True Marriage? And, Related How?

Here is a comment I left at Amptoons.

www.amptoons.com/blog/2011/02/23/will-legal-same-sex-marriage-lead-to-incestuous-marriage-no-it-wont

Ampersand, your comment indicates that you agree with myca's comment in it entirety.

[See the comments at the above link.]

Did you invoke the count of cultures? Yes you did. That is no misconception. You sought to quantify for the sake of rendering an accurate definition of your own.

In the breadth of known human cultures, the practice of men 'marrying' men, or women 'marrying' women, does not count in huge numbers or majorities nor does it even qualify for the descriptor, many. The count would need to include, as confirmed, all the speculative exceptions and include the smattering of present day anomalies to quantify the practice as a tiny drop in the sea.

But since the count clearly favors the two-sexed relationship, as even polygamy demonstrates, it would be counter-intuitive,  as you put it, and dubious, as you put it, to define marriage as other than two-sexed. Or to claim that all these known cultures had it wrong in the aggregate and it is only the smattering of present day portions of western culture that now finally has it right.

But you did.

Moving forward, please confirm, correct, or clarify: You reject the notion that marriage has an independent reality. [You think] that there is no true marriage [core definition] despite your offered core definition.

Such a rejection would render inapt Myca's beetle analogy since the decisive stuff of marriage would not be something intrinsic to the type of relationship but rather something extrinsic.

The stress on practice is presented in lieu of a principled basis for something classifed as marriage. That would mean recasting the thing endlessly maleable and thus not actually definable by stuff integral to it.

By the by, while you made a prediction about the future of incestuous marriage, George did not. His query - and the challenge he set forth - is about the principled basis for something like marriage. Your remarks about incest demonstrate that your proposed definition is incoherent and incomplete.

* * *

Update:

The exchange at Amptoons has already indicated that the SSMer has an inkling that marriage can be reasonably defined based on features found amidst the great variety of the great bulk of human cultures.

Ampersand thought he could reduce the core to 'making unrelated people closest kin'. (Read his blogpost and the exchange for his carefully worded definition of marriage across human cultures.) His reference to polyandry and polygny  - the practice as opposed to the concept and its principled basis, mind - backfires as my subsequent comments there will demonstrate.

I'll crosspost here if the comment section is still open to my participation there. Otherwise I'll continue here what Ampersand started there (with his own blogposts, but not his comments, crossposted at Family Scholars Blog where my comments have been hindered arbitrarily.) The fragility of his pose calls out for a gentle if frank response from defenders of marriage.

SSMers try to mimic the promarriage arguments but their distortions depend very much on leaving stuff out. This has led to misconstruing the challenge that Robert George put to them. This is evident in Ampersand's use of the phrase "core definition" and his claim that the definition that Robert George presented is not representative of marital relationships across cultures. Ampersand counted polygny and polyandry as counter examples to the one-man-one-woman basis but Robert George did not neglect polygamy in his argument. Meanwhile his point (which Ampersand actually quoted but skipped past) is that human cultures regulate the natural connection of mom-children-dad (to paraphrase).

If the unrelated man and woman become related each to the other, how would it be possible? If they do not actually become physically related how are they more closely related than those already related by birth?

Bodily union integrates the male and female persons comprehensively since each person is a body and a personality. This procreative type of relationship is orientated toward the sexual type of behavior which itself commonly makes mom and dad related through birth - the birth of their children. Bodily union is essential to this type of relationship.

This comprehensive union arises from the two-sexed nature of humankind, the complementarily-sexed nature of human procreation, and the both-sexed nature of human community. It is far more than a concept or theory or abstract definition. Human cultures respond to this, as described by Robert George.

This comprehensive union extends beyond the  particular husband and wife; it qualifies marriage as an organic social institution that is recognized rather than created and owned by Government. Through its sexual ecology on the personal level but also on the cultural level, the marital relationship integrates the sexes and provides for responsible procreation.

This is how the man is transformed into husband and the woman is transformed into wife and thus becomes each other's close kin; this is basis for societal response, for recognition by governing authorities, and  both for the special place of marriage and for the boundaries drawn around it. They aren't just close kin; they are a particular kind of kin. That is, the marital relationship is different from other types of relationships (of related people or unrelated people) both in kind and in degree.

Thus united, the wife and husband become the closest that two unrelated embodied personalities can come to being blood related. Ampersand may faintly percieve this for he talks of closest kin without identifying how the unrelated become closet kin. Through marriage but how?

This cannot be so for a same-sex scenario which would depend entirely on a legal fiction rather than comprehensive union via the procreative type of relationship. Each insance of SSM is sex segregative and nonfertile as a type of relationship. It lacks the intrinsic features that classify a human relationship as marital.

Ampersand's attempted core definition is designed to suite his SSM idea but, in terms of marriage across the historical and anthropological records, it is incomplete and thus insufficient.

He had used the count of cultures to make the claim that his offered definition is more accurate. That mimickry of Robert George's argument backfired on Ampersand.