Mo' Dernity, Mo' Problems

Thanks to Ampersand for a thoughtful post on his website. I'm not offended by the fact that he mistook my gender - it's my own fault for choosing a doofy pseudonym. Here is the link: http://amptoons.poliblog.com/blog/week_2004_07_04.html

One reader pointed out that I was wrong about what the title of professor meant historically - it meant giving lectures at a university, rather than doing research. Fine, but no matter - the point is that society gives titles to people in order to encourage certain behaviors - we call people mothers to honor those who care for children in a certain way, even though some mothers are abusive.

The meaty bit of Amperstand's post comes at the end:

Years before the gay marriage controversy encouraged many folks in the marriage movement to write op-eds declaring that children conceived through heterosexual intercourse is the sole purpose of marriage, some of those same folks had a more sensible view. Asking "what is marriage," they said that "marriage is..." a legal contract; a financial partnership; a sacred promise; a sexual union; a personal bond; and a family-making bond. This approach - recognizing the reality that marriage can, does and should serve multiple functions, and can even serve different functions for different people - is far more intelligent and realistic than the "one purpose" analysis most anti-SSM folks have been forced into by their need to exclude homosexuals.

This attacks a position I never attempted to uphold. I did not say that marriage exists solely for the procreation of children, and I can't imagine anyone would seriously hold such a view. Rather, I argued that the possibility of procreation is a defining component of marriage. Society rewards married couples because it recognizes that marriage provides certain social goods: the procreation of children, mutual aid between the spouses, lower rates of domestic violence between the married couple (as compared to the cohabitating couple), and the higher rates of economic productivity and lower rates of crime for married men.

However, there are many ways that we could lower crime rates and raise productivity, but we do not call all of them "marriage." We do not say that a college educated male, because he is less likely to be a violent criminal and more likely to earn above 20,000, is suddenly married. And neither should we say that simply because two men live together, care for each other, and do sexual things together, they are suddenly married.

If marriage is to be defined, as Ampersands would like, as "a legal contract; a financial partnership; a sacred promise; a sexual union; a personal bond; and a family-making bond," then we should allow more than just gay marriages to be called marriages. We should certainly allow polygamy. And why not call a buisness contract a marriage? Or long term roomates? I'm friends with two sisters, one of whom is a single mother. They bought a house together, and they both help out with taking care of the child. Why should be be as flexible in our definition of marriage as Ampersand would like, rather than more flexible or less flexible?

Ampersand's response is (I'm paraphrasing), "Marriage creates a family bond between people. But siblings already have a family bond, so they cannot marry." But of course he doesn't really defend this definition of marriage - in fact the defintion seems custom-built to include homosexual couples but exclude siblings. In any case, I could point out that the sibling-sibling marriage would be establishing a DIFFERENT family bond than that which existed before. Why not be flexible about this, and let people add/change the nature of their family bonds?
Of course - because Amptoons has crafted a definition that excludes sibling/sibling marriages but includes male/male and female/female marriages. If you scrap the tradition, you'd better have very strong reasons for whatever system you seek to set up in its place.