My views on marriage, and the vehemence of my dissent from certain opinions of the editors of this publication, have not changed much since I first wrote on the topic. But one can sometimes say things better after an interval of reflection. Here is an attempt as a Q&A. I’m sorry it’s long, but I hope the form makes for easy skimming.
Should the Respect for Marriage Act become law?
I’m not interested in that question, or in the question of whether its conscience protections are enough.
I’ll just say that anybody was arguing in bad faith who said, “There is no need for this bill because Obergefell is not threatened,” if he simultaneously thought both (as I do, following John Roberts’s dissent) that Obergefell was wrongly decided and (as I do not) that same-sex marriages do not deserve recognition. What, we’re supposed to just trust you?
Noted. So what question are you interested in?
Whether same-sex marriages should be recognized, to which the answer is yes.
Doesn’t recognizing same-sex marriage establish a new view of marriage?
No, it removes a false duality from view.
My colleagues who oppose same-sex marriage say there is an “older” view and a “new” view. The older view is that marriage is “based on the biological reality of sexual complementarity, one man and one woman, that works to advance a social ideal: that husbands and wives gratefully receive the children their unions beget, and that all family members take seriously their obligations to one another.” The new view is that marriage “is purely a means to the end of the married parties’ happiness. It means whatever they want it to mean. Permanent, if you wish; exclusive, if you like; between people of the opposite sex, if you prefer.”
We’ll come back to “purely” and “whatever.” Let’s start with “a means to the end of the married parties’ happiness.”
“Happiness” as considered apart from “biological complementarity”/“advance a social ideal” is the false dualism to be rejected.
It is false because it is by means of aspects of the married parties’ happiness — their sexual attraction, romantic love, and fulfilled vows — that the social ideal is advanced. The having and raising of children is not a contrast with such love but a natural expression of it when a man and woman who are able to conceive children choose to do so.
Not all married women and men can reproduce naturally, nor can any married couples of the same sex.
But common to all these categories is the complex of feelings, thoughts, commitments, self-sacrifices, etc. associated with monogamous romantic love as formalized in a marital vow. Marriages are assumed to begin on such a foundation. Then, in most cases, children will follow.
But isn’t that ahistorical? Do you know nothing of arranged marriages, marriages for land, marriages for an heir, etc.?
Most of us would think such marriages lacked an essential. The themes and language of romantic love stretch back through ancient literature and art. Star-crossed lovers and loveless marriages have long been thought suitable subjects of tragedy.
Regardless, to argue that same-sex marriages should be recognized does not require claiming that every marriage is characterized by romantic love — only that the line between (to oversimplify) “marriage for children” and “marriage for love” has never been sharp, that it’s the love that tends to bring the children, and that the vast area of overlap reveals the similarity of motivation between married couples who have children and those (whether of the same or opposite sexes) who do not.
But is it all that similar? Surely what motivates many couples to get married is the desire to have children together.
You can’t tidily separate that desire from their love, either; probably part of what made them fall in love was, if not the conscious recognition (though that might be true) that the other would be a good parent, then the qualities in virtue of which this is so (warmth, patience, humor, intelligence, etc.).
Conversely, people who want to have children and make the intention to have them a precondition of marriage still look for (forgive the cliché) “the right one.” They’re not shopping for “a reproductive partner having such-and-such characteristics,” as if buying a toaster. The beloved is desired uniquely because he or she is that individual. Love is not fungible.
All right, but let’s get back to the social question, the need to regulate procreation and childrearing. If it weren’t for that, maybe we wouldn’t have marriage at all. Since it’s the consequences of reproduction that led to the institution of civil marriage, why should we include couples who will not reproduce?
Because we already were. Old couples. People with medical conditions that render them unable to reproduce. People who have had themselves sterilized.
Right, but only in cases of sexual complementarity. “Male–female” is the right category to reproduce.
Disputed. It’s not true that every sexually complementary couple can have children, as I just said. You could draw your categories more exactly. The right category to reproduce is not “male–female” but a set including some but not all male–female couples.
That’s fine as theory, but what are we supposed to do, administer fertility tests? Coerce shotgun weddings? Any alternative would be impracticable or tyrannical.
Why should that change anything? If the only practicable and non-tyrannical way to regulate procreation is to do it overbroadly, including opposite-sex couples who will never reproduce and know it, then it’s a matter of equal treatment to include same-sex couples who claim the same motivation and swear the same vows — which are sworn to, let us repeat, a nonfungible beloved individual, not a social purpose.
Note how this supports my denial of a sharp line between “marriage for children” and “marriage for love.” The reason it would be tyrannical to regulate procreation otherwise is that it would mean compelling people to do things rather than riding for free on a choice they have already made (namely the choice to exchange vows). But if we want to ride for free on that choice, we must accept that we have already built their own understanding of it — as an exchange of vows between two people beloved of each other — into our public idea of what marriage is.
We have intertwined the views socially in consequence of their natural intertwining.
You just wrote “marriage is.” What do you mean by that? Is there a fact of the matter about whether marriage is or is not between one man and one woman?
People like to write and say “marriage is” for rhetorical purposes, but the verb equivocates. Civil marriage is a socially constructed institution, but we construct it in response to truths such as I’ve been discussing about the nature of human beings and human societies. Those truths are “what is,” and they guide what civil marriage “should be.”
Let’s go back to “purely” — your colleagues said that the “new view” was that marriage was “purely a means to the end of the married parties’ happiness” etc. Do you disagree with “purely”?
The word is another sign of the assumed false dualism, and it is not very plausible. Rather we should think that the married parties’ love for their children is closely related to their happiness via their love for each other — they love the other in part for being the person they had children with, they had children with the other in part because of their love, and together they find joy in all of this.
We also should think they would love each other and find joy in their marriage if they did not have children.
Okay, but it doesn’t always work out that way. Sometimes they feel that their own happiness and the continuation of the marriage are incompatible, which forces a choice between their well-being and that of their offspring.
That does happen. But the question of married couples who have children but no longer want to stay married will present itself regardless of whether we allow same-sex marriage. (And will present itself as well of married same-sex couples who have children.)
We are defining here the definitionally normative case, the marriage that lasts — much as, when we describe a house, we assume it has a solid foundation, a roof that doesn’t leak, and so on. This is not a statistical matter so much as a conceptual one — “What would this thing have to be like if it were, in fact, a successful marriage or a well-built house?”
To see this clearly, note how, once the married couple decide to divorce, “their well-being” no longer refers to anything held in common. It still refers, but now to the separate and possibly overlapping well-beings (so to speak) of two individuals. Not the well-being of two as one.
You mentioned same-sex couples with children. What is your view of that?
I would not object to banning commercial surrogacy, which I think tends toward the instrumentalization and exploitation of women.
But I think one common argument against surrogacy — that it takes a child away from a biological parent — is irrelevant, since the child would not exist absent the surrogacy arrangement. There was never an option of that child’s being conceived and raised by two biological parents. So the question is not whether we think it’s better for the child to be raised by both biological parents, but whether, given that it will not be, it would be better for the child not to exist at all. That I will not say.
In adoption there is also no option of the adopted child’s being raised by his natural parents. So the right question about adoption is not whether a child will fare better (on average) with natural parents than with a same-sex adoptive couple, but whether the child will fare better (on average) with mixed-sex rather than same-sex adoptive couples. I don’t know the answer. We don’t have adequate evidence to judge (which will not stop polemicists from invoking inadequate evidence to conclude).
It makes intuitive sense to me that a child is better off with both a male and a female parent, but I think the difference would have to be rather dramatic to justify discrimination in adoption. I assume there are many other factors that allow us to make pessimistic probabilistic predictions about child outcomes but that are not often or always thought disqualifying. (For example, single parenthood, moderate financial resources, middling schools, unstable local communities, and so on.)
Please return to the claim of your colleagues that, on the “new” view, marriage “means whatever [the parties] want it to mean. Permanent, if you wish; exclusive, if you like; between people of the opposite sex, if you prefer.”
All right, since you asked so politely. But first please ask me what my definition of marriage is.
What’s your definition of marriage?
Marriage is the reciprocal and total giving of two selves, each to the other, and the community of life-sharing consequent upon it.
And that answers the previous question how?
The first thing to see is that we have not embarked on a project of endorsing everyone’s special relationships of whatever form. We have said that we were already recognizing relationships of a certain form but doing so unevenly, and that now we are including same-sex couples as a matter of equal treatment. “Two people” and “exclusive” are built-in limits because they already were.
Yes, but that’s vacuous — it requires that we first accept your account. How do we know that the restriction to two people is not arbitrary and the number due for increase?
Clarifying, not vacuous.
The restriction is not arbitrary for the same reason that we can distinguish between “friends” and “best friends.” It’s perfectly coherent to be friends with two people; it’s perfectly incoherent to claim each as your best friend.
Is that anything more than a tautology of language? “Best friend” is singular, so what?
Look past the words to what they denote and what it implies. If you have conflicting invitations from each of your two friends, for example, you have to choose — you have, on that occasion, to rank one above the other. Likewise if both require help at the same time. Trade-offs are necessary; affections are, if not precisely divided, then always potentially and sometimes actually in conflict. If you were someone’s best friend and that person started spending half his or her time with a new arrival to town, you would probably feel a bit hurt. Is that just arbitrary?
And you probably do not rely on your friends in anything like the deep and total way spouses rely on each other. Nor are you bonded to your friends in the deep and spiritual way that is possible only through the intimacy and great vulnerability and self-surrender and mutual affirmation of lovers.
Why should this be restricted to people of a certain age? Why should it be forbidden in non-spousal family relations?
Someone who is not yet an adult is not yet a complete self. We restrict the autonomy of minors in all kinds of ways in recognition of this fact. Marriage is another such case. The changes of mind and personality between childhood and adulthood are such that an adult and a child cannot fully understand each other or each other’s lives. The gift of self would be impossible, and the attempt would be confusing and damaging.
Pairs of family members other than the two parents cannot give themselves to each other in a marital way because they were always already given to each other in a different way (as siblings, parent and child, aunt and niece, etc.). So again the gift is impossible. The character of non-marital family relations would be radically changed, and the performance of natural duties associated with them degraded, if passionate attachments arose and, with their demands of loyalty and claims to precedence, established rivalrous asymmetric hierarchies.
I don’t know — that’s so abstract.
Which does not render it indeterminate.
The “older” view I do find indeterminate. Many civilizations have practiced polygamy and thought it presented no hindrance to childrearing. Consanguineous marriages were far from unheard of in royal and aristocratic families for most of history and did not always issue in defectives. Under ancient Roman law girls could be married at twelve, and very young brides are still forced to wed, and forced to become mothers, in many parts of the world. I do not see any clear evidence that an understanding of marriage rooted in procreation necessarily excludes these categories we want excluded. Nor do I think such an understanding will help us see why those categories should be excluded unless it directs our attention to the ways in which they are bad for the people who belong to them, which will in turn do the major part of explaining why those people will be unsuited to raising children together.
And isn’t it interesting that throughout human history, wherever people have attained something like basic equality one with another, polygamy, child marriage, and consanguineous marriage have faded away (albeit too often too slowly)? Why is that? Could it be that free and equal individuals tend to experience love and understand marriage as I have described them — and to discard forms that, in not being a reciprocal and total gift of selves, tend toward hierarchy and coercion?
I’ll think about that. But how about this: Aren’t men just evolved to favor monogamy less than women? And isn’t that relevant — if not to the question of whether two men could be married as you say, but whether many would want to be?
A copout. Beavers have to build dams and birds have to build nests, but human conduct is not behavior: It is a choice. People can choose otherwise.
There’s also a Rorschach quality to this evolution-themed objection. If men are less inclined to monogamy than women but would benefit from it, one may argue that making the marital ideal available to all men becomes more, not less, important.
And I’m not interested in objections of this sort from people whose doctrines have ghettoized gay people these past few millennia. You probably have no concept of what it’s like to think that hearth and home and socially accepted marital love are closed off to one, or how that might nudge one toward “Eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we die.”
I think it might even be millstone-about-your-neck-and-sink-you-in-a-hadal-abyss wicked to load people up like that and then judge them when they trip.
Hmm.
I mean it.
Okay, I’ll have to think about that too. Meantime, is there a public interest other than equality in recognizing same-sex marriages?
A public-health interest, certainly. Beyond that, I think there is a general interest in establishing, when practicable and effective, conditions that will allow people to flourish. We know that many people thrive in marriages. We know that aging alone is often terrible for people mentally and physically. We know that people benefit from the augmentation of their kin networks, which is an automatic consequence of matrimony. Etc.
But we’ve had ten years and more of same-sex marriage now, and it’s hardly as if everyone has paired off and settled down behind a white picket fence.
Well, have all the straight people? Had they ever? If not, maybe they aren’t suitable for marriage either.
And who said that X number of years was the deadline by which everything had to be wonderful? The evidence or standard telling us that this is the right cutoff is what?
And besides, the point is not that all gay people or all straight people have to get married, or that a certain proportion must in order for anyone to have the chance. Marriage must be available to all who coherently seek it, whatever their numbers, if we offer it to any.
Do you think sexual orientation is a simple binary?
No. I think there is probably a spectrum with some clustering toward the poles, and that distributions along the spectrum might look different between men and women. I assume there are people who could marry a member of either sex and be authentic doing it. But I don’t think anyone consciously decides which sex(es) and individuals to be attracted to.
For those who have a choice, do you think that there is a right choice?
No, I think there are two right choices.
Doesn’t that imply some sort of moral relativism or denial of human nature?
Not at all. There can be decisions that ethics fully commands and others that it leaves open. It can be an objective truth that one has an option. We all have faced trade-offs and choices between good but incompatible things.
As for human nature, to recognize its genuine variety — in this case, that people’s unchosen sexual attractions, as well as the intricacies of personality that cause different people to benefit differently from the selfsame choice — is not to deny the truth but to grasp it better.
Between the view that human nature is univocal and the right way of life determined and the view that human nature is formless and the right way of life arbitrary, we will encounter, I believe, the truth.
So you’re saying that having children is optional.
Of course having children is optional for any person or couple. No one is obliged to have children. Anyone who says so has a tyrant’s soul.
Of course children are not optional for a society, and societies should be grateful to and assist those who have them.
Is same-sex marriage a logical fruit of the sexual revolution? Is it a case of “expressive individualism”?
No, it is a rejection of expressive-individualist sexual liberation in favor of a form of self-giving, and often self-sacrificing, domestic community.
Are same-sex marriages merely “emotional unions,” as is sometimes said by proponents of the “older” view?
“Emotional union” reduces the love of same-sex couples to a mere feeling and thereby makes them seem unsuited for marriage, since one cannot vow to feel a certain way always.
But “love is not a feeling,” as Wittgenstein wrote. “Love is put to the test, pain is not.” I.e., we cannot determine whether someone is really in pain (pain being a feeling to which, in others, we have no access). But we think that people in love manifest their love through their outward conduct and thereby provide some way of judging whether the love is true. (That of course is not for society to judge; it is for the two to judge in communication with each other. They then display to society the public expressions of marital love, such as an exchange of vows, a shared residence, a partly merged legal and social identity, etc.)
Suppose you are making great sacrifices, of money or time or peace of mind, to care for an ailing spouse, perhaps while falling apart somewhat yourself. Suppose you donate an organ. Suppose you need to drive your spouse to the hospital in the middle of the night. Suppose you are there when he or she dies. These things do not obviously bring “emotional fulfillment” to you; you might get that from playing music or looking at the sea or waking in a desert. They are, however, exercises of duties you took upon yourself out of love. For “if you already have a person’s love, no sacrifice is too much to give for it,” as Wittgenstein also wrote.
Love does not, however, exclude feeling. Wittgenstein a third time*: “Love, what is important, is not a feeling, but something deeper, which merely manifests itself in the feeling.”
The traditionalist description of same-sex marriage as “emotional union” not only removes from view all matters of duty, service, and self-sacrifice, but also makes it impossible to understand why someone would not distribute the meeting of his sundry-to-profound needs across a set of mutually unrelated lesser friends and acquaintances. The therapist or priest can help you in your grief, and the dog can keep you warm in bed, and the nurses will be there when you die, and that’s all just as good as having your beloved by your side, right?
Maybe you are happily married to someone, or maybe you would like to be. If so, ask yourself what it means to have that person cuddling you at night, and what it means that that is the person on whom you can completely and unconditionally depend.
Don’t ask the question in the stupid way, imagining this snapshot of cuddling-in-bed as if it were fixed in amber and then looking in that scene for clues whose form you cannot imagine. And don’t ask it as if you were designing a perfectly rational human psychology from scratch (as if such a thing could be up to you). Instead try to understand human psychology and ask how it can be made good as it is.
Now, ask what led to that moment in amber — what acts performed, what words spoken, what commitments demonstrated, what suffering borne, what depths sounded before it was possible to want this one person to hold you at night, this night and every night. Ask what you think this person owes you, and you this person, for this giving and receiving of this gift of being held for as long as for both of you there is time and breath.
Does it not matter to you that the person willing to do anything for you is the one holding you? Does not the holding, in its history and its context, with its feeling, its shared and not its solitary feeling, express and befit that willingness?
It is not so hard to understand.
Can people reasonably differ? Is it possible to hold the “older” view without disapproving of same-sex relationships?
I think so. For not everyone sees the falseness of these dualisms, and this itself is a relevant social consideration. To whatever degree the public accepts the false dualism between “marriage for love” and “marriage for children,” recognizing same-sex marriages may tend to dilute the public awareness of parental duty. But if I am correct that the dualism is false, there is no reason the public should be encouraged to continue thinking in falsely exclusivist terms that in the fullness of time will lack all defense.
Is opposition to same-sex marriage just religion under a fig leaf of argumentation?
No, of course not. These are serious questions, and they can be debated without religion.
Which is not to deny that there is a religious debate to be had.
For example, is the wedding feast in the Book of Revelation, with its presentation of marriage as sexually complementary, a reason to think that same-sex marriage cannot be Christian? Or may a Christian say that scriptures are written by divinely inspired men and women doing their best to translate the message they have received into the human language and human concepts of their time?
For example, is everything Paul wrote authoritative? Or may one, like Howard Thurman’s grandmother skipping over (in Jesus and the Disinherited) Paul’s exhortation that slaves obey their masters, hold that inspired words might contain truth and bias at the same time if never in the same place?
Or I guess that is not quite what Howard Thurman’s grandmother did — she refused to let him read Paul to her. Except for this one particular chapter (look it up sometime, it’s interesting). Which I guess would be another option.
Can there be moral judgment without personal dislike?
Yes, I think so. I grew up in a religious denomination (long left behind but often fondly thought of) in which one does not drink or smoke and in which the prohibition on premarital sex is taken very seriously. That did not mean I refused to socialize with people who drank or smoked or had sex. It did not even mean I thought less of them. I thought they had not yet learned certain things and like everyone else were incorrect in certain choices. They might have thought the same of me. But we were friends, we knew people took different views, and there was never a need for spittle and maledictions.
Keep in mind, however, that if you don’t believe in premarital sex but do have friends cohabitating, you are not rejecting their very relationship, which may be the meaning of their lives. You are thinking they should take a certain step. Correspondingly, people who criticize religious teachings on sexuality need not reject religion as such; they are rejecting only certain doctrines of questionable centrality.
Nothing comparable can be said for those who not only oppose same-sex marriage but think the relationships in question are great sins that should end at once. They do oppose the great good meaning of many people’s lives. I think this is the sin. And that bridges of friendship across the chasm of a rejection so deep are sadly few and perforce rickety and narrow.
*Note: The outer two Wittgenstein quotations are anthologized in Remarks on the Philosophy of Psychology, Vol. 1, and the inner quotation can be found in Culture and Value. My knowledge of the third quotation is due to this draft paper by a writer and graduate student in the Philippines, which I came across when trying to find online a reference for the first quotation. I do not endorse or reject the paper’s conclusions beyond their minor overlap with my own. Nor do I assume Wittgenstein would endorse my use of his words or find me better than an idiot.