Language

Opponents to gay marriage often argue that marriage is "by definition" a union between one man and one women. I support gay marriage myself, but this kind of argument is interesting to me--I'm not sure what to make of it. What does it mean to say that marriage is, by definition, thus and so? (Is this just a statement about the way people tend to use the word "marriage"?) More importantly, should we ever be persuaded by such arguments?

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This is a great, and, in light of the fact that same-sex marriage will be legal in New York state in three days, on Sunday, July 24th, a very timely question!! Although some opponents of same-sex marriage maintain that marriage is 'by definition' between a man and a woman, and buttress this claim with an appeal to the Bible, and although both positions have been argued for, perhaps by now even almost ad nauseam, I myself think that what's really at issue here is not the meaning of the word 'marriage', but rather the concept of marriage. What's at stake is whether marriage is a civil contract, in which case it is up to the state to determine what parties may legally contract in this way, or a religious sacrament, in which case it is up to the church--whatever denomination that church may be--to determine who can be joined in this way. I myself am inclined to think that marriage may be seen both as a civil contract and as a religious sacrament, but also think that in a truly secular state, the state should only recognize civil contracts. (If there is indeed a separation of church and state, then only state-sanctioned ceremonies should have any significance for the state, as in France, where many couples are married in a church, but only the civil ceremony, which takes place in the town hall, has any official, that is, legal, standing. The fact that church weddings are even recognized as binding in the eyes of the state in the United States is, to my mind, an indication of a deep ambivalence about the separation between church and state in this country.) If, however, one lived in a theocracy, where religious law was part of state law, then--although not only then--would the religious conception of marriage be relevant to the state. So lurking under what might seem merely to be a dispute about words is a deep and important question about the very nature of the relation between church and state. (This is not an isolated instance, to my mind: many philosophical issues that might initially seem to be mere verbal disputes will, on further scrutiny, turn out to be about the concepts expressed by the words in question and hence to have far deeper significance than a mere question of words would.) But how should we Americans conceive of the relation between church and state? That's a good and deep question, that deserves more consideration than it has recently received.

Let me add a few words to Sean's excellent response.

I think one thing worth keeping in mind here, which I may have said already in response to a similar question, is that the institution of marriage in the United States, and in some other places in the developed world, has changed a great deal over the last sixty years or so.

A friend of mine once joked, "Of course marriage has to be between a man and a woman. Otherwise, how would you know who gets to beat up whom?" Not very funny, of course, in one sense, but perhaps you see her point. There was a time, not very long ago, when it was legally impossible in many states for a woman to be raped by her husband. A married woman's ability to own property independently of her husband was curtailed in some jurisdictions. Men had, by law, that kind of control over their wives, and the entire institution of marriage was one of ownership. That is why many radicals of the Victorian and post-Victorian eras were deeply suspicious of the entire institution. One of these people was Bertrand Russell, who wrote a book, Marriage and Morals, on the topic.

With the explosion of the feminist movement in the 1950s, these things begin to change, and marriage starts to be seen as a partnership between equals. The fact that one of these partners was male and one female slowly, over time, came to be quite irrelevant. Neither party has rights or privileges that the other does not have, simply on the basis of gender, and any such privilege would be seen as sex discrimination.It was essentially on this ground, that the gender difference had no legal significance, that the Supreme Judicial Court of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts made its historic decision legally same-sex marriage.

That is why it is no accident that those who trumpet the "one man, one woman" line are anti-feminist, too.

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