Linguistic Clarity on the Meaning of Marriage

By Michael Bradley | December 8, 2014

The Austin Institute’s recently released Relationships in America survey is a must-read for anyone interested in surveying American attitudes about family, marriage, religion, and sexual ethics. Containing good and bad news both—some of which Mark Regnerus, senior fellow at the Austin Institute, documented last week at Public Discourse—the report is also structured in a maximally digestible manner; one can simply click through the table of contents to particular questions that interest him.

It’s an excellent study and highly commendable. One of its questions, or rather statements, is badly flawed, however: the statement about same-sex marriage. The figures and description of the respondents’ views on same-sex marriage are gathered on a page titled “Should same-sex marriage be legal?” But the statement with which respondents are instructed to agree, disagree, or indicate neutral feelings toward, is worded thus: “It should be legal for gays and lesbians to marry in America.”

This statement is problematic for two reasons. First, it obscures a crucial dimension of present debates over the meaning of marriage by locating the discussion in an alleged correspondence between the civil right to marry and one’s ability to enjoy that right, or not, due to one’s sexual attractions. But understanding the marriage question this way hinders one’s thinking clearly about it. It should be manifest to all Americans that no adult’s sexual inclinations ought to disqualify him or her from being able to civilly marry in America. The conflation of the question of “whether gays and lesbians should be able [it be legal for them] to marry in America” with the question of what marriage is, is deadly for careful thought.

Rather, the appropriate question is: “Should same-sex unions be legally recognized as marriages?” As Aaron Taylor has pointed out, drawing such linguistic and conceptual distinctions doesn’t get to the bottom of what explains the impetus behind the same-sex marriage movement. Such distinctions must be drawn nevertheless for the sake of sound thinking, which will readily recognize that while a person’s sexual inclinations may render marriage an unattractive—though still intelligible and choiceworthy—option for full-being, they do not come to bear upon one’s ability to enter a civil marriage.

Second, the same-sex marriage statement is problematic because its use of “gays and lesbians” suggests what Michael Hannon has called “orientation essentialism,” even as the survey elsewhere corroborates the suggestion that sexual attraction and disposition are fluid and mutable rather than fixed, and gradated rather than discrete, especially for females (Regnerus too cautions against “biological essentialism” in his Public Discourse essay).

One cannot speak unqualifiedly of a person’s being “gay or lesbian” in the same way that one would speak of one’s being Italian-American, or female. Say that a woman, Jane, identifies as lesbian during her college and immediate post-collegiate years, but in her late 20s identifies as heterosexual—say, to a degree such that she checks the “mostly heterosexual” box in response to a survey statement like the one posed in Relationships in America (such a transition was not uncommon among female respondents). Do 31 percent of American adults believe that Jane should be denied civil marriage to a man should she seek it as a 22-year-old, but permitted civil marriage to the same man as a 30-year-old, simply because she is “lesbian” at 22 and (mostly) “straight” at 30?

Almost certainly not. Most people would sense how preposterous the suggestion is, and would reply that in responding to the question they really had same-sex marriage in mind. Yet for many, the response to the survey statement as stands would be “yes,” but the response to a “same-sex unions as marriages” statement would be “no.” And this reveals why the survey’s wording here is unfortunate: Not necessarily because wording it soundly would have altered these responses much (if at all), but because when the rhetorical edifice of conflation becomes the linguistic paradigm for a complex and controversial discussion, that paradigm metastasizes over time and obscures concepts that are distinct, and are even understood rightly to be distinct by some (or many) who see no harm in indulging the paradigm for precisely that reason.

One might object that I wouldn’t make the same point if the survey statement were, “it should be legal for young children to marry,” even though “child-ness,” as well, is neither discrete nor immutable. But being a child is relevant to one’s ability to enter into marriage, which is a consenting (not to mention sexual) union—a conviction shared by all in the marriage debate.

This is exactly the point: Homosexual persons, unlike children, are capable of and therefore eligible for civil marriage because one’s being homosexual, unlike one’s being a child, doesn’t preclude one from being able to marry (though it may render marriage unattractive in the aforementioned sense). So in wording the statement thus, the survey already communicates the suggestion that being “gay or lesbian” effects one’s capacity to marry, and that there is some legally significant correspondence between sexual attraction and ability to civilly marry that is different in kind from both 1) an analogous potential correspondence between, say, being Italian-American and being able to civilly marry, and 2) other mutable and gradated characteristics, such as one’s being a child, that do bear upon one’s capacity to civilly marry.

Of course, most people understand by the term “gay marriage” same-sex marriage, but the concepts are distinct. What could a “gay marriage” be except a marriage in which one or both spouses self-identify as gay? But such a marriage needn’t be a same-sex marriage, and nobody opposed to same-sex marriage should be opposed to allowing “gays and lesbians” to marry, and even to allowing them to marry each other, for even these marriages needn’t be same-sex marriages.

The coupling of the question of same-sex marriage with the sexual identity of a small swath of Americans has proven unhelpful for understanding marriage as the comprehensive union of man and woman. Where marriage is concerned, we should avail ourselves of every opportunity to speak clearly and to correct unhelpful speech, just as the pro-life movement should take care (and largely has taken care) to speak of the child in the womb as a real child—for example, by men speaking of themselves as fathers during their wives’ first pregnancy, not simply upon the birth of their firstborn.

The effort to uncouple these distinct concepts when discussing marriage is rendered less effective by an accompanying disregard for the concrete situations of homosexual persons, but that only indicates that speaking precisely about same-sex marriage isn’t sufficient to making a convincing case for marriage as comprehensive union. Dislodging faulty linguistic paradigms and their vague rhetoric, however, may well be necessary in a discussion being largely dominated by memetic thought.

Thomas Storck

You make some very good and needed distinctions here.
Aaron Taylor

I agree with you completely on the sloppiness of the question in the survey.

Yet I don’t understand why someone can speak of themselves as “Italian-American” in an unqualified sense but not “gay.”

If Scotland voted for independence I would have ceased to be British because Britain would have ceased to exist — which suggests that national identity is fluid and mutable, like sexual desire.

Yet its mutability doesn’t mean that every time I say, “I’m British,” my statement should be problematised by interlocutors, or that I need to follow every such statement with convoluted qualifications. That would be pedantry, not clarity.

If an interlocutor assumes that every time I call myself “British,” I refer to some fixed and eternal essence of Britishness that inheres in me … if indeed they assume I am referring to anything other than an historically contingent social construction, then clearly, the error lies with he who makes the assumption rather than me, about whom the assumption is made. In fact, it would be my readily-assuming interlocutor, and not me, who was guilty of “essentialism.”
Michael Bradley

On the other hand, if your interlocutor understood by your calling yourself “British” not just that you are a British citizen or live in Britain now but are of what we commonly call and understand by “British descent” (or “Italian heritage”), then even were Britain to change its name, or vote to join another country, or otherwise cease to be Britain, you could remain British in the sense of heritage or descent, like someone born in Yugoslavia could remain of Yugoslavian descent even after the state dissolved.

Whatever genetic heritage (not present national identification) one has is just the genetic heritage one has. If one is born of two Irish parents who are each 100% Irish, then one is of immediate Irish descent (one is “Irish”), regardless of what Ireland chooses to call itself today. By the second half of the hyphened phrase (-American) I didn’t mean one living in America currently, but one whose ancestry is Italian but whose Italian ancestors have lived in America for generations. Still, I could have made my point more clearly by just using “Italian,” I think, or rather “of Italian descent.”
Aaron Taylor

Your first sentence indicates wherein lies the rub. Of course, if your interlocutor insists on understanding you in a particular way, that is the way you are going to be understood. Which is my point. Part of the reason “orientation essentialism” is even a thing is because some conservatives insist on interpreting every reference to sexuality in that way even when there is no reason to do so.

Lets suppose for argument’s sake that you were right about the genetics thing. So what? You (and Hannon, etc.) seem to be trying to unilaterally force a new customary rule of grammar on to the English language, whereby a noun used in conversation should always be taken to signify an essence wherever the noun is not accompanied by a qualifying statement to the contrary.

The fact that gayness is totally socially constructed (as a cultural phenomenon) and also quite fluid (as it manifests in individuals) is simply irrelevant. There is *no* rule or custom of the English language that says nouns can refer only to essences or substances that are fixed, eternal, unchanging (and genetics doesn’t even fall into that category anyway), and introducing such a rule in to the English language simply makes it unintelligible, which is why anti-gay critics never insist on applying their arbitrary rule in any other linguistic situation.
Michael Bradley

Hannon doesn’t argue that “a noun used in conversation should always be taken to signify an essence wherever the noun is not accompanied by a qualifying statement to the contrary.” “No,” you’ll say, “but that’s exactly my point. He *only* argues this with respect to the ‘gay identity’.”

But he doesn’t argue that either. He equates the “gay identity” with *sexual orientation,* argues that the concept of sexual orientation is unsound, and consequently recommends dropping sexual orientation on metaphysical and, therefore, dropping “gay” on prudential grounds. No doubt, if by “gay” everyone in the culture understood simply a mutable and gradated pattern of sexual inclinations, then there would there not be a need to resist using the word “gay.” (At least, not this need.) It’s sexual orientation that is his per se target.

(As an aside, I don’t see why you keep caricaturing allegedly immutable personal characteristics as “eternal” qualities, as if the two were synonymous. Being female is an immutable quality; humanity’s existence (as male and female) is radically contingent, as are the words “male” and “female.”)

As things stand, if you asked anybody who espouses “sexual orientation” (as many people do) to specify what orientations she has in mind, “gay” would be her first word in response.

Neither do I argue anywhere in any of my writings what you impute to me and Hannon both. I argue that speaking this way is confusing. Everyone understands by “child” a mutable and gradated “characteristic” of a person, and so it’s not problematic to speak unqualifiedly of “childhood”; but not everyone (not even most people) understand “gay” in the same way. Hence the reason for resisting/wishing to clarify its unqualified invocation, and hence my suggestion and corresponding concern that it is used in the survey as it is.

So to answer your first question in your first comment: We can speak about Italian-American without qualification because the term isn’t associated with unsound metaphysical concepts; the same is clearly not true of “gay.”

I don’t deny that one reason that “orientation essentialism” is an issue is partially because some conservatives make it so; but there is clearly reason for that concerned response (as Hannon’s), and so I see that reaction at least in part as a reaction against a prior invocation of sexual orientation and subsequent a coupling of “gay” with that orientation.
Aaron Taylor

Social constructs like race, or “genetic heritage” (as you call it) are based on pseudoscience with an extremely dark history. I would suggest reading the American
Anthropological Association’s Statement on
“Race”: http://www.aaanet.org/stmts/racepp.htm

There’s no way you can seriously claim its OK
to speak about people being “100% Irish”
without qualification, but not OK to speak about
people being “gay.”

I’m the first to admit the idea of “sexual
orientation” as widely understood is pernicious.
The search for “gay genes” borne of that idea is
even dumber than the search for Bigfoot.
But lets ask ourselves: which entire countries
have been forcibly subjugated and colonised
because of “orientation essentialism”? Where
are the slave galleons and gas chambers
constructed because of dodgy ideas about
sexual orientation? Where are the cotton
plantations where men and boys were flogged
to death and women were raped on account of
LGBT terminology? If we’re going to criticise
false essentialisms, “race” surely has to be
higher up the list than sexual orientation. Not
only does racial essentialism have a history of
much more harmful effects, but it is also much
more widely accepted. After all, the claim that
sexuality is inborn and fixed is, for now, controversial. The falsehood that “race” is innate is accepted by almost everyone, as can be seen from the fact that dumb-as-dishwater conservatives argue against the (equally dumb) comparison between gay rights and the rights of people of colour on the grounds that sexuality is not inborn, but race is.

To be clear: I am not saying you are a racist. In
fact, I’m certain you’re not! Just as, presumably
(hopefully!), you wouldn’t say I’m a sexual
dissident just because I say “gay.” Its precisely
the fact that you’re not racist, however, that
exposes the flaw in your argument. If your
concern is just metaphysical purity, why
problematise the language of sexual orientation *at the same time* (and in the very same comment) as claiming that the language of race
can be used “without qualification”?
Michael Bradley

I can’t say that I’ve ever thought of “Italian” as a racial category!
Aaron Taylor

In your first response you don’t use the word race but appeal quite clearly to racial categories:

“Whatever genetic heritage (not present national identification) one has
is just the genetic heritage one has. If one is born of two Irish
parents who are each 100% Irish, then one is of immediate Irish descent
(one is “Irish”), regardless of what Ireland chooses to call itself
today. By the second half of the hyphened phrase (-American) I didn’t
mean one living in America currently, but one whose ancestry is Italian
but whose Italian ancestors have lived in America for generations.”

In fact, your entire point in that comment — if you recall — was to point out to me that my Britishness is something “genetic,” innate, or inborn.
Michael Bradley

I guess I don’t think of “Irish” as a racial category either!
Aaron Taylor

Then why describe it as one?
Michael Bradley

I didn’t think I had …
Aaron Taylor

The Irish, Italians, English, etc. all have distinct cultures and the ways of thinking, acting, speaking, etc. characteristic of those cultures become co-natural to infants raised in them. But the fact is that when it comes to being Irish (or Italian, or English, or whatever), no-one is “born” that way …

You, on the contrary, described it not as something co-natural but something that is “genetic” and into which one is born. This is the false essentialism I was criticising and which the American Anthropological Association was criticising. You can call it a “racial category,” or you can call it something else like “genetic heritage,” as you did above. You were trading on the same false essentialism and that is what I pointed out.
happiernow

“One cannot speak unqualifiedly of a person’s being ‘gay or lesbian’ in the same way that one would speak of one’s being Italian-American, or female.”

Sure you can-for SOME people. Believe it or not, there are people who are 100% gay or lesbian. Those people have never experienced sexual or romantic attraction for someone of the opposite sex and will never do so. Indeed, the very thought of having intimate sexual relations with a person of the opposite sex is repulsive to them-much like how a person who is 100% straight is repulsed by the thought of having intimate sexual relations with someone of the same sex.

“Say that a woman, Jane, identifies as lesbian during her college and immediate post-collegiate years, but in her late 20s identifies as heterosexual—say, to a degree such that she checks the “mostly heterosexual” box in response to a survey statement like the one posed in Relationships in America (such a transition was not uncommon among female respondents).”

Then Jane is not a true lesbian and never was one. Unlike my lesbian wife, who has never once felt any sexual or romantic attraction toward someone of the opposite sex, Jane is (like me) bisexual.

The real problem is ignoring bisexuality as a real sexual orientation, which in turn leads to a lot of confusion when a bisexual person “switches teams” (for lack of a better analogy, lol). It also causes pressure for the bisexual person to identify as either gay or straight depending on the sex of his or her partner (instead of on the truth of his or her innate orientation). But hey, don’t feel bad. Both the straight community and the gay community do it!