« Turkey - becoming more Islamic? | Main | You won't believe how nasty computer security wars have become... »
October 20, 2005
An Arguement Against Same Sex Marriage...
There is a truely facinating set of posts over at the Volokh Conspiracy by Maggie Gallagher. Ms. Gallagher makes a complex arguement so let me try and distill it (somewhat)
- The big picture: we are in the middle of a huge and only partly acknowledged crisis around marriage and family. Every single society that that we think of as, in other ways, the very best for human flourishing (stable, democratic, market economies with respect for political and creative freedom) is experiencing grave dysfunctions and disruption in the family--and precisely around this whole business of generativity.
That, is the family crisis we face is not a crisis of intimacy, or sexual satisfaction, or emotionally satisfying relations, which our family system. taken altogether, may be better at than any in human history (I'm not sure how one would measure): it is about whether under modern conditions in modern societies, the man and woman who make the baby are going to stick around, love each other, and the baby too.
The conditions that create the creative class, and the conditions that create people, may be diverging.
This crisis is playing out in somewhat different ways in different regions (Italy has extremely low birth rates and much family cohesion, while Sweden has moderately low fertility and high rates of illegitimacy, for example. U.S. has relatively high birth rates, but extremely high rates of solo mothering and divorce).
But in every case technologically innovative, wealthy, western, democratic, market societies are no longer routinely doing what the family did really quite well for most of human history: reliably producing the next generation and reliably connecting most of those children to their father.
Conservatives like to blame welfare alone, or the Sixties and bad moral values. I think this seriously misunderestimates the nature and depth of our marriage and family crisis, which is institutional and structural in nature.
For most of human history children were assets. We depended on family members to produce most of the goods we consumed, and to provide most social insurance: someone to nurse us when we are sick, feed us when we cannot work, shelter and care for us in old age. Under these condition the necessity of procreation and family loyalty were obvious, urgent personal moral and social imperatives. People are always better at duties when it is apparent that you do well, by doing good.
Nowadays, government and the market have taken over large parts of these social functions. The main reason for this is: government and the market do them much, much better. (If you doubt this, imagine have to perform your current job functions while depending only on close kin for colleagues, bosses and employees.). The genius of the market is the way that it allows biological strangers to combine their productive energies.
We can quibble about specific government programs, but basically welfare, unemployment insurance and social security, Medicare and Medicaid aren’t going away in a democracy because people like them. People prefer to depend on either the government, or a pension fund, to becoming dependents on their children in old age.
So why don’t we just let marriage go, stop worrying about what people do or don’t do in the bedroom? Because there is this one critical, literally irreplaceable social function that marriage does, and only marriage does: making babies and connecting fathers to the babies they make.
Now in the middle of this broad, deep crisis, which I truly think does threaten American civilization in the medium term, if its not confronted, what’s the one legal change powerful social, legal and cognitive elites support?
Why, making marriage a union of any two persons, clearly unrelated to procreation and paternity!
Ok. This is, I think, an essentially correct picture of the situation.
Second point: Research clearly demonstrates that family structure matters for children, and the family structure that helps the most is a family headed by two biological parents in a low-conflict marriage.
Third point:
- extending marriage to include same-sex couples would not just give rights to a small subset of the population, but would radically transform what marriage is. So long as only opposite-sex couples can marry, the thinking goes, marriage is linked to procreation; if same-sex couples can marry, too, then marriage is transformed into something else entirely. Adding same-sex marriage would ruin the old institution and create a new one, and the new institution would not longer retain a focus on having and raising children. Viewed in that light, same sex marriage is a threat to society: by redefining the institution, it will kill off its most important feature. [This analysis is by Orin Kerr]
4th Point: Marriage is not innate.
- I don’t think marriage is a universal human institution because marriage is innate. The forms of marriage differ so wildly, cultural variations are huge. You only have to go into the inner cities to see that marriage is not innate. It can disappear.
Yes, there are things in human nature that help sustain it (e.g. a pair bonding preference; sexual jealousy) but others that undermine it (e.g. men’s subjection for much of their life to powerful, indiscriminate and rather impersonal lusts).
But fundamentally marriage is sustained by culture, not biology. Why then is it universal? Because it is the answer to an urgent problem that is biological and innate: sex makes babies. Nature alone won’t connect fathers to children. Children need a society in which both men and women are committed to their care.
When anthropologists in the thirties went out into the vanishing world of human diversity, the reason they found marriage everywhere is that societies that do not hang onto the marriage idea do not survive very long.
But marriage in a particular society is not inevitable; death by sexual disorganization is always an option. Happens quite a bit actually. cf. Roman empire.
So in one sense I’m not worried about marriage. In spite of the progressive mythology that the drive to gay marriage is the irresistible wave of the future, I’m quite confident that 200 years from now, we’re not going to be living in a world where gay marriage is the norm.
I’m just not sure of the place of Western civilization in that future world.
So, here arguement is: marriage can break down and when it does, it pulls the society down with it. Clearly we have a problem in the Western world today with marriage and fertility. Is the solution to weaken the idea of marriage?
Posted by rakhier at October 20, 2005 09:51 AM