197. What Is It About the Word "Marriage"?

  

 

Those holding out against same-sex marriage are down to the right to use a word.  Their last line of defense, that "you can't claim equality when you can't reproduce," broke down for most of them when Justice Kagan, answering a holdout spokesman, pointed out that old people, freely marrying, can't reproduce.  Reproduction is not relevant.  Gays, being the same in all other respects, are equal to straights and therefore deserve equal treatment before the law.

That resolution, though, doesn't seem to go very far in resolving the fight over equal use of the word "marriage."  Straights are as passionate in denying equality here as gays are in pushing for it.  Why is "marriage" so important?

Because it, I think, along with its fellows "husband" and "wife," has honorific force, the negative of which is shame force.  Not much force anymore, maybe, but enough to make gays want it and straights want to keep it.

It's one of those forces in words that we are so accustomed to that we hardly notice them.  Nobody ranks "husband" or "wife" up with the titles they have received, nobody declares it on a lapel pin.  But suppose "You left your wife?" was addressed to you.  Do you feel the force in the word "wife"?  If you don't, try a substitution: "You left your woman?"  If you don't feel the difference in force go further.  "You left your fiancée?  partner? girlfriend?"  What you're feeling is a shame force.

Here's where priests and ministers come in.  They, drawing on long traditions, are the experts in building up shame forces.  They know which ceremonies, which music, which dress, and especially, which words, will heap most honor on those entering a union.  They can add God's approval.  All of which prepares those getting the honor and approval to feel the most shame.  "You, husband, left your wife?"

And all of that works, or used to work, in the interest of society, which is usually to preserve unions.  And in the interest of nature, which selects for societies surest to pass on the species' genes, in whose interest we're all working.

"Marriage" now.  In the effort, at the altar, to give force to that word, religion and words work together, and you can hardly separate them.  "What God hath joined together let no man put asunder."  Asunder.  An oak tree split by lightning, an island broken to pieces by an earthquake, a country torn into gangs by civil war.  See what a big thing you're breaking up?  And what heroes those are who hold it together.

Is this force still needed?  Still relevant?  If you say it's not, your culture and class is different from the one that gave "marrige" its force, one where force on the man was vital to the welfare of the woman.  That's past, but even now, in the U. S., the future of less affluent women (and children) is settled by such forces.

The difference between "marriage" and "union" is that "marriage" has had time to become an honorific.  It may be slight but those who get the honor know what they have paid for it, and know, by the shame ("You left your wife?") what it costs to lose it.  A woman in danger of being abandoned knows what it is to have this edge on her man.  (You might try Googling "runaway husbands," "absent fathers," and "men abandoning pregnant women.")

Time, some Supreme Court Justices believe, is what the country needs to see how gay bonding works out.  And it's what word-watchers need.  Will the bonds we expect of gays turn out to be as strong as the bonds we expect of straights?  Will they be tested as the bonds of straights are tested, as by unwanted pregnancies?  Will gays show rights of possession to the old word?  Could they empower a new word?  We don't know yet.

Would that the battle for words could be fought without any depreciation of the capacity of gays and lesbians to meet the challenges of marriage, run the risks, and gain the benefits.  Would that their incapacity to run exactly the same risks (they can't be the same, since they never risk having an unwanted child) didn't make such a difference, and make it just where the honoric comes into play most urgently, with the male who has accidentally committed himself to children.

Is that such a great loss, a little of the pressure on a chafing male?  What's the harm in extending the use of the word that exerts it?  Especially when you're doing it with such good will, wanting to reassure, to compensate, to comfort a mistreated minority?  Who's really hurt?

I'll go along, but I would lose consistency in this blog if I did not say that the language is hurt.  I have already said that it's hurt when we are so concerned to reassure and comfort that we disqualify "discriminate" in the sense of "distinguish" and take every use to mean "distinguish with prejudice" (Post #8).  I have said that it's hurt when we disallow the word "better" in front of "culture" even when we mean, as fact, "better at" (#77).  And I've said that it's hurt when we take the word "rights" out of the context of reciprocal relationships within which the term has gotten its meaning and use it (as in "animal rights") to rhetorically enhance the flat expression we'd normally and accurately use (as, "animal claims on us").  That's verbal dislocation and it works to disorder our concepts, here the concept of "rights."

For years the word "marry," used for what humans do, fit and flowed with the word for what hoses do: join to each other physically in the most convenient way.  Male end to female end.  People felt that kind of connection beneath every higher use of the word "marriage."  They felt the practical convenience of that kind of fitting.  One bulb, one socket. They could believe that, if nature selects for convenience, that kind of mating was what the word, in the course of nature, had to refer to. 

But of course it doesn't have to.  Words change in meaning and extent of application.  That takes time, however.  And for this one there just hasn't been enough time.  As Justice Sotomayor said, we [the Court] let "society have more time to figure out its direction."  We "let issues perk," as we "let racial segregation perk for 50 years."  The same-sex marriage issue, she thought, had been percolating for "at most, four years."  Others would say longer, but not much longer.  In any case not nearly long enough for the language to be changed.