My Keloland fellow, Cory Heidelberger, has a brief reply to my recent post on Same Sex Marriage and the Constitution. It was so good he apparently managed to post it twice. We are more in agreement, I think, than he may realize; or at a least about some things.
Here is his last paragraph:
To disagree with the good professor, I will appeal not to lust, but to love, to the intentional choice that a free person can make to commit to a relationship with one significant other. That is a valuable, character-building, society-leavening choice. That commitment is about much more than what we do with our naughty bits. It's about sharing a household, raising children, tending each other when sick or dying. Incest and polygamy may still fall under the purview of responsible government, as those behaviors entail problems with power and submission. But if two rational citizens want to make a lasting commitment to each other, we should not contort our law or Constitution into denying that choice.
Cory is making a hardy effort here to distinguish between a homosexual relationship and other "non-traditional" relationships. He seems to think that two consenting adults involved in the former have a constitutional right to marry, whereas persons involved in the latter do not. Now I happen to share Cory's sentiments. I think when a man shows up in a emergency room because his male partner of many years has collapsed on the racquetball court, it is only decency to give him the same rights a wife would have. Moreover if (as some gay activists have argued) marriage can curb the tendency of male homosexuals to be promiscuous, as it surely does curb the promiscuous inclinations of heterosexual males, then both kinds of marriage would be worthy of respect for exactly the same reason. So my sentiments here are compatible with Cory's.
The chief difference is that I don't confuse my sentiments for constitutional principles. Cory is inclined to admire the homosexual couple (two rational and presumably adult citizens) as much as the heterosexual couple. But surely it's possible that some incestuous or polygynous relationships involve rational citizens. Who is Cory to deny them their choice? I agree with Cory that the alternatives he dislikes may "entail problems with power and submission," but so does heterosexual monogamy and, I dare to say, some spicier homosexual partnerships. I suspect that Cory is merely categorizing these relationships into the ones he feels fondly toward, and the ones he doesn't. That is the same as Black voters apparently did in California when they voted for Prop. 8.
I think Cory's intuition is right, and that there are rational principles that indicate which of these relationships should be blessed by the state, which should be ignored, and which should be prohibited. I just don't think these principles are contained in any constitution I have yet seen. Some things are left up to legislatures to decide. So I see "no contortion of the law or Constitution" involved here.
Finally, I partially dissent on the nookie question. Homosexual relationships like heterosexual ones are surely about more than just physical sex. But it is physical sex that ties together all the relationships that Cory mentions. We wouldn't be considering extending the relationship of marriage to couples of men who are just chums. Without the nookie, no one would be talking about marriage. I note that my spell check doesn't recognize "nookie."
Recent Comments