The problem with Bush’s idea of marriage

The New York Times reports that President Bush plans to allocate $1.5 billion dollars in a campaign drive to promote healthy marriage. In this instance, “healthy” strictly denotes a union between a man and woman. Far more ominous, however, is the talk circulating around whether the administration will go after a constitutional amendment codifying marriage in this way, an initiative for which Bush has evidenced vague if consistent support. This is a damaging idea for two reasons.

First, the historical durability of the Constitution is due in part to its overwhelming simplicity. Indeed, in parts it stands as the greatest achievement of American political theory, the one text that has truly bridged the gap between theory and practice—ever since, similar and invariably failed motives have been the ideological calling cards of aspiring intellectuals across the political spectrum. The Constitution was never intended to enshrine the shifting mores of generations, a palimpsest to be changed at the whim of an incoming president eager to make American democracy his own. But this is precisely what amending the constitution means in this case. There is clearly no urgency involved. In a pluralist liberal democracy, conservatives, religious groups, and sociologists are free to pursue the traditional ideals of the nuclear family to their hearts content. No one is stopping them. Conversely, the logic motivating an amendment, and indeed Bush’s proposed campaign strategy, attack this pluralism in a way that does require an urgent and strong response from Americans concerned with the basal rights and freedoms that accrue to citizens in the United States. By codifying the nature of state sanctioned unions, Bush is really proposing to place brutal and far-reaching constraints on individual choice. At the same time, he is promising to muddy the legal and political integrity of the Constitution.

Second, I cannot think of any reasonable argument that convinces us that the adoption of a particular form of the good life is contingent upon universal (or rather, societal) adoption of that form. In other words, Bush and his supporters are suggesting that agents can only realize the full utility of some practice X if and only if all other agents either follow suit and do X, or choose not to do X, given that all other X-like practices are unavailable. This is clearly an institutionalization of the good life. Though some political theorists of a perfectionist bent, notably Joseph Raz, argue that the state is responsible for promoting some versions of the good life and discouraging others, they almost never expound their ideas at this level of specificity. There is, say, a pretty good reason for the state to discourage a life whose main higher-order interests involves stealing from others in support of a drug habit. But that is probably as far as it goes. The idea is that such activities are harmful, no matter how you look at it.

Now conservatives are apt to suggest that any form of marriage that is not between a man and a woman is inherently harmful, and they can probably back this up with evidence selectively culled from empirical social science. But the spate of reports and anecdotes sprouting in the wake of the Massachusetts Supreme Court decision to allow gay marriage indicated that children raised by loving parents of the same sex were not placed at a disadvantage relative to peers raised in traditional familial environments. It is likely that concrete comparative studies of this phenomenon will emerge in the future that vindicate this allegation. Furthermore, no sane person can fail to recognize that the harm generated from actively curtailing civil liberties through the use of coercive legal and, I dare not imagine, constitutional force is incomparably greater than any residual harm incurred by children not raised in a manner consistent with the American form of totalitarian-socialist Christianity.

Lastly, it is worth noting that sweeping decisions of this sort promise to stymie social experimentation. In matters of great controversy, from Lochner to Roe vs. Wade, abortion and marriage, it seems best to let things play out in the public sphere, rather than opt for hasty and necessarily short-sighted preemption. For these reasons, the Bush administrations public scheming in the private life of the family deserves our closest attention.