Posted on 02/20/2004 11:28:38 AM PST by rightcoast
THE SECULAR CASE AGAINST GAY MARRIAGE
Adam Kolasinksi
Homosexual relationships do nothing to serve the state interest of propagating society, so there is no reason to grant them the costly benefits of marriage.
The Tech, Volume 124, Number 5
Tuesday, February 17, 2004
The debate over whether the state ought to recognize gay marriages has thus far focused on the issue as one of civil rights. Such a treatment is erroneous because state recognition of marriage is not a universal right. States regulate marriage in many ways besides denying men the right to marry men, and women the right to marry women. Roughly half of all states prohibit first cousins from marrying, and all prohibit marriage of closer blood relatives, even if the individuals being married are sterile. In all states, it is illegal to attempt to marry more than one person, or even to pass off more than one person as one's spouse. Some states restrict the marriage of people suffering from syphilis or other venereal diseases. Homosexuals, therefore, are not the only people to be denied the right to marry the person of their choosing.
I do not claim that all of these other types of couples restricted from marrying are equivalent to homosexual couples. I only bring them up to illustrate that marriage is heavily regulated, and for good reason. When a state recognizes a marriage, it bestows upon the couple certain benefits which are costly to both the state and other individuals. Collecting a deceased spouse's social security, claiming an extra tax exemption for a spouse, and having the right to be covered under a spouse's health insurance policy are just a few examples of the costly benefits associated with marriage. In a sense, a married couple receives a subsidy. Why? Because a marriage between to unrelated heterosexuals is likely to result in a family with children, and propagation of society is a compelling state interest. For this reason, states have, in varying degrees, restricted from marriage couples unlikely to produce children.
Granted, these restrictions are not absolute. A small minority of married couples are infertile. However, excluding sterile couples from marriage, in all but the most obvious cases such as those of blood relatives, would be costly. Few people who are sterile know it, and fertility tests are too expensive and burdensome to mandate. One might argue that the exclusion of blood relatives from marriage is only necessary to prevent the conception of genetically defective children, but blood relatives cannot marry even if they undergo sterilization. Some couples who marry plan not to have children, but without mind-reaching technology, excluding them is impossible. Elderly couples can marry, but such cases are so rare that it is simply not worth the effort to restrict them. The marriage laws, therefore, ensure, albeit imperfectly, that the vast majority of couples who do get the benefits of marriage are those who bear children.
Homosexual relationships do nothing to serve the state interest of propagating society, so there is no reason for the state to grant them the costly benefits of marriage, unless they serve some other state interest. The burden of proof, therefore, is on the advocates of gay marriage to show what state interest these marriages serve. Thus far, this burden has not been met.
One may argue that lesbians are capable of procreating via artificial insemination, so the state does have an interest in recognizing lesbian marriages, but a lesbian's sexual relationship, committed or not, has no bearing on her ability to reproduce. Perhaps it may serve a state interest to recognize gay marriages to make it easier for gay couples to adopt. However, there is ample evidence (see, for example, David Popenoe's Life Without Father) that children need both a male and female parent for proper development. Unfortunately, small sample sizes and other methodological problems make it impossible to draw conclusions from studies that directly examine the effects of gay parenting. However, the empirically verified common wisdom about the importance of a mother and father in a child's development should give advocates of gay adoption pause. The differences between men and women extend beyond anatomy, so it is essential for a child to be nurtured by parents of both sexes if a child is to learn to function in a society made up of both sexes. Is it wise to have a scoial policy that encourages family arrangements that deny children such essentials? Gays are not necessarily bad parents, nor will they necessarily make their children gay, but they cannot provide a set of parents that includes both a male and a female.
Some have compared the prohibition of homosexual marriage to the prohibition of interracial marriage. This analogy fails because fertility does not depend on race, making race irrelevant to the state's interest in marriage. By contrast, homosexuality is highly relevant because it precludes procreation.
Some argue that homosexual marriages serve a state interest because they enable gays to live in committed relationships. However, there is nothing stopping homosexuals from living in such relationships today. Advocates of gay marriage claim gay couples need marriage in order to have hospital visitation and inheritance rights, but they can easily obtain these rights by writing a living will and having each partner designate the other as trustee and heir. There is nothing stopping gay couples from signing a joint lease or owning a house jointly, as many single straight people do with roommates. The only benefits of marriage from which homosexual couples are restricted are those that are costly to the state and society.
Some argue that the link between marriage and procreation is not as strong as it once was, and they are correct. Until recently, the primary purpose of marriage, in every society around the world, has been procreation. In the 20th century, Western societies have downplayed the procreative aspect of marriage, much to our detriment. As a result, the happiness of the parties to the marriage, rather than the good of the children or the social order, has become its primary end, with disastrous consequences. When married persons care more about themselves than their responsibilities to their children and society, they become more willing to abandon these responsibilities, leading to broken homes, a plummeting birthrate, and countless other social pathologies that have become rampant over the last 40 years. Homosexual marriage is not the cause for any of these pathologies, but it will exacerbate them, as the granting of marital benefits to a category of sexual relationships that are necessarily sterile can only widen the separation between marriage and procreation.
The biggest danger homosexual civil marriage presents is the enshrining into law the notion that sexual love, regardless of its fecundity, is the sole criterion for marriage. If the state must recognize a marriage of two men simply because they love one another, upon what basis cant it deny marital recognition to a group of two men and three women, for example, or a sterile brother and sister who claim to love each other? Homosexual activists protest that they only want all couples treated equally. But why is sexual love between two people more worthy of state sanction that love between three, or five? When the purpose of marriage is procreation, the answer is obvious. If sexual love becomes the primary purpose, the restriction of marriage to couples loses its logical basis, leading to marital chaos.
Adam Kolasinski is a doctoral student in financial economics.
MIT is a private school.
I heard on the radio yesterday that it was DOA...just as I predicted when it came out. We do, however, need to keep supporting H.R. 3534 (introduced by Rep. Tom Tancredo). Write your Congresscritters.
Well, except Chomsky. But as the world's most brilliant linguist, he might as well be the world's tallest midget.
What an emotional response. :) I'm teasing you a bit there, but the reality is, homosexual unions serve no logical purpose whatsoever. They do not make sense from an evolutionary point of view or a religious point of view. They do not serve in any capacity to strengthen the fabric of society.
Homosexual unions are based solely on the 'iwanna' principle. And just because someone wants to do something doesn't mean it should be legal.
The point is that marriage has not been *inevitably* tied to fertility for at least 70 years or more.
Nor is "natural reproduction" necessarily the default in marriage. Many couples where the wife is over 30 or 35 need artificial means to conceive, which to some people is morally the equivalent of homosexuality anyway.
Alas, even this method of showing a "secular viewpoint"--whether or not it's an affected one--won't convince the hardened leftist moral relativist--or five supreme court justices. They can just say that the author is repeating a thinly-disguised sectarian "natural law" argument. "Is it any coincidence" they'd say, "that a Polish student makes an argument straight out of the Catholic natural law tradition?" Argument dismissed.
The TECH here is obsessed with gay marriage... Today's issue contained a brave letter that superbly twisted this gay obsessed columnists pro-gay marriage article to support the amendment...
That letter in question can be found at http://www-tech.mit.edu/V124/N6/saffordlet.6c.html
Its contents:
THE ECONOMIC AND SOCIAL CASE FOR HOMOSEXUAL MARRIAGE
Sean Safford
The Tech, Volume 124, Number 6
Friday, February 20, 2004Adam Kolasinski offers what appears on the surface to be a dispassionate argument against gay marriage based on the legal principle that the protection of a given minority group must further a compelling state interest [“The Secular Case Against Gay Marriage,” Feb. 17]. In short, his claim is that the state recognizes the marriage of a man and a woman because doing so encourages procreation and that the state has a compelling interest in ensuring that people reproduce. The relationships of gay men and women fall short of marriage according to this logic.
First, it’s not at all clear that it is in state’s interest to encourage more children. In our own country, 120,000 children are adopted each year. Worldwide, there are far more children in search of a home than there are adults willing and able to raise them. To be coldly analytical about it, increases in both life expectancy and productivity rates mean that far fewer people are needed to make society run smoothly, not more.
But even if it was in the state’s interest to encourage procreation, what does marriage have to do with whether or not people decide to have children? Most of us are capable of procreating just fine without the government’s help, thank you very much.
Kolasinski recognizes that the state’s deeper interest is in providing children with a stable, loving environment. Prefacing his remarks with the insightful comment that “the differences between men and women go beyond anatomy,” he argues that “it is essential for a child to be nurtured by parents of both sexes if a child is to learn to function in a society made up of both sexes.”
But his comments on the subject conflate the relatively limited evidence on gay parenting with the copious research which shows that having two parents is better than one. A review of the research published in the American Sociological Review indicates clearly that gay parents raise children who are every bit as capable on a wide range of measures as children brought up by straight parents. Indeed, because for most gay parents having a child requires overcoming numerous obstacles, there is evidence to suggest that gay parents are better caregivers.
On the other hand, it is certainly the case that, on average, children with two parents do better in life than children that grow up in single-parent households. Children of single parents, for instance, are 1.7 times more likely to drop out of high school. But the reason has nothing to do with whether those children are adequately prepared to live in a society made of men and women. The “empirically verified common wisdom,” to borrow a phrase from Kolasinski, is that it has everything to do with growing up in loving and financially stable homes regardless of whether those homes are headed by straight or gay parents.
The fact on the ground is that gay men and women are raising children -- according to research supported by the American Civil Liberties Union, estimates are between six and 14 million children have at least one gay parent. So Kolasinski’s arguments regarding the relationship between marriage and childrearing are backwards. It is very much in the state’s interest to ensure that the children of gay and lesbian parents are raised in families that are as equal as possible to those with straight parents. The far more serious danger is that, in not recognizing gay marriages, the state will enact into legislation that gay families are second-class in status.
That is not only a civil rights argument; it is an economic one, too. Like all economic institutions, marriage can be seen simply as a means of reducing transaction costs. Marriage would save gay and lesbian families -- and therefore society -- the cost of hiring a lawyer to draw up 50 separate contracts covering everything from whether they are automatically granted power of attorney in the event a loved one is hospitalized to the right to securing domestic partnership benefits at work.
How efficient -- economically speaking -- is it to have to run home, open the safe, and run back to the hospital to present “evidence” of one’s “contractual rights” when life and death decisions about one’s child need to be made? Whose interest does that serve (other than attorneys’)? From a pure efficiency standpoint, it is much more efficient simply to include gay and lesbian couples within the broader institution of marriage.
But casting the argument in terms of pure efficiency misses the point of the debate happening across the river. Kolasinski would have us believe that people get married because the government wants us to do so. The truth is quite the opposite: people of all sexualities have been hitching up for time immemorial. What has changed is the fact that more and more gay men and lesbians are doing it openly and with the blessing of their friends, families, and neighbors. The danger is that the state will lose touch with the society it is supposed to reflect. In doing so, it risks losing the legitimacy on which its claims to regulate society are based, and that is in no one’s interest.
Sean Safford is a doctoral candidate in the Sloan School of Management.
The reply is that even marriages between people who don't intend to have children allow for the possibility of the production of children accidentally, so that such marriages still serve a public purpose.
In addition, marriage to cousins or polygamous marriages all allow for children, therefore, using these principles would require us to legalize those marriages.
Those cases are handled with other objections. Polyandry, for example, is rarely if ever carried forward successfully among the men involved, unless there is a separate strong rank-order bond among them. Tibetan polyandrists are usually brothers, and their birth-order ranking keeps the dissatisfied junior brothers in line, by pitting them against all their seniors, with the additional liability of legitmacy accruing to their elders.
Polygyny is more workable, but the Congress required the Mormons to put it aside before they would admit Utah to the Union. The moral conflict was clear and unambiguous, and the Mormon elders, with statehood glittering before them, blinked.
Incest is a different case and is handled by public-health arguments about the undesirability of intensifying even minor genetic weaknesses.
Adam Kolasinski offers what appears on the surface to be a dispassionate argument against gay marriage based on the legal principle that the protection of a given minority group must further a compelling state interest [“The Secular Case Against Gay Marriage,” Feb. 17]. In short, his claim is that the state recognizes the marriage of a man and a woman because doing so encourages procreation and that the state has a compelling interest in ensuring that people reproduce. The relationships of gay men and women fall short of marriage according to this logic.
Safford misrepresents Kolasinki's central argument. The core of Kolasinki's case is this:
Homosexual relationships do nothing to serve the state interest of propagating society, so there is no reason for the state to grant them the costly benefits of marriage, unless they serve some other state interest. The burden of proof, therefore, is on the advocates of gay marriage to show what state interest these marriages serve. Thus far, this burden has not been met.
[Emphasis added.]
Safford, besides insinuating the homosexual "rights" case with language like "the protection of a given minority group", which is propagandistic and beside the point, except insofar as the advocates of institutional change are a tiny minority, tries to shift the burden of proof to the majoritarians, which in the continuing homosexual attack on America has become a standard, and knowingly fallacious, tactic. It is not on society to defend its institutions, and it need not yield even on being shown a point of argument, but rather, should yield only if satisfied in its own conscience that the minority have the better argument for doing things their way, or for claiming some right, relief, or redress.
Secondarily, Safford's distortion of Kolasinki's statement becomes obvious with a little condensation: "the protection ....must further a compelling state interest...." (emphasis supplied) suggests that the state will not protect the civil rights of homosexuals or other minorities unless the observance of those rights is in the state interest, and this is an invidious and untrue statement to impute to Kolasinski. Kolasinski is not talking about civil rights; he's talking about a marriage license.
The key here is that society owes nothing beyond a hearing to the proponents of radical change, who bear the burden of making their point to the satisfaction of the majority, and not just of making their point to their own solipsistic satisfaction.
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