The debate about gay marriage is not made any less interesting, but in some ways is made simpler, by thinking of it as a problem of lexicography, that is, as a problem about marriage’s proper definition.  There was another definitional tussle in the news recently when scientists recently redefined the word “planet”.  The new definition excluded Pluto but it is worth noting that it was not the scientists’ purpose to exclude Pluto.  Their purpose was to better understand what makes a planet a planet.

            It would be nice if the inclusion or the exclusion of gays in marriage could flow from a similarly dispassionate agreement about the defining characteristics of marriage.  Too often, though, it flows from tradition, religious dogma, or bigotry on the excluding side of the question, or a simple notion of fairness on the including one. Of the two, fairness is clearly kinder, but neither the urge to be fair nor the determination to be dogmatic necessarily addresses marriage’s purposes.  Both sides tend to put their desired end ahead of a strict consideration of marriage’s institutional aims. Of course, institutional aims are mushier and infinitely more debatable than the physical characteristics of planets.  Still, there are tangible, sociological consequences of marriage.  To the extent that different definitions will yield different consequences, there is room for a more nuanced and rational debate.  

Even Andrew Sullivan, perhaps gay marriage’s most eloquent advocate, has written:  “Surely, society can offer a hierarchy of choices, which, while preferencing one, does not necessarily denigrate the others, but accords them some degree of calibrated respect.”  Sullivan was writing about “waverers” here, people who are unsure of their orientation.  In this case, Sullivan was saying that society can “preference” heterosexuality, without denigrating what might be a waverer’s ultimate resolution to homosexuality.  And Sullivan is absolutely right here: a social “preference” and “calibrated respect” are precisely what’s in order!  It is just that Sullivan does not seem to grasp that “preferences” and “calibrations” preclude, by their very definitions, full equality. The real debate here on the marriage issue should be one about properly calibrating society’s interest in couples, gay or straight.

In their defense, gays are being perfectly logical to claim marriage rights these days and the simple change that now rationally opens marriage up to them is one that was originated by straights. What has changed is this: heterosexuals over the last generation or two have rejected marriage as essentially an institution of procreation and re-imagined it as an institution of cohabitation.

The post-Pill severing of procreation from marriage was so swift as to be almost imperceptible.  If you wonder just how far procreation has receded in the current culture of marriage, consider this: most Americans condone “civil unions” for gays and want to reserve the term “marriage” for a man and a woman, but then, when pressed, they can’t quite put their finger on what salient social difference there might be between the two.

  If you accept this new thinking, that is, if you accept that marriage’s social purpose is to promote committed cohabitation, or more vaguely, to celebrate monogamous love, and not primarily to insure a responsibly reared succeeding generation, then it is virtually impossible to reject – absent some a priori religious objection – the gay claim.

But consider society’s purposes for a moment.  Society looks after our well-being in the present, obviously, what we might dub its “horizontal” concern.  But its greater concern is the “vertical” one, the succession of generations, or as biologists bluntly put it, reproductive success.  When you think about it, everything in the present, from laws and politics to traditions and even religions, is measured against its effect on “vertical” success.  Not simply does “vertical” trump “horizontal” as a social concern, but more subtly, social goodness or badness in the present has no real meaning except in its ultimate effect on survival.

Culture is mostly horizontal; society is mostly vertical.  It is maybe impolitic to point it out, but in the strictest sense, society is only vertical.  That is to say that society, as an ongoing proposition, as a proposition with a future, is not the sum of present people, but the chain of parents.  To paraphrase Richard Dawkins, there is nobody on earth whose parents did not decide to procreate. 

Readers at this point may be thinking that I am about to castigate gays for not reproducing, but that is not at all where I am heading, for gays will point out that however obviously important is species survival, it is not, alas, their particular thing.  The point I wish to make is not one about gays but one about marriage and it is not a point of politics so much as a point of logic.  It is backwards to think that procreation could be a merely ancillary aim of marriage when it is the crucial mandate of life itself.  And by “backwards” here I mean that the horizontal concern is being put before the vertical one.  If reproductive success is the primary aim of society, it defies simple logic to claim that it could be a secondary aim of the very institution that evolved to ensure it.

I don’t bring this up to end debate on gay marriage.  I bring this up rather to challenge the idea, however widely embraced, that society could ever be formally indifferent to procreation, or to put this more pointedly, that society’s interest in childless couples could rationally be equal to those with children.  Writers like E.J. Graff and Stephanie Coontz have researched and written very interestingly about the various purposes and benefits of marriage and its modern transformation into a celebration of romantic love. Sullivan, for his part, dismisses procreation as having been long abandoned by the Western society as intrinsic to the definition of marriage. When he and Graff argue that procreation is simply another option in the institutional design of marriage, and not its primary purpose, they are being understandably modern, but blindly horizontal.  Culture can abandon its interest in procreation but society, Western or otherwise, never can.

I am not arguing that individuals cannot be married without procreating; I am arguing that the institution would not have evolved in the first place without an essentially procreative purpose.  You may own a car without driving it, so to speak, but that does not change what the car is essentially designed for.  Making marriage non-procreative is like making a car stationary.  It can happen in the individual case, but to do so as a general rule is to ignore something axiomatic about a car. The secondary benefits of marriage may be satisfaction enough for any particular couple, but they are institutionally insufficient.

  I suspect that even if you grant me my logic, here, you will think the line overly alarmist.  Surely species survival is not jeopardized by marriage mores. No, not imminently.  But those like Graff, who take procreation for granted (conveniently by others), and who imagine that culture can’t affect birth rates, might look to Europeans. They have removed procreation, not only from marriage, but apparently from life, and were they properly speaking a species, they would be verging on endangered.  Culture affects society; the horizontal affects the vertical.

But whether or not there is any urgency, the theoretical point remains solid and one that is largely ignored.  And the point is that society’s real interest in couples is not everywhere equal.  And the division here – the real fault line – is not between gays and straights but between couples with children and couples without children.

The neatest and most socially coherent solution would be to reserve the term “marriage” for any union – gay or straight – with children and to call all other unions “civil unions.”  This is a nice solution because it does not denigrate homosexuality and neither does it attempt to make unequal things equal simply by yoking them under a common noun.  It is refreshingly not a polite compromise, but an honest calibration of the real social interest.

As logical as this is, I suspect it is also politically unworkable because straights would tend to see it – wrongly – as a demotion.  But straights can’t have it both ways.  If they are not willing to revert to a procreative definition of marriage, then there are no grounds for a gay exclusion.  Straights can’t make exceptions of themselves if they are going to reject the very thing that indeed makes them exceptional.

The liberationist line is, of course, that the intrinsic sterility of homosexuality should be no more of a barrier to marriage than the willed or unwilled sterility of heterosexuals. There are arguments to be made against this comparison, but frankly, it is probably pointless to do so because I suspect that in the end, it will be culturally easier to open “marriage” to gays than to convince both gays and straights alike that procreation is logically essential to marriage as a social institution, properly understood.

Legally changing the definition of marriage to include gays would now only make official what the mainstream largely takes for granted, namely, that reproductive success is not marriage’s essential aim; marriage is, in effect, an instrument for the official sharing of assets and, of course, what the culture is very keen on, the public celebration of love.

I am alone, apparently, but I think resolving the problem this way, i.e. by reducing marriage to a common denominator that pretends to ignore society’s axiomatic interest in progeny, is muddled and ill-thought out.  It might have been admirably liberal if the majority straight world had intentionally severed procreation from marriage in order to open it to gays as socially special case.  But straights did not set out altruistically to open marriage to gays.  What happened is that straights abandoned the procreative ethic for their own short-sighted purposes, and gays became ipso facto the logical beneficiaries of this new, narcissistic, and I think socially flawed understanding. 

  But ultimately the semantic debate is not the important one (except ridiculously in New Jersey) and this gets us back to lexicography and the relationship between labels and reality.  Definitions must, to be useful, reflect reality.  But changing a definition cannot, by itself, change certain realities.  The basic reality here is that agreeing to the new definition of “marriage” will not change society’s essential mandate to insure responsible procreation.    You can make marriage optionally procreative in order to include gays, but you cannot make society optionally procreative.  Somewhere along the line, some unequal, calibrated special privilege will attach to parents.  It just won’t be called marriage anymore.   Love is a many-splendored thing, but at the end of the day, what you really need is breeding, actually.