The National Review Online has an odious editorial up called “The Future of Marriage.” The editorial makes three main points:
- Contrary to what many people think, same-sex marriage is not becoming “markedly” more accepted, and in states that make it easy for residents to amend their constitution to define marriage as exclusively heterosexual, they will do so.
- Those states that have recognized same-sex marriage the “democratic” way — through legislative action — are making a big mistake.
- The purpose of marriage is to provide a societally approved mechanism for a heterosexual couple to raise children.
In other words, the same old garbage, expressed with a particularly glaring disrespect for facts, reality, and just plain old common-sense:
Both as a social institution and as a public policy, marriage exists to foster connections between heterosexual sex and the rearing of children within stable households. [Says who? Where is this written or substantively demonstrated?] It is a non-coercive way to channel (heterosexual) desire into civilized patterns of living. [Again, according to whom? What are “civilized patterns of living”? Why is heterosexual marriage more “civilized” than same-sex marriage? For that matter, why is heterosexual sex within marriage more civilized than heterosexual sex outside of marriage, or raising children outside of marriage?] State recognition of the marital relationship does not imply devaluation of any other type of relationship, whether friendship or brotherhood. [Same-sex unions are not “friendship” or “brotherhood.” They are physically and emotionally intimate romantic unions, exactly the same as heterosexual unions. If two consenting adults love each other and want to marry, but by law cannot do so, that is devaluation of their relationship. Yes it is.] State recognition of those other types of relationships is unnecessary. [And no one argues otherwise. Friendship and brotherhood are not marriage.] So too is the governmental recognition of same-sex sexual relationships, committed or otherwise, in a deep sense pointless. [Why?]
No, we do not expect marriage rates to plummet and illegitimacy rates to skyrocket in these jurisdictions over the next decade. But to the extent same-sex marriage is normalized here, it will be harder for American culture and law to connect marriage and parenthood. [Why? Same-sex marriage and parenthood are not mutually exclusive — and heterosexual marriage and parenthood are not always or necessarily connected.] That it has already gotten harder over the last few decades is no answer to this concern. [Because you don’t want it to be.] In foisting same-sex marriage on Iowa, the state’s supreme court opined in a footnote that the idea that it is best for children to have mothers and fathers married to each other is merely based on “stereotype.” [Well, it’s certainly not based on science, demonstrated fact, or common sense.]
All of the above arguments are circular. They argue for the legitimacy of a prejudice in terms of the prejudice. And they are no different in kind from this:
“Almighty God created the races white, black, yellow, malay and red, and he placed them on separate continents. And but for the interference with his arrangement there would be no cause for such marriages. The fact that he separated the races shows that he did not intend for the races to mix.”
How is this any different from “God created Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve”?
More commentary from Nate Silver at FiveThirtyEight.com, John Holbo at Crooked Timber, The Anonymous Liberal, and Tyler Cowen at Marginal Revolution. The latter makes a point that is not made nearly often enough:
I have a simple hypothesis about the cross-sectional econometrics. If you take the heterosexual couples who engage in the practice which is sometimes “associated” with male gay marriage, I predict those couples will favor legal gay marriage to an astonishingly high degree. Their marriage is already “affiliated” with that practice, and so the notion of legally married gay men (and the practices which go along with that) does not constitute an extra and unwanted affiliation for their marriage ideal.
Now, if you are a rational heterosexual Bayesian and neither engage in that associated practice nor favor legal gay marriage, and then you learn about these cross-sectional econometrics, what should you infer about the correctness of your point of view?
Which is more or less the retort I had in mind (but felt too weary to make) in response to James Joyner’s thoughts on the sexual preferences of the Framers of the Constitution:
I’m hard pressed to believe that the Framers or any of the amenders meant to institutionalize buggery, given that it was anathema to most of them.
See, I didn’t know that — but then again, I have not read the Federalist Papers as closely as I might have done.
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