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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 06 March 2013
This essay is about liberal and conservative views of marriage. I'll begin by mentioning that I would really, really like to avoid use of the terms ‘liberal’ and ‘conservative’, but when push comes to shove, I know of no better labels for the positions that will be discussed in what follows. I would like to avoid these labels for a simple reason: many people strongly self-identify as liberals or as conservatives, and this can undermine our ability to investigate the topic in a sane, rational way. Politics, at least in the contemporary English-speaking world, functions a lot like the world of sports. Many people have a particular team to which their allegiance has been pledged, and the team's successes and failures on the field are shared in the hearts and minds of its loyal followers. In my own case – and here, I ask for your pity – I am a fan of the National Football League's Cleveland Browns. As much as I might wish things were otherwise, I rejoice in the Browns' (rare) triumphs and suffer when they lose (which happens frequently). I do not wait to see what happens in the game before I decide which team to cheer for; if it's an NFL game, and I see orange and brown, I know where my allegiance lies. Furthermore, I identify with my fellow Browns fans in a way that I cannot identify with followers of, say, the Pittsburgh Steelers. Clevelanders are my people. We share something, and what we share unites us in opposition to Steeler Nation. Their victories are our defeats. It is a zero-sum game: for one of us to win, the other must lose.
1 For an excellent discussion of the issues surrounding these principles, see Eberle, C.'s ‘Religion and Liberal Democracy’ in The Blackwell Guide to Social and Political Philosophy, ed. Simon, Robert L. (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2002), 292–318Google Scholar.
2 See Girgis, Sherif, George, Robert P., and Anderson, Ryan T., ‘What Is Marriage?’, Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy, vol. 34, no. 1 (2010), 245–87Google Scholar; Gallagher, Maggie, ‘What Is Marriage For? The Public Purposes of Marriage Law’, Louisiana Law Review, vol. 62 (April 2002), 773–91Google Scholar; and Beckwith's contributions to ‘The Same-Sex Marriage Debate’ Philosophia Christi, vol. 7, no. 1 (2005)Google Scholar, respectively.
3 I say ‘practically speaking’ because an opponent of same-sex marriage would be technically correct in saying that homosexuals would still have the right to marry, even if marriage is defined so as to exclude same-sex couples, because every individual citizen, regardless of sexual orientation, would have the right to marry someone of the opposite sex if he or she wanted to do so (and if the other party consented). This, of course, is small consolation for the person who loves and wants to marry someone of the same sex.
4 Many of the ideas in this section can be found in Girgis et al. (supra).
5 Witness Kim Kardashian, who is in the news as I write this essay, divorcing her husband after just seventy-two days of wedded bliss. Many marriage liberals have expressed the sentiment of George Takei, who sarcastically tweeted on October 31, 2011, ‘Kim Kardashian files for divorce after 72 days. Another example of how same-sex marriage is destroying the sanctity of the very institution.’ This is an unfair criticism of the conservative view (at least in its strongest form), which takes 72-day marriages to be both (i) a serious problem and (ii) a natural consequence of the social construct view of marriage that underlies the liberal position.
6 Budziszewski, J., ‘The Illusion of Gay Marriage’, Philosophia Christi, vol. 7, no. 1 (2005), 52Google Scholar.
7 Girgis et al., 256.
8 In this respect, the analogy to a baseball team fails, for we can imagine a genuine baseball team whose purpose is merely to entertain, and to do so by always losing – sort of a Washington-Generals-meets-the-Bad-News-Bears kind of thing.
9 Girgis et al., 254.
10 One might think that the existence of asexual reproductive technologies, such as somatic cell nuclear transfer, are devastating for these conservative claims, but that is not the case. The conservative is making a metaphysical claim about what makes it the case that two persons become one entity in intercourse. This does not imply a denial of other methods being sufficient for the creation of a new human organism.
11 No one, so far as I am aware, disagrees with this claim, though the details are somewhat contentious. Conservatives often claim that studies have shown that children do best when raised by both of their biological parents (Cf. Girgis et al., 257–59.), but this seems misleading. What is uncontroversial is that, on average, it is better for children to be raised by both of their parents than to be raised in a single-parent home or placed in foster care. Compared to children raised by loving same-sex couples, however, some current research indicates that the children of heterosexual parents are no better off. (See, for example, Gartrell, N. and Bos, H., ‘US National Longitudinal Lesbian Family Study: Psychological Adjustment of 17-Year-Old Adolescents’, Pediatrics, vol. 126, no. 1 (2010), 28–36CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed. For criticism of these claims, see Regnerus, Mark, ‘How different are the adult children of parents who have same-sex relationships? Findings from the New Family Structures Study’, Social Science Research, vol. 41, no. 4 (July 2012), 752–77CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed, which appeared in print while the present essay was under review.) But I am getting ahead of myself.
12 This is another point that might seem to be easily falsified by reproductive technologies, but it is not. A clone of me, for example, would be the genetic offspring of my mother and father.
13 Cf. Girgis et al., 276–79.
14 ‘All the Single Ladies’, The Atlantic (November 2011), 133Google Scholar.
15 Ibid.
16 Ibid, 136.
17 Readers interested in data from the social sciences are referred to the essays cited in n. 11. The Regnerus essay has generated considerable controversy since its publication; forcritical discussion, see William Saletan's ‘Back in the Gay’ [available online at <http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/human_nature/2012/06/new_family_structures_study_is_gay_parenthood_bad_or_is_gay_marriage_good_.html>], and ‘A Liberal War on Science?’ [available online at <http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/human_nature/2012/06/don_t_let_criticism_of_the_new_gay_parents_study_become_a_war_on_science.html>]; as well as Ana Samuel, ‘The Kids Aren't All Right: New Family Structures and the “No Differences” Claim’ [available online at <http://www.thepublicdiscourse.com/2012/06/5640>]. (All hyperlinks accessed 06 July 2012.)