Often I hear from people, especially Christians looking for a nice compromise in the gay marriage debate, that government has no business recognizing marriage, or at least sacramental marriage. But I can’t help but feel that’s a cop-out.
Because it is the government’s job to promote the fruits of marriage, namely, procreation and then raising of those kids in a stable environment. That’s why the government recognizes marriage anyway–it decided it was good for society. Stand by this explanation; it will hopefully avoid bringing sin and other theological points into the debate. I’m not going to make a distinction between sacramental and civil marriage, because society’s interest in both is generally the same.
Young men, who would normally be running around causing ruckus, get married and have sex. Sex isn’t just a fun by-product, but considered fundamental to the marriage. Why? Because society needs people, and marriage is a good way to encourage sex, which is how you get more people. This isn’t just a theological point, which, as a Catholic, you presumably recognize. It’s a practical one–when someone is bound for life to someone of the opposite gender in a loving union, they have lots of sex. Marriage takes advantage of a natural inclination and turns it into something useful
Then kids come into the picture, and the marriage continues to produce benefits. Since the parents are of both genders, they can presumably impart lessons about how to behave in each gender role to all their kids, whether they have girls, boys, or mixed. You’ve probably heard anecdotes about people learning how to be parents by watching their parents. Boys learn how to be fathers from their father, girls learn how to be mothers from their mom.
The benefits aren’t exclusive to the kids. The young man, under the companionship of his wife, suppresses some of his wilder hormones. The man, ideally, works enough so that his wife can concentrate on raising he kids. As they get older, the wife is guaranteed a mate, since it runs contrary to a man’s animal instinct to stick with a partner who is no longer fertile.
And this certainly isn’t the limit of the fruits of marriage…but you get the idea. Marriage=good.
Obviously, this is an ideal. There are a bajillion exceptions. But recognize we’re in the realm of shaping society: we’re trying to produce certain social effects through our legal system. So we can’t force people to do certain things, or prevent them from doing other things. We only nudge, with the hopes that all the “nudges” will achieve the sort of fruits that marriage ingeniously produces.
The problem is, gay marriage doesn’t really achieve those ends. There’s no procreation, and without it, a gigantic chunk of the “fruits” disappear. Sure, gay people can adopt. But none of the things stopping a gay person from producing a child are relieved by their marriage to someone else of the same gender. If a gay couple does what comes naturally, like straight couples do, they’re never going to produce kids, like straight couples do. Children are simply not part of gay sex, but something pursued outside the normal course of marriage. And the advantage of kids being raised by both sexes is nulled. Society doesn’t have much of an interest in promoting gay marriage.
You may be thinking:
- But what about infertile couples? We still let them get married. And we don’t force anyone to have kids. And we let single people adopt. And we grant divorces.
Yes. But recall my earlier point. We have fundamental rights, and society respects them. We can hope that our society’s treatment of marriage produces fruit, but we can’t force it to. The exceptions are just something we have to deal with. Societal treatment of fertility, in fact, supports my point. We view it as unfortunate, as a medical problem to be solved. We at least recognize that an important part of marriage may not happen…but we let them marry anyway, since the procedures required to enforce such a law would be deeply contrary to our view of human rights. (Because such a law would, presumably, also enforce the fertility of couples married already.) My response is the same for forcing people to have kids–we can’t force, but must be content with less-effective nudging. We let all sorts of people adopt, but think about the circumstances of adoption–it will be better for that child to be raised by someone else, as opposed to in an orphanage, and even if the adoptee isn’t ideal, it’s better than nothing.
Our divorce law is an example of where this heed to fundamental rights gets taken beyond where it should have been. Obviously, neither men nor women should be locked in to certain marriages. However, when divorce law is so lax that it is used to null, not only abusive marriages, but ones simply marred by selfishness, lack of effort, and unrealistic expectations, this ease of divorce eats away at society’s view of marriage. Because…
The more societal exceptions you make to the “traditional” view of marriage, the less persuasive that definition is.
Mere arguments about gay marriage prove this. Often someone in support of gay marriage will say, “well, if that’s your definition, why do you grant divorce?” Exactly. The fact that we do grant divorces so easily makes that definition, that societal vision, less real.
So hopefully, you see that society’s doesn’t have much of an interest in promoting gay marriage, but does have an interest in promoting traditional marriage. But you may be objecting still:
- But what harm does it do?
Of course, gay marriage doesn’t personally hurt your marriage. Your marriage may be completely unaffected by our legal system. You may have been taught very well by your family. You may take your faith very seriously and apply its imperatives constantly to your marriage.
Unfortunately, there are many unlike you. There are people who, because of either a reckless, anti-authoritarian streak, or a mere lack of proper bringing, don’t have a good of a grasp on what a traditional family should look like. So society should shape them. And society is largely shaped by laws. Recall what I said earlier: the more a culture strays from the definition of traditional marriage, the less attractive traditional marriage is. People follow the lead of laws; again, look at divorce. The mere existence of easy divorce may not threaten your marriage personally…but it will shape society at-large.
- Ok, ok, whatever. But what about insurance and hospital visitation rights? Shouldn’t gay people get these?
Sure they should. But you don’t need to change marriage to give them that. You may not even need a civil union if the proper organizations take initiative.
- Isn’t this just a rights issue? Why talk about society’s benefit anyway?
It’s not. You can’t create a right out of nothing, and simply saying we have a “right to love someone” isn’t exactly addressing this specific topic. It’s not a fundamental human right because it’s something the state grants to a couple. Loving someone may be a fundamental right, but the state recognizing that love as a union isn’t. Could this be a right, in the American civil sense? Not really. Those rights come from two places: in the text of the Constitution, and in the “history and tradition” of this nation. The later is kind of a catch-all category to capture the general judgment of society where the Constitution is silent or needs enumeration. Is gay marriage in the Constitution, or marriage at all? Nope. Is marriage part of the history and tradition of this country? Certainly, but only traditional marriage. The amazing thing about gay history, if such a thing exists, is that despite the long presence of gay activity in surely every culture, it’s never part of marriage. That’s true for our culture as well.
- Is this worth fighting over? Since it’s more convenient to grant hospital and insurance benefits through civil unions than by rewriting all sorts of code and procedure, why don’t we just do that?
This is where my argument ends. The basic results sought out by gay activists are, in the long run, pretty minimal. My hunch is that many of the rank-and-file gay people just want some of the basic and essential conveniences that heterosexual couples get. These benefits, as I’ve said, pale in comparison to the greater, broader, more penetrating signals that our society sends about marriage, namely, casual hook-ups, contraception, and divorce. So why fight gay marriage, since it will pursue what may be good ends as well? There are surely worse things for marriage, right?
Because, to borrow a term from my college president, it’s part of the grand conversation. Reading the Huffington Post is a guilty pleasure; it’s something I do when I’m either bored or want to piss myself off. And the sorts of things that the bloggers and columnists say in regards to sex and marriage is plain scary. As our society discusses gay marriage, we’re also having a discussion about family, and sex, and marriage, and those things are worth fighting for. I don’t want all the pieces of the arguments for gay marriage sinking into our culture, because a lot of the pieces of those arguments push society in the opposite way of what I’ve been talking about.
