The Gay rights issue starts with the problematic of may marriage and the argument that a marriage is only between a man and a woman.As an advocate for gay rights and gay marriage its hard not to answer to these claims.But really does this question deserves an answer?
The ontological argument of this claim comes second to the first question What is marriage ?We have to know what marriage is in order to discover what it should be.
Dworkin argues that we ought to take the “interpretive attitude” toward social practices. When we take the interpretive attitude toward a practice, we assume that the practice has some essential normative weight to it — that we don’t have it for no reason at all — but nonetheless that the practice as it stands can be an imperfect fulfillment of the reasons that we have for it — that we might have the potential to do better.
The claim that “marriage is between a man and a woman,” in order to be a reason to conclude “marriage ought to be between a man and a woman,” presupposes that there is some good reason that we currently run our practices of marriage the way we do — it presupposes what we might call an “inner morality of marriage,” . If “marriage is between a man and a woman” is any argument at all, it must appeal to some ideal underlying our practices of marriage.
Schulman argues that something called “the kinship system” is the root of marriage, and lists four ways in which marriage serves a function in that system:
1) Marriage determines “who may have sexual access to a woman,” and, in the process, protects women from “rape, degradation, and concubinage.”
2) Marriage codifies certain kinds of kinship-based prohibitions against incest and various other forbidden relationships.
3) Marriage creates a category of socially acceptable sex, allowing us to define, by contrast, the “great nuisance” of illicit sex.
4) Marriage initiates people into adulthood and merges families together. (I take it that there is supposed to be some relationship between these functions, but it’s not clear what that relationship is.)
Against the first argument:
sexist oppression of the sort that suggests that a father transfers ownership of his daughter to her husband on her wedding day. Women ought to be able to regulate their own sexual access. The latter is not a function of marriage at all.
Against second argument:
It’s certainly a function of marriage to indirectly prevent incest by forbidding brothers and sisters to marry. Fine. However, it’s odd to suggest that the prevention of incest is the central purpose of marriage, rather than just a happy function.
— what prevents incest much more effectively is the innate taboo that we all share.
Schulman also lists other prohibitions that marriage codifies. But those, like the regulation of female sexuality, are wicked. Marriage ought not to codify prohibitions of things like “ritual pollution” in the form of cross-religious marriage.
An Alternate Interpretation of Marriage
Here’s a different idea of what marriage is. I think marriage can be understood in its best light as serving two functions, the expressive function and the commitment function.
The expressive function of marriage is that it allows people with particularly strong feelings toward one another to express those feelings in a way that recruits social institutions. Marriage is a really powerful ceremonial way of saying “I love you.”
Marriage is also a commitment device. . Married couples may be able to trust one another at a deeper level because they know that it’ll be too costly to impulsively break up after a small or even a medium-sized fight.
Our practice of marriage does not fully meet the values that justify it because it does not offer those goods to all those who could benefit from it. And, in particular, our practice of marriage does not offer those goods to gay people, even though it could.
We can conclude that the pro-gay-marriage interpretation of marriage is better. Marriage isn’t between a man and a woman. It’s between two people who love one another and want to commit to one another. And that includes gay people.
In Dworkin’s terms a relationship between two committed people that love each other is not a matter only of individual rights but human dignity .
Dworkin appeals to principles of human dignity in order to find common ground. Further, basic notions of human dignity and personal responsibility demand that same-sex couples have the right to marry.
