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The Gay Moralist

By John Corvino

Natural-law theorist Robert George wrote recently in First Things that,
"For years, critics of the idea of same-sex 'marriage' have made the point that accepting the proposition that two persons of the same sex can marry each other entails abandoning any principled basis for understanding marriage as the union of two and only two persons. So far as I am aware, our opponents have made no serious effort to answer or rebut this point."
I found this last claim rather irritating, mainly because I'm one of the people who has answered the point – not only in several columns, but also in the academic journal Ethics, with which George (a Princeton professor of jurisprudence) is surely acquainted. Indeed, when I was working on that article, I corresponded with George about it.
Fellow gay-rights advocate Jonathan Rauch quickly called George out on his absurd claim at the online Independent Gay Forum, prompting a rejoinder from George:
"But the point that is most relevant here is that Rauch's arguments are about social consequences and costs, they are not about the principles that constitute marriage as such. Rauch and the authors he cites (John Corvino, Dale Carpenter and Paul Varnell) do not make a serious effort to show that, as a matter of principle, marriage is an exclusive union of the sort that is incompatible with polygamy (much less polyamory). Corvino doesn't even join Rauch in asserting that there is anything wrong with polygamy – much less that polygamy is incompatible in principle with true marriage. Putting it in the hypothetical, he says, 'If there's a good argument against polygamy, it's likely to be a fairly complex public-policy argument having to do with marriage patterns, sexism, economics, and the like.'"
Time for some clarification.
First, George is right that I am agnostic on the question of whether polygamy is always and everywhere a bad idea. While I find Rauch's arguments on the typical social costs of polygamy persuasive, I am open to possibility that polygamy could be structured in such a way to avoid those costs.
But the issue is not what I think; the issue is whether, as George puts it, support for same-sex marriage "entails abandoning any principled basis for understanding marriage as the union of two and only two persons." And the answer to that question is obviously "no": Rauch is an obvious counterexample (among others).
Why does George think otherwise? The answer has to do with his confusion about what it means to have a "principled" objection to something. More specifically, he confuses having "a principled objection" with having "an objection in principle." The difference is subtle but important. To have a principled objection is to base one's opposition on principles (rather than simply to assert it arbitrarily), and Rauch surely does this.
By contrast, to have an "objection in principle" is to object to a thing in itself, not on the basis of any extrinsic reason. Rauch doesn't object to polygamy "in principle"; he objects to it for being harmful, and if it weren't harmful he presumably wouldn't object to it.
It's worth noting that relatively few things are wrong "in principle." Throwing knives at people isn't wrong "in principle": it's wrong because it's harmful, and if it weren't harmful, it wouldn't be wrong. Of course, the world would have to be quite different than it is for that to be the case. Similarly, the world would have to be quite different than it is for polygamy not to have serious social costs. But public-policy arguments are quite rightly based on the way the world is, not on bizarre hypotheticals.
So Rauch has a principled objection to polygamy, but not an objection in principle. But here's the kicker: while Rauch doesn't have an objection in principle, neither does George. For George's position is based on the requirement that sex be "of the procreative kind." And polygamy is very much procreative. If George wants to argue that polygamy is wrong, he's going to have to appeal to the same sort of extrinsic principles that Rauch invokes. Either that, or he's going to have to just baldly assert that marriage is two-person, period. If such ad hoc assertions don't count as abandoning "principled" argument, I'm not sure what does.
George has claimed before that "the intrinsic value of (opposite sex) marriage … has to be grasped in noninferential acts of understanding." In other words, you can't argue for it: you either get it or you don't. My guess is that he'd say the same thing about the two-person requirement. But two can play at that game. For there's nothing to prevent Rauch (or me or Carpenter or Varnell) from saying, "Hey – I don't get the opposite sex part, but I do get the two-person part. There's my principled reason for opposing polygamy."
Funny how it's no more convincing when we do it than when George does.

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