May 16, 2008

Gay Marriage

By: Sonny Bunch

It’s one of those issues I try to tiptoe around as carefully as possible, but I promised my Doublethink overlords I would comment on the issues of the day, so comment I shall. First, gay marriage in the abstract. As a conservative, I fear, despise, and loathe change, especially fundamental change to society’s fundamental bedrock, namely the family unit. Furthermore, I don’t see where the change stops. Why deny polygamists the right to their conception of a family? Why deny family members the right to marry each other? Worrying about a slippery slope is not the same thing as making an argument, but I think it’s something that must be considered in this case.

As a libertarian, however–especially a younger libertarian–I have no real objection to two chicks or two dudes getting married. It doesn’t really impact me, so hey: live and let live. Furthermore, there’s no stopping gay marriage. In 100 years, people are going to look back on this debate and laugh. A man will sit there with his four wives and 25 children and regale them of stories from a day when their, and their gay neighbor’s, lifestyle was both reviled and illegal. Being on the “right side of history” is even less of an argument than “hey, look out for the wet grass on that steep hill!” but I’m more than happy to claim the moral high ground by saying I’m looking towards a future free from discrimination.

Enough with the abstract: What about the California decision in particular? I don’t know nearly enough about the state, the state’s court system, or the history of the law under review to offer an informed opinion. If you want the pro, go read Andrew, if you want the con, go read the Corner. But I would like to draw your attention to James’s thoughts on the degradation of language as it relates to law:

Look carefully at this phrasing:

…because of the long and celebrated history of the term “marriage” and the widespread understanding that this word describes a family relationship unreservedly sanctioned by the community, the statutory provisions that continue to limit access to this designation exclusively to opposite-sex couples…

The key terms here are ‘marriage’, ‘widespread’, ‘understanding’, ‘family’, ‘relationship’, ‘unreservedly’, ’sanctioned’, ‘community’, ‘limit’, ‘access’, and ‘designation’. The term ‘marriage’ is the one under controversy, and so has been stripped of any prefab definition. The term ‘widespread’ is impossibly vague. The term ‘understanding’ fails to capture the depth and character of public judgments about marriage. These judgments are sometimes mere ‘opinions’, sometimes are fiercely held ‘convictions’; sometimes they are well thought through, sometimes they are not. To declare that some unquantifiable but sufficiently large number of citizens share some unqualifiable but sufficiently coherent mental characterization of marriage as an unreservedly community-sanctioned family relationship is to abstract bizarrely away from the way plain people think about marriage. God knows what a ‘community’ means in this context. A state? A county? A town? ‘Community’ is a wholly meaningless term here. ‘Unreservedly’ is similarly nebulous. And if we all know what ‘family’ means, why must the term be thrown into ambiguity by the qualifier ‘relationship’? How is a family different from a family relationship? These sorts of verbal curlicues are not mere flourishes. They are acts of cluttering up and evasion which are decisive to the reasoning, such as it is, of the majority opinion.

In other words, this decision is based on verbal gobbledygook; worse still, indecipherable legal gobbledygook that could mean anything. Again, I’m pretty ambivalent on gay marriage…but I think we can all agree* that this is not the process by which it should be made legal.

*And by “can” I mean “should” because I know those on the left think that the judiciary is a perfectly acceptable vehicle for pushing public policy and making laws. Original purpose of the court be damned: Judges are more than qualified to make up rights as they see fit!