First of all, apologies for not putting
anything up here for a while. I'd like to say I've been busy with
work, but it would be a lie. The nature of my current year at
university is that it's pretty coursework-heavy, meaning I have
periods of not-very-much-work and then twice in the year I'll have
several weeks of
HOLYSHITGOTTOREADEIGHTYARTICLESTODAYHAVEN'TSLEPTMORECOFFEEYOUGIVEPLEASEYES.
One of these periods is just about to begin (Merry Christmas to me!)
so I doubt I'm going to get any bloggier, unless the workload pushes
my brain into some sort of superproduction lean mean machine mode. I
know most people aren't going to be particularly dying to read this
blog, so I'm mainly saying sorry to myself here, for not keeping up
the writing practice. But just when it seemed like nothing could fuel
the creative fire, a lecturer at my university wrote something dumb
and voila! Here's a post for you.
I was feeling disappointment with my
university already this week, after it came out that the Christian
Union here has had a rule that women couldn't be speakers at any of
their meetings for years. Ironically, it's only now that they've
actually decided to relax the
rule slightly that people outside the group have noticed, and now
it's in the national papers that we have a practising medieval sect
hanging around the campus, giving hot chocolate to Friday night
drunks. Don't eat their warm gooey toasties – the secret ingredient
is misogyny!
Then
it turned out that a professor here, Julian Rivers, had published an
article explaining why the government proposals for legalising
same-sex marriage were
naughty and bad and would ruin things for all of us. I was taught by
Rivers last year, and he always struck me as being rather intelligent
and above all, very, very nice. He just exudes niceness. So when I
read an article summarising his findings, I wondered if his words had
been taken out of context. Fortunately, the full article turned out
to be only six
pages long so I was quite quickly able to confirm that he hadn't been
taken out of context. As parents always say: I'm not angry, I'm just
disappointed. I've never read any arguments against gay marriage that
weren't ignorant, misleading or just plain silly, so I thought that
if anyone could offer a good one it might be him.
His area of teaching at the university is Jurisprudence (philosophy
of law), a subject which is
compulsory on my course though not on all law courses, and a subject
that enthrals
a few (okay, me) and alienates many others. It has a reputation among
students for being not only complex, but rigorous in its approach to
arguments (some would say to the point of pettiness). To paraphrase
something a fellow student once said: Jurisprudence asks you to
define law, then asks you to define 'define'. An academic in the
field of jurisprudence – a jurisprude, if you will – should be
used to making their arguments precise and as watertight as possible.
I was therefore surprised to
see that the head of the subject at my university had made an
argument that was shockingly poor, lazy, and full of suppositions
with no real evidence to back it up.
The
report is here if you want to read it:
http://www.jubilee-centre.org/uploaded/files/resource_432.pdf
We'll
start with the summary:
The Government’s proposal to
introduce same-sex marriage seems to rest
on reasons of equality, stability
and convenience. But on closer inspection,
these are respectively incomplete,
speculative and negligible. As currently
defined, marriage secures the equal
value of men and women.
Does
it? How? And historically, of course, it has done the opposite – up
until relatively recently in the history of marriage, a woman had to
give up her rights to own property once she became a wife. And more
recently than that, the general expectation was that she would give
up her job as well, if the husband could afford to support her.
But this is only the abstract,
so I'm sure we'll hear an excellent argument in more detail later.
It also promotes the welfare of
children. By contrast, the new definition of
marriage will unavoidably call into
question its exclusivity, its permanence
and even its sexual nature.
Holy crap! The gays
getting married might make my marriage less sexual? I've got to hear
about this.
Introduction
On 15 March 2012 the British
Government announced proposals to allow two
people of the same sex to enter into
marriage by way of civil ceremony. The
responses of major Protestant
churches to the proposal have depended substantially on arguments
rooted in Scripture and Christian tradition. There is nothing
wrong with this. In a multi-faith
democracy we should be encouraged to disclose
our deepest convictions; and where a
majority of the population still identify
themselves as Christian, one can
expect Christian convictions to carry some
weight. However, plural democracy
will only survive if we also offer each other
reasons we can expect each other to
share.
It's doubtful that
a majority of the population are Christian. Or rather, that many of
them are practising Christians. Statistics vary, but the
figure seems to be around 10% going to church on a regular basis.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/shared/bsp/hi/pdfs/03_04_07_tearfundchurch.pdf
This report from 2007 shows that though 58% of the UK population
identify as Christian, 66% of UK adults have no connection with the
church. My mother would probably identify herself as Christian,
despite only going to churches for weddings and sightseeing purposes,
never praying and never making references to God or Jesus except when
she stubs her toe. People who identify with this vague form of
Christianity – and there are a lot of them in this country, more
than 'real' Christians – probably don't find religion weighs in on
their convictions very much.
This is all the more important in an
area which shows signs of collapsing into a ‘culture war’ in
which mutual hostility takes the place of collective rational
deliberation. If the only reasons
against (or for) same-sex marriage
are ‘ideological’ or a matter of gut reaction then all we are
left with is mutual incomprehension. The purpose of this paper is to
set out a non-religious case for retaining the current legal
definition of marriage. It does not seek to question the morality of
same-sex relationships, the
provision of civil partnerships, or the current law prohibiting
discrimination on grounds of sexual orientation. Rather it seeks to
answer the fundamental question: should we think of marriage as the
sort of arrangement two people of the same sex can enter into?
Clearly, a same-sex partnership is like a marriage in some respects,
but is it indistinguishable? What, then, is marriage?
Seems reasonable
enough. Show me what you've got.
The common law has always defined
marriage as the voluntary union for life of one man and one woman to
the exclusion of all others. Parliament has altered the age at which
people may marry, the family relationships within which marriage is
prohibited, the formalities by which marriage may be commenced, the
proprietary and financial consequences of marriage, the extent to
which aspects of the common life of husband and wife may be enforced
by law, and the circumstances and
process by which a marriage may be
dissolved. But the essential definition of marriage itself has
remained unchanged.
Oof. Bad start.
So apart from all
those things which have radically changed the definition of marriage,
it's the same, then? Just because the Ship of Theseus has one rickety
original part still intact doesn't mean you can say it's the same
boat. 'Traditional' marriage advocates often like to say that 'one
man and one woman' is the essential core of marriage (though if
'traditional' means 'old' then the most traditional form of marriage
is polygamy), but rarely attempt to back up that supposition. Why the
man/woman bit, rather than any of the other things that changed?
Wouldn't marriage's indissoluble nature have been considered
'essential', once upon a time? It used to be that once you married
someone, you were stuck with them for life, unless you happened to be
good friends with the Pope. Now anyone can get a divorce on grounds
which are relatively easy to prove. (And this is the UK we're
discussing – in Ancient Greece divorce was not only permissible but
in some cases mandatory, showing the fluidity of the concept
temporally and spatially). Marriage used to signal the beginning of
cohabitation for a couple, with the wife moving from being the
financial burden of her father to the burden of her husband. Now it's
common for couples to cohabit before marriage and the general
societal expectation is that both will contribute to the rent (unless
one is doing full-time childcare). Girls often used to be married off
before they'd even had their first period – now it's accepted that
no-one of such an age is ready to pair off with someone for life, nor
is it accepted that someone should get to choose her husband for her.
Oh, and it used to not be a crime for a husband to rape his wife.
Might seem insane to us now, but before it was finally outlawed it
was a difficult situation for judges to decide on, because to them it
seemed to go straight to the heart of what marriage meant – to
some, it seemed to be a contract which signed away one's rights to
sexual choice, even if the couple were separated. That was part of
the 'definition' of marriage too. But maybe we shouldn't look too
harshly on the judges who believed such things. It was a different
time, the er, early 1990s.
All these factors
have had a drastic effect, socially, legally, practically and
economically, on what we understand by 'marriage'. Compared to these
things, the idea that spouses could have the same biological bits as
each other is relatively mundane.
To pretend that
we've always had the same 'definition' of marriage, give or take a
few little laws on women's rights in the 19th and 20th
centuries, is rather disingenuous. It's taking a literal description
of what you see in a marriage ceremony - “I see a man and a lady
promising themselves to each other for ever” - and pretending
that's the be-all and end-all, regardless of how the actual meaning
or context has changed. It used to be about forming family bonds
(often for financial rather than cuddly reasons), expediency, and
societal expectation. Now it's wrapped up in the rhetoric of love,
trust and equal partnership, and apart from the odd pushy mother
no-one can tell you that you have to get married. It's a voluntary
affirmation of the desire to love and be with one another, and
same-sex couples are no less eligible to meet these grounds than a
straight couple.
At root, the meaning of marriage is
socially, not legally, defined.
Well, exactly.
Hence what I just said up there.
When a couple decide to get married,
they do not start negotiating the clauses of an open-ended contract.
Rather, they assume that there is a pre-existing and familiar type of
relationship they are about to enter. Marriage has socially-given
expectations, purposes or goods, which are
intrinsic to the relationship. This
is what we mean by saying that marriage is a social institution. The
legal definition of marriage reflects and supports this social
consensus, and it seems fair to assume a rather close relationship
between legal form and social expectation.
This is just a bit
odd. A couple assume there is a 'pre-existing relationship they are
about to enter'? That makes it sound like they have to change their
relationship to fit social expectations. Doesn't sound like a good
thing to me. There are a million different ways in which people go
about their marriages, and it's no business of mine (or the law) how
they do it. I'm sure there is a general societal expectation of what
a 'typical' married couple looks like, but there hasn't been any
reason given why that should be enshrined in law (and it generally
isn't – adultery, open relationships or living in separate homes
are socially considered to be anathema to marriage, but to have laws
against them would be unnecessary interference in a private sphere).
Changing the legal definition of
marriage will likewise reflect and support a different view of what
marriage is and what it is for.
As previously
noted, we already have a different view of what marriage is and what
it is for, both from each other as individuals and from people in the
past. That's not a bad thing.
The debate about same-sex marriage
is a debate about using law to change the meaning of
the social institution of marriage.
And that affects everyone.
Positively for many
(both LGBT folk, their families, friends and supporters, and people
who would generally like to live in a more tolerant society). I have
yet to see any documented effect it has on straight people who want
to keep marriage all to themselves.
The Government’s arguments
The argument from equality
Discrimination on grounds of sexual
orientation is unjust, so the current definition is unjust. The
same idea underlies the suggestion
that same-sex partners are ‘banned’ from marrying. This argument
assumes what needs to be proved. Any law which sets criteria for
anything discriminates. When the law discriminates on grounds of a
‘protected characteristic’ (such as sex, race, age, religion or
sexual orientation) there is, of course, a presumption that the
discrimination is wrongful. In most public contexts, such as
political life, business or employment, these distinctions should not
be drawn. But sometimes it is right to draw distinctions even on
these grounds. For example, the law of marriage discriminates on
grounds of age. One must be at least 16 years old. In our society, we
do not consider this discrimination to be unacceptable, because it is
justified. It is right that children should not marry. The law of
marriage also discriminates on grounds of kindred and affinity: one
cannot marry a parent, sibling or child, nor a range of more distant
relations. But once again, we think this is justified – marriage
between close blood relatives is medically unwise and in any case
sexualised families are abusive and oppressive – so we do not think
of it as discrimination. It is just good moral sense. We need to
watch out for unjustified slippage between ‘discrimination’ as
the drawing of any distinction and ‘discrimination’ as the
drawing of an inappropriate distinction.
I'd say it was
pretty simple to judge the difference. One is discrimination that you
can make a rational argument for (rather than Rivers' vague
attribution to 'good moral sense', whatever that is). The other
isn't. And I've yet to see an argument against gay marriage that
stood up to rational scrutiny.
Age and sexuality
are clearly completely different anyway – the former is an
indicator, up to a point, of a level of human development which may
lack emotional and intellectual maturity, or capacity for certain
things. We have a ton of laws regarding age restrictions – on
driving, alcohol, cigarettes, criminal responsibility. Sexuality on
the other hand is more comparable in the law with something like
race, where the characteristic should suggest nothing inherently
different about the person's capacity, personality, intelligence etc.
I can't think of any laws where discrimination on the basis of race
is considered to be 'good moral sense'.
If anything, ‘equality’ proves
too much. Whatever its causes, human sexuality is complex and
variable. The commonest form of minority sexual orientation would
appear to be bisexuality. This is also a matter of degree. Many
people have had at least some fleeting experience of attraction
to someone of the same sex. There
are people not sexually attracted to others, or who wish to enter
long-term stable but non-sexual relationships of companionship. There
are also people who only wish for brief sexual encounters; some of
whom are prepared to pay for them. And there are those who enjoy the
challenge of maintaining multiple sexual relationships
simultaneously. Self awareness, desire, social convention, choice,
behaviour and identity are all intertwined in complex ways. The
normal condition of human sexuality seems diverse and even chaotic at
times. It follows that for marriage to be ‘equal’ on grounds of
sexual orientation, the law should not be restricted to just one type
of sexually-intimate companionship. Why can’t a man marry two
wives? Why isn’t prostitution treated as a form of short-term
marriage? Why, for that matter, should single people be deprived of
the chance to pass on their pension rights to a best friend? There
may or may not be reasons for drawing the legal boundaries in any
particular place, but until those reasons
are stated, the argument from
equality is incomplete.
First of all,
there's a misconception here: a confusion between 'sexual
orientation' (the gender/sex one is attracted to) and 'sexual
expression' (the nature of one's sexual relationships). Ending
discrimination in marriage on grounds of sexual orientation in
all circumstances is quite simple – allow people to marry someone
of the same sex/gender, or indeed someone who considers themselves
intersex, non-gendered, genderfluid or whatever else. That would all
be covered quite easily by one statute disallowing discrimination on
grounds of sexual or gender orientation. Sexual expression is
another matter altogether, and one which generally isn't an issue of
discrimination in marriage (with the exception of marriages of more
than two people), because people who like to only have sex with
prostitutes or have one-night-stands or have casual orgies in the
swimming pool don't want to get married. Or they want to get
married to one person and then do those things anyway, but if their
spouse consents and that's their idea of what their marriage should
look like, there's nothing the law can do about it. And rightly so.
As for whether a man should be able to marry two wives, or whether
one should be able to pass pension rights to friends – well,
exactly, why not? So long as everyone's happy. But I'm wandering away
from the central point here, which is that the argument that 'either
you have to defend all of it now or none of it' is a poor one. Gay
marriage rights are what people are campaigning for now, there has
been no particularly good reason given to discriminate in marriage on
the basis of gender or orientation, and this is the one part of
marriage law which is being considered right now. One may as well
argue 'you can't change the law on a particular crime until you've
decided exactly what constitutes 'criminal behaviour', and
that means in all circumstances for all situations where
someone might have committed what might be a crime'. The law
constantly develops and changes with the times; it is never
'complete'. No campaigner on a legal issue claims that the change
that they are arguing for will make the law perfect. They merely
claim it will make the law better.
There then follows
an argument that a marriage will be no more stable than a civil
partnership, which I'd agree with, though it's rather convenient that
a civil partnership is considered the same as marriage in some parts
of the argument and yet different when it suits the person arguing.
The argument from convenience
The difficulties of a small group of
people are emphasised at some length by the Government. Currently,
the marriage or civil partnership of a transsexual person is
automatically dissolved on receiving their newly assigned gender. If
their spouse or partner is willing to continue the relationship, a
new civil partnership or marriage must be entered into. By making
marriage gender-blind, this will no longer be necessary. Rather, the
parties could choose to affirm and continue their marriage. This
problem affects only a tiny number of people and the inconvenience of
entering into a new civil partnership or marriage must be minor
compared to the trauma of gender dysphoria and medical and
psychological treatment for reassignment. In any case, civil
partnerships would still have to be dissolved in cases of gender
reassignment, which shows that again the Government does not take its
own argument seriously. The argument from convenience is negligible.
Trans people (which
is the generally accepted term, not 'transsexual' as is used in the
article) are a minority, and they've had to go through a bunch of
horrible stuff already, therefore we shouldn't bother. Nice.
Marriage secures the equal value of
men and women
One of the goods of marriage is that
it confers social recognition on a relationship which is dependent on
the gendered ‘other’. Thankfully, we live in an age and society
which has
done more than most to ensure that
gender roles are fluid, that men and women are equally able to access
jobs, careers and other social opportunities, as well as taking up
domestic
responsibilities. Yet we still
recognise that men and women are in various ways different. The point
about equality for men and women is not that the difference is
irrelevant, but that both
are equally valuable and necessary.
So you're saying
that they're separate but equal. Hey, that's a catchy phrase. Where
have I heard that before?
We may struggle to identify all the
dimensions of that difference, and disagree about their significance,
but as many feminist writers have rightly recognised,
‘gender-blindness’ is not the answer. Genderblindness runs the
risk of entrenching norms and practices which typically favour men
and are oppressive towards women.
How?
The fact of difference has to be
acknowledged and valued if we are to secure equality. That is why we
are right to worry about the small number of women MPs or CEOs.
Not necessarily.
Some think it would be good to have more women MPs or CEOs because
they bring a different perspective; others think it would be good
because it shows we do not consider them to be different. None
of this has any bearing on whether people who don't conform to the
typical idea of men's and women's sexual orientation should be able
to get married. This is the problem with the 'men and women are just
different' idea – it seems to be all cuddly and still in
favour of equality, but what happens when someone doesn't conform?
What happens when a man decides he'd rather stay home with his
children than be the one who earns the money? What happens if a woman
decides she doesn't want to get married at all? Suddenly the cuddly
idea of male and female 'roles' becomes oppressive when you don't
feel like you magically fit them. The main argument against female
suffrage back in the early 20th century wasn't that women
were lesser, it was that they had a different 'sphere', and politics
wasn't part of that sphere. By now we should recognise this hoary old
tactic for what it is, and recognise that equality isn't about being
put in a pre-defined role. It's about being able to make a choice as
to your role, no matter what your background.
It would be ironic if after having
reformed the patriarchal consequences of
marriage the institution itself
should become gender-blind.
No, it wouldn't.
Also note how the claim seems to be that 'traditional' marriage is
now good for women, since women who want to marry women
apparently don't exist.
Redefining marriage to be
indifferent to sexual identity reinforces [an] individualistic
tendency because it turns human society – from marriage outwards –
into a matter of individual inclination and choice.
OH NO! You mean
people would get to choose whether to get married, and what
their marriage means to them? Hold
on a minute while I get my pitchfork.
Marriage promotes the welfare of
children
A child represents the combined
genetic inheritance of his or her parents. She is the embodiment of
both, a living testimony to their intimacy and a bearer of the
identity of earlier generations. A child is likely to outlive her
parents, and so this embodiment symbolises the permanence of marriage
as well as its heterosexual nature. We know that these multiple
intertwined relationships are important, both on account of the
strong natural desire people have to know their genetic parentage as
an aspect of their identity, and because of the pain a child
experiences on divorce. The child can feel almost literally torn
apart.
Because of the pain
that everyone in their family is experiencing, not through some
magical genetic connection. Or do adopted children not feel pain when
their parents divorce?
This means that there is a
distinction between sexual union and sexual intimacy. A sexual
relationship can be called a ‘union’ not because it is intense,
but because it can be embodied in a new human person. Only a man and
a woman can form the biological unit capable of procreating another
being ‘free and equal in dignity and rights’. No new human being
can exist as a living expression of the intimacy of a same-sex
couple. Redefining marriage to include same-sex partnerships will
have two distinct effects. As far as same-sex couples are concerned,
it will close off the question of the impact of same-sex parenting on
children. But more importantly, it will
sever the presumptive connections
between marriage, childbearing and kinship for everyone.
Which is why we
passed that law banning infertile couples from getting married. And
from allowing straight couples to adopt or use surrogate parents or
IVF, or to choose not to have children. You can't use this
argument against same-sex couples without applying it equally to
straight couples. So apparently adopting a child, or using the wonder
of medicine to conceive one artificially, is not a legitimate way of
starting a family. Certainly not as holy as forgetting to put a
condom on your husband during a drunken Sunday fumble.
The prevailing view is that there is
no significant deficit in same-sex parenting, although a recent major
study has called this into question. However, we do know that the
distinctive gender roles of a father and a mother are important in
the psychological development of children.
It must be at least possible that
having two ‘fathers’ or ‘mothers’ will not compensate for the
absent mother/father-figure. The data is inevitably recent, and we
will not know with certainty for
some considerable time what the
effects of same-sex parenting are. Recent changes already allow for
same-sex partners jointly to acquire children; redefining marriage
will render these developments immune from reconsideration. Such
confidence seems premature.
Which
is why we passed that law banning single parents. Also, it is
incorrect to state that the data doesn't
yet show long-term effects:
“In
June 2010, the results of a 25-year ongoing longitudinal study by
Nanette
Gartrell of
the University
of California and
Henny Bos of the University
of Amsterdam were
released. Gartrell and Bos studied 78 children conceived through
donor
insemination
and
raised
by lesbian mothers. Mothers were interviewed and given clinical
questionnaires during pregnancy when their children were 2, 5, 10,
and 17 years of age. In the abstract of the report, the authors
stated: "According to their mothers' reports, the 17-year-old
daughters and sons of lesbian mothers were rated significantly higher
in social, school/academic, and total competence and significantly
lower in social problems, rule-breaking, aggressive, and
externalizing problem behavior than their age-matched counterparts in
Achenbach's normative sample of American youth."”
(Thanks,
Wikipedia!)
I actually did
a essay myself last
year on psychological attachments to fathers and mothers, and found
from meta-analysis that there wasn't much difference at all. Evidence
suggests that the most important thing isn't the sex of the parent
but having parents that actually care – which is almost certain to
happen if your parents had to actively try hard to bring you into
their family, as same-sex parents do.
Rivers
then repeats some of the stuff about how if we allow same-sex
marriage we should also allow polygamy, which I've generally covered
and could do in more detail but this is really, really long already.
In spite of the relatively easy
availability of divorce, marriage is still lifelong in intention.
Permanence serves important personal, social and economic goals. The
fragility of
marriage is a major cause of harm in
twenty-first-century British society. The problem is that stability
requires the genie of autonomous choice to be kept firmly inside its
bottle. Why should one be so foolish as to sign away one’s future
choices for the rest of one’s life? If one is allowed to
choose the terms on which one enters
marriage, why should one not choose a less permanent form of
relationship?
This makes no
sense. Same-sex couples are trying to get married, which to most
people in current society represents an affirmation of permanence.
They want permanence, not to make marriage less permanent. To say the
genie of choice has to 'be kept firmly in the bottle' is not only
disingenuous but also a bit creepy, as if to suggest that marriage
should have some element of coercion to it.
The permanence of marriage is
symbolised by the life of the child who embodies it. But if marriage
includes the choice of a relationship which has no intrinsic
connection with procreation, why should it not also include the
choice of a time-limited relationship?
Again, thank God we
passed that law against infertile couples then!
Rivers is missing
the point of what marriage means to people, both LGBT and straight.
He asks “if people aren't going to make children,” (ignoring the
fact that LGBT couples CAN make children by various means, and that
not all straight couples can or do) “then what is the point of
signing up to permanent partnership?” Apparently the answer
“BECAUSE THEY WANT TO” just isn't good enough.
The sexual dimension of marriage
will be undermined
In law, marriage is a sexual
relationship. Incapacity and wilful refusal to consummate a marriage
are grounds for annulment, and adultery is one of the five facts
which demonstrate irretrievable breakdown. While in theory one could
imagine courts trying to identify same-sex analogies, in practice the
law will have to draw a veil over the sexual dimension of the
relationship, subjecting disputes to the broad test of ‘unreasonable
behaviour’.
Hehe. Correct me if
I'm wrong, but Rivers appears to be saying, in some legal and
academic terms, “um...how do you know if they've...you know, done
it? I mean, with the lesbians, when does it count? Is it when they do
the thing with the.....or I mean, is it when they, you know....”
This isn't a difficult issue. If your same-sex wife has been sticking
her hands down another woman's pants I'm pretty sure that comes under
most people's definition of adultery, even if it's not good
old-fashioned 'traditional' adultery with a penis and a vagina. Being
a bit squeamish about discussing gay sex is no excuse for denying
people their rights.
Given that civil partnership need
not be a sexually-active relationship, the refusal to allow close
relatives to enter into that status is illogical. Marriage will
become like civil partnership in this respect, taking on the same
illogicality.
Oh seriously, we're
doing this? The “If a man can marry another man then next he'll be
allowed to marry his sister” argument?
Rivers contradicts
himself anyway. Earlier he said that marriage was sexual in nature,
and there's no reason why same-sex marriage couldn't be considered
sexual in nature also, even if it means we have might have to have a
mature discussion about something some people find icky. Also
I'd argue that in modern culture marriage is considered more romantic
in nature than sexual anyway – the lack of provisions for what
constitutes gay consummation doesn't automatically mean marriage
becomes totally disparate from our idea of what sort of relationship
a married couple has. This argument also ignores asexual people of
any orientation, who often still have romantic orientations, and can
and do desire marriage which won't involve sex.
There then follows
some stuff about how marriage is so solemn because of what it means
in Christianity, because of course everyone in the UK is a Christian
and the concept of marriage only comes from Christian countries.
Conclusion
The proposal to change the current
definition of marriage depends on a sense that the man–woman
criterion confers no distinctive social goods and represents an
arbitrary limitation. But this is not the case. Marriage affirms the
equal value of men and women, and promotes the welfare of children.
Moreover, the logic of equal recognition and radical choice means
that the boundaries of any new definition will be far more
vulnerable. Challenges to its exclusivity, its permanence and even
its sexual nature will be unavoidable. Marriage risks becoming any
formalised domestic arrangement between any number of people for any
length of time. On such a trajectory,
marriage will eventually unravel
altogether.
In conclusion, some
people wanting to get married, because they see it as a force for
good, is going to make the rest of our marriages implode.
**
Sigh. Like I said,
I'm not mad. I'm just disappointed.
