The Notman Cometh

An attorney in Bermuda, Stephen Notman, has written a lengthy defense of the bride+groom requirement in state marriage licensing, both from a secular perspective and from his Christian convictions. It was prompted after he posted a link on Facebook to he National Review article "The Case For Traditional Marriage". Someone he assigns the name Red Sonja rebutted his endorsement of the article. He analyzed her response, and it is worth a read. (Hat Tip: Wintery Knight)

In the quotes I provide below, I mostly stick to Notman's secular arguments. If you click through to his piece, you can see the rest.

[The quotes are after the jump.]

She contended that marriage about an emotional union more than procreation. Notman pointed out:

The Article's secular argument is a simple facts of life argument based in biology. Marriage exists to provide a satisfactory arrangement to deal with the fact that heterosexual sex often produces children, who in turn, are in need of protection.

And...

The most weak and a vulnerable person in the family is the one in need of most protection and thus the law strives to protect the child’s best interests. Of course, this does not prevent infertile couples from marrying or couples that do not choose to have children, but marriage is defined a certain way so that it can provide the best possible structure for child-raising.

He goes on to offer:

In fact, it is quite clear from listening to the words of many activists that the effort to establish same sex marriage is really not about securing marital rights for homosexuals, so much as it is about deconstructing the traditional concept of marriage. If judicial activism succeeds in ratifying homosexual marriages so that it gains the sponsorship and protection of the State, they will have deconstructed the traditional notion of marriage between a man and a woman and opened the door for virtually any kind of relationship to count as a marriage. Once the essence of marriage as between a man and a woman is eradicated, it can be defined any way that people want and so marriage will become whatever anyone wants it to be.

Red Sonja brings up the infertility argument, and asks if we are going to prevent disabled people from getting married because they will be more limited in parenting or prevent people from getting married at all because divorce hurts children, and they can’t divorce if they were never married.

Unfortunately Sonja has woefully misstated the Article's argument and knocked down a straw man. The argument acknowledges that the law has never prevented heterosexual people from getting married because they would risk splitting up, or prevented heterosexual disabled people getting married because they could not give optimal care for children. Rather, the argument is that marriage exists because men and women typically tend to procreate and thus to acknowledge this fact it is built in to the definition of marriage.

Red Sonja asked:

How can the Article equate a same-sex partnership with cohabiting friends or ‘elderly brothers’? What sort of flawed logic exists? Surely the difference between platonic and romantic relationships is understood?

Notman responds:

The Article summarizes the legal issues that will logically arise as a consequence of denying marriage of its procreative nature and stripping the definition of marriage of its gender requirement. Red Sonja has denied that marriage is essentially procreative in nature. Instead, she believes its primary focus is the emotional union and devotion between loving adults. Fine, but what the Article points out is that elderly brothers can have an emotional union and be devoted to one another. Co-habiting friends can do the same. So why can they not get married? “Because they’re platonic”, cries Sonja. But if marriage’s focus is fixated on devotion and not the procreative element, then why discriminate against two brothers who love each other dearly and want to express that love with a marriage, simply because they are not having sex? On her criterion, she ends up making non-procreative gay sex the determinant criterion for a same sex marriage. And that does not seem logically consistent, since she does not seek to exclude celibate or non-procreative hetero couples from getting married.

Notman notes the inconsistency in saying that morality should not be used in the argument, while subsequently appealing to morality.

The National Review has attempted to present a case for traditional marriage without reference at all to the moral question. But Red Sonja repeatedly couches her objections in moral language. She speaks of rights to marriage, that gay people ought to be able to marry and ought not have to suffer social ostracism. She believes firmly that there is nothing inherently immoral in the homosexual lifestyle and that gay sex is certainly not immoral. Recall that even if she did think it was immoral but thought tolerance was appropriate, the response would be that sodomy is not illegal, civil partnerships are available and marriage goes beyond mere tolerance and into open approval, at the price of tolerance for religious freedom of expression and the optimal environment for raising children.

She clearly believes that gay marriage is an objective good and that denying it to homosexuals is a real moral evil. In order to rationally hold these positions, she must believe in the existence of objective moral values. She cannot simply believe that moral truth is relative ie. True for you, but not for me. For if moral truth is merely relative, it logically leaves her with no legitimate grounding to impose her personal beliefs on anyone outside of herself.

Red Sonja asked:

The Article states that supporters of same-sex marriage are in denial that it would cause a 'radical change in American law or society.' What radical change would this be? He doesn’t elaborate on this point, merely begins to theorise on the purpose of marriage.

Okay, one quote about where Christians are coming from. Notman responds:

Redefining marriage will have a profound social and legal impact on our freedom of religious expression. Virtually all major religions proscribe against homosexual forms of sex. But apparently, thousands of years of collected wisdom is wrong and all major religious figures and followers alike are a bunch of bigoted homophobes. This is the point that some might doff their Biblical scholar’s cap and demand to know where Jesus said homosexuality was wrong. I would remind them however that He never directly addressed paedophilia either and that ‘arguments from silence’ are logical fallacies. Moreover, the Bible never condemns homosexuality in terms of orientation. Rather, it is explicit that homosexual sex is prohibited. While some liberal postmodern theologians have tried to reinterpret God’s law, virtually all Biblical scholars agree that homosexual sex is specifically condemned as an ‘abomination’ in the Old Testament in Leviticus and again condemned in the New Testament in the Book of Romans. Moreover, marriage is repeatedly described throughout the Bible as between one man and one woman.