Marriage Debate

Over at Volokh, guest blogger, Maggie Gallagher, is having a debate about same sex marriage. It's an interesting exchange in a variety of ways, some of which I comment on over there and some which I will comment on here later.

Occasionally, amid the huffing, puffing and strawman agruements on each side, a little nugget of the visceral, emotional truth bobs breifly to the surface. Here's one I thought an interesting observation:

I really do think, btw, that this is what bothers most ordinary people: an instinct that their government, against their will, is telling them (and will re-educate their children) that everything they know about marriage (like the first ingredient is a husband and a wife, duh) is wrong and must now change. Upon penalty of being officially labelled bigots by their government. And everyone knows its open season on bigots in our society.

Read the thread and comments. It's really very interesting.

My hat is off to Eugene for hosting this on his site.

Update: This is also an excellent bit, although Andrew Sullivan made a similar point a while back in one of his columns.

As to the second, Maggie captures something important that has been obscured by reproductive technology--primarily birth control. Prior to reliable means of birth control, it was inevitable that male-female unions would produce babies; in this way, they were fundamentally different from same-sex relationships, and even had such relationships been recognized, they would have not have presented the same problem of how to contain and nurture the inherent generativeness (?) of the male-female union. Defining marriage broadly enough to capture most fertile couples was an attempt to solve the myriad problems this generative (and uncontrollable, apart from celibacy) characteristic of male-female relationships. Perhaps Kate is also correct that the popular concept of marriage has been transformed (arguably by the development of reliable birth control technologies). If she is, and the popular concept of marriage has finally diverged (or will diverge) so markedly from the traditional religious concept, perhaps it's time for either a privatization of marriage or a reassertion of the distinction between civil and religious marriage?

I'm fundementally a fan of the idea the a) the government shouldn't be in the marriage business at all and b) we should end all government subsidy/penalty of marriage.