Former Governor Jon Huntsman of Utah, who sought the Republican nomination for president in 2013, has edorsed gay marriage, saying in the American Conservative that: Marriage Equality is a Conservative Cause. Very similar to Ken Mehlman’s recent article in the WSJ saying that gay marriage “fosters family values.” In 1989, when most Americans (including me) hardly knew that gay marriage was even an idea, and certainly never imagined that many people would ever take it seriously, Andrew Sullivan wrote: Here Comes the Groom: A (Conservative) Case for Gay Marriage.
Categories: Marriage
I loved this quote by Huntsman:
“Today we have an opportunity to do more: conservatives should start to lead again and push their states to join the nine others that allow all their citizens to marry. I’ve been married for 29 years. My marriage has been the greatest joy of my life. There is nothing conservative about denying other Americans the ability to forge that same relationship with the person they love.”
Judging from the comments following the linked article, Jon Huntsman has opened Pandora’s Box for mainline Republicans. I wonder how the Mormons will handle Jon’s endorsement of ssm, considering the Huntsman family is not small potatoes for the Mormon Church.
Heterosexual couples are the ONLY unions that can create new life for society. Children are a benefit to society. Yes, there are infertile couples but the state cannot inquire about that due to privacy laws. See Standhardt v Arizona(“government inquiry into a couple’s procreation plans or requiring sterility tests before issuing a marriage license would raise serious constitutional questions”)
Expanding benefits to more childless marriages yields no benefit to society. If anything, it’s a waste of tax money.
“Heterosexual couples are the ONLY unions that can create new life for society.”
And both heterosexual and homosexual unions RAISE that life to the point of self-reliance.
Society is actually much less interested in making babies, than in raising them. Birth control and abortion are quite legal; both of those things prevent a baby from being born. However, once a baby is born, someone must raise it. And married couples, committed to staying together for the duration of the child’s inability to be self-reliant, are the best environment for raising a child.
@Kevin wrote “Society is actually less interested in making babies than in raising them.”
Do you have proof to back that up?
Also, is procreation going to stop anytime soon? No.
Should the state regulate procreation? Yes. Why? Because childhood poverty and unmarried parenthood are closely linked. Marriage is the best framework in raising them.
Furthermore, here’s my counter evidence to prove your statement is wrong. See Adams v Howerton(“The state has a compelling interest in encouraging and fostering procreation of the [human] race…”) and providing (“stability to the environment in which children are raised.”)
@zztstenglish
And by marriage, do you mean traditional civil marriage, or a union between two humans?
I read this as procreation is regulated to yield a positive child-rearing outcome. The focus is on the outcome of the result of the procreation, and not on the procreation (e.g. the creation of life). Is that your thrust?
Huh. This is a new anti-ssm tack for me.
Setting aside the gender of the married persons in question for a moment, I don’t see how this argument tracks for even just exclusively heterosexual marriages. The government entitlement of married persons goes back to the earliest days of the Republic, though it has grown and changed since the days when it was primarily a debate over pensions for war widows and their dependent children. Since the end of legal coverture, and the growing economic and legal equality of women throughout the twentieth century, marriage entitlements administered by the government have focused less on husbands providing for wives than they have on overseeing the welfare of dependents and survivors within households.
To cite one common example, being legally married gives a surviving spouse more or less automatic access to such things as life insurance benefits and social security benefits. These have never been contingent on the marriage having produced children, yet serve a public good by ensuring that a vulnerable widow or widower — who had, heretofore, been part of an economic unit of two — will not end up on public assistance, or struggling in poverty.
From my reading about the history of these federal and state-level marriage entitlements, most were actually designed to ensure that the state would not have to care for more impoverished citizens — rather than being some sort of expansion of taxpayer burden, they were rather instated to encourage the formation of household units that would have built-in cooperative care and economic sustainability.
To go back to the war widows example, I heard a lecture back in December on the debates over pensions for war widows in the mid-19th century. There was a great deal of discussion about how to document marriages for the pension administration during that period, due to the fact that marriage was a highly unregulated social institution during the Early Republican period.
But there was fairly uniform agreement that if pensions were going to be distributed, they must be distributed to all widows of soldiers (and not just officers, as was the practice is in many European countries). While there was some debate over what “counted” as a legally-recognized marriage (and thus a pension), the notion that certain couples would be refused the right to marry out of fear that the pension system would break under the weight of payments does not seem to have been part of the debate.
Similarly, in debates over social security in the New Deal era, and other family safety-net benefits, while there were constant debates over who qualified for certain state-funded support, I have yet to come across a proposal that as a nation we restrict the number of people allowed to marry due to fiscal concerns.
@acook – Well, you know what? It would seem your information is outdated. The state does not subsidize marriage “to care for more impoverished citizens.”
http://www.law2.byu.edu/jpl/Vol22.2/Black.pdf
To the contrary, see pg 333 “[Marriage benefits] is, rather, the recognition of the extra costs in MAINTAINING CHILDREN…” See footnote 12 taken from the US Treasury.
The FACT that the state is subsidizing marriage for children should tell you something.
zztstenglish, as I think has been pointed out in other threads, Black has a very particular vision of marriage law that is not a straightforward “fact” but rather one interpretation of an enormously complicated and evolving field of policy and precedent.
For example, dependent children are certainly among our most vulnerable citizens, so your point about marriage benefits which support the care of dependents (a category that once included wives by default, and can now sometimes included a care-giving, unemployed spouse) is not necessarily incompatible with my historical analysis. I venture to suggest that my information is not so much “outdated” as it is an historical perspective on present-day circumstances, a window into the legal pathways that inform our current system.
I ask in all seriousness what your solution to this question of taxpayer “waste” going to childless families might be.
Is your vision one of restructuring the entitlements system wholesale so that it is no longer dependent on marriage, but rather on the care-giver relationship? There are certainly some compelling arguments for this revision, however difficult it would be to implement, being more rational in today’s social context than a structure developed around outdated notions of work and gender.
Or are you suggesting that marriage be restructured to exclude those who are not providing dependent care? Perhaps marriages would be entered into (and supported by the state) at the advent of the first child — a common practice, in fact, in Colonial New England — and then dissolved when the last child became economically self-sufficient?
Or do you have some other vision of the state-marriage interaction that falls somewhere else on the matrix?
@zzstenglish
Your reference shows that state subsidies are given to all parents, not just married ones. The child credit is certainly not the greatest benefit there. Arguably, the disabled non-earning dependent is.
How does this support your argument that “marriage is about procreation” (or perhaps more to the point, refute acooks recounts of historical motivation for marriage subsidy)?
@Anna says “Black has a very particular vision of marriage law…”
Wha?? How can it be a ‘particular vision’ when he got it directly from the US Treasury? Sorry, but that’s completely baseless.
http://www.sfu.ca/~allen/samesexmarriage.pdf
Next, I suggest you read the link above that answers your inquiry. Think of it this way after you review it: The state INVESTS in marriage / families through subsidies and the RETURN on that investment are productive participants (ie: the children) in society. In other words, children are the state’s futue workforce who’ll one day defend the nation, run the economy, etc. I urge you to understand the economic argument.
@zztstenglish
If I could borrow from your posts this week, I think you yourself have provided numerous arguments against your position, starting with the very response in which you asked for ‘proof’.
The argument here clearly states that the focus is child-rearing, not child creation.
The facts from the Treasury here clearly show that all parents (single or otherwise) receive subsidies for children. No subsidy is cited for the creation of the child.
And this reference clearly repeatedly refers to the raising of the child, even going as far as to say “Within the NIE wealth is defined broadly, so that raising successful children, if this is the
desire of the couple, is a form of wealth.”
(Asterisks above, my own, for emphasis).
Do women who offer their infant child up for adoption receive subsidy from the government for the ‘creation of a human’?
I’m having some difficulty understanding a pattern that might elucidate your position (other than your affection of jurisprudence). I again ask if you might help me better understand your position?
zztstenglish, we seem to be talking past one another, and I’m not sure if that is because you are not actually listening to what I am saying, whether I am framing my comments poorly, or whether we are simply seeing things that differently that communication is rocky.
You accuse me of making “baseless” claims about Black’s vision of marriage due to the fact he has quoted aspects of US Treasury law. I point you back to my earlier examples of the ways in which marriage entitlements are not dependent on procreation or responsibility for children. Yes, some tax credits and benefits are particular to parents, but as others have pointed out these are not dependent upon marriage but parenthood. These two systems work in tandem to, I would argue, try and shield the most vulnerable in society from economic destitution. Indeed, many of them have their roots in the efforts of the federal government to assist citizens suffering during the Great Depression.
Your linked PDF is to an assessment of same-sex marriage laws from an economic perspective; I asked you not for your position on same-sex marriage specifically, but rather marriage law holistically. It is a practical reality that our marriage laws and entitlements were not designed specifically for parents, nor are they serving only parents today. My question for you was, given that reality, where you imagine us going from here. Do you wish to restrict marriage, for financial reasons, only to couples who are actively parenting? Do you wish to remove marriage-based entitlements from our federal benefits system? Do you have some third way I haven’t thought of for remedying this fiscal issue you seem concerned about?
Finally, if anything marriage equality appears to generate wealth rather than drain the economy. See, for example, this story from the Huffington Post:
I hope that you might be willing to expand a little more on your own position on marriage entitlements in general rather than separating out same-sex couples whose entry into marriage you are so opposed to on economic grounds. It seems like the complaints about marriage entitlements you have equally apply to heterosexual couples, as they too enjoy marriage benefits under the same legal system as same-sex couples who can now marry (at least on the local level).
It seems to me that until very recently in the u.s benefits were given to women because husbands were expected to support wives and wives were not able to support themselves. This was partly the was the economy and education worked and partly the fact that women had children and raised them.
So in a way the benefits were about children and in a way they were not.
At this point marriage benefits are more mutual. I would say that although they have changed they are still both about helping a spouse and about children. One of the justifications for helping a spouse is that raising children may mean one partner gives up some of their economic goods or earning power. I don’t think that is all there is to it though. It is also good for society if older spouses stay together and help each other deal with health issues, for example.
Gremlint:
If sterile couples are worthless to society then elderly couples shouldn’t marry. You could also ask each married couple for a birth certificate of a child after 5 years of marriage. Those who don’t present one will have their marriage dissolved. I’m guessing you support this?
And since optimal parenting is what marriage is all about, then you should oppose the marriage of poor people. Poverty is just as bad or even worse for children than a lack of gender-complementarity.
Making babies versus raising them – society is and must be interested in both! In the past we actually regulated both, but now we have more freedom. We do not punish people for pre-marital or extra-marital sex. This is good.
However we do have an interest in trying to make sure that children are made with people who want to raise them. We just need to find ways to encourage hat without turning intonation repressive society.
Will, I think you’re missing the point by oversimplifying what I wrote.
I wrote that sterile homosexual unions are relatively worthless to society (relative to heterosexual unions, which are fertile in principle). You twisted that into all sterile unions are worthless to society. Do you see the difference? Do you see why what you wrote is therefore a straw man?
Marriage is fundamentally linked to procreation and child rearing. Incidental infertility and contraception does not break that link, because:
(1) the overwhelming majority of married heterosexual couples do have children (in sharp contrast to homosexual couples)
(2) the state is constitutionally prohibited from screening couples for fertility (see Griswold v. Connecticut, 1965), and
(3) all heterosexual couples still model the family form in society that is best for procreation and child rearing.
“(2) the state is constitutionally prohibited from screening couples for fertility (see Griswold v. Connecticut, 1965), and”
That can certainly not mean that the state can’t use any information about a couple to determine whether they are capable of procreation. Because that is exactly what you are proposing right now, that the state take into account sex in determining whether a couple can procreate. If that is the case, then why not the age of the partners? That’s not intrusive, and no couple over 65 has ever procreated. And birth certificates are something the government already has. There’s no violation of a right to privacy there.
“(3) all heterosexual couples still model the family form in society that is best for procreation and child rearing.”
How can they be a model for any family form when there are no children? All you are saying is that infertile heterosexual couples are heterosexual which is, on your view, an aspect of the best way for raising children. But a life-long commitment is also an aspect of the best way for raising children. So a married same-sex couple can also model aspects of an optimal procreative and child-rearing arrangement.
If anything, infertile married couples are a bad model for your conception of marriage since they show that marriage and procreation aren’t necessarily connected. The infertility argument is one of the most popular arguments in favor of SSM.
The idea that society even needs anyone to “model the family form in society that is best for procreation and child rearing” is doubtful.
You ignored my other argument that you are paying an inordinate amount of attention to one aspect of what you think is good parenting, gender-complementarity. If the proper response to a couple’s sub-optimal parenting ability is denying them the right to marry, then you should also make poor couples wait till they get more income before they can marry. There are so many ways to be a bad parent. To zero in on gender complementarity is highly selective.
Gremlint wrote:
And the overwhelming majority of heterosexual couples who marry after the age of 65 do not have children (in sharp contrast to younger heterosexual couples).
Why do you support restricting marriage based on sex, but not based on age? Both are significant barriers to procreative ability. You’re simply drawing the line where you want to.
,
As already pointed out, they would not have to do this for older married couples; it would be a safe assumption that the couple would not be able to procreate.
This is perhaps the most ludicrous point. “All” heterosexual couples certainly do not model the family form that is best for procreation and child rearing. There are abusive marriages, marriages where one partner is in prison, and marriages of addicts and alcoholics. Less extreme is the example brought up earlier of parents in poverty, which is not an ideal position for child-rearing. Step-families are also proven to be less than ideal. Marrying one’s former mistress is less than ideal. And yet, we do not stop any of these people from marrying.
As for your point about sterile marriages being useless to society, that is simply not true. Married people, whether they have children or not, are good for society because they are less likely to go on welfare, less likely to commit a crime or go to prison, less likely to be addicts, and more likely to contribute to the economy. If you can’t see any benefits of marriage to society beyond making babies, you’re not even trying.
Those claiming to argue for “traditional marriage” are actually arguing for “anything goes, as long as they are heterosexual.” None of the distinctions between straight and gay couples the anti-gays have tried to use to justify their position stand up to even the slightest amount of logical scrutiny. And when your justifications are so clearly arbitrary or illogical, it’s only natural for people to wonder if they are simply motivated by prejudice.
“all heterosexual couples still model the family form in society that is best for procreation and child rearing.”
Not if they don’t have children, if you believe marriage is about procreation and child-raising. Can’t have it both ways. Childless couples are bad PR for marriage as a vehicle for procreation and child-raising. Now if “creating a committed couple” is the purpose of marriage, and I think it is, more than creating and raising babies, then same-sex couples are just as useful for telegraphing that purpose.
@Anna – Hmm…strange. My post to you yesterday is not appearing for some reason. Anyway, please review those docs that I submitted that refute your claim that benefits are not related to family. The evidence is crystal clear.
Next, I’m aware of that Huffington post article. But does it include pending litigation costs that are costly to the taxpayers? IE: Us v Windsor. And should DOMA get struck down, does that estimate include federal benefits? We are talking about billions of dollars per year of lost revenue
The issue though, is that we shouldn’t let people make children with someone of the same sex. That’s always been what marriage meant and should always mean that the couple is approved to make children. So SSM means approving of people making children with someone of the same sex, and we don’t have to approve that and we shouldn’t approve that, any more than we have to approve of people making children with their sister or daughter. Even an 80 year old marriage is allowed to have procreative sex and they should not be prohibited from having children. They probably won’t have children, but they are allowed to, they have a right to. But we don’t have to approve of them using surrogates and donors, or any one using that stuff, because the right doesn’t mean a right to other people’s children, and is not a guarantee of success, it isn’t a right to a baby, especially one from outside the marriage, so banning 3PR or even IVF would not ban any right of any heterosexual marriage.
We also don’t have to ban 3PR at all, we could leave it a wild west like it is, where same-sex couples have babies made for them, and still withhold the official approval and benefits that come with marriage and reserve marriage for couples that have a right to procreate. But we need to acknowledge the difference between having a right to procreate and not having a right to procreate and merely getting away with unethical things.
@Diane says ” We do not punish people for pre-marital or extra-marital sex.”
But that’s the very thing the state is trying to avoid. Why? Because it can lead to unwanted children.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tanf
A quote: “legislation included reducing out-of-wedlock births and increasing rates and stability of marriages”
Will wrote:
See the third item from my previous comment. Furthermore, men over the age of 65 do not become sterile. So your proposal would lead to discrimination by gender, as old men would retain a right denied to old women. The state avoids all of this by simply recognizing heterosexual unions as the form that leads to significant social benefit.
Your regurgitation of the infertility canard obfuscates the issue by confusing incidental circumstances with the general characteristics of a class. It’s dishonest, and you need to stop.
Heterosexual raise children with gender complementarity and in a way that the children intimately known those who brought them into this world. Homosexual couples are biologically incapable of doing that.
Your argument fails spectacularly because you act as if one common feature between homosexual unions and heterosexual unions were sufficient to make them equally beneficial to children.
“The state avoids all of this by simply recognizing heterosexual unions as the form that leads to significant social benefit.”
And the states are starting to recognize the significant social benefit of treating all citizens equally under the law, regardless of sexual orientation, as well as seeing all children raised by a secure married couple. These are enormously important social benefits. Obviously it’s more important to society that a same-sex couple raising children be married than a childless different-sex couple.
But since there is no scarcity of marriage licenses, society can maximize the social good by maximizing the number and kind of couples allowed to marry.
“Furthermore, men over the age of 65 do not become sterile. So your proposal would lead to discrimination by gender, as old men would retain a right denied to old women.”
They are being discriminated against due to their fertility, not their sex. Not all women are being prohibited to marry, just those over 65.
“Your regurgitation of the infertility canard obfuscates the issue by confusing incidental circumstances with the general characteristics of a class. It’s dishonest, and you need to stop.”
Couples belong to many classes not just the heterosexual or homosexual class. They can also belong to the class of couples where a woman is over 65 or to the class of couples in poverty. Your view is that the only class which we can legitimately use to exclude couples from marriage is sex. That’s completely arbitrary.
“Heterosexuals raise children with gender complementarity and in a way that the children intimately known those who brought them into this world. Homosexual couples are biologically incapable of doing that.
Your argument fails spectacularly because you act as if one common feature between homosexual unions and heterosexual unions were sufficient to make them equally beneficial to children.”
I didn’t say that. You claimed that infertile heterosexuals should be permitted to marry since they “model the family form in society that is best for procreation and child rearing.” I responded that same-sex couples should also be permitted to marry if that is the case. Both heterosexual and same-sex couples can model certain aspects of what you view as the ideal family form. Infertile heterosexuals can model gender complementarity and lifelong commitment. Same-sex couples can model lifelong commitment. Infertile heterosexual couples more closely model your vision of the ideal family than same-sex couples, but they are not a perfect model (since they lack children, and therefore cannot model the practices of an ideal family other than being heterosexual and married). The difference between the capabilities of each type of couple to model the “ideal family” is a difference of degree.
You didn’t respond to my other claims: that it is unnecessary for infertile couples to model marriage and that infertile couples are a bad model for procreation-centered marriage.
And, once again, you have ignored my argument about poor couples.
Will D. Raison, infertile cousins don’t “model marriage,” they get married, just like all marriages. They don’t have to kids, but they are allowed to have kids and we recognize their commitment and love for each other and let them have kids. No one ever says that a married couple may not have kids, everyone approves of them living as husband and wife, sleeping together, having sex, and making babies with each other. We never say they can live with each other but not procreate, that they must make kids with some sperm donor or surrogate. But that is what same-sex couples must do, so if we say they may marry we have to say 3PR and ART is legal, moral and ethical, equal to a young newlywed couple that might be poor or might have low intelligence genes. Those aren’t equal rights, the poor couple has a 100% right to procreate, and there is 0% right to use 3PR. IF 3PR is allowed and said to satisfy the right of marriage to procreate equal to male-female marriages, then there is nothing special about the right to do it naturally, with their own genes, and people will be pressured and lose respect of society for having babies naturally instead of using ART and having better babies. That would be really expensive and would destroy the basis of equality and rights, which is that we are all created equal.
zztstenglish,
It doesn’t seem that we have a lot left to say to one another. I have already “reviewed” your links and explained my reasons for disagreeing with them, and asked you to expand upon your own reasoning — which you have not done.
I have also asked you to clarify why, in your mind, the fear of lost revenue from jointly-filed tax returns at the federal level justifies excluding same-sex couples rather than simply reforming the tax code so that all married couples are paying at a sustainable level. You have not followed up on that either. You just repeated your earlier claim that allowing same-sex couples to marry will equal a loss of revenue. My request to you is that you a) explain why that is an acceptable reason for sex-based discrimination, and b) why it is NOT acceptable to approach the revenue question through other avenues.
@Anna
A) I did explain but for some reason, my post did not appear. So, I had to re-write and shorten it.
B) “simply reforming the tax code” Because it jeopardizes the very benefits you seek which were designed for families / children. See pg 352 from Black’s document(“Congress would have to REPEAL ALL BENEFITS for marriage or engage in a major overhaul of the tax code. Failure to do so would mean inconsistency and years of uncertainty litigating marriage benefit issues.”)
C) Marriage denial was not based on gender discrimination but, rather, the inability to procreate between 2 men or 2 women. See Baker v Nelson
D) “approach the revenue question through other avenues” Which could be through cuts in marriage benefits as pointed out in point b above. Hence, this affects heterosexual couples to no fault of their own.
gremlint,
“I wrote that sterile homosexual unions are relatively worthless to society (relative to heterosexual unions, which are fertile in principle). You twisted that into all sterile unions are worthless to society. Do you see the difference?”
Is your clarification supposed to be a redeeming one with respect to your original statement?
Because…. it’s not.
tax returns is no more discriminatory than it is to singles. than it is discriminatory for singles to have to pay a lower deduction than married.
We argue a lot on this site about whether the purpose of marriage is romantic love or making babies.
For most people, it’s both. Before birth control, what else would it be? (Well, sex, but that went with love and making babies for most couples.)
I believe that it’s both, but for a couple, it’s more about love, while for Society of the state, it’s more about the babies.
Here’s the thing, though – most people don’t think that “I want to make babies with you” is a good reason to get married.
http://familyscholars.org/2013/02/20/pew-why-get-married/
Having children may play a part in our decision to marry, but we modern Americans tend to see it as using another person, settling, and maybe even wrong.
We also tend to think that marriage is about love and that people shouldn’t stay together for the sake of their children.
http://familyscholars.org/2013/02/24/remember-when-marriage-was-an-institution/
What we think should keep a family together is love. Lasting love is what most people want to find. (Anyhow a lot of young women on Pinterest certainly are into it.)
So if the argument is that heterosexual couples can strengthen marriage by fitting into the model of people who can make babies, I would like to suggest:
Maybe if we want people to get married and stay married, we should be showing them models of people who love each other.
Maybe the gay couple who have been together 28 years and just got married could be a fantastic model of what love and commitment mean.
@Manny,
There are a number of thoughtful responses to your concerns over ART written by philosophers and activists. I’d encourage you, for example, to read Christine Overall’s Why Have Children: The Ethical Debate in which she spends a great deal of time parsing out the difference between a) not impinging upon human beings procreative agency, and b) an active “right to reproduce.” Quite simply, while there is a long history of ethical and legal thought that argues that we cannot stop people (i.e. through forced sterilization) from exercising reproductive choice, it doesn’t follow that every person can simply demand that society enable their reproductive actions. Not all heterosexual people seeking to procreate will find willing (sexual or reproductive or parenting) partners. Some people will face physical barriers to procreation. Overall argues that it is not unethical for a government to decide they will not cover IVF treatment as a “right,” for example, choosing instead to allocate those resources toward existing children (or some other social good).
Therefore, I don’t believe that your belief that same-sex marriage automatically entails same-sex couples access to reproductive technologies to be accurate or persuasive. We don’t guarantee heterosexual people, even when married, the right to access all technologies or other aides to assist with reproduction. We could decide, as a society, to outlaw all ART due to ethical concerns, without any reference to same-sex marriage.
@Diane – And what about arranged marriages? How can a couple love each other when they haven’t even met? Yet, arranged marriages are permitted.
The state does not regulate love. You’re confusing your PERSONAL reasons for marriage rather than the STATE’S reasons for marriage.
Annajcook. I’ll check out that book, it sounds right to me. I agree there could be a ban on ART and it wouldn’t violate any marriage’s rights because marriage isn’t a right to a child, it’s just the approval of possible children, they can’t be sterilized and shouldn’t be rendered infertile. Marriage also isn’t a right to acquire children from outside the marriage either. But I’m not just arguing that SSM makes it impossible to ban ART, I’m saying we shouldn’t approve of a same-sex couple making children, and marriage should always approve of that. Yes, I think we can and should ban 3PR and certainly not cover 3PR in mandated insurance. But we probably won’t ban it and probably will cover it in mandated health insurance, since access to ART is the real demand even moreso than all 1037 Benefits of marriage (which they are willing to move slowly on, state by state, leaving millions of same-sex couples worse off). And there is an argument that if we don’t ban same-sex couples using donors and surrogates, then we in fact approve of same-sex couples having kids, and should allow same-sex marriage. But there is a middle ground between banning ART and approving of same-sex couples making children, which is not giving same-sex couples equal marriage rights and withholding the approval and incentive, but still leaving all that stuff legal. We don’t have to ban all ART right away to justify withholding approval of same-sex couples making children.
The state’s reason for marriage has always been about inheritance, not procreation. Procreation is only incidental to inheritance. Marriage simplifies matters for the courts, as most people don’t have a will. Recognizing spouses as primary inheritors means fewer probate cases. (And spouses *are* primary inheritors, over and above children).
@La Luba says “The state’s reason for marriage has always been about inheritance, nor procreation”
Where’s your evidence? Here’s my proof that in fact links marriage and procreation. See Loving v Virginia(“Marriage is…fundamental to our existence and survival”) Marriage wouldn’t be ‘fundamental’ to our ‘existence’ and ‘survival’ if it had nothing to do with the procreative potential.
And the Loving Court’s subsequent action CONFIRMS what that quote means when they rejected gay marriage in Baker v Nelson only 5 years later.
not at all La Lubu.
there are plenty of cultures in which spouses don’t inherit from each other. they still regulate marriage.
Once marriage is a regulated institution, THEN inheritance laws can be passed to cover the marital relationship, not the other way around.
Kisarita, I was speaking of how marriage operates in the United States.
Zztstenglish, there is ample evidence that even without marriage, people will still voluntarily procreate. While there are threats to human survival as a species, lack of marriage and lack of children aren’t among them. Just saying—the U.S. has never required children in order to validate a marriage.
I am struck by the number of people on this thread who seem bound and determined to reduce the meaning (legal or social) of marriage to a single thing — inheritance rights, procreation, etc. Historically and across cultures, marriage has (always?) been multifaceted — see the books on history of marriage by E.J. Graff and Stephanie Coontz for two lengthy treatments of the topic. Why can’t marriage be about children AND economics AND love and in various relationships emphasize some of those things over the others (and vice versa)? Flexibility seems to be one of marriage’s strength as a socio-economic institution.
Why is it so important (for those who express this desire) to boil marriage down to its single “essential” purpose? My cynical self suspects that most of those attempts end up being an exercise in jury-rigging a meaning by which same-sex couples are excluded “by definition” from the One True Intent of marriage. But perhaps there are other reasons such seekers would give?
@Anna – But nobody disputes marriage has had different meanings across different cultures. The reason why love is irrelevant in this discussion is because the state does not regulate love. That’s your PERSONAL reason for marriage not the STATE’S reason. Homosexuals can love their partner all they want without state recognition.
The reason why this discussion has centered around procreation and child-rearing is because that’s why the state took an interest in marriage to begin with.
Re: Having children may play a part in our decision to marry, but we modern Americans tend to see it as using another person, settling, and maybe even wrong.
heaven forbid, that ‘we modern Americans (who? all of us?)’ might actually be, you know, wrong about our views of what marrige ought to be. Truth and morality aren’t the sort of thing that boil down to oppinion polls.
I don’t mind that gay couples have the legal right to marry, but they don’t match up to my ideal of what makes a marriage, and I would never put forth a same-sex couple as a model of what marriage should be.
Re: While there are threats to human survival as a species, lack of marriage and lack of children aren’t among them
Lack of children isn’t a problem for the species as a whole, but it’s certainly a problem for some countries, and some subcultures within the United States. Fortunately, it’s a self correcting problem in the long run. People who like children (which is probably largely genetic) are going to have more of them, people who don’t will have fewer of them, and the genetic composition and values of the population will change. The future belongs to the fertile.
@La Luba
1. Please supply your evidence.
2. “lack of children” Is procreation coming to a halt anytime soon? Answer: No. Should the state regulate procreation? Answer: Yes. Why? Because childhood poverty and unmarried parenthood are closely linked.
3. “the U.S. has never required children in order to validate a marriage.” That’s because the state cannot inquire about that due to privacy laws. For evidence, see Standhardt v Arizona(“government inquiry into a couples’ procreation plans or requiring sterility tests before issuing a marriage license would raise serious constitutional questions”)
Just because the law cannot perfectly delineate the fertile / infertile distinction doesn’t mean marriage isn’t about procreation. It just means the state uses imprecise ways through the gender prerequisites (man+woman) and subsidies. Besides, why do you think the state is subsidizing marriages for? You think they do it for fun? What’s the logical reasoning behind it?
Diane M.
Beautifully, simply put, Diane.
It is simply inarguable that committed, loving couples who vow to take care of each other above all else are good for society.
zztstenglish:
I agree with this, but it certainly doesn’t help your case. By keeping certain children’s parents from marrying, you are ensuring that more children will unnecessarily live in poverty.
And the state could easily implement another imprecise way of delineating between fertile and infertile couples, through an age prerequisite.
Or, we could come to our senses and realize that the state is concerned with marriage for reasons other than just procreation.
The benefits of marriage to society other than responsible procreation are obvious, and have already been pointed out to you. You’ve chosen to ignore them.
@Chris – “age prerequisite”
http://students.law.drake.edu/lawReview/docs/lrVol58-allen.pdf
See page 1056 – 1057 “Like the infertile couple, it is difficult to identify all elderly couples ex ante. It is easy to identify two octogenarians at the local senior center as elderly, but not so easy to identify the marginal elderly couple, who are perhaps in their forties. Nor is it low cost to identify an elderly male marrying a younger woman as an elderly couple. Over time, and with the advancement of reproductive technology that extends female fecundity, this identification has become even more difficult. Hundreds of women in their fifties now give birth each year and in 2008, a seventy-year-old woman in India gave birth to twins…”
zztstenglish:
“The reason why love is irrelevant in this discussion is because the state does not regulate love. That’s your PERSONAL reason for marriage not the STATE’S reason. Homosexuals can love their partner all they want without state recognition.”
And if you reduce same-sex marriage supporters’ arguments to us asking for a permission slip from the government to love our partners, you severely misunderstand and ignore many of the arguments rendered in favor of same-sex marriage.
Can you name some of the reasons same-sex couples and allies give for state recognition of same-sex marriage?
I’ll also add that I’ve been following this thread without commenting, and I find your confidence in your conclusions, given the evidence you’re offering, to be a bit too hasty and, therefore, unwarranted. It’s nice when people on the Internet offer evidence, and as an attorney I like to see people citing court cases.
However, the sources you are citing are not as definitively authoritative as you seem to believe they are. At most, they are useful to generate a conversation over arguable conclusions. As for “proving” your contentions, I’m not persuaded. But, it generally takes much more to convince me of anything than, to paraphrase your approach, “here, this link proves I’m right.”
zztstenglish: provide my evidence? As in, you doubt that the numbers as listed in U.S. government statistics of unmarried women still giving birth and raising children are wrong? If you think those numbers are greatly exaggerated, I don’t know what to tell you except that maybe you need to get out more.
Also: the state is not invalidating childless marriages in the U.S. The U.S. also has a long-standing practice of recognizing the marriages of people who clearly cannot have children—postmenopausal women. That’s also well established in U.S. government statistics, but again—-if you don’t recognize their validity, I don’t know what to tell you. I can assure you that as our population ages, more older women are marrying, and no one is discouraging them from doing so despite their infertility.
@LaLuba – Yeah, but you never supplied the link or documentation to what you said “The state’s reason for marriage has always been about inheritance”
Next, you wrote “the state is not invalidating childless marriages in the U.S”
See Equal Protection v Bruning pp108-109(“Even if the [procreative] classification at issue here is to some extent both underinclusive and overinclusive, PERFECTION IS NOT REQUIRED TO SATISFY EQUAL PROTECTION STANDARDS, and such imperfection as exists can be rationally related to the secondary objective of legislative convenience.”)
There is no imperfection, ZZ, because we aren’t trying to prevent couples that won’t have children from marrying, we are trying to prevent couples that should not have children from marrying. It’s not about ability to succeed it’s about the abstract right in principle to have children. We should not let anyone say that a married man and a woman have the same right to have children that a same-sex couple do.