It’s the fall of 2006. John Partilla, an Upper West Side advertising executive, meets Carol Anne Riddell, a local news anchor. Like-minded and both brimming with energy, they hit it off; within five years, they’re exchanging vows. But when the New York Times covers their wedding, it sparks a blaze of controversy. Why?
Partilla and Riddell were already married when they met — at their children’s pre-kindergarten. In fact, their families became friends. But rather than “deny their feelings and live dishonestly,” they decided to abandon their spouses and children. As the Times put it, “All they had were their feelings, which Ms. Riddell described as ‘unconditional and all-encompassing. . . . It was a gift . . . but I had to earn it. Were we brave enough to hold hands and jump?’”
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Just days before Partilla and Riddell’s story appeared in the Times, Robert P. George, Ryan T. Anderson, and I posted online an article to be published in the Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy defining and defending what we called the “conjugal view” of marriage, according to which marriage is inherently the union of one man and one woman. We showed how redefining civil marriage to include same-sex romantic partnerships would speed the cultural currents that led Partilla and Riddell to “jump,” and thus seriously harm the common good. Recently in these pages (“Two Views of Marriage,” Feb. 7), Jason Steorts published a counterargument that, while not mentioning Riddell and Partilla, amounts to a brief in their defense.
That counterargument is false in almost every dimension. Steorts builds a faulty theory of marital love on a confused account of the human person. He construes marriage as “maximal experiential union” — a goal that, to the extent that it is intelligible at all, would put undue strain on spouses, obscure the value of norms specific to marriage (like permanence and exclusivity), and bulldoze the topography of non-marital relationships. It would thus tend to undermine the marriage culture, and with it the welfare of spouses and children. But it would also affect the unmarried, by obscuring the special value and social prestige of other forms of intimacy. Steorts’s view, imbued with sentimentalism, is in fact less humane than the view it would displace.
Steorts wrote his argument with enough acuity to flag certain common philosophical errors, but not enough care to avoid them — with the remarkable result that its early sections contain, in plain language, rebuttals to the rest. But it is worth rehearsing its problems here and showing how the conjugal view of marriage avoids them. The reason is simple: For all its problems, Steorts’s argument captures and condenses the nebulous ideas behind today’s movement to redefine civil marriage, yesterday’s push for no-fault divorce, and other corrosive trends. Answering it convincingly will hasten the day when the invitation to join Riddell and Partilla’s jump into emotivism is seen for what it is — a call to cultural suicide.
COMPETING VIEWS OF MARRIAGE
George, Anderson, and I argue that marriage is a unique form of friendship in being comprehensive and inherently oriented to procreation. As a comprehensive union, it unites not merely minds and wills, but also bodies. Human beings can achieve bodily union only when they cooperate in coitus, which makes two people into a single reproductive unit. As a union inherently oriented to procreation, marriage is sealed and distinctively embodied in this reproductive kind of act. (That is, although spouses may deepen their union through any number of activities, only coitus is per se marital, which is why it has historically been called the “marital act.” The law has never treated sodomitical acts, even between a wedded man and woman, as marital or capable of consummating marriage.) Our account of marriage explains why it is structurally different from other forms of friendship (e.g., pledged to permanence and exclusivity), why it is of particular interest to the state, and why two persons of the same sex cannot (any more than triads) form a marriage.
For Steorts, on the other hand, marriage is “maximal experiential union”: It consists in “two persons’ sharing each other’s lives — conceived not as the facts about their bodies plus the facts about their minds, but rather as the facts about their experienced unity of the two — as comprehensively . . . as possible.” Readers might wonder in what sense they could share “the facts about” that experienced unity (or is it the experience of that experienced unity?) with their spouse. They might further wonder whether Steorts’s taste for oracular pronouncements hasn’t overwhelmed concern for coherence in this, the central statement of his definition of marriage.
I had hoped that NR would be publishing a new response to Steorts instead of republishing a response where -- once again -- Steorts has the last word.
Girgis' response in NR was nearly as insufficiently argued as Steorts' original tendentious piece. It was embarassing to see Steorts argue about how "maximal experiential unions" must be between sufficiently different, complementary individuals -- and to see this argument applied to incest without a second thought to what it does to his own position. Somebody should have thoroughly fisked his position, and Girgis wasn't apparently up for it.
I still have no idea why NR allowed Steorts to use the limited space of its printed pages to ride his radical hobby horse.
---
In his reply, Steorts continues to deny all significant differences between an infertile straight couple and a gay couple.
I believe that men and women are complementary -- and even obviously complementary -- in a variety of ways, but there are two that drive the need for a unique legal sanction for the relationship between a man and a woman, and for encouraging monogamous stability for that relationship:
1) That's the only arrangement that can reproduce naturally.
2) That's the only arrangement that can provide a child with a mother and a father.
It's not just about child-bearing, it's about child-rearing.
Even with a defective reproductive system -- or even a deliberately disabled reproductive system -- a traditional marriage can still provide an adopted child a stable homelife with a mother an a father.
The state has an interest in providing a unique sanction even for those straight couples who have no plans to adopt: plans change, circumstances change, and it's sensible to encourage stability BEFORE a child arrives.
But even those straight couples that are dead-set against child-rearing in any way -- and who do not change their minds or have their minds changed through circumstances -- ought to have their relationships affirmed as marriages because they STILL fit the pattern of matrimony even if they don't reach the full bloom of what it generally ought to be.
Two men aren't an incomplete or imperfect fulfillment of the pattern: they are a radical transgression against the pattern of the conjugal and complementary matching and mating of husband and wife.
That the transgression ought to be permitted, most of us readily agree, but it ought NOT to be called a marriage.
Unfortunately, the view of marriage you are all trying to protect is already dead. American's behave as if marriage as something they can jump into an out of as easily as a pair of shoes. For the majority in the West there is nothing sacramental about marriage...assuming they would even understand what that entails. You're fighting as if gay marriage is the last front line against the dissolution of the institution, but the sad truth is that war has already been lost.
If you want to save it, go back to the mainstream population and do your work there. The gays are utterly insignificant in comparison to the damage you all have wrought all on your own.
The problem isn't the way people understand marriage it's the way people view themselves and others. So many are self-indulgent, unaccountable to anyone, live for nothing larger than themselves, and can't even be assumed to put their children's needs before their own.
Nuanced sociological arguments will help when we have become a nation of people with no sense of character, virtue, or ethics.
That's the truth people do not want to face, and I for one am tired of being blamed for the character defects of an entire nation.
@tflavin - no one is blaming you. Most people do not wish to erode marriage any further so gays can feel better about their own relationships by having government approve them as normal, lawful and moral. On the other hand, most people are perfectly willing to let gays enter into whatever relationships they choose without the imprimatur of the government in the form of a marriage license.
One more thing. I have read and heard ad infinitum the benefits to gays from redefining marriage. What are the benefits to society?
Well Said Tflavin! Those were my thought too, as I read Dr. Girgis utopian social dream.
His view of marriage has been dying since I was a kid 40 years ago. My Mom had married 5 times by the time I had graduated high school, twice to the same man. She had a child with each husband.
In his rebuttal Steorts points out what I was thinking the whole time I read Dr. Girgis. All my life my view of marriage has been to fall in love and marry that girl that I could not live without. LOVE is intragal to marriage and the concept of it. It is what 'regular' people think about when they contemplate marriage. Dr. Girgis seems to be laying out a sociological guidelines for how life should be in a perfect world, though he acknowledges that the institution is on its last leg.
[exerpt]
“Of course, marriage policy could go bad, and already has, in many ways. The issue of same-sex unions is not uniquely important, but it is the focus of a live debate whose results have wide implications for reforms to strengthen our marriage culture. Social and legal developments have indeed worn the ties that bind spouses to something beyond themselves and thus more securely to each other. “
He realizes that the system is broken, but doesn’t want it to die.
[exerpt]
“But redefining marriage to accommodate same-sex partnerships would mean cutting the last remaining threads. After all, underlying people’s adherence to the marital norms already in decline are the deep (if implicit) connections in their minds between marriage, bodily union, and children.”
Love and commitment is all that should be required to allow to consenting people to form a union. The social contract that Dr. Girgis is grasping onto is already dying, and like Tflavin said, it has nothing to do with Gays.
I understand the need for social order, but the irony is that Dr. Girgis is actually arguing against including those who want to form marital unions, and families, and communities, thus giving new life to a dying institution.
Sorry, that should be" "Nuanced sociological arguments will NOT help when we have become a nation of people with no sense of character, virtue, or ethics."
JWales, it's not an unreasonable expectation that the final word on a subject should reflect the official position of the editors rather than the contrary position of the managing editor.
As you've been doing since early in the comment thread for Steorts' original, ill-conceived article, you're gainsaying: you're objecting to even quite innocuous points being made by people with whom you disagree.
But, please, tell us again how we need to unilaterally surrender to your radical position so that we may focus on more important things.
@Lawrence: You are absolutely hilarious. You criticize me for disagreeing on 'innocuous' points. Who would be the referee on this forum that can tell me what I can disagree with? Oh, that would be you. LOL
Seriously, you have been pouting about these articles since release, saying the same thing, over and over again. You object to them being on NR, you object to the length, you object to who gets the last word, you basically object to everything.
I realized after reading Dr. Girgis's latest rebuttal that this whole issue is about CONTROL. And you are a prime example. You want to control everything: my thoughts, my beliefs, what I should object to, who posts what articles on NR, how long the articles should be, who gets the last word.
Not all articles written in the defense of marriage are persuasive, but, for what it's worth, the editors' cover story from last year is still one of the strongest brief arguments I've seen on the matter:
Everything from these recent published debates is really superflous: Steorts writes absolutely nothing, for instance, that persuasively challenges the editors' conclusion that there is "no good answer" to the charge that the argument for "gay marriage" doesn't also open wide the door to polygamy.
Pandora's Box was opened years ago, and now instead of arguing about how we can close it, we instead argue that it cannot be closed and we must learn to live with it.
In a bit of irony, as I type this message my Google Desktop displays a heading from an article that states Lady Gaga booted Adam Lambert from her birthday party. Hmm, that serves as a metaphor in more ways than one.
@tflavin wrote: "Unfortunately, the view of marriage you are all trying to protect is already dead."
Sadly, that was going to be the first line of the post I was going to write but you beat me to it.
I guess gays didn't get the memo: marriage is dead.
Marriage died when no-fault divorce laws became the norm. Stopping gay marriage is the right thing to do, for all the reasons Girgis provides, I'm just not sure it's that important given that marriage is already dead.
I'm guessing that the vast majority of divorces are forced by one partner or the other (like my divorce), that it is rarely a joint decision. Marriage is "permanence and exclusivity" + procreation (i.e., exactly what the Catholic Church has always said it is); what Steorts is talking about is some weird, nebulous, ongoing, occasional connecting between two people. I'm all for it, but why should society care about it? What society needs is an institution that protects each partner from their own and their partner's human nature, i.e., their fickleness, lust, stupidity, middle-life-whatever, and protects the children resulting from the marriage from the same.
@tflavin: you are right that we need to do our work upstream with the general population. In the meantime, I think the Catholic Church, the only institution that really understands marriage, needs to stop requiring a state marriage certificate, which isn't worth the paper it's printed on. Instead, the Church needs to insist that both husband and wife sign a pre-nuptial agreement that makes the couple to go through a Church-sponsored process in the event one or both parties want a divorce. This process needs to protect the interests of the the family, massively slow down the process, and make moral judgements about what is going on in the marriage. It needs to be painful, drawn-out, and ultimately it needs to make divorce, at least among couples married in the Catholic Church, rare again.
Lawrence, I would genuinely be interested to hear how the procreative-capability model of marriage proscribes polygamy. After all, there is still a man-woman, essentially life-generating marital act involved, and as a point of practicality, polygamous unions produce more children, not fewer, even when taking into account the many unmarried males.
I would forbid those unions based on the independent societal consequences: large groups of frustrated young men (Gaza has one the biggest unmarried population bulge of young men, for example, and there is good evidence that as the unmarried, unsettled young male population rises, so do incidents of violence in society), as well as a downward pressure on the marriage and childbearing ages of women.
What I find even more disturbing is that same-sex enthusiasts are basing their entire position on Justice Kennedy's majority opinion that personal moral bias' are inappropriate basis’s from which to come to an opinion; while simultaneously ignoring the second part of Kennedy's opinion cautioning the reader not to read to much into his opinion by viewing it as an open door to same-sex marriage.
Once again we see that same-sex enthusiasts only concern themselves with the parts of speech that appear to vindicate their demands for special rights when said text is viewed out of context.
@Lawrence: Regarding what you call my "radical position":
As I said, I had no dog in this hunt before you and a few others posting revealed that you felt that gays were 'defectives' and should be marginalized and contained.
It became clear to me that you don't care about people; only your institution, your traditions, your control.
When conservatives clearly state - as you and others have - that a group of people are inferior and biological mistakes, that is a HUGE sign that you and yours have no business directing the course of this country.
Your ways of thought are frightening, because we have seen where that path goes.
Posted this late in the game yesterday, so copying to today's thread with some enhancements:
Never were there so many tortured rationalizations created on either side of a debate. All the talk of "bedrock" on one side and "imprinted unions" on the other are at best pointless, and at worst after the fact justifications for positions that have more to do with personal preferences than any fundamental societal needs.
It is as simple as this - married couples are afforded certain benefits in our country by law (eg tax breaks, healthcare benefit sharing, rights of survivorship, etc.) which gay couples desire to share in. As far as I can see, there is no legitimate argument not anchored in personal biases to deny any two people the right of entering into a "marriage equivalent" contract as long as they abide by the only other 2 basic rules embedded in it:
1 - that it only be between 2 people of the age of consent
2 - that only one such contract exist for an individual at any given time.
Spare me the strawmen of people marrying their dogs or others. They are equivalent to the strawmen of infertile couples.
All the other words on either side are simply noise that ultimately comes to nothing. Either take away the privileges granted by law to married couples or extend them to any two consenting adults willing to sign the contract.
At the end of the day, same-sex marriages will be the law of the land well within a generation regardless, just as the segregation and miscegenation laws were bound to fall. It is a certainty.
"So once again we see that same-sex enthusiasts and their supporters believe the best way to fight fire is by pouring gasoline on it."
No, my point is that the definition of marriage is irrelevant when people no longer have the moral/ethical fortitude to follow through with their own commitments. To use an analogy, criminals understand the law, they understand why following it is better for everyone but themselves, but they simply don’t care. Similarly, you can define marriage at the federal level with a constitutional amendment stating that marriage is and will only ever be a union between a man and a woman but it will not improve anything because it is not our understanding of marriage that is causing the problem, it is our understanding of commitment, honor, responsibility, etc....or more accurately, the lack thereof.
Personally, I don’t care about getting married. Civil unions are okay with me, so long as I’m allowed the same rights afforded everyone else. Sometimes I wonder why the government is in the business of blessing sacramental unions to begin with but that’s beside the point. However, I pay taxes, I’m civilly engaged, I obey the laws and I’m a good American. I don’t care if you approve my relationship, find it normal, or find it moral. But I’ll be dam*ed if I accept that the person I am prepared to commit to for life can be shipped backed to Canada, or that I have to pay inheritance taxes on wealth we built together as a couple, etc. However, if using the word “marriage” is so upsetting to so many people I don’t see any harm in changing it. The only danger is that leaves us open to laws regulating civil unions and not marriage that can over time dilute them to almost nothing.
However, I see no harm in it and for many of my friends it simply a civil rights issue. I support them in that. Also...from a social studies standpoint there is no reason for the anti-marriage group not to bring hard data to the table. There has been legalized marriage in some countries/states for years. If it causes demonstrable harm, bring on the data and let’s have a conversation about it. This should not be a hypothetical argument at this point. This article's philosophical nuance is many years too late. We're well within the realm of (soft) science now.
Side note: I do think gays need to make more concession to religious groups. No church should be obligated to marry a gay couple, nor host their celebration on their property, etc. We both have reasonable but in some ways mutually exclusive rights. This requires maturity and compromise.
@jwales: Love and commitment is all that should be required to allow to consenting people to form a union.
Wow, that's worked out really well for society, what with broken families, financial devastation, children emotionally scarred for life...
@jwales: The social contract that Dr. Girgis is grasping onto is already dying, and like Tflavin said, it has nothing to do with Gays.
No, what we are saying is that it's dead *already*. See the memo "Re: No-fault divorce". I wish their was this wonderful planet of "love and commitment" somewhere but I live in the real world, where love is an exceedingly dangerous game (ask Francesca and Paolo, ) played for very high stakes for both the male and female -- other genital pairings don't count because they don't generate more males and females. You don't get to play unless you put something into the game, i.e., the occasional sharing of bodily fluids for no other purpose that your own enjoyment does not count.
Marriage is dead because the law no longer protects the husband and wife (and their children) from their own short-term stupidity. I have three stepchildren and two biological children -- these kids have been absolutely devastated and changed forever after going through the inferno of divorce. And thanks to the progressive geniuses who innovated with no-fault divorce, the pain never stops for them, really, ever.
@Lawrence: You are absolutely hilarious. You criticize me for disagreeing on 'innocuous' points. Who would be the referee on this forum that can tell me what I can disagree with? Oh, that would be you. LOL
Seriously, you have been pouting about these articles since release, saying the same thing, over and over again. You object to them being on NR, you object to the length, you object to who gets the last word, you basically object to everything.
I realized after reading Dr. Girgis's latest rebuttal that this whole issue is about CONTROL. And you are a prime example. You want to control everything: my thoughts, my beliefs, what I should object to, who posts what articles on NR, how long the articles should be, who gets the last word.
"Lawrence, I would genuinely be interested to hear how the procreative-capability model of marriage proscribes polygamy. After all, there is still a man-woman, essentially life-generating marital act involved, and as a point of practicality, polygamous unions produce more children, not fewer, even when taking into account the many unmarried males."
It's not about maximizing the numbers of children being born, but providing the best care for those who do arrive on the scene. The editors' model can argue against polygamy persuasively (if not conclusively) by taking the position that, ceteris paribus, the best environment for childrearing is the nuclear family.
The model allows for judgment calls, e.g., about cousins that cannot be permitted if marriage is some sort of civil right which must allow for all possible configurations.
