OPTION FOUR: Ramesh Ponnuru

[I haven't read the whole piece, since only a chunk is online, and the newsstand I visited didn't have the new issue yet. Maybe more once I've read it. --Eve]

The debate over marriage does not seem to be amenable to compromise. It is one of those debates in which the contending parties disagree not only about what answer we should reach, but also about what the question is in the first place. As in the debate over abortion, the very terminology of this debate is contested. Advocates of "gay marriage" use that phrase to suggest that what they want is an end to the exclusion of a class of people from an institution. Opponents of "same-sex marriage" use that phrase to suggest that what is at stake is a redefinition of the institution: The law they defend does not examine the sexual preferences of the parties to a marriage, but merely requires that they be of opposite sexes.

But perhaps a limited compromise can be reached, if we can separate the two fundamental issues in the debate: recognition and benefits.

Whenever the debate has been at its most abstract and ideological, it has concerned the politics of recognition. Proponents of gay marriage want the government to recognize long-term homosexual relationships as morally equivalent, at least for public purposes, to marriage. Many proponents undoubtedly want more than this kind of formal legal equality: They hope that insisting on governmental evenhandedness between homosexual and heterosexual couples will change people's attitudes so that society, and not just the government, will see them as equally worthy and morally indistinguishable. Opponents warn that if the demand for same-sex marriages is granted, it will be followed by demands for state penalties on people and churches that refuse to recognize them. But for now, what is being debated is the legal recognition of committed homosexual relationships as on a par with marriage.

...But the issue of benefits can, to a large extent, be separated from the issue of the legal recognition of relationships.

slightly more
posted by Eve at 4:04 PM VOTE

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