MARRIAGE AS NORM: Mark Barton replies to Maggie Gallagher

Maggie writes: You seem to be moving on some underlying logic like "marriage is a moral issue. What else is a moral issue?"

No. My line of thought is: Maggie says, 'For me the question of what SSM will do to marriage is primary. [...] I don't see marriage as a "right." I see it as a "norm" and a social institution, which means it has to have substantive content.' But this makes no sense at all--in general there is no necessary contradiction between something being a right and something being a norm. On the contrary, enshrining something as a right is often a necessary first step to making it a norm.

Maggie writes:

The norm I'm supporting is that most children should be born to
married couples and most of those marriages should last.

That's the ideal for which I'm striving, which I think is uniquely immportant to the common good.

OK. It's a start, but a measure of how incomplete and vague it is is that I can happily sign on to it even though we have radically different views. It's
incomplete in that it doesn't even cover all the major, substantive, marriage-related things that we know you want, such as most children being brought up by married couples.

More importantly, it's vague in that it's at best an it-would-be-nice-if claim. It doesn't have any substance except to the extent that it implies a set of responsibilities for individuals in different circumstances, and a system of carrots and sticks to ensure that they fulfill their responsibilities in acceptable numbers. Hopefully there is a fact of the matter as to what you think people's responsibilities are, and how much carrot and stick it is reasonable to apply.

Of course, in your previous post, you seemed to be suggesting that we could get to the ideal more or less entirely through enlightened self-interest, with no coercion or disapproval. But that doesn't pass the giggle test. First, it's certainly not how things worked in the old days, when every form of coercion up to and including a shotgun was used to enforce marriage norms. Second, it's implausible that a high level of conformity could be achieved today without similarly large sticks, given
that the urge to have sex with little thought to consequences and the hatred for a spouse who has become tedious are two of the most powerful of human emotions. Third, it's certainly not something you're serious about, when you propose legally preventing same-sex couples from getting married.

In particular, it's not at all clear how your formulation above implies any responsibilities for same-sex couples at all. For a fairly obvious sense of "be born to", no children can possibly be born to same-sex couples, married or unmarried, so same-sex couples being allowed to marry, or choosing to marry can't possibly have any direct effect on whether the goal is met.

If there is to be any effect, it must be something indirect involving the attitudes of opposite-sex couples, and indeed you've often alluded to such a thing. But again, this makes no sense at all. If there were anything to it, there would have to be many straight couples that, if pumped full of truth serum and asked, would say, "Oh, we never thought to get married because of all those gays and lesbians getting married." But the sane response to that is not "How appalling! We must stamp out
same-sex marriage!" but, "What an unbelievably lame excuse! If you're planning
to have kids, or place yourself at a significant risk of having kids, then you have a responsibility to be there for them, quite regardless of whether gay people formalize and protect their relationships by getting married."
posted by Eve at 5:53 PM | link

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