Actual Discussion on Marriage

Pat Crowley offered a pleasant surprise by actually making a counter-point in response to my recent post on encouraging marriage:

Because apparently now the law tells married couples that your ability to marry is relative to your ability to create children. Which makes many marriages, mine included, some how null and void. After all, my wife and I are deliberately choosing not to have children ( I have 3 from a prior marriage but that is a WHOLE ‘nother story). We must be somehow flaunting our liberty to interpret the reason behind the law as we see fit by not reproducing. And what about couples who want to have kids but can’t? And what about adoption? Are people who are married but adopt somehow exploiting a loophole in the law, thus violating the intent? Are they adoptive couples really still married or are they also re-defining the institution by adopting instead of conceiving?

Not to muddy the waters by quipping toward the issue of abortion, but I wonder whether a broader inference could be derived from Crowley's apparent understanding of the notion of choice. By his own admission, his failure to procreate with his current wife is a freely chosen decision, which means that, even if he were correctly understanding my argument, his marriage would not be "null and void," because he and his spouse have the ability to have children. Should they change their minds, or should their birth control method fail, they are already in the relationship into which society ought to prefer that children be born. For similar reasons, the notion of sterility is inadequate as a contradiction of my construct, because sterility is generally not known to be a problem until the couple is already attempting to have children, in which case, again, we want them to be married.

Be that as it may, Crowley makes a common error to the degree that he's actually attempting to understand the opposing side. Marriage is inherently related ("relative" implies degrees of marriage) to the "ability to create children" inasmuch as it has until recently been limited to those pairings that tend toward that end. Men and women tend to create children when they're intimate together, so limiting marriage to relationships that include one of each draws that line.

That a couple does not procreate, by choice or by inability, does not affect the cultural understanding of their relationship type. This is how the culture works — on the basis of principles. Principles are not like the law — which operates on the basis of rules — in that mild contradictions or variations don't represent a break.

(As for his comments on Charles Murray: It's apparent that Crowley has never read the Bell Curve, which did not put forward the argument that he attributes to it.)