Holding The Line

Culture 11 has an article by Joseph M. Knippenberg, entitled: A False Truce? - Civil unions and the promise of culture wars becalmed. He stresses how almost any compromise only hurts advocates of marriage, and how any truce is only temporary and naive to accept.

Here I present the heart of the matter – It contains a useful understanding of how same-sex “marriage” argumentation only serves to undermine the important institution of marriage itself.

“The likeliest tack he will take is one advanced recently by the University of Michigan's Douglas Laycock, a well-regarded legal scholar and First Amendment specialist. Laycock argues that the state should get out of the marriage business, leaving the sanctification of bonds to the churches. The state, he says, ought to restrict itself to granting civil unions to any couple that seeks one. If you want all the legal rights and privileges that we now accord to marriage, you have to go to the state for a civil union. If you want to be united before the eyes of God and the church, you get married. By itself, a church wedding gives you no legal rights and privileges. It is a "private" religious ceremony with no earthly consequences.”

This position has the merit, some might argue, of preserving the sanctity of marriage and denying that anyone is entitled, as a matter of right, to claim that sanctification. In other words, this position denies same-sex marriage advocates the cultural victory they have been seeking, forcing them to settle for mere legal, as opposed to "cultural," equality.

“But it achieves this end by, in effect, privatizing marriage and elevating the legal status of civil unions. The legal respect and privileges accorded the latter will inevitably be seen as tokens on public approbation, while precisely no worldly privileges will attend to the former, which will just as inevitably betoken a certain public indifference (at best) or hostility (at worst). The religious character of marriage is "saved" by being, in effect, trivialized in the eyes of the public.”

(I also note that once we treat relationships as mere contractual and hence conventional, there is no principled ground on which to resist all sorts of creativity in our arrangements. Why not more than two partners, for example?)

Same-sex “marriage” by the very call of the demand, drives society to question the very purpose of marriage. Once its procreative and opposite sex aspects are rejected their exists no reason to not include a myriad of other forms, extend many of its benefits to multiple care giving arrangements, or abolish the institution entirely.

For many this is a feature (I’m afraid) and not a bug.