In my last post, I argued that there is no such thing as homosexuality, in the sense that homosexuality is not a thing, an external, objectively verifiable condition or state of being, but only a badge of personal identity. To put it another way, I argued that homosexuals are not a different category of person from heterosexuals in any way that can be measured: there is no DNA test or blood marker that you can test for in a lab. And I added that I was not trying to make a political point.
You may ask, though, how is this not a political point? The Supreme Court has recently agreed to hear two cases on the subject of gay marriage. And the public argument in favor of gay marriage is precisely that so long as it is illegal, homosexuals are a special category of people who are forbidden to marry, unlike their heterosexual fellow citizens. The argument continues that this prohibition is no different from the law that forbade slaves to marry in the antebellum South, and that it is likewise unjust. If I argue that there is “no such thing” as homosexuality in the first place, am I not attacking the support for gay marriage? Since this is a hot political topic at the moment, am I not thereby taking a political stand?
It looks like it, but no I’m not. Explaining that will take a few minutes, however, because it requires several steps. Please be patient as I work my way through this. One of the risks of philosophy is that philosophers are often assumed to be taking a stand when they are just trying to untangle their own thinking.
To begin, let me insist on a minor point of terminology. Today, only a few states in the Union have passed laws recognizing gay marriage; but in all the others, it is not actually illegal in the sense in which, say, the sale of alcohol was illegal during Prohibition. If two men, or two women, find a clergyman who is willing to perform a wedding ceremony for them, nobody is going to drag them off to jail. The only response from public authorities will be to ignore them when, say, one or the other applies for spousal benefits, or when they try to file their tax returns as “Married Filing Jointly.” So the question is not whether gay marriage should be legalized so much as whether it should be recognized or institutionalized. It’s still a valid question, of course, but we should make sure we are talking about the right thing.
Fair enough, you might reply, but slaves in the antebellum South were allowed to “jump the broom” too. They weren’t necessarily punished for it, but no law recognized them as legally married. The master could sell one of a couple and not the other, with impunity. So even conceding this terminological distinction, I haven’t addressed the main argument that today’s laws (in all but a few states) discriminate against homosexuals by refusing to recognize their marriages. How is this fair?
I respond that at a literal level, the argument supporting gay marriage is simply untrue. That argument, to repeat, is that a gay man or woman who lives in one of the states without gay marriage cannot marry in a way that will be publically recognized. Suppose Fred is a gay man who lives in Alabama. Then Fred (so says the argument) has no way to contract a legally-recognized marriage, and this is unfair. But of course he can. Suppose Fred goes down to the courthouse to complain to the local judge that he can’t marry; what does the judge tell him? “Why son, sure you can marry. How about you pop the question to Suzie, who lives next door to you? She’s about your age, she’s a spinster and a good Christian, and she seems to keep a right tidy house. She’d make you a fine wife.” Naturally this is not the kind of advice Fred wants to hear, nor is he about to follow it. I get that. My only point is that the laws don’t prevent him from marrying. The only options they leave him are unappealling, but laws often do that.
In other words, at the level of public argument the opponents of gay marriage have the stronger case. The advocates argue that all they want is “marriage equality” – that the marriage laws apply equally to gays the way they apply to straights. But as Fred’s example shows us, they already do. Fred doesn’t want to take advantage of the existing laws, but they do apply to him in just exactly the same way that they apply to his straight friends. What Fred wants is something more fundamental: to change the meaning of the word “marriage” so that it includes the kind of relationship he has with his partner, Paul. This is exactly what the opponents of gay marriage keep saying – that the real agenda is to change the meaning of marriage altogether – and at that level they are simply right.
Why are the advocates of gay marriage so reluctant to admit this? It’s a rhetorical strategy. In any political question, there are always a few ardent advocates on one side, a few ardent opponents on the other, and a vast swamp of the public in between who really don’t care all that much. Neither extreme camp will ever persuade the other, so the political challenge is always to capture the indifferent middle. But the middle is usually frightened of change – deep, substantive change, at any rate. So if you want to advocate for fundamental change, you have to call it something else. The Founding Fathers argued for a republic and independence from the British Crown by appealling to the traditional rights of free Englishmen – rights which were traditionally protected by the very King from whom they hoped to separate. In the same way, those who seek to change the definition of marriage so that it includes same-sex partners as well as opposite-sex partners frame the conflict in terms familiar from other battles in the past, battles which have already been won and which the vast indifferent middle will therefore understand to be part of the status quo. This is why they insist on drawing comparisons to slave times, even though the comparisons are untrue on their face.
At this point you may be more convinced than ever that I am making a political point, because I insist that the core argument of the opponents of gay marriage are truer and more accurate than the core arguments of the advocates. But here is the rub: both arguments are completely beside the point. After all, what difference should it make, from a philosophical perspective, whether the recognition of gay marriage constitutes a fundamental change in the meaning of marriage, or not? New or old, who cares? Surely the only important philosophical question is whether the recognition of gay marriages would be a good thing. Surely the question whether it is an innovation is totally irrelevant.
Would the recognition of gay marriages be a good thing? I’m inclined to think yes. I’ve spelled out some of my thoughts about the meaning of marriage in another post. Among other things, I called marriage “a school for character.” Why should homosexuals be denied the benefit of such a school? Why should they be denied the chance to become better men and women that is afforded by the burden of having to be decent to someone else every hour, day in and day out? Of course it is true, as the judge said to Fred, that they are permitted to marry under the existing laws, so this “school for character” is strictly speaking not out of reach. But we all know that Fred won’t ever marry Suzie. What logical reason is there that should prevent Fred from getting the same education in character by marrying Paul? I can think of none. The only reason I can think of to stand still, to avoid extending the meaning of marriage so that it covers Fred and Paul, is a fear of change itself. Fear of change is a powerful motive in the public arena, which is why opponents of gay marriage gabble so shrilly about a “slippery slope”: allow this change and the next thing you know we’ll have to allow more change, and still more. But fear of change is not a philosophical reason for anything. The only fair question is whether something is good or bad, and I see nothing bad in the public recognition of gay marriage.
So yes, I have an opinion on the political question. The disclaimer in my earlier post just meant that my political opinion is based on my thoughts about the nature of marriage, and not on my thoughts about the nature of homosexuality. You can agree with me that there is no such thing as homosexuality without committing yourself to either side in the debate over gay marriage.
Why are we having this debate now? If I’ve understood the issues correctly, why didn’t someone else figure this out hundreds of years ago, and institutionalize gay marriage way back then? They didn’t, because it is only recently – inside the last two hundred years – that we came to anything like the modern understanding of marriage. In fact, marriage has been undergoing redefinition ever since the early nineteenth century; before that time, the whole question we are debating now would have been meaningless. The only way that advocates of “traditional marriage” can talk the way they do is by not knowing the history of marriage.
The critical point is that marriage for us is not just a legal bond, but a romantic and emotional and spiritual one. And this means that we want to marry only those with whom we think we can have a permanent bond on all those levels at once. This is why Fred will never marry Suzie: he might appreciate that she can keep the house tidy, and I hear she bakes a mean peach pie, but he will never ever be in love with her. His love is given to Paul, and so Paul is the one he wants to marry.
But three or four hundred years ago, the question would never have come up. A seventeenth-century Fred probably would have married his Suzie, precisely because she was so good at cooking and keeping house. The question of love would never have come into it, because marriage was much more a practical arrangement and much less an emotional one. Fred back then would have seen no conflict between (1) marrying Suzie for her domestic accomplishments, and (2) turning to Paul for sexual ecstasy and deep emotional consolation. Fred might even have been able to bring himself to bed Suzie once or twice in all the decades they lived together, just to get himself a child or two who could inherit whatever he left behind when he died. Even Edward II got himself an heir, and there has never been any doubt that he preferred men as sex partners.
In short, the twenty-first century battle over redefining marriage to include same-sex partners is a direct result of the nineteenth-century revolution that redefined marriage as an emotional and spiritual bond rather than a merely practical one. Once we had decided that it was personally unacceptable to marry someone with whom there was no “spark” just for the domestic benefits, it was inevitable that we would have to face the question, What about those who find a “spark” only with members of the same sex? It was only a matter of time. Change begets more change. In that sense, ironically, you could say that the “slippery slope” argument is valid after all; only it was our Victorian great-great-grandparents who stepped onto that slope and left us with the inevitable inheritance.
