Anti-Climacus

While I am generally in support of the argument about marriage elaborated on here, I think it misses the essence of what the term "traditional marriage" is supposed to represent.

The key mistake made by most people who attempt to show that religious, legal, and social forms of marriage have changed over time is to assume that "traditional" means something like "historical," when it means no such thing to the people who use it. It suffices for those of us who find historical argumentation convincing that the meanings and purposes of marriage have changed significantly over time--e.g. that marriage was not public and legal until the Lutherans decided it should be--but that's not the argument that's being made (nor is it entirely correct to say that the preferred conservative conception of marriage is a 1950s Father Knows Best-style marriage).

"Tradition" as it gets employed here (and elsewhere) has two elements to it: a particular claim about nature, and a claim about what is essential to the definition and what isn't. The nature claim is that men and women were created as distinct sexes with particular roles to play in child-rearing, and that it is significant that only the male-female combination can create future life. From this follows the claim that because this biological reality is so apparent, all societies have recognized the necessity of carving out a special protected status to reinforce and support procreation in this way. Societies have added or subtracted additional requirements over time, but the central role of protecting those who would procreate remains. Therefore SSM is a threat to marriage, or cannot be marriage, and therefore also the variations made to particular marriage laws do not represent anything about the institution itself (indeed, though I've never seen this argument made, the wide variety of legal understandings of marriage seems to underscore the point that any meddling in the definition of marriage apart from giving protected status to couples who might procreate causes unnecessary problems).

Now, the problem is that this doesn't work unless you accept the underlying premise: that couples who can procreate deserve special protections from the state, and because laws have to be general, all heterosexual couples have to be included, and that there are no other sufficient reasons to grant similar protections to anyone else. And it's this that I think is and will be the largest source of trouble (states give out privileges all the time for all kinds of reasons; arguing that someone categorically shouldn't get privileges being given to comparable others is always going to be a problem).