10/24/2006
Traditional Marriage
So today in a horrid class that I am taking, the professor told us that people who say that tradition is a reason for preventing same sex marriage dont understand history. He told us that in the past, if my brother married a woman I would be prevented from marrying her sister, or if my sister married a man I would be prevented from marrying her sister. Since these are allowed now, obviously same sex marriage should be allowed. This seems a fallacy to me because in neither of these examples was anyone marrying a person of the same sex. The way I understood the traditional marriage argument was not that marriage hasn't changed in the last 6000 years, but that while same sex relationship have existed for a long time, same sex marriage has never been permitted. Now my understanding may be flawed because I dont argue in favor of same sex marriage and so never hear the arguments against it (other than my own obviously and I dont use the traditional marraige argument). So I ask you my liberal readership, do people actually argue that marriage has not changed ever and so we shouldnt change it now, or is my professor a quack?
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5 comments:
I don't think it's a tenable argument that marriage has not changed ever. But your professor isn't a quack--I'd say the most common argument against same-sex marriage is that it would violate centuries of tradition about what "marriage" means.
It seems like your professor may be saying this: Tradition is a common argument against same-sex marriage. But people who use tradition as their primary argument should probably have pointed out to them that a lot of things that are traditional about marriage have been changed. (Bans on interracial marriage, bans on married women owning property, etc.) Thus, maintaining tradition is not a sufficient argument for preventing changes to marriage. So, if they want to stop this change, they had better have some other reasons too.
It seems like you might be misrepresenting your prof's position. As SP said, his changing tradition point is a valid rebuttal to people who say that tradition favors hetero marriage. However, it is not an argument FOR gay marriage, just a response to an argument against gay marriage.
In many native american tribes, there were people who were transgenered or gay, etc. They were give a place of honor - called "two spirit beings," anthropologists often refer to them as "berdache." "two sprit beings" who were physically women, may marry women; those who were physically men, may marry men. That's a whole lot of tradition.
I remember learning about this in my studies, and although I don't have time to find the best links, but this page offers many. http://www.coreymondello.com/Berdache.html
There's a wikipedia entry on same gender unions, and they do have some historical precedent.
The ancient Greek paradigm is common - there's a mentoring relationship between an older man and a younger man, but it contains varying degrees of sexual involvement and romantic attachment. See, for example, Plato's Symposium and the relationship between Socrates and Alcibiades. (Boston marriages are an exception. It's a 19th century term for 2 cohabitating women. Think Kate and Allie.)
While these relationships are not marriages as we now know them, the male female relationships of the time were not marriages as we have them now.
I respect tradition to the extent that it provides continuity or stability in society. However, when there's something that's unjust about a tradition, we shouldn't hesitate to get rid of it. A good example of this is slavery, which has a long tradition but is morally reprehensible.
While I don't think that the injustice in the gay marriage case reaches the level of slavery injustice, I still think that the benefits of having gay marriage outweigh the disadvantages.
A tradition argument goes like this:
a. It's better to keep doing things the way we've done them in the past.
b. We've always or sometimes done X in the past.
c. Therefore, it's better to keep doing X.
The force of this argument depends on the strength of premises (a) and (b).
Premise (b) is very strong in this case. The world has virtually always (until the last few years, at least) seen marriage as heterosexual. So the tradition argument has more force than it did in those cases.
However, I'm not sure how important that is, since I think that we as a society have basically rejected premise (a) when there are countervailing considerations of justice. When justice weighs against tradition (allowing interracial marriage, allowing married women to own property, etc.), the way we've done things in the past just isn't that important.
Did we allow interracial marriage because the past tradition of banning it wasn't that strong? I don't think so. We decided tradition wasn't as important as justice. Same here.
I think the real disagreement here is over whether there's a countervailing consideration of justice.
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