March 21, 2013

I cut this passage because it just felt weird and unnecessary.  Like, there's no need to argue about faux philosophy.  I still think it's weird and I don't love it, but I'm including it here because I think there's something there.

There are a thousand thousand reasons opponents of marriage equality offer as justifications to maintain the unjust status quo. To my mind none of them hold water.

I’m not going to attempt a detailed analysis of these positions, because it would be incredibly boring and because I would end up so angry I’d probably cut my hands off, but mostly because it’s already been done, in Evan Wolfson’s terrific book Why Marriage Matters and, for the truly rigorous, in Jonathan Rauch’s excellent Gay Marriage: Why It’s Good for Gays, Good for Straights, and Good for America. (At first I was reluctant to recommend books by other authors—why give the competition an edge?—but then I figure if you’ve gotten this far you’ve already either bought this book or spent enough time reading it in the bookstore aisle that you’re not going to buy it anyway.) I’ll address instead only what I see as the main arguments people make against marriage equality, the most prevalent of which seems to be that the purpose of marriage is to create an environment that encourages healthy procreation and, since a gay couple can’t procreate, gay couples shouldn’t be permitted to marry.

This makes no sense at all.

Taken as an abstract principle, this means what? Something like when a thing can’t achieve the purpose for which it is intended, it should be forbidden. With me so far? Marriage is intended (we’re saying for the sake of argument) for procreation; when two people of the same sex marry, they cannot procreate, so marriage in such cases should be forbidden.

Okay, fine. Makes sense enough, until you actually think about it for three seconds.

Let’s take this away from such an inflammatory issue as marriage. Let’s say we’re talking about, oh, I don’t know, baseball caps. What’s the purpose of a baseball cap? Well, a baseball cap is intended, I think it’s fair to say, for keeping the sun out of people’s eyes. So let’s take our principle and apply it here: when a baseball cap can’t keep the sun out of people’s eyes, it should be forbidden. Or, in other words, no one should be allowed to wear a baseball cap at night.

Right.

So even if marriage is for procreation—which I don’t agree that it is, by the way—that fact has nothing to do with whether same-sex couples should be allowed to marry.

But even if there were a logical connection—if people’s ability to procreate were the determining factor in whether they ought to be allowed to marry or not—then I would say that people who object to marriage equality on these grounds are arguing in bad faith, that they don’t mean what they say. If they did, they would be just as upset by the idea of old people getting married. But they never are, are they? Nobody is rushing to pass laws or constitutional amendments forbidding post-menopausal women to marry, even though post-menopausal women can’t have children. So that can’t be what’s really going on.

At the moment I’m going to assume that same-sex couples and opposite-sex couples ought to be equal before the law, in which case the only option other than marriage is, perhaps, civil unions of the type that New Jersey and, until recently, Vermont have allowed. I have a few thoughts about these. These ideas—or permutations of them—have been offered by other people elsewhere, in some cases by a lot of other people a lot of elsewheres, but these happen to be the ones that I’m particularly interested in at the moment.

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