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 Sunday, October 23, 2005
Equality v. Liberty/Maggie Gallagher
A particularly vivid example of how the equality argument, unfolding in public life, structures thought is the Larry Summers flap at Harvard. Are men, on average, more likely to be exceptionally gifted mathematically than women? This is a question that, at Harvard at least cannot be entertained. Good people don't ask questions like that, because they have a prior commitment to the absolute equality (in the sense of sameness) of men and women. Social and/or legal punishment are important to maintaining that kind of cognitive boundary. (Which is why those Harvard women professors threw such an amazing public hissy fit. The boundaries of taboo must be rigorously policed or the taboo fails. You have to pay a cost for even raising this question if unquestionability of the premise is going to be sustained). But the institution of androgyny is self-enforcing at its core. Good people internalize the cognitive boundaries. We don't ask questions like that, only bad people do. If we accept the moral logic of SSM, then (as many of the comments in Volokh.com made crystal clear) a similar new cognitive boundary will be redrawn around same-sex and opposite-sex couples; these two things are now declared "equals." Under equality principles, we will start from the cognitive premise (now encoded in law) that there is no difference of any social importance between these two things. Any difference that exists must be downgraded in importance (if it is real, it is not significant and so is conceptually disregarded) if this cognitive boundary is going to be sustained. People who raise big, obvious differences between same-sex and opposite-sex couples will find the cognitive screens against this information are very high. Perhaps there is some level of empirical evidence that could persuade people that there is something of significance about the fact that when men and women have sex, they can make a baby. But it is hard to see what. People who are able to screen this out, to flatten their perception (in obedience to their cognitive, moral commitment to equality)so that some really big, obvious facts (like when men and women have sex, women often get pregnant; or if you don't have enough babies, your society will die out) become difficult for people to see, in the sense of attributing any importance to. I've always wondered about the way public debate now works in America. People who propose something utterly untested (like SSM) have no obligation to provide any evidence at all. Meanwhile, if you are going to go into the public square and say anything that is remotely traditional (like, "marriage matters" or "children needs mothers and fathers"), you need a mountain of social science evidence (which given the inherent limitations of social science as a discipline, will often be disregarded anyway as not amounting to irrefutable proof, the only standard of evidence that can support a proposition that is not radical.) Traditional requires evidence amounting to proof. Radical innovation requires no evidence at all; it is self-evident. The answer has something to do with the kind of cognitive screens against information people internally construct, in obedience to moral principles. posted by maggie at 10:47 AM | link 
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Maybe the reason those supporting "tradition" have to back up their arguments is because the make embarrassing rheotircal leaps predicting the end of civilization or people dying on camels in the desert (or something like that).
The other reason, of course, is that those arguing "tradition" have been wrong so often. Slavery was defended by "tradition" arguments, miscegination laws were defended by "tradition" arguments, Jim Crowe and segregation were defended by "tradition" arguments.
LIstening to your arguments, one comes to the uncomfortable realization you would have made all of these same arguments to support bans on interracial marriages. Your allies in the social conservative movement would have been there since their predecessors WERE there.
"Perhaps there is some level of empirical evidence that could persuade people that there is something of significance about the fact that when men and women have sex, they can make a baby. But it is hard to see what."
It depends on what the context is. If the context is childbearing and raising in general then it's so well-established and obviously significant that no additional data is required, thank you very much. It's significant in that _if_ your goal is to have kids raised by both biological parents as often as possible, _then_ applying social and legal pressure to people not to have kids unless they're married and not to walk away from a marriage while there are still kids being raised will go a long way to achieving the goal. I'm not convinced that it's the optimum solution in this day and age, but it's not silly, because there's a very direct relation between means and ends.
If on the other hand, the context is SSM, then yes, some empirical data - _any_ empirical data - would be nice because your armchair philosophical arguments are so vague, hand-waving and wooly as to not count as arguments at all. As you've presented it so far, your argument that marriage is for procreation implies that SSM is bad is just plain silly - _really_ silly. It's about as silly, and silly in the same way, as the idea that because noses are for smelling implies that perching eyeglasses on them is bad. Commonly objects or institutions are good for more than one thing. Sometimes there's interference between multiple purposes and sometimes there isn't. It won't do just to raise the possibility in the abstract - you need to give details.
And I submit that it's implausible that you ever could tell a story with details. After all, the three main motivations for getting married correspond to the three purposes called out in the Book of Common Prayer: procreation, supposed ritual impurity of sex outside marriage, and mutual aid and comfort. You're effectively claiming that you despair of being able to ground a marriage culture in those three and that you need to be able to pitch marriage as an exclusive club for breeders. That's nothing short of pathetic. Why should we take seriously the advice of someone who's such a poor judge of sermon material? On the one hand the three main themes have enormous resonance (free slogan: "Duty to children, duty to God, duty to partner"). On the other hand, the alternative doesn't make sense. Marriage will never be an exclusive club. It has 100% theoretical eligibility, and probably 80%-90% of people are potentially seriously interested. You'd do rather better hyping the pretty bridal gowns.
And of course, as usual I'm being mischievous and taking you at face value. Everything you say makes perfect sense if we supplement it with one or more of the following homophobic tacit premises: (i) same-sex sex is bad and should not be given tacit approval in marriage law (ii) procreation is so important that people should be pressured into it without regard to sexual orientation, (iii) people who might be tempted not to get married because they don't like being in the same club as supposed sex perverts should be pandered to rather than denounced as the bigots they are.
What exactly is controversional about saying "children need mothers and fathers"?
Marty, given that Maggie's interest in children needing married parents stops the day the children get born, I presume that "children need mothers and fathers" is, for Maggie, a statement of simple biological fact and nothing more.
Children need parents to take care of them, but Maggie has made clear she thinks it doesn't matter at all if those parents taking care of their children are married: it only matters if the parents are married at conception and/or birth.
Identity Politics, Love Your Label
To disagree [with SSMers] is to invite childish chants of “homophobe” and “bigot”. When that happens it is a sure sign that discussion has been abandoned in favor of identity politics. And that is reminiscent of the rhetoric of racial identity groups today who are the true inheritors of the flawed purpose behind the bans on interracial marriage.
There's nothing controversial about saying "children need mothers and fathers." The problem is stopping there, and not explaining the basis of that assumption and acknowledging its limitations. Some in the marriage movement--like Elizabeth Marquardt and Tom Sylvester--are much more willing to explain it the whole way through. Maggie tends to just stop, never dealing with the limitations on the statement.
I don't think your source is being entirely fair, Chairm. Even if 90% of the responses to pro-traditional marriage are cries of "bigot" and only 10% are attempts at reasoned debate, the 10% of people who want to intelligently debate do deserve to be debated with.
Those relatively few who make the attempt at reasoned debate would refrain from the namecalling and assigning ill-motive. It hardly ever happens that one of these few stick their necks out to object to that sort of behavior or tactic or whatever it is. That points to identity politics at play -- and it usually drowns out the voices of reasoned argument even on the part of their best advocates.
Isn't the flip side of Maggie's question why is it some people are so unconcerned about equality? It's as if equality shouldn't be a consideration and that the only question is how it allegedly affects kids and allegedly affects marriage.
That assumes the there is inequality. The SSM side seems to be convinced by the peculair notion that combining both sexes is unjust sex discrimination.
What they really believe, as evident at Volokh, is that heterosexual couples are eligible for the special status afford marriage, while homosexual couples are not afforded a special status on par.
But that objection transforms into something different when Civil Union is on the table. The real goal is to replace marriage with an alternative to marriage and keep the name "marriage" and appropriate the social status that the alternative could not get on its own. This is the way the argument goes even if people have other stated motives.
It boils down to a well-intentioned, but deeply flawed, attempt to find a problem to fit the solution.
chairm: [link] Identity Politics, Love Your Label [//] To disagree [with SSMers] is to invite childish chants of “homophobe” and “bigot”. When that happens it is a sure sign that discussion has been abandoned in favor of identity politics."
Actually it's the other way around: childish chants of "identity politics" are usually a sign of bigotry. To make a charge of identity politics is normally in part to disclaim responsibility by trivializing or refusing to acknowledge the very possibility that members of a group could have problems that aren't self-inflicted through the act of identifying with the group.
Now of course there are indeed some pretty disfunctional black ghettoes, and and someone who isn't prepared to be pretty ruthless about dissociating from ghetto friends and possibly even family is probably not going to do as well for themselves as they might if they go with the flow. But another big chunk of the problem for someone trying to escape the ghetto is the sad fact that a lot of white Americans are still pretty racist. And whether any particular individual going on about identity politics is virulently racist or not, a lot of current American conservative philosophy was originally about making the Republican party safe for racists, so someone who's picked up the propaganda is at a minimum much less mindful than they should be of how badly the white race in the US continues to treat the black race, and, if they're white, much less mindful than they should be of their responsibility for fixing it.
The author of the linked commentary is just this sort of bigot towards gay people, and not up the casual end of the spectrum either. He doesn't have the foggiest idea what the experience of gay people is like, and worse, he's explicitly refusing to hear, because he's so dead set on his pet panacea that the idea that it might not suit everyone and might in fact make some people utterly miserable is just not to be tolerated.
"And that is reminiscent of the rhetoric of racial identity groups today who are the true inheritors of the flawed purpose behind the bans on interracial marriage."
No, it's even less about identity politics than the racial case because what causes blacks to have different experiences is only indirectly about being black - it's mostly about the learned attitudes of other people, especially whites. By contrast, what causes gay people to have different experiences is the intrinsic difference itself. So, one might reasonably hope that in a hundred years the races will be living, working and socializing together without thought to skin colour. However there will still be gay bars, because it will never be an effective use of a gay person's time to look for compatible partners in a venue that's 95% straight.
Convinced that identity politics is the way to go, eh?
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