In TPD
Prof. Charles Reid thinks love makes a marriage. He claims we think sex
makes a marriage. In truth, comprehensive union makes a marriage. And getting
marriage right matters for everyone.
Earlier this month, at the annual Fall Conference of Notre Dame’s Center for
Ethics and Culture, two of us (Girgis and Anderson) participated in a public
conversation with Professor Charles Reid on the subject of “Marriage,
Catholicism, and Public Policy.” There, Reid amiably defended his view that two
men or two women can form a marriage, and that civil marriage should be
redefined accordingly.
In a follow-up piece
in the Huffington Post, Reid attributes to our book, What Is Marriage? Man and Woman: A
Defense, the argument that sex is what makes a man and a woman
permanently bonded and hence married. Against the obvious point that one-night
stands don’t make a marriage, he claims that we would invoke marital vows but
never really stop to consider what might motivate such vows in the first place.
If we did, Reid argues, we would see that it is not matching “bodily design[s]”
but “human affection” that really “makes a marriage.”
So for Reid, the real question for the marriage debate is “who is capable of
love”—by which he means a certain “emotion.” And that, he thinks, is an
empirical question now settled by science showing same-sex bonds to be
stable.
In his op-ed and our debate, Reid mangles our view (and the historic
understanding) of marriage. In its place, he proposes a view vulnerable to
objections—some quite obvious—that Reid himself laid out years ago, before he
altered his stance on the issue. Here we address his distortions of our view,
and the weaknesses in his own, before turning to the social stakes of the
debate.
Distortions
Reid says that we think a man and woman’s sexual intercourse “is enough to
create a permanent union.” We have never said or written any such thing, for the
simple reason that we consider it obviously false. To suggest otherwise, Reid
cites a passage in our book in which we point out that the kind of bodily union
that exists within a person is possible between two people, but
only in coitus. What makes a person’s heart, lungs, and other parts “one flesh”
is that they are actively coordinated toward a single bodily end (life) of the
whole (the person himself). Likewise, we argued, in coitus a man and a woman
participate in a bodily coordination with a single bodily end (reproduction)
that pertains to the whole (the couple).
Nowhere in the passage (or even on the page) cited by Reid do we address the
marital norm of permanence. So, pace Reid, we don’t think sex itself
creates ex nihilo a permanent bond. Nor do we think sexual
complementarity is what motivates a man and a woman to pledge permanence.
What makes a marriage—what marriage is—is not just love or sex but
comprehensive union. That—total union with the beloved—is what romantic
love seeks. Since persons are embodied, one element of total personal
union is bodily union—which only a man and a woman can form. That is what
we argue in the passage cited by Reid.
Of course, there is more to marriage. It is comprehensive, not just in the
dimensions of the partners united (mind and body), but in the range of goods
toward which it unites them. Marriage calls for the wide sharing of domestic
life because it’s inherently fulfilled by family life. And that is so
because the act that makes marital love is also the kind of act that makes new
life.
In other words, just as only a man and a woman can unite in both mind and
body, so only a male-female bond can naturally produce a child or inherently
call for a comprehensive sharing of life. Only such a bond can be oriented by
its nature to the development of whole new human beings—i.e., not just
this or that good, but new participants in every good—and thus to the all-around
sharing of domestic life.
And finally, this twofold comprehensiveness of marriage—in the dimensions of
the partners united and the range of goods uniting them—calls for equally
comprehensive commitment. That means a commitment of one’s whole self, for one’s
whole life: exclusive and permanent.
In short, it is not emotion alone (as Reid supposes), or sex alone (as Reid
wrongly supposes we suppose), or even sex plus emotion plus childrearing that
creates the permanent commitment. Vows do that.
But contra Reid, our invocation of marital vows here isn’t arbitrary.
What determines the kind of commitment people should pledge—the type of
vow they should make—is the kind of cooperation they seek. What calls for
comprehensive commitment are the comprehensive cooperation of bodily union and
its fulfilment in family and domestic life.
Indeed, this sort of cooperation doesn’t merely justify comprehensive
commitment; it also gives it content. Commitment is never generic; it is
always commitment to do certain things. What spouses pledge to be
permanently exclusive about is the comprehensive cooperation that begins
in the marital act that seals consent, and unfolds into domestic life.
So it isn’t just that other groups (two men, two women, any three or
more) can’t form a comprehensive union in these senses, and so have no objective
basis to decide to pledge total commitment (as opposed to whatever they happen
to prefer). It’s also that if they did make such a pledge, it would be a
permanently exclusive commitment to something else: to sharing a home and
fostering romantic desire, perhaps. In any case, it would not be commitment to
the kind of mind-body union inherently oriented to family life—to marriage.
Against this, Reid’s citation of studies finding stable same-sex
bonds—whatever the quality of those studies—is no rebuttal. Our point is not
that two men or two women can form only fragile marriages. It is that they can’t
engage in the comprehensively unifying act, or form a bond ordered to the
comprehensive sharing, that makes a marriage and calls for total
commitment.
Reid’s alternative
Now consider the failures of Reid’s view. Though his line—that love makes a
marriage—is a familiar slogan, we are certain no one has ever believed it as
stated—not even today, not even Reid. The love of mother for daughter, of
teacher for pupil, of pastor for flock; the love of brothers or best friends is
true love. No one thinks love in these forms can make a marriage. The question
is what is distinctive of marital love, and of the specific form
of union it takes.
Most people on both sides of the current marriage debate—including Reid, who
has occupied both sides—agree that marriage requires a permanent and exclusive
commitment. They agree that it is a sexual bond, and that it unfolds into family
life. Our view explains and unifies all these features by the idea of
comprehensive union.
But to say with Reid that love makes a marriage, and to explain love as
intense emotion, is to make nonsense of these same features. Here is how one
scholar put it just a few years ago:
Affection is, of course, a good thing. . . . But
affection, personal commitment, love between persons, seem to be insufficient,
without more, to provide a coherent foundation for marriage. What does it mean
to say that a marriage is grounded on “affection”? What if affection, or
commitment, vanish? [sic] What if affection cannot be confined to a single
party? What if loyalty shifts?
That scholar was Charles Reid. He has now eschewed the conjugal view of
marriage as a male-female union for a view of marriage as defined by
affection. But nowhere has he answered his own (former) objections to his own
(current) view. We reissue Reid’s challenge to Reid.
The Harms of Redefinition
Professor Reid also once grasped the harms of legally enshrining this new
vision of marriage-as-emotional-union. As he
put it:
I suspect that the lowest common denominator—the
state-established default rules that specify the minimum necessary to enter
valid marriage—may come to define marriage for a large majority of persons.
In other words, if the law redefines marriage as simple companionship, then
every other distinguishing feature of marriage—permanence, exclusivity,
monogamy—will become arbitrary in principle, and harder to support in
practice.
We argued as much in our early written work on marriage, when some called it
scaremongering. But since then, these implications of the emotional-union view
have been embraced by many advocates of marriage redefinition. Indeed, if
language is a measure of culture, it’s telling that new terms have been coined
to encourage people to flout the stabilizing norms that we argued
the emotional-union view would undermine.
Thus, a New York Times profile of gay activist Dan Savage, headlined
“Married,
with Infidelities,” introduced Americans to the term
“monogamish”—relationships where partners would allow sexual infidelity,
provided they were honest about it.
The article explained: “Savage says a more flexible attitude within marriage
may be just what the straight community needs.” After all, the story added,
sexual exclusivity “gives people unrealistic expectations of themselves and
their partners.” Rather than strive for faithfulness to one spouse, Savage and
increasingly many likeminded advocates would have couples embrace sexual
openness. And why not, if some find openness more emotionally satisfying, and
emotional union is what makes a marriage?
But by the same token, why should marriage—emotional union—be limited to two
people in the first place? Thus the word “throuple:” a couple-like union of
three. A 2012 New York Magazine piece profiled one
throuple:
Their throuplehood is more or less a permanent
domestic arrangement. The three men work together, raise dogs together, sleep
together, miss one another, collect art together, travel together, bring each
other glasses of water, and, in general, exemplify a modern, adult
relationship.
Finally, our culture’s romantic lexicon now includes “wedlease,” introduced
in an
August 2013 op-ed in The Washington Post. Why should marriage be
permanent if what defines it is emotion, which is notoriously inconstant? Why
not have temporary marriage licenses, as with other contracts? “Why don’t
we borrow from real estate and create a marital lease?” the author asked.
“Instead of wedlock, a ‘wedlease.’” He continues:
Here’s how a marital lease could work: Two people
commit themselves to marriage for a period of years—one year, five years, 10
years, whatever term suits them. The marital lease could be renewed at the end
of the term however many times a couple likes.… The messiness of divorce is
avoided and the end can be as simple as vacating a rental unit.
Of course, we’re not primarily concerned with linguistic trends. Our central
point is that if people are taught by the law that marriage is fundamentally an
emotional union for personal fulfillment, as Reid suggests, it will be more
difficult for people to see the point of permanence when emotion fades, of
exclusivity when the heart wanders. That will undermine these norms in
practice—just as no-fault divorce (we now know) didn’t simply make the
separation process easier but weakened public appreciation of permanence, making
people more likely to decide to split. Similarly, if we redefine the law to make
mothers and fathers optional, it will be hard for people to see that they are
critical. And that will weaken motivations to stick with a marriage for the
children, or indeed to marry before having children.
All these developments, in turn, will harm the very interests that motivate
and justify the state’s role in marriage. As a policy matter, after all,
marriage is about attaching a man and a woman as husband and wife to be father
and mother to any children their union produces. When a baby is born, there is
always a mother nearby: that is a fact of reproductive biology. The question is
whether a father will be involved in the child’s life, and for how long.
Marriage makes a man likelier to be committed both to the children that he helps
generate and to their mother.
It does so for the sake of the children in question, and for everyone else.
For whatever one thinks of the morality of sexually open, multipartner, and
deliberately temporary bonds, their social costs run high. The marital norms of
monogamy, sexual exclusivity, and permanence make a difference for society. They
reduce the numbers of fatherless children and fragmented families, which
improves prospects for the whole of the next generation.
Redefining marriage collapses the distinction between marriage and
companionship in principle and in practice. It therefore undermines all the
marital norms—so critical for spousal stability and the next generation’s
well-being—that explain the law’s involvement in marriage. Professor Reid once
seemed to understand this. He now seems to overlook it, and to have difficulty
even grasping the contrary view he once defended.
