A Case Against Gay Marriage
August 5, 2010
“The liberal case against gay marriage” is an article in the Summer 2004 issue of The Public Interest by Susan M. Shell. While I don’t expect universal agreement with it, I’m curious what our readers think of the article.
For those wishing to comment, I’m not interested in what you think about Same Sex Marriage. I’m interested in what you think of Shell’s arguments.
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I read this last fall.
This is what I found convincing: the state does not need to approve gay marriage, but can remain neutral via civil unions. As a quote from a plaintiff in today’s nytimes showed. She said something like, just because we are gay doesn’t mean our relationship is not as loving as the rest.
Convincing: She notes that marriage and having children do seem to be connected in society. I have noticed that even among the portion of the country that cohabitates for about 5 years, they almost always get married before they have children(I’m talking about the middle class. The lower class does not seem to connect marriage and children at all.)
Unconvincing: she takes a really long time to say that procreation is a reason that marriage is special, and the state can recognize it as special. Despite all her verbiage, I don’t think she makes this any more convincing to people who live in the society described above by MM, individualism etc.
Not convincing.
In all the cases I can think of when marriage is used as a metaphor (the Church as the Bride of Christ, nuns or virgins as brides of Christ, the marriage of painting and poetry, the marriage of two minds), it is always about union and never about procreation. Even in the story of Adam and Eve, there is no mention of procreation:
Same-sex marriage is an extension to gay people of the ability to commit to one person as a life partner in much the same way that marriage is open to heterosexual couples who cannot (or do not want to) have children.
Marriage is primarily about being united with the one you love. When Romeo and Juliet get married, is it because they want to have children?
Her argument is something like this, it seems to me:
If we remove government completely from the realm of defining (and protecting, promoting, defending etc) marriage, then the market will move in to the vacuum. This is the kind of thing liberals usually claim to be against.
Does that sound right?
She has several arguments. Rather than the market, one of the things she claims is that marriage will be come an expression of individuality rather than being a concrete thing.
btw, my favorite passage is this one. I am however more interested if people find any of her arguments persuasive.
(Again, I’m not sure If I understand her correctly, but. . . )
Her argument strikes me as question-begging. She seems claims, rightly enough, that not just anything can be a marriage, in the same way that not just anything can be a funeral. A funeral requires, at a bare minimum, a dead guy, and death is something objectively definable. Marriage, similarly, requires sexual difference, which is also objectively definable.
But of course there are many imaginable funeral rites that might involve the living participation of the honoree. I could easily imagine a tradition where one’s death were recognized before it actually happened ( a sort of “those who are about to die, we salute you”). In fact a death watch, where people sit with the dying is in fact a part of many death rituals.
So there is much leeway as to what counts as a funeral.
As for marriage, I assume homosexuals would characterize their relationship as sexual, and not merely intimate or companionate, which would put them on the continuum of “sexual relationship.” So I can’t see denying homosexuals marriage. . . not for the reasons she states.
I think the argument is clever and fun. However, it is not likely to convince anyone who doesn’t already think that there are essential definitions to concepts.
Phosphorious –
You make a challenging point against Shell above, though, if I may play devil’s advocate – I’m not sure it successfully refutes the ‘funeral’ example.
I would imagine that Shell would respond by saying: your attempt to broaden the definition of funeral to ‘any ritual surrounding death’ commits the very same mistake that advocates of homosexual marriage commit when they want to stretch the definition of marriage to include (what they see as) non-marital unions; so in effect, your critique employs the very logic she is attempting to deconstruct.
According to any definition of a funeral qua funeral, there must be a dead person. Even the etymology of funeral, from the Latin funus (corpse, death, burial, funural) indicates that the word’s origins were not used to signify any ritual that centers on death in the abstract, but a concrete death as event (and nothing expresses death more concretely than a corpse). Even contemporary definitions associate it with events prior to immanent burial.
I agree with you that the various transcultural rituals surrounding death practices does demonstrate that there is a broader category of ritual pertaining to death than a funeral ; that is, that ‘funeral’ does not exhaust every possibility of extant death rituals (in the same way that ‘marriage’ does not exhaust every kind of union). Though, on a side note, I don’t know how effective it would be to engage in a death ritual while a person is still living – yes, it can happen, and yes it can merit fruits. But if the person is still there, alive, then death is present only as an idea in the abstract.
Thus, ‘death ritual’ is a broader, more generic (as in genus-like) category than funeral. It would seem that, according to Shell, a funeral cannot be identified with the more generic, broader category of ‘death ritual’ – rather it is a species of it.
This is precisely the point she wants to make: marriage is a specific kind of union, in the same way that a funeral is a specific kind of death ritual. In her view, apparently, proponents of homosexual marriage confuse the species with the genus. And I would imagine her response to your critique would point out the same confusion.
Breddan,
Interesting point. But if the VA decided to give a funeral benefit to widow(er)s of service members even when there was no corpse present for the ceremony, would there be a national movement to defend “traditional funerals” and deny the extention of this benefit to such widows?
Kurt,
That’s an interesting question, and a fine point to make against Shell (if in fact she asserted the absolute necessity of a corpse for a funeral; I can’t recall at the moment). However, I think it may involve a misreading of what I wrote about a funeral. Here is what I said:
According to any definition of a funeral qua funeral, there must be a dead person. Even the etymology of funeral, from the Latin funus (corpse, death, burial, funural) indicates that the word’s origins were not used to signify any ritual that centers on death in the abstract, but a concrete death as event (and nothing expresses death more concretely than a corpse). Even contemporary definitions associate it with events prior to immanent burial.
Now, in the situation you describe, even without the actual corpse, there is still a dead person and there is still a concrete death event (assuming that the information being provided by the military is accurate and truthful). While I did (parenthetically, NB!) write that “a corpse expresses death most concretely,” I never said it was the sine qua non of a funeral. I think you may have inferred that conclusion. So it would seem that your example would still fit with what you term a “traditional” funeral. No denials are necessary in this case.
Certainly, without the corpse the death being mourned probably feels less concrete and somewhat without closure. I would imagine that in these cases, the lack of the body, the less than concrete situation that results and the lack of real closure, only compounds the pain. Further, I would suspect that these families would either prefer to have the body, or discover that the person is still alive, but I can’t imagine anyone saying that a body-less funeral is the best scenario.
The point is that in this exceptional case, the lack of the body is not willed by the mourners; it is a most unwanted and unwilled situation. In fact, the lack of the body in a kind of dialectical way makes the presence of the body more wanted, and the pain of loss more present.
This is far different, though, from a “death ritual” where the one being mourned is still alive and present, or some such thing like that. Here, it seems to me, there is a clash or tension between what is willed by the participants and the actual reality. To mourn a person’s death while they are still alive, as I noted, may yield some worthwhile fruits, but in Shell’s view, I think, it cannot be considered a real funeral, no matter how much one wants to stretch the definition of ‘funeral’.
I do think if the VA decided not to allow funeral and burial benefits to a soldier who, while still alive, is about to be sent off to the middle east, and whose friends are consequently throwing him a ‘death ritual’ in the event that he may die, is certainly appropriate. This is not a funeral and does not merit the “benefits” that come with it.
But all this, it seems, uncovers a much larger (philosophical, historical and linguistic) issue of how we derive words, and how our words relate to the realities they signify. I’ll not speak on that just now, but it is, in my view, a far more interesting question.
Suffice it to say that if one believes words are merely vocal utterances created by the human mind and will as it pleases, then there is no discussion: I can call anything I want a funeral. In the same vein, if one believes that a word is identical, without remainder, with the reality it names, then there is also no discussion. It seemsto me that in contrast with both positions a far more subtle and nuanced position is necessary (akin to what Plato laid out in his Cratylus, or what Aristotle laid out in his Organon and elsewhere, or what the Scholastics laid out in their noteworthy efforts).