Posted by Dale Carpenter:
Blankenhorn and the purposes of marriage:
http://volokh.com/archives/archive_2007_04_29-2007_05_05.shtml#1177948415
In addition to the important procreative and child-raising purpose of
marriage that David Blankenhorn and others opposed to gay marriage
have emphasized, marriage has other functions arising from our
history, tradition, and actual practice that are served by allowing
people to marry even if they never have children.
So what does marriage do? What is it for? Marriage does at least six
important things. I put these here in block text for ease of
reference:
(1) Marriage is a legal contract. Marriage creates formal and legal
obligations and rights between spouses. Public recognition of, and
protection for, this marriage contract, whether in tax or divorce
law, helps married couples succeed in creating a permanent bond.
(2) Marriage is a financial partnership. In marriage, "my money"
typically becomes "our money," and this sharing of property creates
its own kind of intimacy and mutuality that is difficult to achieve
outside a legal marriage. Only lovers who make this legal vow
typically acquire the confidence that allows them to share their
bank accounts as well as their bed.
(3) Marriage is a sacred promise. Even people who are not part of
any organized religion usually see marriage as a sacred union, with
profound spiritual implications. "Whether it is the deep metaphors
of covenant as in Judaism, Islam and Reformed Protestantism;
sacrament as in Roman Catholicism or Eastern Orthodoxy; the yin and
yang of Confucianism; the quasi-sacramentalism of Hinduism; or the
mysticism often associated with allegedly modern romantic love,"
Don Browning writes, "humans tend to find values in marriage that
call them beyond the mundane and everyday." Religious faith helps
to deepen the meaning of marriage and provides a unique
fountainhead of inspiration and support when troubles arise.
(4) Marriage is a sexual union. Marriage elevates sexual desire
into a permanent sign of love, turning two lovers into "one flesh."
Marriage indicates not only a private but a public understanding
that two people have withdrawn themselves from the sexual
marketplace. This public vow of fidelity also makes the married
partners more likely to be faithful. Research shows, for example,
that cohabiting men are four times more likely to cheat than
husbands, and cohabiting women are eight times more likely to cheat
than spouses.
(5) Marriage is a personal bond. Marriage is the ultimate avowal of
caring, committed, and collaborative love. Marriage incorporates
our desire to know and be known by another human being; it
represents our dearest hopes that love is not a temporary
condition, that we are not condemned to drift in and out of
shifting relationships forever.
(6) Marriage is a family-making bond. Marriage takes two biological
strangers and turns them into each other's next-of-kin. As a
procreative bond, marriage also includes a commitment to care for
any children produced by the married couple. It reinforces fathers'
(and fathers' kin's) obligations to acknowledge children as part of
the family system.
I suppose some people would dismiss these sentiments as the product of
�adult-centered� thinking about marriage, with all the emphasis here
on legal contracts, finances, sacred promises, sexual fulfillment, and
private personal bonds. I suppose some would say I�ve missed the
central importance of marriage as the place for child-rearing. After
all, I�ve placed any procreative and child-rearing function at the
very end. It doesn�t even make the Top 5. I suppose others would say
I�ve placed marriage in a largely private context and given little
attention to the existence of marriage as a public institution with
public purposes.
David Blankenhorn would not be among those people. He drafted these
very claims about marriage as part of a �Statement of Principles� by
the marriage movement in 2000, at a time when gay marriage was barely
a blip on the radar. In the block text above, I have copied the
statement word-for-word, except that in #4 I have substituted �the
married partners� for �men and women.� (The statement can be found
[1]here. The original link and web address for the Statement of
Principles of the Marriage Movement is for some reason no longer
available.)
Blankenhorn has also [2]explicitly rejected the anachronistic and
reductive view that the only public purpose of marriage is to
encourage procreation and child-rearing. Marriage is a
�multi-dimensional, multi-purpose institution,� he acknowledges. �It
is not true therefore to say that the state�s only interest in
marriage is marriage�s generative role,� he wrote a couple of years
ago. �Instead, marriage�s role as a pro-child social institution is
only one, albeit the most important, of these legitimate state
interests.� (Emphasis original.)
Blankenhorn has been [3]criticized for a �change of tune� � for
emphasizing procreation and biological parenthood in the context of
the gay-marriage debate, while he did not emphasize these things
before the debate took center stage. He has [4]defended himself on
this point by saying that it is only in the context of the
gay-marriage debate that some people have insisted there�s no
connection between marriage and family-making. I suppose he could also
say that the six dimensions of marriage are valuable only because they
serve the family-making purpose of marriage by cementing the bond
between two biological parents. But that is not how I read the
statement and I don�t think it fits the idea of marriage as a
�multi-purpose� institution.
Blankenhorn, who has long been concerned about fathers leaving their
families, is not necessarily being hypocritical by now emphasizing the
role of marriage in bringing biological parents together. Nothing in
the statement he endorsed seven years ago is inconsistent with the
view that the central and important purpose of marriage is to
encourage procreation and child-rearing within marriage. But that�s
the point: even if you erroneously thought gay marriage had nothing to
do with benefiting children, and everything to do with, for example, a
�personal bond� that �represents our dearest hopes that love is not a
temporary condition,� it would not be a threat to marriage.
Gay marriage can very clearly meet five of the six dimensions of
marriage Blankenhorn himself has endorsed: it can benefit the couple
with legal advantages that help �create a permanent bond�; it can
facilitate the formation of a financial interdependence that �creates
its own kind of intimacy and mutuality�; it helps the couple find
values, including religious ones, that go beyond the mundane and
everyday and that may be �a fountainhead of inspiration and support
when troubles arise�; it can �elevate sexual desire into a permanent
sign of love� and be more likely than cohabitation to lead the couple
to withdraw themselves from the sexual marketplace; and of course it
can be a deep personal bond between two people who share the common
human desire for permanence and attachment to one other person.
Gay marriage can also serve the sixth, family-making, function
identified by Blankenhorn seven years ago. A gay couple can�t
procreate as a couple, it�s true. But they can serve all of the
purposes listed above in the same way a sterile straight couple could.
Marriage can turn gay couples, unrelated biologically, into
next-of-kin, as it can for opposite-sex couples. It can reinforce
parents� (and parents' kin's) �obligations to acknowledge children as
part of the family system,� just as it can for second-marriage couples
and for sterile opposite-sex couples who adopt or use some method of
assisted reproduction.
Even if they never have children, married gay couples will hardly be
outside the bounds of marriage as it is actually practiced and as
Blankenhorn described it in 2000. By choice or by necessity, lots of
marriages never result in children. We do not think less of these
marriages, do not think they transform marriage into something wholly
adult-centered, and do not worry that they represent a threat to �the
future of marriage� by making biological parents think family
structure is unimportant. There are already far many more such
childless opposite-sex marriages than there will be gay marriages. We
recognize that these childless marriages serve the additional
functions of marriage that Blankenhorn beautifully articulated seven
years ago and that, in doing so, they do not undermine the important
family-making purpose of marriage.
Many opponents of gay marriage would deny that homosexual couples can
meet even the five companionate (non-generative) dimensions or
purposes of marriage. But based on his public statements about
homosexuality, I think Blankenhorn would have to agree that for gay
Americans marriage would be �a personal bond,� the �ultimate avowal of
caring, committed, and collaborative love�; that gay persons equally
share the deep human yearning �to know and be known by another human
being�; and that they too possess �our dearest hopes that love is not
a temporary condition.�
If that�s good enough reason to let childless straight couples marry,
to let sterile couples adopt or reach outside their sexual union to
produce a child, why is it not good enough for gay couples? The answer
to that question might be found in moral or religious objections to
homosexuality, in a desire to avoid placing society�s imprimatur on
homosexual relationships, or in ugly stereotypes about gay people as
hyper-promiscuous or unstable. But it cannot easily be found in a
world-view that affirms, [5]as Blankenhorn recently did, �the equal
dignity of homosexual love.�
Blankenhorn is no flake. He has thought long and hard about the needs
of heterosexuals for marriage. He has challenged the idea that family
structure is irrelevant. He has said that our ethical and moral
traditions require that we place the needs of children above adult
needs where they�re in conflict. He has been right about all of this.
But for all his integrity and sincere opposition to anti-gay bigotry,
I don't think he has thought very hard about the needs of gay
families. That's why, for example, he and many others opposed to gay
marriage could imagine that protecting gay families in law means
placing the needs of adults ahead of children -- as if we don't
already have may childless marriages and as if thousands of gay
families don't already include children whose welfare the gay parents
place before their own.
Perhaps, just perhaps, Blankenhorn will one day see that marriage
offers gay people and their families, at no cost to heterosexuals, the
best hope that they too will not be �condemned to drift in and out of
shifting relationships forever.� They will have the prospects for
permanence and stability enhanced but not guaranteed in their lives
and in the lives of any children they may raise. That�s all marriage
can do.
References
1. http://gabrielrosenberg.typepad.com/galois/2005/06/conjugal_marria.html
2. http://familyscholars.org/?p=5260
3. http://www.amptoons.com/blog/archives/2005/10/31/change-of-tune-part-3/
4. http://familyscholars.org/?p=5260
5. http://www.eppc.org/conferences/eventID.116/conf_detail.asp
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