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 Tuesday, November 01, 2005
CHANGE OF TUNE: Barry Deutsch replies to Maggie and David Blankenhorn
...Maggie, I think you've misunderstood what Andrew's saying. No one denies that David--and you--have been saying fathers and marriage are important. Obviously, you've both been saying that for many years. But David, like you, nowadays argues that the only thing that justifies the state's interest in recognizing marriage is marriage's generative capacity. That's simply not compatible with the marriage movement's "statement of principles", which you drafted in 2000: Marriage is a personal bond. Marriage is the ultimate avowal of caring, committed, and collaborative love. Marriage incorporates our desire to know and be known by another human being; it represents our dearest hopes that love is not a temporary condition, that we are not condemned to drift in and out of shifting relationships forever. Five years ago, you and David advocated this; today, both you and David routinely dismiss statements along these lines as adult-centered. Five years ago, you wrote that the state has an interest in supporting marriage because--among other reasons--"Marriage is a unique generator of social and human capital, as important as education in building the wealth of individuals and communities." Let's put the particulars of that statement aside. What's relevant to our discussion is that five years ago, you admitted that the state has multiple reasons to want couples to get and stay married, some of which were not exclusively about heterosexual reproduction. What the anti-SSM movement says today--that the only legitimate state interest in supporting marriage is its generative capacity--is incompatible with the marriage movement's "statement of principles" circa 2000. I know that you, David and others have written about the connections between generative capacity and marriage for years. But that's not the only thing you wrote about. And the implicit admission made, in 2000, that marriage has dimensions in addition to generative capacity, and that there are legitimate state interests in marriage in addition to generative capacity, shows your position has changed over the last five years. And that's a shame, because your 2000 understanding of marriage was far more nuanced and realistic than the simplistic "generative or nothing" view you take today. As Andrew says, you folks were right in the first place. more (plus comments, so far mostly on govt's interest in marriage) |
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Again, where SS'M' supporters err is in believing that this bond can just magically exist in the same way between some arbitrary combination of people.
What the anti-marriage crowd have a problem with, apparently, is that people who want to get married usually want to get married for other reasons than wanting to have babies. (They may also want to have children and believe that marriage is the best way of creating a nurturing environment within which to bring up children, but Maggie has explicitly said she disagrees with that idea: for her, marriage is about production of babies only.)
The idea that there is one and only one configuration that can be married or that has a right to want to be married - and that configuration is one fertile woman, who wants to have babies, with one fertile man, who wants to have babies - is purely arbitrary.
(That some of the anti-marriage crowd don't care if the couple can actually have babies, or want to have babies, so long as it looks as if someday they might, is pure sympathetic magic. Silly.)
Love is more than just sex and marriage is more than just procreation.
Individuals cannot be fertile alone. No person has ever procreated solo.
Only couples can be fertile and only the integration of the sexes can generate human life. That conjugal relationship is endorsed in the social institution of marriage. Marital status is unique in how it bonds the husband and wife and their offspring.
The unisexed combination is quite distinct and as one of the types of nonmarriageable combinations it is not a social institution that is endorsed by society through preferential status. Perhaps someone can proposed the purpose of the state in enacting such a preferential status. How would society benefit such that society, through the state, would be compelled to elevate the unisexed relationship?
Not just any unisexed relationship, but according to SSMers, most precisely the homosexed relations of gays and lesbians. Please, don't argue "me too".
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