The Absurdity of Same-Sex Marriages

By Russell Shaw
Herald Columnist
(From the issue of 4/8/04)

So in the end, what's wrong with gay marriage? Although the fact that most people spontaneously reject the idea has considerable moral and psychological significance in itself, intellectually honest opponents know framing a decisive argument against same-sex marriage — except for one grounded in religiously-based morality (it's bad for your soul) — isn't so easy.

It won't do, for instance, to say legalizing homosexual marriage is a bad idea because it would lead to more homosexual marriages. True as that is, as an argument it's an example of the fallacy called question-begging. It takes for granted what needs to be proved — namely, that homosexual unions are wrong.

More to the point is the experience in Scandinavian countries where the experiment has been tried.

The evidence is that fewer people, either heterosexual or homosexual, bother to marry, cohabitation soars, and the breakdown of cohabiting unions also increases. This is to say same-sex unions are associated with a generalized collapse of the institution of marriage, though perhaps more as a conspicuous symptom than as a central cause.

That suggests another consideration against homosexual marriage which lately has occurred to me. To put it bluntly, the very idea is absurd, and is so in the literal, technical sense of being devoid of meaning. And absurdity is, to say the least, a risky foundation on which to build social policy and law.

The following considerations make this point clear.

A husband is a man defined as such by his relationship to a wife. A wife is a woman defined as wife by her relationship to a husband. Wives are people with husbands, husbands people with wives.

In a same-sex "marriage," however, either there are two women, neither of whom is a wife, because no man-husband is involved; or else there are two men, neither of them a husband because there isn't any woman-wife. Thus, to accept a same-sex union as a marriage one must accept the idea of marriages in which there are no husbands and no wives.

"So we'll call them ‘spouses,’" advocates of gay marriage say. But that, too, is question-begging. "Spouses" is a generic name for husbands and wives, and calling the parties to a gay marriage by that name assumes precisely what needs to be proved — namely, that the relationship is essentially the same as the relationship between a husband and a wife. But that is what the fight is all about.

Same-sex marriage is possible only in a Through the Looking-Glass world. Humpty-Dumpty tells Alice, "When I use a word it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less." This also is the position of the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts, which twice has told the world that "marriage" means what it chooses it to mean. (If you doubt that, read its opinions.)

Thus the highest court in Massachusetts proposes to base constitutional law and social policy on the absurd proposition that relationships lacking husbands and wives are marriages. Law and policy based on absurdity are law and policy based on sand — a bad procedure in its own right and one that leads to disappointment and disaster in the long run.

A taste for absurdity also can be seen in the position of Sen. John Kerry, who says he opposes same-sex marriage and also opposes the means the Massachusetts court has made necessary to prevent it — an amendment to the federal Constitution defining marriage as what it is, a relationship between a husband and a wife. Humpty-Dumpty would understand. The rest of us can only marvel.

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