A couple of days after Chick-fil-A Appreciation Day, I
posted on a comment Brandon
Vogt had gotten on Facebook: “So not allowing certain individuals rights
based on a religious viewpoint is not dictatorship?” In the central paragraph, I contended:
He’s assuming that opposition to same-sex marriage can be based on nothing other than traditional Christian morality, that a secular case can’t be made against it, and that therefore one-man-one-woman state laws and amendments amount to an establishment of religion. He’s wrong; but had he said just that, a fruitful discussion on the First Amendment and the place of religion in the public square might have followed. But no-ooo-o! he had to phrase it in a manner that implicitly equates religion with totalitarian regimes.Them’s fightin’ words. Or, to put it another way, that’s not how you change people's hearts and minds.
The one response I’ve gotten so far at this writing — and it
was a nice comment, too! — came from Abraham:
I cannot help but notice that you do not make any attempts to provide any secular argument against same-sex marriage. Couldn’t it be successfully argued that once removed from a religious context, there is no valid reason not to recognize homosexual unions in the same way as heterosexual ones?
Of course, I didn’t provide one there, because that would
have been a distraction from the point of that particular post (to paraphrase
Gustave Flaubert: by dint of railing at bigots you run the risk of becoming a bigot
yourself). Besides, to take on SSM is in
a sense to take on the whole of the Sexual Revolution, from the
Pill to in
vitro fertilization to gendersilly
theory. Third, any attempt to
articulate a secular theory of any sort almost requires citation of social
science data; however, the
GLBT lobby has made it clear they will not tolerate any study whose findings
contradict the Preferred Narrative.
No, thank you, I don’t want to get sidetracked into “My scientist can
beat up your scientist”.
Rather than present a full defense at this time, I propose
to sketch an outline of such a defense, to present the skeleton stripped of
quotations, citations, historical examples and case studies. This way, I can see where the foundation
needs firming before I go to build the superstructure (if you’ll pardon the
mixed metaphors).
* * *
I: What is marriage?
Translations of words from one language to another depends
on the fact that brute facts, whether they be concrete or somewhat abstract,
remain constant over cultural barriers.
One language may have finer distinctions than another other, and for
some abstractions cognates may not line up exactly (e.g. Latin dignitas vs. modern English dignity). Yet noting the differences between the Roman gladius, the Japanese dai-katana and the French épée
doesn’t truly obscure the fact that they’re all swords.
At the same time, though, different words do live on
different levels of abstraction; the gladius,
dai-katana and épée
are all types of swords, yet they’re
used in different combat styles for different kinds of attack. Noting that sedans, pickups, sport-utility
vehicles, busses, tractor-trailer rigs and APCs are all truthfully and
logically described by the term vehicle
doesn’t make your Mini Cooper interchangeable with an M1A2 Abrams tank.
So it is with relationships.
From the moment we’re conceived, we exist in a web of different kinds of
relationships with other people, some of which we can choose and some of which
are “baked in”. “You can pick your
friends, but you can’t pick your relatives,” the old truism runs; it’s easy to
forget that the most relevant feature of truisms is that they’re true. Sister,
wife and mistress are all specific
kinds of relationships, but each has different sets of functions, expectations
and limits, as well as different places on the human love map. They’re not interchangeable; in fact, they’re mutually
exclusive (morally, at least, in almost all cultures).
Marriage isn’t
just another word for relationship;
it’s a specific kind of relationship
that fills a specific social purpose.
Stray far enough from that purpose, and the relationship is no longer a
marriage … whatever else it may be.
What is that
purpose, then?
To a certain extent, the argument for same-sex marriage is
predicated on the belief that love is the defining quality of marriage, a
common enough belief stemming from our Judeo-Christian cultural heritage.[1] Certainly, it’s commonly believed that love
motivates most love matches. However, other
relationship categories are marked by erotic love and yet aren’t marriages even
by analogy; as other kinds lose their social odium, marriage as a community-approved
sexual relationship becomes less relevant.
No, we see what marriage is
by looking at what it does. Namely, it first establishes legal claims by
the partners over each other’s bodies as matters of right rather than
convenience. But not just over each
other’s bodies; the institution establishes rights and responsibilities over
the fruit of that union. This is
specifically true of paternity: it establishes the rights of the mother and the
children against the husband and father, as social ballast to his physical and
psychological ability to walk away from his paternal responsibilities.
In other words, marriage attaches legitimacy (as opposed to bastardy) not only to the sexual union but also
to the children that spring from the union.
It also establishes exclusivity
because the marriage propagates a specific line of genetic heritage; multiple
fathers create mixed lines of heritage, which works against the father’s
genetic self-interest. The community is
called to be, in the legal sense, witnesses to the formal union, so the fact of
the marriage is established before as many people as possible; their approval
is nice but not specifically required.
Function, not motive, is the central issue: the question is
not, “Why do people get married?” but rather, “Why is there such a thing as
marriage?” Reproduction and
child-rearing are at the heart of marriage because they’re at the heart of sex
and human sexuality … a fact we’ve not forgotten so much as we’ve blocked out
of our minds.
[1]
Which is one reason attempts to package other cultures’ friendship rituals as “gay
marriages” have been less than convincing: they assume that all cultures base
marriage on love.
