Showing what “marriage” is: Law’s civilizing sign
AbstractIn “What is Marriage?” (2010), Girgis et al. explain how the legal redefinition of the traditional meaning of marriage would erode not only the institution, but also the common good. More importantly, they argue that there are principled reasons why the law should distinguish conjugal and revisionist conceptions of unions and retain the conjugal meaning of “marriage.” However their arguments I argue are problematic. Retrieving their insights, I develop a different argument on behalf of their case. By examining phenomenologically the dynamism of the life-world of relationships under the “conjugal” and the “revisionist” conceptions of marriage, rather than the physics of coitus and same sex activity, I argue that there is a distinct difference between the two types of unions. Also, conjugal unions matures us so that we can become other-caring persons, with civilizing effects that trickle outwards into the community from the core of a conjugal family unit. I conclude that the law should retain the traditional meaning of “marriage” to include only conjugal unions, in order to point to these instead of others, with the social and civilizing benefits these unions entail when young men and women aspire to and attain these.