The Meaning of Marriage Part One of Two

Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and they shall become one flesh.” (Genesis 2:24) In my previous article about the meaning of marriage, I outlined the following three options that are available to us when asking the question, “What is marriage?” I closed the article by promising to offer a defense of the first definition. These are the three definitions that I gave, which I developed after dialogue with people on all spectrums of the “gay marriage” debate: Although the concept of marriage involves a degree of cultural relativity, at its core marriage is something specific, namely a sexually complementary (or dimorphous) union publically recognized because of its potential fecundity; Although the concept of marriage involves a degree of cultural relativity, at its core marriage is something specific, namely a union of consenting persons (or adults) who commit to romantic partnership and domestic life. The concept of marriage is entirely culturally relative; therefore marriage is a social construct and can mean whatever we choose for it to mean. In this article and the article to follow, I will offer a defense of option #1 by a process of elimination as I consider the problems inherent in the other two positions. This article will be concerned with the problems of option #2 while my next article will tackle the problems in #3. It may be helpful to acknowledge on the outset that in the real world the above positions are not always as clearly demarcated as I have implied. For example, champions of same-sex “marriage” will frequently assert the second position above when developing positive arguments for “gay marriage”, yet they will invoke the third when trying to answer the arguments of their opponents. Let me explain about that inconsistency before moving on to address the problems with option #2. “Gay Marriage” Realism When advocates of same-sex “marriage” make statements about the importance of not denying a certain group access to the institution of marriage, they are being realists, since they are implying (perhaps without realizing it) that marriage has a definite meaning that transcends the contingencies of culture and language. For if marriage did not have a fixed meaning that could in principle include certain classes of people, then there would be no way we could meaningfully speak of those classes being unjustly excluded, just as you could not meaningfully speak of tennis players being unjustly excluded from an athletic club unless you first knew that the category “athletic club” had a specific objective meaning that made possible the inclusion of tennis players in a way that it did not make possible the inclusion of, say, chess players or musicians. In this respect, champions of same-sex “marriage” are realists. They think marriage has objective content that is fixed and specific, namely the union of two persons in some kind of love relationship. Because of this (so the argument goes) we should not exclude any person from such unions, whether that exclusion is based on race, gender, sexual orientation, or something else. The realism of this position coheres with the first view of marriage given above since both option #1 and option #2 hold that marriage has a specific objective meaning. The only difference between the first and second option is on the question of what marriage actually means: is it a union of sexually dimorphous persons or is it simply a union of persons? “Gay Marriage” Nominalism In my experience, often the same champions of “gay marriage” who are realists when asserting that marriage is a union of persons will quickly switch to being nominalists when interacting with their opponents. That is, they will move from asserting that marriage has an objective meaning that is specific and fixed (namely the union of persons) to suggesting that the meaning of marriage depends entirely on arbitrary naming acts. For example, in arguing against option #1 above, they frequently point to the fact that past cultures have sanctioned things like marriage to children or polygamy, as if this shows that marriage is entirely culturally relative, and entirely a matter of definition. This moves us to option #3 above: marriage has no intrinsic meaning, but achieves its meaning through external will; therefore, the primary questions we should be looking at are questions about what social outcomes will result from defining marriage in a certain way. The only problem is that if the champions of same-sex “marriage” were to be completely consistent with this nominalist turn, they would have to deny any objectivity to the claim that marriage is a union of persons in general (over and against a union specifically of a man and a woman), which mostly they are unwilling to do. This unwillingness is not surprising, because the entire argument about needing to “expand the pool of people eligible to marry” assumes that marriage has objective meaning and refers to a union of consenting adults who commit to romantic partnership and domestic life. But if marriage is an infinitely malleable social construct, then we cannot claim that its existence as the union of two persons is fixed and objective any more than we can claim that its existence as the union of a man and a woman is fixed and objective. …. Two leaky buckets Have you ever tried to have a discussion with someone who used two faulty arguments interchangeably? You go to address the first faulty argument, and the person switches to the second faulty argument; and then, when you go to address the errors of this second argument, they switch back to the first. Each argument is invoked to patch up the problems of the other, but never stays put long enough to answer the critique. When I’ve been involved in discussions like that before I explain to my interlocutor that it’s like having two leaky buckets. If you put one leaky bucket inside another leaky bucket, it’s still not going to hold any water. Similarly, two faulty arguments, added together, still do not equal a sound argument. That’s how it is with option #2 and option#3 above. Both are faulty, and used together they are like one leaky bucket set inside another leaky bucket. The analogy actually breaks down, however, since it implies that the two leaky buckets can fit inside each other. But actually, option #2 and #3 above are contrary. Defenders of “gay marriage” try to make them co-inhabit, so that each position can bring in the dirty laundry of the other, even though in a purely logical sense they are contraries (meaning they cannot both be true, even though they may both be false). I’d like to now address why I think option #2 is faulty…. If we say that marriage is a union of consenting adults who commit to romantic partnership and domestic life, there are two things we might mean. We might mean either that (a) this is what marriage does or ought to mean now even though it hasn’t always meant this; (b) this is what marriage has always meant; If the meaning of marriage can change as dramatically as implied by (a), then how is this anything other than acknowledging that marriage is entirely culturally relative, that it is a social construct and can mean whatever we choose for it to mean? When you think about it, option (a) is really a different species of the same Nominalism represented by option #3 above, and therefore it can be considered later under that rubric. Robin Phillips May 06, 2013 END PART ONE