly described as having "obviously a fairly large difference in kind" with respect to parenting outcomes any more than blue-eyed couples versus brown-eyed ones. Now of course Eve is welcome to invoke caution and argue that there might be small but important differences, or large differences in variables that haven't been studied, but I think at this stage of the game "obviously" and "large" should be considered beyond the intellectual pale.

Eve: 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.

Mark B.: Not at all. There's less procreation because what comes after it (i.e., childrearing) is as hard as I suggested it was and women have more options nowadays. The only place I may have given the wrong impression is that when I said that stage would need a hand, I didn't mainly mean marriage. It's not that marriage doesn't have a valuable role to play, but in and of itself it's not any sort of solution to the fundamental incentive problem, and never was. Marriage in and of itself isn't a significant carrot. Sex is a carrot, companionship is a carrot, economic support is a carrot, many aspects of childrearing are carrots, but none of them is intrinsic to marriage--you can get them about as easily through shacking up. To make marriage into a solution to the procreation problem, you'd need to act pretty heavy-handedly make other alternatives less attractive or non-existent, such as and especially, by restricting women's employment and banning fornication and birth control.

I'm afraid you wouldn't have my support for that, and I doubt you'd find support elsewhere once people realized that that's what it would take.

posted by Eve at 8:35 PM | link

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