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

It can be hard to get students to seriously consider the other side of this issue, and to admit that not everyone on that side is a fanatic, moron or psychopath (in part because so many are). So this is an article where they might have a better chance of seeing the other side as human, if misguided.

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.

Thanks for highlighting that aspect of the Somerville piece. Yes, indeed, she includes a reverse form of the argument. If same-sex reproduction becomes technically possible, and there are practical reasons for banning it (e.g. it isn’t sufficiently safe), then the rights of married couples to have children might trump any attempt to outlaw the technology. Marriage “does” many things, some of them to do with having children. If the state permits same-sex couples to marry (for reasons not to do with child-bearing, e.g. inheritance law), then these married couples might get the reproductive rights associated with marriage as well when the technology enables it.

Strangely enough, similar concerns make me opposed to reproductive definitons of marriage. Suppose some really extreme government limits marriage to couples who have biological children (so post-menopausal women or men with too low a sperm count can’t marry). This would create a strong incentive to use reproductive technologies (that might not be entirely safe) just to have children, in order to get married. When, absent the biological definition of marriage, couples might have been happy getting married and adopting, or not having children, or having children via a sperm donor etc…)

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.

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.)

Robert George and Gerard V. Bradley, “Marriage and the Liberal Imagination,” Georgetown Law Journal 84 (1995) 301-320

especially if taught in conjunction with the Macedo piece it’s responding to, works well. (And it’s no more religious than anything else in the Finnis new natural law tradition—but if you find that whole tradition to be sectarian, you’ll find this so too.)

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.

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.

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