Gay marriage redux

Last January (2007), I wrote a short piece in response to the statistics on single women and the general decline of marriage among women until later life in my generation. I pointed out that gay marriage can't really be blamed for these trends, given the virtual non-existence of it at that time, and even now, only a few places allow it. This humorous video shows the fallacy of blaming gays for heterosexual divorces is like blaming Jews.

Stanford issued a press release in 1995 that summarized, even way back then, the genetic and hereditary evidence that homosexuality was not merely an arbitrary lifestyle choice. Given the new research just reported this week that shows a fundamental difference in the brain structures of gay men and women versus straight men and women, arguing that being attracted to the same sex is a "choice" is without merit. That's the first hurdle anti-gay advocates face: showing how discrimination against them is fundamentally different from discrimination based on race or gender.

About a week ago, a colleague emailed me an article by Chuck Colson (former corrupt Nixonian) about gay marriage and, quote:

There is nothing in the California majority opinion that necessarily limits “loving and long-term relationships” to two people, or even people who are unrelated to one another. The biggest impediment is our revulsion at polygamy and incest—revulsions that can be swept aside by activist judges as easily as the millennia-old revulsion toward same-sex “marriage.”

That would only leave the argument that these arrangements pose a threat to the health and well-being of children.

I want to look at this common "slippery slope"-style argument.

First, I want to make it clear that a lot of the "issues" swirling about here should be clearly delineated:

1. What is the "compelling interest" of the state to involve itself in any fashion in marriage?
2. What role(s) have the state and federal government played in regulating marriage in the past?
3. What are the government-related benefits of marriage?
4. What can be said about the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment and marriage?
5. Would people be satisfied if gays were given equal rights and benefits but it was called a "civil union" rather than a "marriage"? What is the non-semantic difference?
   

Marriage certainly pre-dates written history and the logic of marriage is simple and compelling: as social creatures, humans have a lot of required investment in raising their young. Unlike other primates, whose young become self-sufficient for food after a maximum six years in gorillas and chimps, human young are highly dependent on their mothers for much longer. As such, this enormous divestment of time and energy is a trade-off that pays for itself in learning -- the longer the developmental period, the more learning and behavior that can be passed between generations. Given that we males are just as biologically and evolutionarily invested in the survival of our young, the formation of families or family groups is something seen in all primates. Although our current concept of monogamy seems logical and moral, we have seen polygamy's place in ancient (check your Bible!) and modern history, and our closest cousins, the great apes, certainly do not form strictly-monagomous pairing.

Institutionalized marriage probably began as a simple property transfer. Fathers literally sold their daughters off to suitors for a reasonable "bride price", overseen by local authorities, and this has a lot of precedent in the Bible and the earlier Babylonian Hammurabi's Code (see #138). It's understandable from a moral and pragmatic point of view that in these times, fathers were responsible for and controlled their daughter's welfare up until puberty, keeping her safe and getting value out of her by the work she did around the household. Once she was old enough to take care of herself (and a family), then her "value" in work around her father's household would have to be compensated for by the prospective groom. Primitive? Of course, but logical enough...

It should be quite obvious that divorces have happened as long as marriages have (again, see Hammurabi's Code #138). The "threats" to marriage, then, have been around long before "them queers" started asking for the legal rights to marry. The divorce rate in our country is fairly high, and if you want to talk about slippery slopes, the "remedy" proposed by many groups is to make no fault divorces illegal. This is another case where conservatives are completely inconsistent: they are adamant that raising taxes is horrible because it circumvents individual liberties and call themselves champions of states' rights. On the other hand, when they have a moral argument about restricting alcohol sales on Sundays, or laws against marijuana, or laws about gay marriage, this whole notion of civil liberties gets pretty damned fuzzy, and they want the government to step in and limit individual freedoms.

Given the paucity of logic or evidence that allowing gay marriage would somehow "undermine" or "threaten" marriage as an institution, the argument to prevent gay marriages must rest mainly on legal precedent. Unfortunately for antagonists of gay marriage, much of the legal precedent concerning "equal protection" will not work out well in their favor, unless the judges involved want to completely ignore the clear letter and spirit of the law. The Equal Protection clause of the 14th Amendment guarantees (aptly enough) equal protection to all groups under the law; it has been used with increasing scope to prevent discrimination based on race, gender, disability, religion, &c. The next logical step is to use it to prevent discrimination based on sexual identity/preference, and this is exactly what the courts in California and Massachusetts have done.

Now, perhaps I feel that marriage should not even be the purview of government, and that really all the government should have to do with it is in recognizing my wife's status in order for her to execute legal documents on my behalf and as co-owner of my property. What is the government's interest in regulating marriage, after all? Is the government a giant family planning organ that serves to try to help citizens propagate the species? Unbelievably, this is exactly the argument that some of these quote, pro-family, groups and anti-gay writers use in predicting "the demise of civilization":

Because civilization provides the best odds for their children to live to adulthood. So even though civilized individuals can't pursue the most obviously pleasurable and selfish (i.e., natural) strategies for reproduction, the fact is that they are far more likely to be successful at reproduction in a civilized society -- whether they personally like the rules or not.

Civilizations that enforce rules of marriage that give most males and most females a chance to have children that live to reproduce in their turn are the civilizations that last the longest. It's such an obvious principle that few civilizations have even attempted to flout it.

Even if the political system changes, as long as the marriage rules remain intact, the civilization can go on.

Get that? The impetus on government is to protect and prolong our society and civilization. This takes the primary aim of marriage as reproduction. Of course, given that many marriages are childless, either because one or both of the spouses are infertile, or because they simply don't want kids, one must wonder if in this paradigm it would entail that government should regulate marriage further than it already does and restrict it to only couples who are fertile and want children. It's already clear that these anti-gay so-called "family advocates" are in favor of tightening restrictions on divorce, overturning a woman's right to choose, as well as making birth control less readily available, so it's obvious that they think that the government's compelling interest is not just to keep the "rules of marriage" immutable, but to literally control the reproduction of society.

If the "rules of marriage" are loosened, let's say all the way to the point that people could marry animals or be polygamous (or start sex cults), would it logically follow that heterosexual couples would stop marrying? Would they stop breeding? To assert, "yes" to either of those questions is to admit to a credulity beyond that which I am capable. What you are asserting is that people would no longer have a rational justification for committed monogamous relationships if the imprimatur of the government was not attached to it. This conveniently overlooks the fact that people engaged in such relationships before governments regulated them; whether or not the government "sponsored" marriage, people would choose to live in a committed monogamous relationship that mirrors, in all respects, marriage.

Slippery slope arguments like the one employed in the article by Colson assert that to allow two people to marry of the same sex removes the threshold of rationality from deciding what marriage is, and would open the door to bestiality or polygamy. These arguments are simply horrible. These same exact arguments have been historically employed in the following way:

1. Lincoln wants to give blacks the right to vote? Well, what's next? WOMEN?
2. They're going to give women the right to vote? What's next? Civil rights for blacks?
3. They're going to give people of different colors the right to marry? What's next gay marriage?

Now, we hear:

1. They're going to give gays the right to marry? What's next, will we be able to marry dogs or multiple people?

The slippery slope argument ignores the fact that people can draw rational distinctions between categories, and that humans cannot correctly divine rational and irrational behavior. It gives no credit to the powers of human reason to limit change, implying that one change must entail another, even one of a completely different nature, which commits a category error. Imagine that I said the following:

1. Lincoln wants to give blacks the right to vote? What's next, dogs?
2. Women will be given the vote? What's next, dogs?

The category error here is clear: the ability to vote is already held by white men, so extending it to black men is including another part of the category "man". Extending it to dogs would be absurd. Ditto with women: they belong to the category "human" and so extending the right to vote to them is simply saying, "All humans have the right to vote," rather than saying, "Everything has a right to vote."

By the same logic:

1. An adult man and woman are allowed to marry: this is a definition of marriage. It is completely consistent with me using a gender-neutral definition: two adult people are marrying one another.
   
2. If a man and man are allowed to marry, this entails no substantive expansion of the definition: two adult people can choose to get married. Ditto with a woman and woman.
   
3. It does not follow that the definition of marriage has been altered to allow more than two adults to marry, nor to allow adult persons to marry animals.
4. If not substantive change in the definition of marriage occurs, then the supposed "snowball effect" of change is undermined.
   

Those who make the slippery slope argument imply that to broaden the definition of marriage from "one man, one woman" to "two adult persons" would be enabling the definition to be broadened even further to "more than two adult persons" or "persons and animals" but this is a categorical mistake.

This mistake is akin to someone who argues that, "If you make it illegal for me to punch you in the face (assault), then what's next? Will I be arrested for patting you on the shoulder for a job well done?" It implies, again, that human reason cannot differentiate between degree and quality of action or definition. Basically, the slippery slope argument is employed by those who have no valid arguments or evidence on their side to make people afraid that change in tradition will snowball in effect and run amok. The problem is that history has taught us, again and again, that people are able to adapt and change and modify law and make progress without the destruction of civilization.

...at least, so far.

Conclusions:

There is more and more evidence that gay people are physiologically determined as such. Denying them marriage rights runs afoul of the Equal Protection clause. The slippery slope argument often commits a category error and always ignores the ability of people to make distinctions and refinements and progress in existing law and culture; it implies that humans cannot act rationally and control the changes in the status quo, because change will snowball and multiply and wreak havoc on civilization. This has been shown logically fallacious and historically inaccurate.