PARENTS AND PROCREATORS: Mark Barton replies to Mary Catelli

Mary Catelli: "The current treatment of heterosexual vs. homosexual couples is indeed rather broadbrush. That is not proof that it should not be made. Consider three men, all twenty when World War II broke out. [...] This is because the effort of sorting out the deserving vs. the undeserving -- once you've defined who is who -- would be many times the cost of providing for all veterans, but the effort of sorting out the veterans from the non-veterans is much simpler."

Mark B.: Certainly it can be defensible to adopt a crude but bureaucratically practical criterion over a fairer but impractical one. However the case of veterans benefits is not a good example of this principle, or a good analogy to the case of SSM. The problem is that veterans benefits are only partly a reward for serving. As much or more, they're an inducement to enlist. All enlistees are making the same dangerous gamble: they may get a cushy desk job, but they may get sent to the most dangerous of combat zones and they have little or no choice in the matter. If enlistees got to unilaterally opt out of that risk, one wouldn't be so generous with the benefits in retirement of those who did.

According to statistics, of order 40% of couples are childless, and at a guess, probably half are readily identifiable as permanently so, either through lack of interest or fertility. If marriage is such a costly reward in terms of resources or symbolism that it's worth amending the constitution to avoid wasting it on the 3-5% of couples who will never be breeding pairs because they're same-sex, it smacks of hypocrisy (not to mention homophobia) not to be lifting a finger against a rather larger population of almost as readily identifiable non-breeding couples.

And of course, the above allows for the sake of argument that marriage is a reward for being a breeding pair, but that's not true either. Nobody in their right mind thinks things like (it's hard to find a non-ridiculous example), "It would be good to be able to visit someone in the hospital, let me go and marry someone, so I can visit them." Rather they think things like "It would be good to be able to visit N. in the hospital...", where N. is their particular, already chosen, significant other. Marriage used to be a reward because people would think, "It would be good to have sex; let me go and marry someone, so I can have sex with them." As I was suggesting, I'm coming more and more to suspect that whether it's consciously articulated or not, Elizabeth and others are necessarily more for stigmatizing the sexually active unmarried than for rewarding the married. To the extent the problem they see with SSM is really that it somehow gets in the way of punishing the unmarried, they might want to have a go at formulating the argument explicitly in those terms because it's falling between two stools at the moment.
posted by Eve at 11:14 AM VOTE

0 Comments:

Post a Comment

<< Home