Against Gay Marriage

Margaret Somerville from McGill caused a stir in Canada this year based on her disinclination toward gay marriage. I don’t know if she is philosophically based enough, but she’s a pretty prominent ethicist in the home country.

Have a look at this short piece:
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1082190/posts

The piece of Somerville’s to look at is “The case against gay marriage“. It’s not quite right to say that she caused a stir. The stir was caused when Ryerson University voted to award her an honorary degree and then, when faced with protests, issued a statement saying that they would proceed with the award but would not have offered it if they had known her views on same-sex marriage — a stunning bit of hypocrisy. Somerville’s work is well argued and not in any sense “homophobic”.

hmm…seems I should have read the whole post before jumping in. So scratch the Card paper. The George on is quite good though, and it fits the bill of at least not explicitly resting on religious foundations.

Not sure if this is as philosophically sophisticated as you’re looking for, but here’s one that argues against gay marriage, at least initially, from the “gay liberation” perspective.

http://www.inthesetimes.com/site/main/article/493/

The money graph:

“The push for gay marriage is clothed in the uniform of a fight for equality. And, of course, it is that. But gay marriage strikes me as, first and foremost, just another way to show the straights that we’re the same as them, that we’re as “normal” as the heterosexuals with whom we share the planet and thereby are worthy of acceptance into their clubs. Well, without getting into a discourse on the social function of homosexuality in cultures ancient and modern, let me just assert that, guess what—we’re not the same. We’re different. Rather than try to paint heterosexual stripes on our pelts, let’s examine, explore and celebrate our different coloration.

The goal of the gay rights movement should not be to erase the perception of difference in the minds and hearts of our fellow citizens but to eliminate the use of that difference to deny us rights enjoyed by others. “

This is the best thing I’ve seen: http://www.gideonsblog.blogspot.com/2003_07_01_gideonsblog_archive.html#105952165206390107 Non-religious, and it comes from a person who’s otherwise sympathetic to gay rights.

Stephen Fry in the 2005 Hay-on-Wye ‘blasphemy debate’ (still available on line, I think) suggests that same-sex marriage ‘quite misses the point of being gay’. Which is nice.

Anthony Kenny argues against gay marriage (but in favour of civil unions) in his most recent book, What I Believe, a compendium of his views on various weighty topics, with a rather schematic account of his reasons for them.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/0826489710/202-5711117-5744607?v=glance&n=266239&s=books&v=glance

The Liberal Case Against Gay Marriage.
Susan M. Shell
The Public Interest Summer 2004.

Ishmael,

Are you trying to help? Because so far as I can see, you aren’t.

Harry,

It isn’t my area of expertise, but “natural law” arguments are generally considered non-religious For that purpose, some selections from Humanae Vitae rely on natural law arguments as opposed to revelation/magisterial arguments and would seem to fit your purpose well.

You mean you’re not joking?

Thomas Sowell just wrote an article on the topic.
http://www.townhall.com/columnists/column.aspx?UrlTitle=gay_marriage&ns=ThomasSowell&dt=08/15/2006&page=1

Ishmael, your posts are way, way off point. People don’t come to CT to be proselytized. If I was a blogger here I’d moderate your posts into oblivion.

Oh good. Now we can have a nice, civilized discussion. No more nasty crazies like Ishmael, just sophisticated, reasonable types like Maggie Gallagher and Stanley Kurtz.

Megan McArdle wrote what I thought was a brilliant skeptical essay on gay marriage last year.

http://www.janegalt.net/blog/archives/005244.html

The general gist is that if one trifles with centuries-old institutions, there are going to be unintended consequences.

Now, it’s not anti-gay marriage… but it frames the debate in a way I’d not seen before.

Kieran, I wasn’t aware that we were actually debating gay marriage. I thought we were just finding resources that weren’t religious that argued against it in good faith.

The general gist is that if one trifles with centuries-old institutions, there are going to be unintended consequences.

Indeed! You get rid of coverture and establish married women’s property rights, and the next thing you know, women get admitted to the bar and earn the right to vote!

I suppose it’s true that tampering with basic social institutions produces unintended consequences, but the notion that marriage is an instution that has gone unchanged for centuries is ludicrous.

Are we devolving into a discussion of Gay Marriage? I suppose it’s inevitable…

i’ve got one that appeared in Theolgy I think last year arguing that gay marriage was pointless on utilitarian grounds up at http://home.sandiego.edu/~baber/research/homosexuality.pdf

Probably this isn’t what you’re looking for because the argument is that on utilitarian grounds the whole point of marriage is to institutionalize a contractual arrangement between unequal partners–men and women–and that there’s no point in institutionalizing these contractual relationships for same-sex partners who are on equal footing. Not exactly against gay marriage–which I personally favor. The idea is that the whole purpose of marriage is to lock men into contractual obligations to provide financial support in exchange for child-bearing and domestic service.

No one has mentioned Michael Warner’s “The Trouble with Normal”:

http://www.salon.com/books/feature/1999/12/08/warner/print.html

“AIDS activists,” Warner observes, “learned quickly that effective prevention cannot be based on shame and a refusal to comprehend; it requires collective efforts at honest discussion, a realism about desire and a respect for pleasure.” But “normal” morality honors none of these things. When the right to marriage is finally secured, a thin, white shadow of gay liberation will drift into condos and the PTA, taking most of the money, few of the troubles and all of the credit from the untouchables left behind.

Also, Anthony Esolen had a five-part series on this subject.

http://merecomments.typepad.com/merecomments/2006/07/ten_arguments_f.html

http://merecomments.typepad.com/merecomments/2006/07/ten_arguments_f_1.html

http://merecomments.typepad.com/merecomments/2006/08/ten_arguments_f.html

http://merecomments.typepad.com/merecomments/2006/08/ten_arguments_f_1.html

http://merecomments.typepad.com/merecomments/2006/08/the_last_two_ar.html

The best explanation I’ve read of why gay marriage is perceived as a threat is certainly not what Harry’s asking for, but I commend it to everyone’s attention. Sara Robinson, guest-blogging at Orcinus, linked to Doug Muder’s essay, Red Family, Blue Family. Here’s the relevant bit:

Same-sex marriage. The husband/father and wife/mother roles in the Inherited Obligation model are timeless, unchangeable, and necessary. Someone has to be the husband/father and someone has to be the wife/mother. Same-sex couples just can’t cover both roles, no matter how well-intentioned they may be.

But no comparable difficulty exists in the Negotiated Commitment model. A child has needs, and the parents have to negotiate a plan to meet those needs. Whether the parents are a mixed-sex couple or a same-sex couple – or even a single parent with a lot of committed friends – the problem is the same.

If the government recognizes same-sex marriages and same-sex couples as parents, then it is tacitly siding with the Negotiated Commitment model of marriage and parenthood, and undermining the Inherited Obligation model. This is why conservatives believe that marriage needs to be “defended” from same-sex relationships. But from the Negotiated Commitment point of view, “defense of marriage” is nonsense. How a same-sex couple negotiates its relationship has no effect on the negotiated relationships of mixed-sex couples.

The beliefs of the traditional family values contingent are rather fragile, and they consider a threat to one a threat to all. Just go read the whole thing. It’s not that long.

44. ” I doubt a judge would be very sympathetic to someone who was sexually assaulted by their spouse.” But judges are — sometimes — in marriage as it exists now, and not only in cases of arranged marriages or one which were the result of arm-twisting of some form. People change; an unxorious husband on the honeymoon can be a unreasonable monster a few years later. People marry unsuitable partners for all sorts of reasons. And courts understand this. Sexual assault is certainly recognised in marriage, but, as outside marriage, the problem is with burden of proof.

43. The Orincus link goes to the wrong post, as far as I can see. Also the ‘Inherited Obligation’ model looks utterly worthless to me; it doesn’t cover single parents, or children largely brought up institutions (including the boarding schools the well-heeled insist on dumping their greatly beloved sprogs in, so they don’t have to see them ten months of the year), nor even to families with largely absent fathers (such as those in the military), where, assuming the two roles to be at all real, the mother has to play both much of the time.

The Margaret Somerville essay linked above might be good as a text to use in class. It’s a well-written version of an argument often heard in this debate. It’s weak in the same places that many other instances of this argument are:

It’s partly dependent of the current state of medical technology: at present, two women cannot both be the biological parents of a child, but reproductive technology is quite likely to make this possible within our lifetimes. (More pertinently: it could become possible within the timescale that it takes governments to draft legislation)

Assuming the technology advances, we’re left with the argument that two people of the same sex should not have children, even if they physically can. She doesn’t justfy this at all.

It’s also unconvincing where it argues that infertile opposite sex couples should be allowed to marry (e.g. post menopausal women). Sure there’s a privacy angle: it would be overly intrusive of the state to actually try and check that a couple can have children. But wouldn’t the presumed right of privacy also apply to the case of two women who wish to marry? (Is the state entitled to check that one and only one of the partners has a penis?)

(NB: I realise that there are gay male marriages as well as lesbian ones; I wrote the examples as female-female because Somerville’s argument is dependent on the technology, and the technology looks likely to change matters soonest in the female-female case.)

The more sophisticated arguments against gay marriage (e.g. Velleman’s) that I’ve seen strike me as missing the point of the actual debate. Velleman is apparently opposed to gay parenting (and marriage) for reasons which would also require him to be opposed to blind adoption. Presuming that he actually holds this consistent position, even though it’s a perfectly fine oposiiton it makes him pretty much irrelevant to what’s actually being argued about nowadays, since the biggest opponents of gay marriage (conservative Christians, especially Catholics) are anti-abortionists who are generally strongly supportive af blind adoption. The actual argument is about whether gay sexuality should be fully accepted as unproblematic.

It would seem that the medical issues of parenting by donation (family medical history) can be handled the same as the medical issues of adoption. This strikes me as a place where the technical fix works.

To me the solution would have been to separate civil and religious marriage entirely and call them by different names. Marriage is a religious state recognized by law, and as such is imperfectly secular.

Certainly religious groups should be allowed to refuse to recognize gay marriages for their religious purposes. For example, it seems to me that a religious group could legitimatley refuse to accept couples married outside the church, including gay couples, and also refuse to marry gay couples. I don’t know how the law would handle this, though, for example regarding hiring.

I think that blue laws are an analogy. Blue laws (against alcohol, for example) are often originally religious in motivation and have mostly been repealed, but a church certainly should be allowed to reject drinkers from their congregation.

susanc,

I didn’t get the impression that Somerville opposes reproductive technologies on paternalistic grounds. RTs seem rather to be wrong for one or both of the following reasons: (1) They violate the right of a child to have/be raised by a biological mother and father; (2) They are intrinsically wrong, because they are “unnatural”, or possess some “ick” factor. ((1) seems to me a far more serious concern than (2), but I have my doubts even about it.) It’s plausible that marital reproductive rights could trump the paternalistic case against RTs, but not so much these other considerations.

The general gist is that if one trifles with centuries-old institutions, there are going to be unintended consequences.

The death of spirituals and the rise of hip-hop, for example.