What Marriage Means

Finally, my promised follow-up to my most recent posts on marriage (here and here) addressing some issues raised by B. Daniel Blatt in a post from June. I was particularly interested in seeing Jonathan Rauch's comments in his review of David Blankenhorn's The Future of Marriage.

One of Blatt's major concerns, and the genesis of a great deal of our correspondence, is his feeling that the national gay rights groups don't concentrate enough on the meaning of marriage as a social institution, and instead see it in terms of legal and economic considerations.

know I’ve said this before, but I’m still flabbergasted by the rhetoric on gay marriage of the gay groups (especially HRC’s lapdogs at Log Cabin) who don’t seem to see marriage as anything more than a “right” and seem to think freedom means state recogntion. Nor do they recognize that the struggle for marriage is more than an issue of such recognition, it also involves a social understanding of the institution.

I've pointed out on more than one occasion that in challenging existing restrictions on same-sex marriage, we are limited to addressing legal and economic disparities in treatment of same-sex couples. That's what the courts can deal with, and those are the bases that support actions at law. You can't really make a case on a generalized concept of "social understandings."

As far as this social understanding, one of the key points that Blatt doesn't really address is that we don't have a consensus meaning for marriage in this country, and insofar as we ever did, it's somewhat in the past. This is really nothing new. Marriage and its compnents have been "redefined" so many times in history that one rapidly loses count. One of the most constant aspects, however, has been that it is a civil institution that may or may not have had religious support. And, if you look at the history, it has been largely a matter of property rights -- a business arrangements. It's worth noting in this context that marriage as an official ritual was something engaged in by the upper, moneyed classes and pretty much not bothered with by the poor well into the modern era. Thus, we still have the concept of a "common-law" marriage, which translates as if you live together and say you're married, you're married. (Don't take my word for this. There are any number of sources documenting these arrangements, starting with John Boswell's Same-Sex Unions in Premodern Europe, which, in spite of sometimes questionable interpretations of documents relating to same-sex unions, does provide a good concise history of marriage. For that matter, the novels of Jane Austen and John Galsworthy's The Forsyte Saga give vivid illustrations of what marriage was about in nineteenth and early twentieth-century England, aside from being enjoyable reading in their own right.)

So, we don't have a consensus on what marriage means. I think I can say that there is an intangible value that regrettably bears little weight with the courts, although perhaps its best summation is, ironically enough, from the opinion in Goodridge, et al.:

Marriage is a vital social institution. The exclusive commitment of two individuals to each other nurtures love and mutual support; it brings stability to our society. For those who choose to marry, and for their children, marriage provides an abundance of legal, financial, and social benefits. In return it imposes weighty legal, financial, and social obligations

And later:

Barred access to the protections, benefits, and obligations of civil marriage, a person who enters into an intimate, exclusive union with another of the same sex is arbitrarily deprived of membership in one of our community's most rewarding and cherished institutions. That exclusion is incompatible with the constitutional principles of respect for individual autonomy and equality under law.

And yet, even here, the court did not enumerate exactly what the elements of this "most rewarding and cherished institutions" were, I suspect that, aside from the fact that it's not incumbent on the court to do so, the court can't, anymore than anyone else can.

Jonathan Rauch gives a similar rationale:

By marriage, I mean not just a commitment that two people make to each other. Marriage is a commitment that the two spouses also make to their community. They promise to look after each other and their children so society won’t have to; in exchange, society deems them a family and provides an assortment of privileges, obligations, and caregiving tools. (Not, mostly, "benefits.") Marriage does much more than ratify relationships, I would tell audiences; it fortifies relationships by embedding them in a dense web of social expectations. That is why marriage, with or without children, is a win-win deal, strengthening individuals, families, and communities all at the same time. Gay marriage, I said, would be the same positive-sum transaction. The example gay couples set by marrying instead of shacking up might even strengthen marriage itself.

On a basic psychological/social level, marriage defines your status within the community. It is the label that says, among other things, "These people are a stable and definable part of our community, they can be relied on to behave in certain ways and to pursue certain goals, and they are no longer available for courtship." (This is the platonic ideal, of course.)

Much of the official objection to same-sex marriage hinges on children (which is also addressed in the Goodridge opinion -- four of the seven couples who sued were raising children), but not, mind you on the careful and responsible upbringing of children, but the physical act of creating them. As far as the contemporary meaning of marriage, procreation has lost its punch. (Quite aside from the fact that no one, I think, can argue that humanity is in danger of extinction through anything other than its own efforts at this point -- not without being laughed out of the room -- and also aside from the fact that not being married doesn't seem to stop very many people from having children anyway.) But let's keep in mind that raising children is still one of the key reasons for marriage. In this regard, here's Rauch's comment on one of the points of agreement he has with Blankenhorn:

And we agree that children, on average (please note the qualifier), do best when raised by their biological mother and father, though he makes more sweeping claims on that score than I would.

Frankly, I don't see a legitimate argument here. There is no evidence to support this belief, and so it remains merely a belief, an opinion that can't even garner supporting evidence. Every study that has been done comparing the children of gay couples with the children of straight couples comes to the same general conclusion: no difference. So, this argument remains a matter of ideology, not fact.

Rauch quotes Blankenhorn on something I think is critical to understanding this question:

For Blankenhorn, "the most important trend affecting marriage in America" is not same-sex marriage. It is the "deinstitutionalization" of marriage–that is, "the belief that marriage is exclusively a private relationship"–of which gay marriage is merely a prominent offshoot. To his credit, he understands and forthrightly acknowledges that the individualistic view of marriage "has deep roots in our society and has been growing for decades, propagated overwhelmingly by heterosexuals."

The "deinstitutionalism" of marriage begs for definitions. We are dealing with two (at least) classes of "institution" here. First is the obvious, public, formal institution as codified in law, both civil and religious. The second, and I think much more important, is the organic, subtextual institution that grows out of and is an integral part of social convention and custom. Rauch again:

Marriage creates kin. In society’s eyes, it distinguishes a relationship from a family. The trouble, for Blankenhorn, with declaring any old kind of relationship a family–with turning marriage into "a pretty label for a private relationship"–is that marriage evolved and exists for a specific social reason, which is to bind both parents, especially fathers, to their biological children. Same-sex marriage, he argues, denies this principle, because its "deep logic" is that a family is whatever we say it is, and it changes the meaning of marriage "for everyone").

"Marriage creates kin." That is a key factor in the social meaning of marriage, and what makes it a truly binding and fundamental social institution. I think Blankenhorn is wrong on a central point here, though. Blood relationships no longer have the weight in a mobile, transient society that they had when people grew up and stayed put. Family as a nexus of social contact is still important, but it's not only gays who create their own families. One sees it in the emphasis on networking, and the increased prominence of maintaining those friendships and relationships formed in school. I don't think the answer to Blankenhorn's dilemma is restricting marriage; it would seem that the only solution here is to require everyone to stay put. Not gonna happen.

As Rauch goes on, it becomes clear that biological parents raising their children is the key factor in Blankenshorn's argument on the meaning of marriage. Given the things I've outlined above, this is at best questionable. In one sense, we're back to property rights and business arrangements: being sure who your parents are is important for inheritance of property and position. Given the plethora of mechanisms to insure those things, insistence on a biological basis for family becomes less persuasive. (This doesn't surprise me -- I've run across Blankenhorn's ideas before, and wasn't impressed.) In fact, in terms of the "meaning" of a double-barreled institution such as marriage, I consider Blankenhorn's argument trivial, if for no other reason than that there are so many contemporary aspects of family that it doesn't address -- childlessness, adoption, extended families and the like.

Rauch quotes this manifesto from 2000:

Still others can be found in a 2000 document called The Marriage Movement: A Statement of Principles. In a section headed "What Is Marriage?" the manifesto declares that "marriage has at least six important dimensions": it is a legal contract, a financial partnership, a sacred promise, a sexual union, a personal bond, and a family-making bond. "In all these ways," the statement continues, "marriage is a productive institution, not a consumer good."

The manifesto was written by David Blankenhorn. Ironically, considering his current position and my comments on the history and purposes of marriage above, is that Blankenhorn gives pride of place to legal and financial considerations.

I don't mean to question Blankenhorn's sincerity or his integrity, but his arguments leave much to be desired, as Rauch so ably points out. As for Blatt's concerns with the meaning of marriage, I suspect that's a question that's going to admit of no single answer, unless it be the very broad one relating to organic institutions and social bonds. That's an area in which the law becomes irrelevant -- gay families will operate in a context that sees them as de facto families, whether or not they achieve recognition de jure. And the bonds between children and their "unrelated" aunts and uncles are going to be as firm as the bonds between any children and their extended families simply because those bonds are not genetic. They are the product of usage and emotional ties and shared histories. That is something that is going to exist outside the law, and so the legal process of recognizing gay families can't rely on that.

I'd like to be more precise about this, but I don't think it's possible. I have to conclude that defining the meaning of marriage is not something we can do right now, not in any fine-grained way, because that meaning is in flux and has been for the past fifty years. It's also something that's going to happen in spite of the national gay rights groups and the courts and the legislatures, not because of them -- they are only going to be able to identify the boundaries, for those who wish to maintain them.