More on Marriage

February 24, 2004

One favorite defense of heterosexual exclusivity in marriage is that marriage is supposed to be for procreation. As gay people cannot reproduce without scientific intervention, the thinking goes, they are not elligible for marriage.

Ah, but what about couples who are childless either by choice or by circumstance? My friend Blogless Missie forwarded me this explanation she found on a Washington Post chat-room.*

bq. Yes, infertile and childless opposite-sex couples are allowed to marry too–but that is only because excluding them would require either an invasion of privacy or the drawing of arbitrary and inexact lines. Marriage is left open to the entire class of those couples that are even theoretically capable of reproduction (opposite-sex couples), but closed to those that are intrinsically infertile (same-sex couples).

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* Please do not mistake this for Blogless Missie’s position.
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As creative defenses of indefensible arguments are concerned, this one is pretty good. Now, tell me if you think I’m mis-reading this, but it seems to me the argument is two-pronged:

# Determining whether or not a heterosexual couple is biologically capable of having children would be an invasion of privacy (presumably because it would require cultural devulsion of medical issues).
# It’s too hard to tell if a heterosexual couple is fertile or not, so infertile ones get a pass. Homosexuals, on the other hand, are obviously infertile, so they don’t get that kind of pass.

Now, first off: I’m no marriage scholar, but it does seem to me that tolerance for infertile couples has on many occasions been rather thin — and no one gave two cents for a couple’s privacy. This idea that people have a right to privacy in their medical reproductive lives — that’s a new one, born out of a democracy where some things are considered personal business. In other words, I don’t see what privacy has to do with defending traditional marriage values when traditional marriage values did not include privacy.

The second argument is complicated by science. If we wanted to, we would ensure that everyone’s equipment worked, and dissolve marriages that were childless after a certain number of years. In fact, I would not be surprised that that was exactly what some cultures did, although I am as much an anthropologist as George Dubbya is a statistician. (Anthropologists are invited to comment, however.) (George Dubbya is neither an anthropologist nor a marriage scholar, by the way.)

And while we do draw the line at obviously incapable homosexuals, we don’t withold the rite of marriage from similarly obviously incapable heterosexuals. For example, women past menopause can still marry, despite the fact that such a union would be as infertile as a same-sex marriage. To my mind, that’s an arbitrary decision.

In any case, infertility *is* a traditional acceptable reason for dissolving or breaking marriage vows. I have been told that infertility is grounds for annulment from the Catholic Church; and heirless kings, lords, and landowners the world over and throughout history sought other female partners not their wives if they didn’t get a male heir.

Was the institution of marriage created for the purpose of procreation? Possibly. Helping ensure paternity, surely. Establishing male ownership and domination of women, almost certainly.

But do we still need these things? Do we need to encourage procreation, or can we reliably believe it’s going to continue regardless? Do we really think marriage vows ensure fidelity any more? Do we really want women to be owned by men?

If the answer to these things is “no,” then why cling to the procreation purpose of marriage?

Posted in Politics, Sex