Same Sex Marriage: Lowest Common Denominator
June 29, 2005 · By Tom Cerber
Father Raymond de Souza’s National Post editorial (subscription required, but check here) on what Bill C-38 has achieved is worth reading. As is Andrew Coyne’s and Jonathan Kay’s praise for C-38 (Coyne’s seems not to be posted).
You’re more or less familiar with the arguments on either side of the same-sex marriage debate. De Souza’s argument, however, deserves further attention. Unlike Charles McVety and other opponents of same-sex marriage, De Souza doesn’t rely on predictions on what may or may not occur with same-sex marriage. He avoids the “slippery-slope” argument. However, he also avoids the facile position shared by Coyne and Kay that “everything’s still normal” because the new definition affects only 3% of the population, which wrongly assumes that redefining marriage means simply “broadening” a category.
What the “broadening” argument overlooks is that any category, whether “broad” or “narrow,” is exclusive and its exclusions are based on a principle. Coyne recognizes that the new category too “discriminates,” but says that such discrimination is justifiable but never explains WHY such discrimination is justifiable. Perhaps because the urban liberals behind same-sex marriage oppose broadening it any further (plus neither Coyne nor Kay regard polygamists as a serious challenger to the new hegemony - perhaps they’re right, but that’s still beside the point).
De Souza’s argument deserves attention because he takes the new exclusion principle seriously. As should we, especially since our politics is dominated by the courts, which deal in legal principles.
De Souza observes that the new category reduces marriage to “sex.” The only relationships worth recognizing are those where partners have access to genital and anal areas (nevermind that such access has nothing to do with sex, properly understood). This is an admitedly crude way of formulating it, but what De Souza touches on, perhaps without realizing it, is the perspective of the law.
Proponents of same-sex marriage have argued all along that it’s about “recognizing” gays and lesbians. Their relationships are just as loving (and unloving) as heterosexual relationships. Whatever the truth behind those statements, the fallacy of their argument consists in their failure to recognize that law is too crude an instrument to give them “recognition.” It can coerce people to utter statements they don’t believe (for fear of having a Human Rights Commission busy-body come after them, as happens now) (see here, here, here, here , here, here, here, and here for more commentaries on this issue at thepolitic.com).
However, law cannot recognize a “loving” relationship. It has never asked man-woman marriage partners if they love one another. Up to now, it has only recognized whether they exist in a relationship that takes the form of a procreative relationship (whether they choose to procreate is secondary) because the law is interested in protecting the fruits of that relationship - the safety and security of the couple, and of the children.
But what are the “fruits” of that relationship now? As De Souza indicates, “sex.” It can’t be the safety and security of the couple (or children), since civil unions (or domestic partnerships give them such protection).
Despite C-38 consisting of a culmination of a process that began 30 years ago with the decriminalization of homosexuality (and no-fault divorce), the state is now very much interested in what goes on in the bedrooms of the nation. This doesn’t mean that Mounties are going to start forcing people to experiment in homosexual sex. Rather, as Iain Benson of the Centre for Cultural Renewal testified before the C-38 Parliamentary Committee, this law is about:
“sexual conduct legitimacy� in the public sphere.
…
Here it is critical to understand that we allow differing views of sexual conduct to co-exist. But when the idea of sexual relationships are hidden within the language of marriage - - as they are, there is a risk that what is really at issue- - differing views of human sexuality, are missed.The attempt to claim THE public definition of marriage is actually an attempt to gain public recognition through law for certain sexual practices and those who affirm them. This is not a legitimate use of law in a free and democratic society.
The removal of restriction on homosexual and lesbian sexual practices was done on the basis that “the State has no place in the bedrooms of the nation.� Most people would agree with this. What people object to is that what goes on in the bedroom is now the focus of public conduct, expression and practice seeking public support and affirmation.
Yet… yet, the law is a horribly blunt instrument to secure “recognition.” When marriage is defined as a sex-relationship, what the law recognizes is something bizarre indeed. As Robert Sokolowski argues in response to claims that same-sex marriage is about the state recognizing loving relationships, the state can only recognize the “exchange of sex”:
In a feeble imitation of Platos Crito, I put the phrase into the mouth t)f the laws as they explain to me why my uncle and I cannot get married. Laws are notoriously impersonal and insensitive to the nuances of human emotion, and the crassness of the phrase was meant to suggest that. This is how it would look to the laws, which deal with rights and not personal commitments. It would be impossible, in fact, for the laws to verity whether or not the people who want to get married do have a caring and interpersonal
love, the laws must take their word for it; and if they do so, why should they not take the word of people who have motivations other than sexual for their friendship? Why not let them get married too? Other kinds of relationships can be caring, special and lasting, and the sexual relationship can prove to be quite changeable.
So law is crude. Law is blind. It cannot, by definition, “recognize.” Yet SSM’s Jacobin proponents will continue to insist it does, in the name of “sexual conduct legitimacy,” to the detriment of the public square.
They will attempt to do the impossible, to square a circle. The very definition of “extremism,” despite constant media efforts to paint them as “moderates.”
The consequences to marriage in a practical sense may indeed be what Coyne and Kay and countless other liberals proclaim. However, those consequences are a thin veneer to the shallow core of the new definition which will require a sustained forgetfulness and hypocrisy among people wishing to believe marriage is something more than “exchange of sex.”
Since the new definition imitates the traditional definition of marriage (by preserving the number 2, for instance) and the general social capital that traditional marriage creates, then such enforced hypocrisy will be a dead weight on that social capital. So long as people recognize that they must be hypocrites to celebrate the institution of marriage as the “exchange of sex,” they won’t get too excited about getting married. Coyne’s hopes for using the passage of C-38 getting serious about marriage go by the wayside. That is, of course, if people don’t forget that they must be hypocrites in order to celebrate marriage. They can always forget. Proponents are betting on it when they say, “get on with it.”
If, as I’ve suggested previously, marriage and citizenship are intertwined, then Bill C-38 has shrunk even more our ability to be citizens.
UPDATE: Joe Knippenberg of No Left Turns reminds me that Immanuel Kant referred to marriage as the mutual and exclusive use of genitals. He adds: “If IK is the “highest” expression of liberalism, then SSM is the “natural” working out of liberal principles, which of course doesn’t justify it but rather perhaps shows their ultimate bankruptcy.”
This country was founded on Psalm 72:8 “May he have dominion from sea to sea, and from the River to the ends of the earth!”
Maul Partin has killed it: Psalm 37:35 “I have seen brutal people abuse others and grow strong like trees in rich soil.”
He said she said will now be He said He said. Imagine if two heterosexual male friends live together in a home owned by one of them. They live in this home for six months to two years. They have a falling out and the boarder leaves declaring they were in a homosexual common law union entitling him to half of the homeowners assets. Who can prove they didn’t have sex?
July 1, 2005
CANADA’S BLESSINGS, INCLUDING GAY MARRIAGE
John Chuckman
July 1 is Canada’s national day, and although the country has its share of political problems, we have a great deal to celebrate.
We are not at war in Iraq, killing and maiming for no reason. We have conservatives in our politics, but we have no commentators spewing hate like Ann Coulter or Rush Limbaugh. We have no puffed-up imperialist ones like Thomas Friedman. We have no genuinely dangerous public figures like Tom Delay or Donald Rumsfeld.
Our Supreme Court has decided a murderous beast, Rwandan exile Leon Mugesera, will be deported to face justice, while a mass murderer who blew up an airliner full of people and unquestionably engaged in many other acts of violence, Luis Posada Carriles, is protected by the President of the United States from receiving justice in Venezuela.
I’d rather have a Prime Minister who sometimes dithers - although, as a pure politician, Mr. Martin has demonstrated breath-taking skill in outmaneuvering his opponents - than a President who seems capable of nothing but lying and crying about terror while terrorizing others.
Only a few days before the national holiday, with the passing of Bill C-38, Canada became just the third country in the world, after Holland and Belgium, to expand human rights by giving gays the same right to marry as others. Any person aware of history and the gradual expansion of human rights over the last few centuries understands that this is something that will come eventually to all advanced countries (Spain became the fourth the next day), but it is nice to be in the forefront of progress and decency.
Contrary to the harsh uninformed preaching of fundamentalists mainly in the United States, the fully-formed modern idea of marriage only appears in the twentieth century, a time when people choose their companions, often for love and a time when we treat children as being rather precious and needing expensive education. Many marriages are of course childless, but they are still regarded as marriages in every meaning of the word. Control of human fertility for the first time in human history gives us an idea of children new in some respects. Many do not want them. Most have a small number of them and invest a very great deal in them.
The meaning of marriage has changed many times, just since the Middle Ages. Peasants typically during the Middle Ages co-habited. The Catholic Church made marriage a sacrament to enlarge its income and control. Marriage was mainly then an institution for the rich, and it had very little to do with love or companionship. Marriages of the rich and powerful were arranged, always with a careful eye to wealth and property. At the top of the social pyramid, unmarried princesses became literally pawns of their fathers in international affairs.
Elizabeth I, the greatest prince in European history, used Europe’s then-traditional views on marriage to advance the affairs of England, avoiding destructive wars by toying with various princes, sometimes for years, over the possibility or even the terms of marriage, something to which she privately was determined never to subject herself, having the harrowing experience of her father’s treatment of six wives, including her own mother, burnt into memory.
While details changed, by the eighteenth century, this view of marriage was still alive, even in the New World. George Washington married the richest widow in the British colonies, Martha Custis, and made himself a rich man. I say “made himself” because by the laws and customs then still prevailing, all Martha’s property became George’s. George liked Martha but no one who knew them ever regarded theirs as a marriage of love. Property and male control of property remained so inextricably linked to marriage, it wasn’t until well into the twentieth century in North America that women could hold bank accounts or take loans and mortgages without a husband to co-sign for them.
Children were not treated in the sentimental way we treat them. In upper-class families, children were typically raised by servants and educated by hired scholars in demanding curricula. By the eighteenth century, they were typically sent to boarding schools at a young age. In lower-class families, children were worked like beasts. Through the Industrial Revolution, people very unsentimentally sent children at an early age to work under brutal conditions - as when they were literally chained to machines - or to apprentice in some trade. Charles Dickens’ hated apprenticeship to a bootblack was almost gentle compared with what many children in early Victorian England experienced.
So, too, on American farms of the nineteenth century, regarded by so many with sentimental, unrealistic visions of Little House on the Prairie. Children were assets in small under-capitalized enterprises. They did tough work like haying, picking, and water-hauling. Many of the marriages involved little of what we regard today as love or affection, although that was always possible. The women were sometimes mail-order or often not well known to their spouses-to-be. They did unremitting work, aging and dying often quite young. High infant mortality, too, limited the development of purely sentimental bonds with children because nearly half of them died before growing up.
There is simply no reason, other than blind prejudice, for gay people to be denied the rights, satisfactions, and responsibilities of modern marriage. Many may never consider marriage. That too is their right. What is wonderful is that Canada’s legal acceptance of their equal status in marriage will gradually work to wear away any remnant of regarding gays as something corrupt or immoral. That is always how it is with social change: change occurs in notable events, almost little revolutions if you will, and gradually all of society alters its attitudes. A number of men, including preachers and newspaper editors, swore up and down, saying many ridiculous and embarrassing things, when women were given the right to vote in the early part of the twentieth century. It’s not easy giving up privileges and prejudices.
Not that gays have a difficult time in Canada, the country being far more tolerant than many. Toronto’s Gay Pride parade has become a huge event, an entertainment which families attend, with a bigger turnout than the Santa Claus parade. Most people understand that homosexuality is as birth-determined as hair color. The favorite line of preachers of hate that gays are choosing a lifestyle, an abominable lifestyle in the eyes of God, is patent nonsense. However Canada’s new law allows churches who believe this stuff to be exempted from performing gay marriages.
Happy Birthday, Canada.
John Chuckman: Did you read my post?
[...] #8217;s argument accords with some of the things I’ve been pointing out of late (see here).
[...]
[...] I agree that people should marry for love. But the same sex marriage is not, and can never be, about love. Law is not about recognizing love, as I’ve argued previously. [...]
[...] I agree that people should marry for love. But the same sex marriage is not, and can never be, about love. Law is not about recognizing love, as I’ve argued previously. [...]
[...] This comes as no surprise, for reasons I’ve outlined as recently as here. [...]
[...] See here on why the new definition of marriage opens this door. Oh yeah, there’s the biological factor of inbreeding. But hey, genetic engineering should fix that in short order. [...]
[...] If you’re still not convinced about the constitutional argument, read my extended explanation of it here. [...]
[...] In the wake of same-sex marriage opening up a new regime of marriage, the Supreme Court decided it’s ok to run swingers clubs. [...]
rohkem sisututvustusi ei viitsi kribada, keda huvitab loeb ise, ja keda ei huvita… noh see ei loeks nagunii… http://www.thepolitic.com/arch.....nominator/ Siiski siiski, väljavõte ühest kommentaarist:John Chuckman: “The meaning of marriage has changed many times, just since the Middle Ages. Peasants typically during the Middle Ages co-habited. The Catholic Church made marriage a sacrament to enlarge its income and control. Marriage was mainly then an institution