SSM: THREE TYPES OF ARGUMENT. Throughout these posts, and previous posts on this site, I’ve been making three different kinds of claim:

1) Marriage was not designed to respond to the desires of and pressures on same-sex couples, and we shouldn’t expect it to do so. This is at once the strongest and the weakest claim. Strongest, because it strikes me as glaringly obvious! As Maggie Gallagher has pointed out, even societies that accepted or valorized (male) homosexual conduct did not institute same-sex marriage. But it’s also the weakest claim, because of the obvious objection: If same-sex couples want to put on the yoke of a relationship model never meant for them, well, is that really my concern?

2) Marriage is an honor certain kinds of relationship earn from society because of what they do for society. Same-sex marriage would do far less for society than regular-old-marriage does. Marriage is, inherently, a “special right”–something a relationship earns because of what it gives society.

3) Same-sex marriage is likely to actively harm heterosexual marriage and family-making. Thus it will knock the wind out from the current renewal of marriage, undoing a lot of the gains we’ve made in areas like unwed childbearing and fatherless households. This is obviously the claim with the sharpest edge.

Let me prevent one misapprehension at the start: I am not claiming that the day California passes a same-sex marriage law, Mr. and Mrs. Skylar Moonbeam will decide to abandon their kids to go take poppers in a bathhouse and join a lesbian vegan commune (respectively). I’m not sure why I have to make this point, but I’ve actually seen people say things like, “Canada instituted same-sex marriage months ago–and hey, Canada’s still there! Where’s the breakdown of the Canadian family? What, do you really think people are gonna leave their spouses just because Bob and Tim get hitched?”

We’ve heard that line of argument before, of course. What, do you really think making divorce easier will make happy marriages fall apart? No–but it made good-enough marriages harder to sustain and harder to form. (For more, read The Abolition of Marriage.) As with the rise of unilateral no-fault divorce, the effects of same-sex marriage will be generational, gradual–and very hard to reverse.

Here’s a list of my previous posts on SSM. I’ll point out the places where I make arguments of types 1, 2, and 3.

“Abolish marriage”? At the end of this post I gesture toward argument type #1.

Civil unions? arg. #1.

Review of AFF same-sex marriage debate. Toward the end of this, I call for more discussion of what makes best-friendship different from marriage, and why marriage is a sexual relationship and not just an emotional commitment. (Relates to argument type #2.)

These three posts give a quick overview of argument #2, and the discussion of friendship in the last post gets into arg. #1 as well.

How can a minority affect a majority? (prerequisite for making arg. #3)

This post at Gideon’s Blog goes into several areas of argument #3. My response to him is here (scroll down).

This piece by Maggie Gallagher hits arg. #2 hard, and makes arg. #3 as well. Similarly but faster here: “Marriage is the place where we think it is a good idea to have children. This is no longer written anywhere in the law, when we got rid of provisions restricting the sexual license to marriage and also giving special privileges to children born within marriage.

“But regardless of whether or not the law is articulate about this purpose, it is still one of the things that marriage is (marriage not being the sum of its legal incidents).

“Therefore, in giving marriage to unisex couples, we are saying that we think it is a great idea of unisex couples to acquire children. We are saying children do not need mothers and fathers.

“None of that is true with any male-female union.”