The Trick Question about Marriage

"When did you stop beating your wife?" That's, of course, a trick question that will get you into trouble no matter how you answer. The whole gay marriage legal issue is even more a conundrum of confusion.

Think carefully about the recent federal court ruling that Kentucky's marriage law, upholding marriage as between a man and a woman, violates the U. S. constitution's 14th amendment. 

Laws can't discriminate against any particular class of people, the federal judge ruled according to the constitution. Yes, homosexuals are a class of people. Hard to deny that. But it's also been hard to deny another stubborn reality; at least it remains incredibly hard for many, if not most, Kentuckians. The long historical definition of "marriage" as only between a man and a woman is the one that has fundamentally shaped the civic culture of Kentuckians and other Americans well before any of us were born. Many, if not most of us, just don't have the mental categories to perceive "marriage" any other way. At least we can conceive that what homosexuals are doing can be legitimately defined as "civil union" in a public sense, or perhaps furthermore as "loving commitment" in a personal sense. But "gay marriage," more than merely a legal struggle, forces us to preserve any sane trajectory of "logic" itself. More than ever before, words mean everything. 

History also teaches us something else. Revolutions usually need confusing chaos from which the revolution's new categorical thinking and culture can arise. So now, you are either trying to sort out and assess the new logic of "gay marriage," or you are leaving the thinking to others. If you're among the latter, this is actually no longer a revolution for you. It might as well be life as you'll always know it from this point forward. What about the new normal?

The Disconnect Between Gay Marriage and the Civil Rights Movement

Even before the historic U.S. Supreme Court decisions last week on DOMA and Prop 8, many, if not most, gay marriage supporters have seen the movement as a continuation of the black civil rights movement. Justification to do so has a problem (among others). To understand this particular logical problem, we must consider the specific things African Americans and other minorities were denied access to leading to the racial civil rights movement and contrast those things with "marriage" as generally understood in our civic and religious culture.

 Rosa Parks, for example, was denied access to the front of the city bus. She and other black people were forced by authorities to sit at the back. In the ensuing protest for racial justice, the issue at hand was the right for blacks to sit where they wanted on the bus. No one needed to redefine what exactly it meant to "sit where one wants on a bus."

 Another example would be blacks not being allowed to use public facilities, such as water fountains and restrooms (at least not use the same ones as whites). Civil rights leaders had no interest in redefining what it meant to "drink from a public fountain" nor to reinterpret "using a public restroom." The same logic applies to affirmative action initiatives such as the meaning of "consideration for a good job" and the definition of "acceptance into a good college."

The gay marriage movement, on the other hand, is grounded in an effort of redefinition. The movement is fundamentally about society agreeing that marriage should be explicitly redefined in a way that differs starkly from how it has been understood throughout western (and perhaps even non-western) history--both civil and religious. Exceptions have been perfunctory, until now. History has advanced with the overwhelming definitional understanding of marriage as being between one man and one woman. Religious polygamous anomalies such as in Islam are more provisional than normative.

Whether there are any merits to such a redefinition is, of course, another discussion and is perhaps the discussion of the modern era. But the gay marriage movement has been logically weak in binding its nuptials to the black civil rights movement, and the fact that this weakness keeps getting lost in the discussion is unfortunate.