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.

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

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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.