The big news of the day is that President Obama, after years of reticence on the topic, has just announced that he supports same-sex marriage.
I don’t suppose this will have much effect on the vote. It’s hard to imagine that his coming out in favor of SSM will snatch any supporters away from Mitt Romney, and although a majority of blacks oppose legalizing same-sex marriage (the latest poll I’ve seen reported 55% opposed and 42% in favor), I doubt that this will cost Mr. Obama much, if any, of his lock on the black vote.
Interestingly, Mr. Obama also said that although he personally approves of same-sex marriage, he thought that decisions about its legality should be left to the States. (Indeed, this just happened yesterday, with North Carolina voters rejecting the idea by a wide margin.) I mention this because I can’t think, offhand, of any other examples of Mr. Obama endorsing this sort of federalism; it isn’t generally his style at all.
Another interesting question, what with a Mormon standing as Mr. Obama’s opponent this fall: what percentage of supporters of same-sex marriage would object to the legalization of polygamous marriages? On what principled basis can they do so?
16 Comments
The principled basis for excluding polygamy is this: in the eyes of the state, marriage is a contract between two people. Where same sex marriage is A-OK, gender is irrelevant. However, in all cases, having two non-related adults who voluntarily agree to get hitched define the necessary and sufficient conditions for marriage.
If polygamists want to form contracts among themselves: go for it. It might be love, but it ain’t marriage, and it doesn’t go together like a horse and carriage.
Re federalism: Obama is just giving his opinion, but he has no power to do anything about it. Each state has its own marriage laws, so it’s clearly an issue for the states. It became something he couldn’t avoid once the prolix Joe Biden opened his pie-hole, so he had to decide between being evasive and being bold. He chose bold.
I do think it is a political loser, and not only because swing states like North Carolina may now be out of reach. It’s the sort of thing which will energize those elements of the Republican base who are less than thrilled with Romney. I think that endorsing same sex marriage was the right thing to do, but not something which will be helpful to him in November.
You haven’t articulated any actual moral or other principle there; you’re just deferring to public opinion. If public opinion shifts, as it has in some states with regard to SSM, then the “eyes of the state” will follow. If we’re willing to redefine “marriage” to include two people of any sex, then why not three, or fifteen? (You can’t appeal to tradition, of course, or any conventional notions of family; that stuff’s already out of play.)
Perhaps you are right that this will be a net loser for Mr. Obama. I certainly hope you are, but I think most social conservatives were already likely to vote for Romney.
If Bob, Carol, Ted, and Alice want to enjoy the same benefits as Malcolm and Nina – provided the state they live in allows them to – that’s fine by me. However, it’s not legalized marriage. It’s legalized polygamy. Polygamy may share some aspects of marriage, but if it’s not two adults, it’s not marriage.
As someone who believes in limited government, I do not believe that the state has any legitimate voice in how individuals choose to live with one another. It should neither promote nor discourage traditional marriage. If people want to live like Ozzie and Harriet, that’s fine; if they don’t, that’s fine too. Hence I think that providing federal benefits like lower tax rates to married couples is invidious discrimination against singles and same sex couples whose states do not allow SSM.
The strongest argument against my position is incest. If the state has no business regulating who does what with whom, then what business does it have in banning incest? This is a puzzler. I am hard-pressed to find a principled basis on which the state can ban Warren Beatty and Shirley MacLaine from forming one awesome couple, if that’s what they wanted to do. The ick factor is not a legitimate principle of jurisprudence. But still.
The exception to all this, of course, is when children are involved. Minors are wards of the state, and the state has a compelling interest in making sure that they reach adulthood in a healthy environment. I’ll concede the notion that incestuous and perhaps polygamous households are sub-optimal. But for households without kids: why not?
Surely you realize that you’re still just begging the question here, no? I’m asking you to what principle, if any, we can appeal for a definition of marriage, and all you’re doing is defining it for me.
This is terra incognita: previously, in every culture on every land-mass on Earth, throughout all of human history, the definition of “marriage” has been the same: a union of people of opposite sexes. If anyone asked why, there were plenty of answers, based on religion, tradition, and the universal understanding that the generation of progeny within the context of a heterosexual union was the atomic foundation of stable societies.
My point is merely that if we rule those principles out of bounds, then we’re free to radically redefine “marriage” in any way we like. (I can hardly see any principled objection to defining it to include polygamy, at the very least.) If that’s what we want, then fine. But let’s be clear.
It’s complicated. From a libertarian, small-government perspective, I’m inclined to agree with you that the best thing would be to get government out of the business of defining marriage altogether. That said, I also understand the importance of tradition and ritual in human societies, and I think we toss them aside far too casually these days. (This isn’t always easy for me; I tend to see religion as having great, perhaps necessary value in forming strong, cohesive, durable human societies, even though I’m an atheist.) I’ll also say that as far as threats to the sanctity and importance of marriage go, the skyrocketing divorce and illegitimacy rate among heterosexuals is a vastly more serious concern.
Does the State have a legitimate interest in preventing incest? If so, why not an equally clamant interest in, say, preventing the generation of imbeciles and the reproduction of the unfit in general? (Because that, after all, is the ostensible reason for banning incest.) This was certainly a respectable position amongst leading intellectuals not so long ago. Given that criminality seems to have a strong genetic component, why not sterilize recidivist felons?
As for your last paragraph:
Can the same argument can be extended, perhaps, to homosexual households? Are we so sure that anything other than a parent (and role model) of each sex isn’t “sub-optimal”? Polygamous families at least have both male and female adults to raise the kids. Can you be sure that homosexual households are more “optimal” than that? How?
Despite what you might think, I really have no axe to grind here, and I’d rather that marriage had nothing to do with the government at all. But I think these are all perfectly reasonable questions. (Unwelcome in polite society these days, perhaps, but reasonable nevertheless.)
How long ago was it that everyone understood, “in the eyes of the state, marriage is a contract between two people” of the opposite gender?
There used to be a line. On one side of that line were people who could marry: Two people, opposite genders. For all the talk of fairness and equality, we have only moved that line a few inches, so on the one side we now have two people, any gender. But aren’t the people on the other side wondering, “why can’t you move it just a bit more to include me and my first cousin (as is done in most of the world, you Eurocentric bigot)? Or me and my four girlfriends, as is done in most of the etc”? What do you say to those people? What is the principle that keeps them on the other side? Won’t they use the same arguments that are used for SSM?
Take Andrew Sullivan’s argument for SSM: Virtually Normal. How hard would it be to write, “Virtually Normal: The Polygamy Edition”. Just change a few words.
Right, Dom. Indeed SSM is more of a leap than polygamy: social recognition of homosexual marriage is, to the best of my knowledge, completely unexampled in human history, whereas polygamy is quite common.
The fact that something may be “unexampled in human history” does not mean that it is right or wrong. It simply means that it is unprecedented. Most — maybe all — societies were male dominated until about a century ago, often allowing few if any rights to women. Slavery was hunky dory for many societies until about two centuries ago. Precedent alone did not justify these practices, nor does it invalidate the efforts to end them.
As a small government enthusiast, my view is that the state has no right telling people how to live their lives, provided the lifestyle one chooses does not interfere with another’s rights. You can swing your arms as far as you’d like, provided they don’t reach my nose. Live and let live. If people choose to live as part of a same sex couple, a polygamous arrangement, a hippie commune, or a kibbutz: these things don’t deprive me of any of my rights, and hence ought to be allowed regardless of whether I approve or disapprove.
The issue of marriage arises because it is a legal contract which confers benefits to its participants: rights of survivorship, lower tax rates, hospital visitation, and so forth. Gay couples have been around since at least ancient Greece, and they do pretty much everything which straight couples do: raise children, pay utility bills, argue about who controls the clicker, and so forth. While gay couples cannot conceive a child without outside help, we do not make procreation a necessary condition for straight couples who wish to marry. The only significant distinction between gay couples and straight couples is that the former prefer to schtup members of their own gender. On what principled basis can the state use this preference to deny gay couples the same civil rights and protections as married couples? What compelling interest does the state have in promoting heterosexual sex?
By the same token: if two men and two women want to live together and enter into a contractual arrangement regarding things like survivorship and visitation rights, under what principled basis should the state prohibit them from doing so?
As one who grew up in the age of Donna Reed, my notion of the ideal family being comprised of Mom & Dad & Bud & Sis does not square with how millions of others choose to live. What right do I have to enforce my worldview on others?
“The issue of marriage arises because it is a legal contract which confers benefits to its participants: rights of survivorship, lower tax rates, hospital visitation, and so forth.”
Okay. The original question was, “What is the principle that allows us to grant these rights to some but not to others?” That was the question that led some states to grant marriage rights to SS couples. When polygamous couples start to ask the same question, what do we say? When they pick up the argument-stopping trick of calling you a bigot if you disagree with them, when the MSM obliges by using this same trick, when they publish children’s books called “Sally has 5 mommies and 3 daddies”, when they find penguins in group marriages, what then?
That wasn’t my (or Dom’s) point (I see that Dom has just responded also). We were just pointing out that once tradition, religion, history, etc, are no longer considerations, it is hard to see any principled objection to defining “marriage” in any way whatsoever, particularly as regards polygamy.
I wonder if the historical/literary record offers many examples of homosexual couples raising children before recent times. I rather doubt it. Even in ancient Greece male homosexuality was generally asymmetrical, with one partner assuming a submissive, feminized role, and the whole arrangement was subject to a good deal of social disapproval, as for example in the plays of Aristophanes. (One thing that characterizes attitudes toward homosexuality both in ancient Greece and now is that it was more widely accepted amongst the aristocracy than by the common people.)
As I said, I think that in social/historical terms the current radical normalization of homosexuality (and by “radical” I refer to the effort to compel normalization all the way down to the “root” of society) is terra incognita. (As is much of the rest of the exponentially changing modern world, of course.)
There is a difference between “defining marriage in any way whatsoever” and extending equal rights to those who live alternative lifestyles. One could allow polygamous groups to form contracts which enable rights of visitation and survivorship without defining them as marriages. The fact that two separate groups may share common rights and privileges does not conflate them into the same thing.
Fine. But then on what consistent principle do we extend the official definition of “marriage” to include the homosexual “alternative lifestyle” (rather than just having homosexuals “form contracts which enable rights of visitation and survivorship without defining them as marriages”), while at the same time denying that same extension to polyamorists, etc?
I care not a fig whether “the official definition of marriage” is extended to gays, or anybody else, provided they have the same rights and privileges as Homer and Marge.
And that’s fine. The public debate, however, and Mr. Obama’s recent pronouncement, are not about the various sorts of civil unions that can confer legal rights upon domestic partnerships (which are generally fairly uncontroversial), but about state-sanctioned “marriage”.
From this: “If polygamists want to form contracts among themselves: go for it. It might be love, but it ain’t marriage …”
To this: “I care not a fig whether “the official definition of marriage” is extended to gays, or anybody else …”
We’re doomed. This country will sanction polyamorous and even first cousin marriages any day now.
I’ll be exercising the option of expressing no opinions on the subject other than to observe these sorts of conversations are not occurring in Arkansas. Not so civilly anyways. Have to say I admire ya’lls various positionings – Go Waka!
Dom on penguins and Peter’s, “I do think it is a political loser, and not only because swing states like North Carolina” brought chortles not only ’cause this subject has finally galvanized hillbillies to abandon the still ongoing feud over Mountain Meadows.
But somehow I find Pete, your using “swing states” gut-busting funny.