Gay marriage: labels matter

Last week I helped lead a faculty-student discussion on gay marriage, and one trend in the participants' comments struck me as worth noting. Somewhat to my surprise, among both liberals and conservatives, the label "marriage" really does seem to matter. Noting that opposition to gay marriage is often intertwined with religious conceptions of marriage, I floated the idea that government should get out of the marriage business entirely, recognize only civil unions, and leave "marriage" to religious and other intermediate communities to define and implement. There was widespread resistance to this idea. Participants had some difficulty articulating why it matters, but almost all of them conceded that they do not simply want a certain set of legal rights and privileges surrounding their state-sanctioned relationship; they want to be married, and they want to be married in the eyes of the state, not simply some subcommunity of the state. I'm not sure what significance to take from this, other than that it underscores the difficulty in distilling the debate to a question of comparable bundles of rights. There seems to be an inescapable moral dimension to the recognition of gay marriage, regardless of whether one opposes or supports the concept.

Rob