Gay Marriage: Why we don’t agree at all
This article was originally published on post.ryanoshea.com on March 28th, 2013, around when the Supreme Court was hearing arguments on DOMA and Proposition 8.
Amid all the support poured out on Facebook in the last week, those opposed to gay marriage have tried to make their opposing views known. This is a good thing. Coming from the viewpoint of supporting equal rights for gay couples, it is easy to characterize anyone with a different opinion as a bigot—after all, they oppose granting what we see as equal rights to a certain group of people.
But it isn’t quite as black-and-white as that. Many of these people aren’t hateful bigots. Some exhibit those qualities, to be sure, especially those who cling to the belief that loving someone of the same gender is a choice, a disorder, or something against nature. But many have legitimate concerns. These might be unjustified or irrelevant in the end, but they are rational enough to the people who believe them to convince them to oppose gay marriage.
One of the articles being passed around is by Christian apologist Trent Horn. Titled “Gay Marriage: Our Agreements Solve Our Disagreements,”it proposes to analyze the topic of gay marriage, and marriage in general, in non-religious terms. It argues against extending the traditional definition due to societal concerns, rather than biblical morality.
As I was reading, however, I couldn’t help but notice religious foundations to many of the claims made. I decided to mark it up and publish what I thought. Again, you can read the full text here.
Horn starts off by addressing how to solve the disagreement between gay marriage supporters and opponents:
The only way we can settle the same-sex marriage debate is to find out which view of marriage is correct.
I admire the approach of this author, but this starts off with a question that isn’t worth answering. There is no absolutely correct version of a human institution that was made by humans, for humans, for the purposes of securing property (included in that property were wives, let’s not forget) and organizing mating in a time when both of those things were wholly unstructured. The “correct” view of marriage is uninteresting first because it relies on a religious view that marriage is something unalterable established by God for mankind, and second because marriage should be treated just as any other institution, like taxes or Social Security, and tailored to best fit the needs of the people in this country at this time. We should be asking which form of marriage best fosters the pursuits of life, liberty, and happiness, without infringing on the rights of others in the process. Denying people access to their loved ones in the hospital, tax relief if they decide to adopt children, and the other benefits of marital status, based on one group’s perception of the so-called “correct” nature of a man-made institution, is unnecessarily hurtful and discriminatory.
Critics on both sides of the argument seem to agree that marriage involves at least these three elements:
- A union involving two people
- A lifelong union
- A sexual union
The problem here is that we don’t agree with these three elements. In reality, those on the “relational” side only support the first. The lifelong aspect has been fully optional in heterosexual marriage since the legalization of divorce, and the sexual aspect is predominant, but again, fully optional and absolutely not a requirement. This “agreement” is the foundation of the article, but I’ll ignore that for now the sake of argument.
I contend that the conjugal view explains these three aspects of marriage, while the relational view merely assumes they are true for no good reason.
See the above comment for why this sentence is false. The relational view does no such thing, because it doesn’t even agree with the last two items. And the conjugal view does not explain them, it requires them for its own reasons, for promoting a specific type of relationship, based on tradition and popularity, at the expense (in terms of legal privileges) of others.
If marriage is strictly a relational agreement between adults, then why not have more than two people? Same-sex marriage advocates might argue that polygamy, or a man having more than one wife, is inherently abusive and exploitive of women, and that is why marriage should be restricted to two people. But this reply is weak on several grounds. First, it would not show polyandry, or one woman married to several men, or self-marriage (marrying oneself) is wrong, since the opportunity for exploitation in these unions would be very low. It also wouldn’t show why group marriage, or marriages involving two husbands and two wives, should be forbidden. That relationship would not be exploitive, since there would be an equal balance of power in the number and sexes of the people involved.
I don’t think outright condemnation of these relationships is warranted. Throughout history, polygamy has been prevalent mainly in religious cultures, as sanctioned by said religions. They were exploitative of women, but so were the religions and societies they took place in. There should, nonetheless, be discussion about whether those types of relationships would have a negative affect on society and children. If the answer to that question is no, there is no objective reason to prohibit such relationships, and the side-effects will have to be taken into account when considering implementation in terms of things like legal privileges, hospital viewing rights, etc. I’m not advocating for polygamy, but it shouldn’t be dismissed so briskly, without a serious discussion.
The conjugal view makes sense of limiting marriage to two people because that is all that is needed to create children. This relationship is also best for the children who are created, since they are legally connected only to adults who are biologically related to them, who statistically are the adults least likely to abuse them.
Besides nearly accusing gay couples of being more abusive by lumping them into foster parent and displaced home environments that are fundamentally different situations, this sentence assumes that gay couples who adopt or use surrogacy create inherently worse family environments for children. I’d like to see evidence for that claim, limitedjust for gay couples.
We make fun of marriages that only last for 72 days, but why? … Most people think [treating marriage like any other social relationship] flies in the face of what marriage is, but the relational view can’t explain why we should force people to be in a relationship they don’t want to be in anymore.
Society shouldn’t force anyone to be in a marital relationship they no longer want to be in. Is the author seriously suggesting that the presence of a child totally supplants the rights of the parents? What about a domestic abuse situation, or even something worse? Is it right to force a woman or man to stay in an abusive relationship because of the delusion that that environment is more healthy for their child? Absolutely not. Even a parent who wishes to leave because they no longer feel attachment to their partner is entitled to.
It is the responsibility of the parents to ensure that they are, to the best of their knowledge, in a fully committed relationship, and if they decide to have children, that they are prepared to be responsible for them for as long as they are needed. All of this, ideally, needs to happen before the decision to have children. This is the responsibility of the parents. If childbearing is undergone without these considerations and commitments, it could be incredibly detrimental for the children, but the responsibility again rests with the parents, in whom we trust nearly every other aspect of a child’s development. Secondly, if people have children without considering these things, then a marital union against the will of either party can only be detrimental to the child’s development. Parents staying together can only help children if the parents are committed to that child, and those couples, more often than not, would stay together anyway. This isn’t without exception, but it makes sense to me in the majority of cases.
This is an entire non-issue anyway. Even the conjugal definition of marriage doesn’t prevent divorce, and today, with marriage solidly between men and women, we have the same problems you’re indirectly suggesting would arise if homosexual couples were allowed to marry. You’re simply blaming problems that already exist on a condition that has yet to arise. It’s wholly unfair.
Perhaps this article should be about making divorce illegal, because for many of these arguments, gay marriage isn’t even relevant.
Same-sex couples can have children only if other conjugal unions fail through divorce, death, surrogacy, or Frankenstein-esque science experiments.
The characterization of surrogacy as a failure of a romantic union is not only illogical, but unspeakably condescending. Who is anyone to deny two loving, committed parents the ability to have a child using their own genetic material, and entrust its natal development to a responsible person who wishes to provide that capacity to a couple who—through no fault of their own—are unable to provide it. The love, trust, and commitment involved in that process is nothing if not beautiful, and should be the shining example of the values a married couple should embody, not the scorn of a hetero-normative one-liner.
Hopefully, all of this makes sense. I admire the effort this author made to explain his views in a logical way, with the good of society in mind, but I can’t help seeing that most of his concerns are irrational or relevant only to people with similar religious views. The agreement he references to justify his argument for conjugal marriage simply doesn’t exist, and once that is recognized, the entire article falls apart.
Extending equal rights to gay people is the biggest civil rights issue of our time, and I’ll be glad if this post can convince even one person of its necessity.
