A Marriage Proposal

MARRYING IGNORANCE AND BLISS

The world possesses many more problems than I personally suffer.  That detachment provides an atmosphere for both a dispassionate reflection and a regrettable disinterest (for these are real problems for many real people to whom I harbor no ill will).  When I might be affected by a problem directly, my judgment will likely be impaired by my emotional biases.  Such problems may not be the proper topics for my reasoned advice.  But when urged to overcome my disinterest, I might be expected to produce a balanced analysis of a problem and its fair resolution or, at least, amelioration.

Recently, I was asked to undertake just such an evaluation.  The issue is currently under US Supreme Court consideration: Same-gender marriage, or more specifically the banning or legal denial of them.  While the deliberations of those learned jurists on the specific matters of the cases under review will surely be both intensive and historic, I wish to examine the issues more broadly.

Choice of language may play an important role emotionally in how people react on this matter.  The phrase “same-gender” implies much less about the shared activities and roles of the partners than the term “homosexual” which subtly emphasizes “sex” as their primary binding force.

Similarly, “marriage” has connotations from many realms of human affairs: religion, culture, history, law, and even science.  In the USA, while we share history and law (and sometimes science), we have made the deliberate Constitutional decision to allow Americans to live bound only by their own choices of religion and culture and not those of others, even if the others are a majority.  Thus, “marriage” in the context of this debate here should be restricted to what marriage conveys legally and historically.

As far as I have heard, there has not been a single challenge against the anti-marriage legislation for the denial of sexual conjugal rights.  Sexual relationships between consenting adults are often still subject to the moral teachings of religions and cultures, but, both historically and legally, this aspect of humanity has not been limited to (or from) the state of matrimony.  In prohibiting same-gender couples to marry, governments do not seek to ban or restrict sexual activities, extramarital or not.  Any religiously or culturally based discomfort with such relations between homosexually coupled Americans is not provided any relief by legislation such as the Defense of Marriage Act and its kindred State legislation.

The effect of these anti-marriage actions is to deny the advantages (and obligations) of marriage “under the law”.  Why are there legally granted and required conditions related to marriage?  If the society is not seeking to promote sex, what is society attempting to favor in the differential treatment of “married” couples versus “unmarried” couples?  The answer is: FAMILY.

The family is considered the basic unit of society.  While individuals may exist alone or congregate into populations, once they gather to form societies, the need to develop rules for interactions amongst individuals leads to identifying “more than one” entities within the larger group and to defining the rights and expectations for these units.  The word family derives from the Latin word for household (including the servants (famulus)).  The household members are ultimately responsible for the care and behavior of all those who live within their walls.

When one looks up “marry” in the dictionary, it is quickly discovered that we use the verb with a variety of subjective and objective nouns.  The bride’s father will marry his daughter to her husband.  The bride and groom will marry their spouses.  The justice of peace will marry the couple.  This is not just sloppy use of language – this is a formation of a new family from the old structures, with parents “giving” the bride (and groom) into the marriage, the spouses “pledging” themselves to the marriage, and the community “witnessing” the exchange as a new binding contract under law and custom.

Traditionally, we as a society have sanctioned a lot of privacy to what happens within the walls of that family household.  Sex is one cultural and religious taboo that receives a blind eye within the sanctioning of marriage.  It is this carefree license to copulate that some anti-gay advocates wish to refrain from granting.  They do not wish to be seen as approving this behavior that violates their sense of propriety.  This is most commonly stated as the biblical “Adam-and-Eve-not-Adam-and-Steve”/”it’s not natural” argument.  

In this biblical tale, Eve was created from Adam’s rib (the world’s first clone) which would “naturally” endow her with his XY composition as a male amongst believers in modern biology. Her “supernatural” origin as Adam’s only option for companionship defeats the “natural” part of this viewpoint.

Further, overlooked by the quick readers of this tale, is that after God decides “it is not good that man should be alone,” He takes on the task to make him a helpmate and starts by creating “every beast of the field and every fowl of the air” as possible candidates for Adam to meet (and name). When Adam finds no helpmate amongst them, only then (three verses later) does the God of Moses created Eve as his helpmate.  If sex was God's purpose in creating a "helpmate,” it is a strange biblical endorsement of the consideration of bestiality.  Something more innocent (unashamed in their nakedness, as were all other creatures) was the original intent of this first marriage. Only in skipping ahead in the story to the “sinful parts” about the serpent, the apple, and the casting out does Adam finally get to "know" his wife two chapters later. Sex would appear to be as “natural” to Adam and Eve as clothing became – e.g. not some God-intended attribute, but a habit (habiliment) they picked up on their own.

But the biology of intercourse is not the purpose of families.  If it was, society might not sanction two octogenarians either getting or remaining married.  Families are about the psychology of joining with and caring for others, be they children or spouses.  Families, for society, are about sharing responsibility for finances and, more importantly, behavior both within the private family household walls and on the streets of the community.  Early response and adjustment within strong and stable families lessens the necessity of the community to “fix the problem”.

How then does the stigmatization of same-gender couples who wish to commit to a family contract help society?  Sadly, the anti-marriage argument is often a condemnation of the societal advantages given to married couples and their families.  Some advocates of denial point to the expense of granting spousal benefits to the additional “other half” of the proposed newly allowed couples.  By the same logic, those benefit-reducing advocates should be encouraging programs to promote divorce and lifelong decisions to remain single.  In advocating based on economics instead of humanity, they attack their own opposite-gender marriages in a terrible contradiction to the title of their keystone piece of legislation, the Defense of Marriage Act.

But, in this argument lays the common pathway to a solution.  If sincere about the burdensome impact of marriage on our government and legal system, then these advocates should work to remove the 1,138 (2003 estimates) federal statutory provisions in the United States Code in which benefits, rights, and privileges are contingent on marital status.  They might still decide to remain married themselves devoid of these advantages if the sex is good enough.  Or they too may recognize the other reasons that couples cleave together through better or worse, richer or poorer, under the power of their marriage vows.