by Howard Schweber for The Huffington Post
Last week the Connecticut Supreme Court ruled that the state must extend the legal status of marriage to same-sex couples. Their argument involved a determination that homosexuals constitute a quasi-suspect class -- a question the U.S. Supreme Court has gone to nearly incredible lengths to avoid addressing -- but I'm not really interested in that at the moment. Instead, it's the dissenting arguments that intrigue me. Debates about same-sex marriage seem to inspire really, really bad arguments, and I thought I would take a moment to review a couple of them.
One of these Really Bad Arguments is captured in the phrase "Defense of Marriage." The idea, of course, is that allowing same sex couples to marry threatens the marriages of mixed-sex couples. As a member of a mixed-sex marriage myself, I have to confess that I have never been able to ascertain the nature of the threat. (The only explanation I can come with, actually, is one that I call the "wow, I could have had a V-8!" principle.)
An equally silly version says that I will take my own marriage less seriously if too many other kinds of people are allowed to have them. The idea, of course, is the idea of exclusivity: who wants to be a member of a club if just anybody can join? The further assumption is that the mixed-sex couples around me are all the Right Kind of People, while the same-sex couples clamoring to get married are not the sort of people with whom I would want to be associated. Okay, never mind any thoughts about the average intelligence, decency, and good will of same-sex couples seeking to marry. Trust me: as I look about the country, there is absolutely no danger that extending the prerogative of marriage to new classes of people can possibly diminish the regard I have for the class of Married Americans.
Then there is the argument from "nature." This one is bad on so many levels. For one thing, homosexuality is difficult to describe as "unnatural" given that animals practice it with some regularity. But another, more serious, argument is this: animals are governed by nature. Humans are governed by reason, and law. The Hebrew Bible God gives the Israelite a single injunction: "Justice, justice, you shall pursue," not "Nature, nature, you shall pursue" (a rather more Aristotelian position, and one forever diminished by Hume's demolition of the is/ought distinction. "There is a special place in Hell," said Bertrand Russell, "for those philosophers who have refuted Hume." It was in a different context, but Russell had a point.
But the Really, Really Bad Arguments are the ones that try to define marriage as being about having children and the reason from there. To see just how bad these arguments are, one has to go through it step by step, in each of its two iterations.
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