Earlier this week we heard from Harvard junior Jim McGlone that in the wake of last week’s Supreme Court decisions, sitting out is not an option. Now Notre Dame senior and incoming Director of the LFN campus group Rodzinka, Timothy Kirchoff responds:
It goes without saying that a word can have multiple definitions, and that the definition of a term can change based on common usage. There are currently two definitions of marriage in common use, and the recent Supreme Court decision regarding the Defense of Marriage Act seems to be based on one definition rather than the other.
The definition of marriage behind the Supreme Court decision on DOMA reads something like this: marriage is the public affirmation of an exclusive emotional union and sexual commitment between two individuals. This is how our culture has come to treat the institution, and it is this common social understanding of marriage that has motivated recent attempts to change the legal definition. Indeed, under this definition, there is no compelling reason to limit the institution to opposite-sex couples. If we say that marriage is about recognizing the value of human relationality, then we cannot discriminate based on sex. As Justice Kennedy’s opinion suggests, asserting that genuinely fulfilling human relationships can only occur between one man and one woman wrongly demeans every other kind of fulfilling interpersonal relationship.
Anyone who, having accepted this definition of marriage, refuses to expand the legal institution beyond the limitations of one man and one woman can rightly be called arbitrary or even bigoted. However, neither I nor other defenders of traditional marriage oppose expanding the legal definition of marriage on these untenable grounds. Rather, it is clear to me that, as valuable as human relationships are, the particular kind of relationship traditionally understood as marriage serves a particular and necessary social function that we cannot afford to put aside.
Marriage, under a more traditional usage, is a permanent, loving, and exclusive sexual relationship between a man and a woman that is both open to the creation of new life and prepared to accept responsibility for that new life. This definition of marriage involves the public acknowledgement of an exclusive and loving relationship between individuals, but its limitation to opposite-sex couples is justified in that marriage is understood as a way of harnessing both sexuality and emotional attachment as a means for creating and safeguarding families: through marriage, children can not only be created, but brought up with their biological parents as their primary caregivers. Defenders of traditional marriage are not arguing that other loving relationships between adults have no value; rather, we argue that the difference between a generic publicly-affirmed loving adult relationship and the kind of permanent and exclusive union between one man and one woman which has the capacity to bring new life into the world – to create a family – is significant enough for the latter to be justified in having a unique term to define it.
This is not to say that words cannot have more than one meaning, or that the primary meaning we assign to a word cannot change, but rather that there are certain concepts – concepts like marriage – that demand a particular word of their own, if for no other reason than mere conceptual clarity. The actual choice of word might be arbitrary, but the recognition that this choice must be made can hardly be called bigoted.
A version of this piece was originally published on the author’s personal blog.
The post Students Respond to SCOTUS: Definitions make a difference appeared first on Love & Fidelity Network.
