Single-sex marriage/This house believes gay marriage should be legal

 

 

The moderator's rebuttal remarks

 

Jan 5th 2011 | Roger McShane  

 

Judging by some of your comments, we have chosen the wrong motion for this debate. Leaving aside the arguments for and against gay marriage, many of you have questioned why the government is in the marriage business at all. A popular suggestion would have all interested couples joined under state-sanctioned civil unions, with marriage left to the churches, temples and mosques. But if the idea is to merely drop the name of marriage and install civil unions with all the same rights, benefits and obligations, then what has been accomplished? This debate is about more than semantics. Still others go further, claiming the government has no cause for sanctioning any type of relationship. But this view ignores the societal benefits accrued by the state's encouragement of stable families. I refer you to our first leader on gay marriage, in which we argue that the state's involvement in marriage is both inevitable and indispensable. Evan Wolfson and Maggie Gallagher are not alone in thinking the debate at hand is a worthy one.

 

Our impassioned participants have come back with compelling rebuttals, but I am disappointed that neither has yet provided much evidence to support their claims. There is no small amount of social-science research on gay marriage and its effect on society and the family. Mr Wolfson says his side is supported by the American Psychological Association and the American Academy of Pediatrics, but he might cite a study to back up his claim that "when more committed couples join in marriage, families are helped and no one is hurt". Similarly, Ms Gallagher provides no support for her insistence that "children do better and society does better when the mother and father who make them raise them together." Surely this has been studied. Perhaps our next guest commenter, M.V. Lee Badgett, will help us out in this regard. Ms Badgett is the author of a book called "When Gay People Get Married: What Happens When Societies Legalize Same-Sex Marriage", which concentrates mostly on data from the Netherlands, where same-sex marriage has been legal since 2001.

 

I'd like to think my call for more evidence would also be supported by our current guest commenter, Susan Meld Shell, who urges caution before moving ahead with gay marriage—she would like us to examine more fully the consequences for liberal society. At the end of her post she also says, "What the law cannot do is to abolish the distinction between couples that can or might together produce children of whom they are the sole biological parents and those that cannot." That distinction is the key to Ms Gallagher's rebuttal argument, and also seems to be the focus of a new paper that has been repeatedly cited by opponents of the motion in comments.

 

Ms Gallagher narrows eligibility for marriage to couples whose sexual acts are "freighted with the possibility" of producing a child. Gay couples (and sterile men and women, apparently) do not qualify. Her justification is her concern that gay marriage will lead to the further fragmentation of sex, reproduction and marriage. This is an interesting argument, though it burdens gay marriage with a trend that is well under way. After all, out-of-wedlock births have been on the rise in the West for three decades, with no correlation to the legalisation of gay marriage. If you share Ms Gallagher's concerns, it would seem much more radical solutions are in order. But her argument also raises a cumbersome question: if our end-goal is a societal norm of stable families through marriage, do the acts (sexual or otherwise) that produce those families matter?

 

According to most of you, they do not. A large majority of you have thus far supported the motion that gay marriage should be legal. Some have attributed the initial outpouring of support to the concerted efforts of the "gay lobby". That theory is seemingly contradicted by the individuality of the many intelligent comments we have received. But if it's true, if the gay-rights movement has trained its sights on this meagre debate, then I'd humbly suggest they save their resources for bigger fights.

 

 

 

The proposer's rebuttal remarks

Jan 5th 2011 | Evan Wolfson  

 

As 2011 dawns, a majority of Americans support the freedom to marry, having seen loving and committed gay and lesbian couples making a public promise to one another, and marrying in five states and the District of Columbia, all while the arguments made by Maggie Gallagher's anti-gay activists against the freedom to marry prove empty. Repudiating the National Organisation for Marriage's scare tactics, leading professional authorities in the country—from the American Psychological Association to the American Academy of Pediatrics, from the American Bar Association to the US Conference of Mayors—have called for an end to marriage discrimination. The APA summed it up: "Prohibiting civil marriage for same-sex couples is discriminatory and unfairly denies such couples, their children and other members of their families the legal, financial and social advantages of civil marriage."

 

Realising that they have no case, anti-gay forces such as the NOM now rely on diversionary claims and abusive raw power, flooding states from Maine to California, Iowa to New Hampshire, with money in political attack campaigns, all to distract from the reality that when more committed couples join in marriage families are helped and no is one hurt. But, whatever Ms Gallagher says, there is nothing "respectful" about spending millions of dollars to strip away some Americans' ability to fully protect their loved ones.

 

The truth is that ending the exclusion of gay people from marriage does not change the "definition" of marriage any more than allowing women to vote changed the "definition" of voting. It would remove a discriminatory barrier from the path of loving couples seeking to strengthen their commitment and participate fully in society while taking nothing away from anyone else. By contrast, denying marriage hurts kids whose families are deprived of the critical safety net, support and meaning that marriage brings.

 

A few years ago, while on a play-date at her home in Iowa, a little girl named McKinley BarbouRoske learned that her moms, Jen and Dawn, were not married. She was devastated because she thought it meant that her parents did not love one another enough to make that commitment to each other and their family. Jen and Dawn explained to McKinley that they loved her, her sister Breanna and each other very much, but even though they desperately wanted to marry, they were not legally able to do so in Iowa. McKinley could not understand why her friends' parents were married while her family was being left out. But she did not take the news lying down; she immediately asked if she could write a letter to the president to ask him to treat her family fairly and let her parents get married.

 

Jen and Dawn, who had always wanted to marry and were heartbroken at McKinley's reaction to their not being married, did not take their exclusion from the freedom to marry lying down either. In December 2005, they became plaintiffs in Lambda Legal's lawsuit seeking to end the exclusion of gay and lesbian couples from marriage in Iowa. Later, McKinley and her sister were included as plaintiffs in the case because they were also affected by the state's denial of marriage to their family. A trial judge held that there was no evidence to justify the exclusion. In 2009, all seven justices on the Iowa Supreme Court unanimously upheld the trial judge's findings and ordered an end to the exclusion of same-sex couples and their families from marriage. (Three of these justices were the Republican and Democratic appointees that the NOM brags about recklessly attacking in 2011, having spent hundreds of thousands of dollars to oust them, knowing that an independent judiciary is dangerously vulnerable to such raw politics.)

 

Little McKinley was thrilled when the decision that would allow her moms to marry was read aloud at the court. That same year, the BarbouRoske Family was named "Person of the Year" by the Iowa City Press Citizen. After 19 years together, Jen and Dawn had a July wedding so that all of their friends and family could be there to witness them follow through on their commitment to each other, McKinley and Breanna.

 

I would not want to take that day away from McKinley and her family. Why does Ms Gallagher?

Couples have a mix of reasons for wanting to marry, and for many, it is not about kids. George and Martha Washington's marriage did not produce children. Does Ms Gallagher believe their marriage hurt others or was less worthy? Does she believe we should have left the marriage rules unchanged, leaving women subordinated, divorce prohibited and interracial marriage banned? A large portion of people during that century had that fundamental view of marriage.

 

The reality is that couples who cannot have children, or choose not to, have not historically been excluded from marriage.

 

Ms Gallagher's airy allusion to other ways to provide benefits is ironic, given the NOM's bait-and-switch opposition, even to partnership and civil union. She makes it sound as though marriage itself really is not that important. But we know that marriage matters; that is why committed, loving same-sex couples want the same rules, responsibility and respect—the freedom to marry.

 

 

The opposition's rebuttal remarks

Jan 5th 2011 | Maggie Gallagher  

 

 

Evan Wolfson's essay is mostly dedicated to "social proof"—since more people agree with him, maybe you should, too.

 

If you are the kind of person who, when considering a great moral question, says "What would Bill Clinton do?", you may find Mr Wolfson's argument persuasive. Similarly, if you like arguments from authority, "Judge Vaughn Walker says so" might be compelling—except for all those other judges whom Mr Wolfson does not quote, who have ruled exactly the opposite.

 

I do thank Judge Walker for making the consequences of gay marriage so clear: getting to gay marriage requires rejecting basic truths about human nature upon which civil marriage is based. Marriage arises again and again across diverse human societies, because all societies have to grapple with the same basic facts: sexual passion between men and women creates children, and those children do better and society does better when the mother and father who make them raise them together.

 

Judge Walker ignored history, social science evidence and clear legal precedent to rule that neither biology nor gender matters to children or to marriage. He did not merely say that we need to value responsible parents wherever we find them. He ruled as "fact" that society has no rational interest at all in bringing together the child's two natural parents, his mother and his father, to raise the child together, where possible. In so doing, he made crystal clear that the ideal of the natural family itself must be discarded if the central promise of gay marriage is to be achieved.

 

Why? Because gay marriage is premised upon, and promises a society dedicated to, the proposition: "there are no morally significant differences between same-sex and opposite-sex couples." That is what "equality" means. But when we cut off marriage as a civil institution from deep roots in human nature, government's involvement in marriage becomes increasingly hard to explain: Why sex? Why fidelity? Why two? Why not close relatives? Advocates for gay marriage cannot explain any of the basic features of "civil" marriage.

 

Of course marriage is under deep challenge today from many sources, most of them heterosexual. Gay marriage would not be plausible except for the growing disconnect between sex, love, babies, mothers, fathers and marriage. In America, 40% of births are outside wedlock and perhaps 40% of first marriages end in divorce. For me, far from being a reason for us to accept gay unions as marriages, this emergency is the reason the foundational questions about the meaning and purpose of marriage raised by same-sex marriage are so important.

 

Here is the question we face, the decision we are making: are we going to renew our marriage culture, to rededicate the civic institution to its core public purposes? Or will we accept the emerging, competing conception of marriage as a celebration of adults' right to love and caretaking?

 

I do understand why gay marriage advocates like Mr Wolfson want the promise and the premise of gay marriage to be realised. But I do not think he (or they) genuinely understand those of us who disagree.

 

When I was a young woman, I was told repeatedly that technology had conquered procreation, that sex and reproduction had been separated. But what I found instead, as a daughter of the sexual revolution, was that sex continues to make babies, and those babies continue to suffer when the man and woman who made them fail to form a stable family through marriage. Today, three-quarters of all babies are unintended by at least one of their parents. When parents are married, "unintendedness" does not matter much to children. When they are not married, it means suffering, risk and sometimes permanent damage.

 

Gay people do not get children as a result of acts of sexual passion. The relationship of marriage to their children's well-being is deeply unclear. A society deeply focused on sexual fragmentation as a major source of suffering and inequality for our children would not accept a movement that seeks and celebrates changing marriage so that procreation and the natural family are no longer part of its public meaning.

 

Sexual unions of male and female really are different. Whether or not they result in a child, they are freighted with the possibility, both for good and for harm. Millions of years of evolution have freighted the sexual relationships of men and women with a weight that same-sex relationships simply do not carry.

 

Whose suffering is most important here? Adults who understandably feel slighted that their unions are not considered marriages? Or the children who will grow to adulthood in a society, after gay marriage, in which the idea that children need a mom and dad is treated as scientifically discredited bigotry?

At least now, the choice is clear.

 

 

http://www.economist.com/debate/days/view/634