196. Same-Sex Marriage: Are They Just Fighting Over a Word?

-->

Tuesday I heard a plaintiff in the Proposition 8 case, Jeff Zarillo, tell the nation (on CNN's Starting Point) how important the word "marriage" is to him: "It has global recognition. No one celebrates a domestic partnership-versary. They celebrate an anniversary of marriage."

Zarrillo wants what I once (in Post #27) called "flavor" in his word, and "domestic partnership" doesn't have it.  Nor, I suppose, does "civil union" or any of the other alternatives.  

Flavor satisfies the taste but it sometimes confuses the mind.  The word "rights" in "animal rights" has a flavor of legality, but it lacks legal foundation and leaves us groping for a referent.  But I was wrong to depreciate Zarillo's cause with a word like "flavor."  The word "marriage" is sought not out of a taste preference but out of a demand for equality.  The argument, put simply, is that "we who are essentially the same — in our ability to love, and remain faithful, and raise children, etc. — should have the same rights, privileges, and benefits others do.  The word 'marriage,' if not a right, is at least a benefit that should be allowed to us.  Otherwise we are not equal."

This throws us back into a verbal dispute, this time over the word "equal."  To call two things equal they have to be the same, not in all respects (nothing, outside of mathematics and logic, ever is) but in relevant respects..  Gay and lesbian candidates for marriage argue that they are the same as heterosexuals in everything but their ability to reproduce.  But, the key question, Is that ability relevant?

"No!' said Justice Elena Kagan on Tuesday.  We let old people marry.  And our best columnists and bloggers have nailed her counter-example down.  (See, for a very thorough example, http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/human_nature/2013/03/homosexuality_as_infertility_how_to_end_the_gay_marriage_debate.html  )

The strongest argument for the relevance of fertility is, I think, one that fixes on human purpose and decisions that further it.  "Fertility is certainly relevant in a candidate for a place in my garden.  I don't want to plant a sterile flower where I need more of their kind.  No matter that they are as beautiful, as cherished, as welcome in the spring as the fertile flowers, they are not, in this important respect, the same.  So they can't, in my estimation, be equal.  I can discriminate among them when I go to the nursery."

That analogy will not, I think, be enough to satisfy Justice Kagan and those she speaks for, so we are left with the unshaken view that bonded gays and bonded straights are the same in all relevant respects. 

But does that mean that the words for them and their bond have to be the same?  Are words relevant?

On Tuesday Chief Justice Roberts made the radical suggestion that a word is the only thing that's relevant in the present case.  The plaintiffs have made it that way.  "It's just about the label....all you're interested in is the label and you insist on changing the definition of the label." 

That gives me a vision of peace.  It's probably just an unrealistic, academic vision but maybe you could share it.  What you do is take a thorough scientific survey.  You list every benefit the government gives the married, from survivor's benefits through income tax deductions (there are 59 of them) to special state protection for “intrafamily offenses” all the way to joint bankruptcy.  After you make sure you have all the legal rights (1049 here) you add all the privileges.  Everything society can give a partnership of gays or lesbians will be in one package.  Finally you put a name on it — "civil union," "domestic partnership," "sworn bond," anything but the name "marriage."  Then you ask whether or not your interviewee will accept the package.  If he (or she) says "No" you put him down as one fighting only for a word.  You follow a similar sequence with an interviewee of the opposing party.  If he says, "Granted," to each item on the list but won't grant "marriage" then he too is fighting only for a word.  At the end you add up what's in your columns and, if the numbers are significant, you publish them in a newspaper (not an academic journal) and write an editorial asking, "What in the world are you two groups so mad at each other about?  You're fighting over a very little thing."  They read it and say, "You're right.  Chief Justice Roberts was onto us.  One word isn't worth all this."

There can't be any objections to a vision, can there?  Later post, later post.

195. Humane Feelings and the Collapse of the Cincinnati Reds.

-->

Oh how well we clear thinkers understand games.  We know (preceding post) that they are pure tests of ability, that humane feelings gum them up, and that if you don't get rid of them you'll look as foolish as those who let Oscar Pritorius run with a metal foot, Renée Richards play women's tennis with men's muscles, and thousands of handicapped people think they have really won something when they come in first at the Special Olympics.

And where might this superior thinking lead us?  I think the experience of Cincinnati and the players on its baseball team, much of it detailed in my posts on Baseball Pain (#179 through #192), gives us a good idea.

For the players I think right thinking would lead to their shutting out, on the field, every thought of the dying Fred Hutchinson.  That means, distant analyst, that in every at-bat during those thirty-three innings when all they needed (to bring home the runner who would give them victory) was to lay the bat firmly on just one ball, they would be saying to themselves, as each ball came out of the pitcher's hand (see it, analyst, get up close), "Here comes a ball, like any other, that I am going to swing at, or not, according to its position (high, low, out, in) and appearance (spin, little spin, no spin), judged by my experience with other balls leaving pitchers' hands."  That would follow from their knowledge of the game, and indeed from their coaches' instruction.  To win you keep your poise; you don't heighten your determination.  You do not say, it would be fatal to say, "Here comes a ball I'm by God going to hit for Hutch."

And what are you saying if you are a clear-thinking fan?  "Way to go.  Keep it up.  No Hutch."  And if you are a clear-thinking analyst you're saying, "Yes, that's the right thing, for player and fan."

Us now.  What do we say?  We know the full story.  We know what a great job these players have done maintaining their poise.  It's almost unbelievable.  For months they have watched Hutchinson lose weight and sag, and walk more and more slowly out to relieve his pitcher.   They have followed him as he went out of uniform and into the stands.  They have seen him up there as a spectator, and they have managed, apparently, to put that and all those other pictures of him out of their minds as they made their plays and swung their bats and climbed in the standings.  And then, during a road trip that removed the pictures, when there remained only the temptation to think of him at home, listening on the radio, they had continued to keep their balance, on and on, through now nine straight victories. 

Sure, in the last six of those wins, in these days when the visible finish line tightens the tension in every pennant race, the schedule had blessed them with the advantage of playing out of sight (and, often, radio range) of Hutchinson, in distant cities, and that must have made it easier.  But now they are in their home town, with Hutch's hospital close by, and his picture in the papers.  We know that the fans know that.  They know that the preceding tests are small compared to what the players are going to face in the coming games.

What most of them don't know, and won't learn until later (as I did, from Doug Wilson's book, Fred Hutchinson and the 1964 Cincinnati Reds), is that Hutchinson, within six weeks of his grave, was in the midnight crowd at the airport waiting to greet the returning team, and that he would make his way to them, and hug each of them.

That's a test we have to imagine, before we face our own test.  Say you're Deron Johnson, clean-up man, counted on to bat runs in.  You know you have the best chance of being up at bat with the game on the line, maybe the season on the line.  You know that you have the best chance of coming through if your mind is empty.  And you, by this time, know how much effort it takes to keep Hutchinson's image out of it.  You know the odds, and what your emotions will do to them.  OK.  You see Hutchinson coming down the line giving hugs.  Do you bail out?  Sneak off, go home, try to forget him?  Or do you risk the hug? 

That's Johnson's problem, and we, forgetting what we know about the actual outcome (that Johnson, with one out in the fourteenth inning of the crucial game, with the winning run on third, struck out), have to imagine what Johnson faced at that time, feeling what he knows he would feel in that hug — the looser grip, the closer face, the bone in the sagging shoulder.  Our problem, our test, is whether or not we want him to do it.  Wanting is what makes the spectator complicit with the actor. Don't object that the test of the fan here, wanting or not wanting a hug, is microscopic.  Trace elements are good enough.  One small slide and there it will be: character!

What we will have a trace of may be small but there will be no mistaking it.  One kind of character says, "No!  No!  No hugs!  Go the other way.  Ignore him.  Forget Hutchinson.  Do anything, callous or not, to win.""  The other says, "Forget winning, forget the game, forget logic.  Feeling for a suffering human being comes first."

It's a small test and we baseball fans are, culturally, small people, but it's a test to be taken seriously.  Here is our chance to share in the decision-making of the great — Ulysses Grant counting the number he will have to sacrifice at Antietam, a scientist like Gottlieb (in Arrowsmith) anticipating the deaths in his control group, Tennessee Williams foreseeing the suffering of the sister he will abandon, Doris Lessing seeing the same in the children she will leave in Africa, all great generals and scientists and artists, really, all who have to be ruthless to succeed.  We can share in their decision-making by reading about it but that doesn't really test us, not like getting into a baseball season (or a novel, or a play) and being forced to decide, up close: do I really want this ruthlessness?  There's so much supporting either answer, whatever the grandeur of the outcome. Say No and in our culture you've got Christ behind you.  Say Yes and you've got the Greeks, the Romans, and Machiavelli. 

And there's so much to lose, either way.  Yes and you lose your humanity (in older terms, your soul).  No and you lose your reason, the faculty that told you what a game was, and distinguished it from parties and treatments, and made your words fit into a logic — in short, put things in conceptual order.

Try to go both ways, want both success and humanity, and you lose your reputation with analysts. You get called a "coward," one unwilling to pay the necessary price, or a "dullard," one unable to see the connection between success and price, or, both together, a "sentimentalist," one who wants "every idea without its sequence and every pleasure without its consequence."

These are the hazards once you throw yourself into spectating or reading, and quit just filling a seat.  Do that, become a fan in the old full, sense ("fanatic"), follow your passion one way or the other, and, by the experience of the fanatics in Cincinnati, I think your imagination will carry you well beyond the season — or the novel, or the play.  Did I make the right decision?  Do I have the right character?  We all want to be justified.

So some of us will have Johnson, after he has avoided the hug, meeting Hutchinson in Heaven.  "Hell, Hutch," he says, "my mind was on the next game."  We are seeing Hutchinson's character tested.  If he is the good manager we think he is he will understand perfectly. He'll forgive Johnson as Billy Budd forgave Captain Vere.  You do what you have to do to win. Superior ballplayers, superior beings, don't make a big deal out of hugs.

And some of us will have Johnson, after he has hugged, meeting Socrates, who will understand and sympathize, but who yet will say, "Yes, you have seen the injury you might have done to a man, but do you see the injury you have done to the laws, the laws of thought?  Logic.  The ordering of our concepts."  And he will go into the consequences of that for later generations, including his own children and grandchildren, who will look to his example.

Since those who give in to their hearts can track consequences in the same way, though, and we don't know how it will come out, we are left pretty much in the air.  It looks like a lady-or-the-tiger kind of choice.  I myself choose the hug-avoiders, but I'd be interested in hearing from others.  My email: hswardson@yahoo.com