Dartblog

Dartblog has been covering and opining on the gay marriage debate, particular in reference to “Prop 8” California’s recent constitutional amendment to ban the practice. Some past thoughts here. I have been mulling the issue over for some time now, here are a few thoughts.

With all that is at stake in the wake of the recent election, I don’t quite know why my interest has turned towards this particular issue, but I thought that I would offer up a few comments. I am obviously not a voter in California but, if I were, I don’t think I could justify to myself voting against allowing same-sex marriage. With the recent court ruling in my home state of Connecticut, perhaps I will get the chance to vote on the issue sooner rather than later.

As I have offered up before, maybe it is the case that government should not be in the business of sponsoring, incentivizing, or recognizing marriage at all. Even if this is the ‘best’ scenario, Prop 8 (and any state constitutional amendments to ban gay marriage) only presented voters with an opportunity to choose among competing alternatives for the second-best: allow marriage only between a man and a woman or allowing any two people to marry irrespective of gender.

A vote to allow same-sex marriage surely ‘redefines’ marriage in the sense that government-recognition of such unions is, to my knowledge, a relatively new phenomenon in history. Still it seems to me that tradition alone is not a compelling reason by itself to limit liberty. As a sidebar, the fact that marriage as we understand it is merely the opportunity for government sanction, doesn’t change the argument for me. Yes, not recognizing it doesn’t prevent association (like bans on sodomy, etc used to), but the opportunity to acquire social recognition seems enough of a liberty argument. If two individuals are going to love each other, live with each other, and raise a family together, marriage seems like a fantastic idea to me. Not providing this legal sanction (if we are going to have the sanction via government at all) tends to stigmatize, I think wrongly, homosexuality.

In any event, I don’t see a real reason not to allow same-sex marriage. That is, I can’t see how it hurts anyone. There are a number of candidates for potential harm. The first is the same-sex marrying persons themselves, however if we are going to begin to operate under the principle that people don’t know what is best for themselves than we have opened up a much bigger can of worms. The next candidates for potential harm are children, but gay marriage does not seem to harm them either. Some may argue that allowing adoption by gay couples (or individuals) does harm children, but the issue here is marriage. A child is almost certainly no worse off being adopted by a gay married couple than a gay unmarried couple, however this last might affect a child. The last group of people I could see being harmed by same-sex marriage are heterosexuals, married or otherwise. But if we are going to ban things that make people feel bad, we are going to have a lot of work to do to be consistent, work that we should certainly not attempt to do. As a general political principle, when practices don’t physically or materially harm others, I don’t think the government should get involved. If they do, the more local the involvement the better.

I certainly believe that the vast majority of Prop 8 supporters (and all those who support bans on gay marriage) are well-intentioned. I think these folks, after deliberate reflection and careful consideration, oppose the practice based on their reasoned judgments about what is best for themselves, their families, and American society. I generally agree wholeheartedly with their dissatisfaction with courts seeming to circumvent the will of popular majorities, certainly democratic votes are of critical importance and always the preferable means of affecting change. But I think they are wrong on the underlying issue.

Democracy, for reasons intrinsic to human dignity and for the purposes of generally and eventually achieving the substantively better result, is unequivocally the best approach to contentious issues. But I think it is quite unfortunate that this most recent vote in California turned out the way it did. As a Dartmouth student, class of 2009, writes to Dartblog, “the legalization of gay marriage represents equality before the law and validation as persons and the passage of Proposition 8 is thus a tragic loss.”