The Marital Is Political
There’s one key moment in his diavlog with Matt Yglesias where James does to the “Let’s get government out of the marriage business altogether” response to the same-sex marriage conundrum what Mark Texeira has lately been doing to American League pitching: he destroys it. I’m not going to transcribe his remarks, but here’s the relevant segment (about a minute long):
There actually was a time when I was tempted by the sort of position that James is taking on here, but his response shows quite effectively why no real defender of what’s come for better and worse to be called “traditional marriage” ever should be. Human beings are not, and never can be, creatures whose self- and other-understandings are constructed independently of societal context; we’re political animals, and like it or not this means that the laws and common understandings of the polities we inhabit have deeply pervasive effects on the ways we live our lives. And so when marriage becomes, as it would if its status were relegated to the fast-shrinking sphere of the “religious”, not an aspiration for all humankind but instead simply a special kind of inner state, a move in a private language game that only a god can divine, marriage then becomes nothing at all; it has not just been redefined, but defined away, made trivial in its faux-“sacredness” because of course we know that trivial is exactly what the supposedly sacred is. It is, I’d vouch, precisely for this sort of reason that the Church doesn’t refuse to acknowledge civil or otherwise extra-ecclesial weddings as constituting the real article: marriage is indeed a sacrament and deserves to be recognized as such, but the grace of the sacrament resides in what is fundamentally a human institution, one which is open even to those who don’t fully understand it for what it is. Marriage is indeed something sacred, but despite that it must still be allowed to be profaned, lest what remains for those in the “merely” public square is an even paler simulacrum of the real thing than the contractualized, divorce-ridden sets of interpersonal “arrangements” that we’ve presently got. There is nothing tradition-preserving at all about making marriage the province of the priests, and letting the public at large work out something altogether different.
Filed under: government/law, marriage, religion
Nobody would care about marriage if it wasn’t for the pursuit of the cash benefits that accompany marriage. I don’t think this clip did anything to change my mind about the fact that we would indeed be better off if the government did indeed stop getting involved in the marriage business, and I really don’t care how everybody else has always done it. They’ve just always been wrong.
Ok, then the alternative is gay marriage. Or at least, it certainly looks like that’s inevitable, at this point. Would you agree?
But what if we went to this two-tiered system, and it became apparent, both empiracally through polling and through daily anecdotes that people who were capital-M Married were much happier than those who were in state-sanctioned “arrangements?” And that the children of those Marriages where better off than those coming from other arrangements?
Wouldn’t that restore Marriage to be something to aspire to? And if not, then what are we fighting for, anyway?
I guess I’m unconvinced that marriage as it stands right now can be restored to an aspirational, sacred instuton. That horse has left the barn.
I don’t know about inevitability, Freddie; I think a state-by-state approach could be effected that wouldn’t require a one-size-fits-all solution. But I certainly think that granting marital status to homosexual couples would be preferable to getting the state out of the marriage business altogether.
JohnMcG: I’m regretfully sympathetic to your last comment. I find it quite unlikely, though, that the situation you describe in the first paragraph would actually come to pass; much more likely, the commonplace institution of civil unions (or whatever they might be called) would undermine the significance of the religious institution of “capital-M Marriage” to a point where it would make very little difference whether one entered into it at all. Russell Arben Fox - you out there, Russell? - pointed me a while back to France as a case study, and as I seem to recall the natural lesson to draw was very much along these lines.
I largely agree with what you are saying here.
But doesn’t Classical Liberalism largely deny the statement “[h]uman beings are not, and never can be, creatures whose self- and other-understandings are constructed independently of societal context; we’re political animals, and like it or not this means that the laws and common understandings of the polities we inhabit have deeply pervasive effects on the ways we live our lives”? (That is, deny it as a metaphysical, not an historical fact) So if we accept the Liberal/Modern underpinnings of our political order, “let’s get the government out of the marriage business altogether” is rather a logical consequence. It’s just one more step along the road to total atomism. But perhaps I have too tendentious (and negative) an understanding of Modern Liberalism.
But that aside, insofar as Freddie seems to be right in his statement that the alternative is gay marriage, I think that you are going to see an increasing number of pro-traditional-marriage people adopting the “let’s get government out of the marriage business altogether” position over the coming years, since they won’t see themselves as having any other option.
What makes marriage special — that it is a lifelong commitment ordered to raising children, or a set of “goodies” that society confers upon the couple?
If it is the former, then a two-tiered arrangment would be fine.
If it is the latter, then it is difficult to avoid the charge of bigotry in denying these goodies to same-sex couples.
What makes this complicated is that it’s “both-and.” Society gives its support to married couples in varous ways, and it’s difficult to disentangle the two.
I think your diagnosis is quite helpful, Petullius.
Why do you say this, John McG? I’m not at all sure how it follows; James’s point, I think, was just that every crucial component - “lifelong”, “commitment”, and “ordered” - of the formulation you gave would drop out of the common understanding if the “m”-word were reserved only for religious contexts.
I say that because if what makes marriage special is that a lifelong commitment for raising children, then it doesn’t matter what other relationships society chooses to recognized or privielege, Marriage will retain what makes it special. It’s sort of the “how does it hurt your marriage if two women get hitched” argument.
I think reality is a bit more complicated than that. Marriage is the institution through which society pledges its support to the couple, and it matter to whom we do so. But again, given that we are already using to to privielege many classes of couples that are neither lifleong commitments nor ordered towrd child-raising, it is diffucult to justify not extending it to same sex couples on non-bigoted grounds. And since I don’t see us rolling back marriage to only child-rearing committed couples, I see a two-tiered approach the least bad option.
But the problem, JohnMcG, is that even if that’s what in fact makes marriage special, certain sorts of social and political arrangements can make it difficult for us to recognize that specialness. I suppose this means that I’m moving toward the second of your formulations; but for more on why I think the “How does it hurt your marriage …” line of response is inadequate, see this post.
[...] Filed under: Uncategorized — David Schaengold @ 3:48 pm Schwenkler and Poulos on why marriage is political. Do read it all. What it means is that the argument about gay marriage really is about whether we [...]
@Petellius:
“Human beings are not, and never can be, creatures whose self- and other-understandings are constructed independently of societal context; we’re political animals, and like it or not this means that the laws and common understandings of the polities we inhabit have deeply pervasive effects on the ways we live our lives”
I certainly don’t think J.S. Mill would deny that (indeed, much of the argument of On Liberty seems to depend on something like that being true!), and if he’s not a classical liberal, I don’t know who is.
Wow John, that seems a very reactionary stance. If I’m reading this right, religion requires the State to have meaning? The fear of becoming irrelevant is sufficient to deprive others of their free will? It’s not a private language that’s a danger (it’s impossible right?) but a realization of the decreasing influence in the public language game by fair means. Hopefully, I’m just misreading your post.
I do think you’re misreading my post, Cascadian, but at the same time I’m not at all sure what to make of your comment. (What does it mean for the state to “have meaning”? And where did I mention a “fear of becoming irrelevant”, let alone express a desire to “deprive others of their free will”? The point of my post was just to say that Christians and other supporters, both religious and non-religious, of “traditional marriage” shouldn’t think that getting the government out of the marriage business would be good in the long run for the institution they’re out to preserve.
It’s not the state that requires meaning but the “religious institution of ‘capital-M Marriage’” that requires the state to maintain a definition so that marriage doesn’t become meaningless.
“There is nothing tradition-preserving at all about making marriage the province of the priests, and letting the public at large work out something altogether different.”
Could you unpack this for me. Are we really only talking about priests or is this a signifier for the broader traditional/religious community? Who exactly has the authority to let the public do one thing rather than another.
” shouldn’t think that getting the government out of the marriage business would be good in the long run for the institution they’re out to preserve.”
For those that don’t support your particular sacramental view of marriage, how is this not a government subsidy and violation of the establishment clause.
No, that’s not my view; rather, it’s the ordinary (common, public, non-religious) institution of marriage that requires legal recognition (definitions are beside the point).
Not sure what these questions mean. The problem of authority in political affairs is a deeply challenging one that I’m sure I have no answer to, but for the purposes of this argument you could just as well think that authority derives from the people; my point would then just be that if the people care about preserving marriage, they’re not going to be able to do it by depriving it of official recognition.
Now I really don’t understand you. As I said, my argument here is deliberately premised on not taking a “particular sacramental view of marriage”, but rather taking marriage to be a public good that the state ought to recognize. Hence my point, which I think I stated more clearly in the comments and in that later post, is that marriage would be better “preserved” by having the state permit the title to apply to homosexual couples than if the state were to strike the “m”-word from the lawbooks.
Perhaps, the problem lies in my lack of understanding on what differentiates Civil Unions from Marriage. Given the choice and equal protections I would prefer a CU. I don’t think it follows that I lack a life long commitment or any other emotional content (apart from the religious) contained in “marriage”. So, how exactly does me choosing a CU over “M”arriage damage your marriage, other than by just choosing something different? With the civil and religious aspects of marriage separated the religious should be able to obtain all the traditional meaning they could want while leaving those that don’t want the inherent sacraments to define their own life-long relationships.
But the “traditional meaning” of marriage isn’t defined by the sacraments! My assertion is that the “m”-word connotes, as you suggest, a certain sort of commitment ordered in a distinctive sort of way; if that word were the province only of the sectarian, then those goods - because surely they are that - would no longer occupy the central place in our society that they need to.
Put somewhat differently: you’re highly educated and quite self-reflective, so a mere verbal shift might not affect your self-understanding all that much. That’s surely not the case, though, for the majority of people.
So, without the word “marriage”, non educated folk are going to forget that they love each other? Even in pre-contact Polynesian culture life long monogamous relationships were the norm. I don’t believe that one is required to be religious to be moral, nor do I believe that one need be “married” to understand and enjoy a life long commitment. Positing that the foundations of a successful relationship will be unavailable to less sophisticated lovers seems a red herring to me.
No, but they - and not just they; to some extent all of us - will lose hold of the sense that the particular set of goods embodied in marriage and family life are the most natural ways to embody that love. Denying that this is so is, as Megan McArdle put it in a long-ago post, a bit like insisting that dramatically increasing taxes won’t affect the way that people approach their work.
” the particular set of goods embodied in marriage and family life are the most natural ways to embody that love.”
How are you using “particular set”?
Make it “diverse sets”, then. One helpful way to put the key point is in terms of James’s distinction between unions and arrangements; the idea is that despite what the language of “civil unions” may suggest, they fall solidly in the latter category, and if those take precedence over marriage as the default status for loving commitment, we’ll be the worse for it.
Is there a transcript? If what you’re referring to is in the blogtv thing above, I tried watching it but couldn’t stand the pain. Who could be more annoying to watch than bloggers in general and Matt in particular. I would enjoy seeing the argument that unions aren’t unions without actually having to watch these two. Could you recreate the basic argument?
Interesting…but I wonder if what we call “marriage” at the civil level isn’t already the sort of union/not union James describes?
Civil marriage isn’t permanent. It’s not always exclusive (e.g., open marriages). And the various means people use to control or even permanently destroy fertility mean that children are not only not seen as the natural and expected result of the marriage relationship except in the rare cases of either primary or secondary (age-related) natural infertility, but are considered a lifestyle choice which can be made completely outside of marriage and are not a “given” of a marriage; the once-unthinkable question “Do you want/plan to have children?” is asked routinely of newly-married couples today. Childlessness, once a misfortune and source of sympathy and pity for the couple, is now potentially the chosen way of life for a married couple, so no one today would assume that a couple without children actually wants any.
In other words, if marriage ought to be based on a lifelong commitment for raising children (as I think it ought), it’s hard to argue that civil marriage is any such thing–so that changing the name to “civil union” doesn’t much change the reality on the ground.
Of course, I fail to see what the state’s interest in marriage is at all if marriage is not a lifelong commitment geared toward the bearing and raising of children (even if some few couples are unable to do this) but only a contingent arrangement between adults. What exactly does the state get out of promoting such marriages, or of calling similar arrangements civil unions and promoting them? When marriage implies a partnership between the family and the state that is aimed at the rearing of future citizens, it’s easy to see why the state would have a compelling interest in setting standards for and licensing these arrangements. But when marriage implies nothing of the sort, instead implying only a temporary contract between consenting adults, what exactly are the “goodies” in the form of tax breaks etc. supposed to be encouraging?
Why is marriage (absent any discussion of children) a public good? Why are civil unions a public good? Why wouldn’t the state encourage with tax breaks and other goodies, say, single people, or commune-style relationships, alongside or even instead of these marriage/civil union arrangements?
The best argument I’ve seen for unions, absent children, is that encourage self sustaining units. So that if one gets sick, loses a job, etc. they have someone other than the state to seek assistance and support. Another is that most people do eventually seek a life-long relationships and reguardless of children, it’s helpful for the state to create legal systems to acknowledge this. Of course, this can be met outside of our current concepts of “marriage” with tools such as Power of Attorney.
If ‘marriage’ is about children, then why do we give benefits to the parents? Why don’t we support proven generators such as Winston Blackmore? If conservatism is at least in part aimed toward reality, how many two person families today can afford to have one parent stay home with the children? Does the transfer of the economy from agriculture to information change the optimal amount of children? If one wanted to have a stay at home parent, with out passing the resulting economic disadvantages along to the youngster, how many partners would the average family need?
I don’t think that marriage is “about” any (one) thing at all, really. My claim is that the particular sort of lifelong, more-than-merely-contractual commitment embodied in marriage, which is widely understood as oriented toward the having of children even if it doesn’t always turn out that way, is one of the foundational institutions of American culture, and that replacing its public role with a watered-down, purely legalistic construct like that of civil unions would likely have widespread social consequences, and in any case isn’t the sort of thing you should go in for if you think - and of course the post was premised on this assumption; it didn’t argue for it - that marriage should be “preserved”.
Marriage should be preserved as one option.
Well obviously it should be preserved at least as that. My own view is that it should also be preserved as a norm and a cultural expectation.
I don’t have a problem with marriage being the norm… as long as there’s a choice and the government isn’t used to bring it about. Otherwise, there’s an Establishment Clause issue.
I can understand wanting to preserve the institution. I can’t understand the desire to change the content one is supposedly protecting in order to avoid competition.
“Desire” is the wrong word here; it’s simply a willingness. Nor does “competition” seem quite right, but anyway …
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