Robert P. George and Legal Arguments Against Gay Marriage

A small storm seems to have been started by the president's support of marriage equality, so it seems appropriate to give the issue a little thought.

I am going to be reading The Meaning of Marriage: Family, State, Market, and Morals by Robert P. George and Jean Bethke Elshtain. I look forward to reading this because it takes a social stance with which I mostly disagree. The description for the volume says that it

brings together the best of contemporary scholarship on marriage from a variety of disciplines - history, ethics, economics, law and public policy, philosophy, sociology, psychiatry, political science - to inform, and reform, public debate. Rigorous yet accessible, these studies aim to rethink and re-present the case for marriage as a positive institution and ideal that is in the public interest and serves the common good. The essays in this volume were presented to an audience of scholars, journalists, public policy experts, and other professionals at a conference at Princeton University sponsored by the Witherspoon Institute. The authors are among the most eminent authorities on marriage and public policy in the English-speaking world.

I am interested to see the arguments they make. I do worry that the authors will spend their time begging the question, that is assuming their conclusion in their premises, as the introduction states "An underlying presupposition for the essayists featured here … is that if we alter the institution of marriage as it is understood in our laws, there will be profound and perhaps unintended consequences for the ways in which we think of ourselves as men and women, and for the kind of society we live in." Along these lines, it presupposes the already very troubled western notion of gender binary.

Elshtain is a political philosopher; her work puts a lot of emphasis on the development of gender "roles in … social participation." She was one of President Bush's supporters in military action in Iraq and Afghanistan.

George is a professor of Jurisprudence at Princeton University. He is also contributing to a forthcoming book What is Marriage?: Man and Woman: A Defense (Holy colon!), which I look forward to reading.

The very first sentence in the description for What is Marriage reads: "Until just yesterday, no society — monogamous or polygamous — had defined marriage as anything other than a male-female union." It doesn't seem like this statement is true. For example, Ancient Greece, Rome, and some chinese provinces had same-sex marriage and same-sex unions that resembled marriage (see Kathleen Lahey and Kevin Anderson's Same-Sex Marriage: the Personal and the Political, Ritualized Homosexuality in Melanesia by Gilbert Herdt, John Boswell's "Same Sex Unions in Pre-Modern Europe," James Neill's The Origins and Role of Same-Sex Relations in Human Societies, and Same-Sex Marriage: A Reference Handbook by David E. Newton for the history of gay marriage). The description goes on to say "those who embrace same-sex civil marriage leave themselves no firm ground — none — for not recognizing as marriages every relationship type describable in polite English, including multiple-partner ('polyamorous') sexual unions." I look forward to reading this book because I have yet to see a convincing argument that the first logically leads to the other (unless there is a convincing case, this is the same slippery slope argument Bill O'Reilly makes when he states that legalizing marriage equality will lead to humans marrying turtles).

Again, I look forward to reading these books as I am not convinced of the merits of legislating a definition of marriage and imposing it on a secular State. I hold that marriage equality is a case of socio-economic benefits which should not be denied consenting adults in a free society; this amounts to discrimination.