Dr. Blanchard has provoked vigorous commentary with his weekend blog post on same-sex marriage and incest. Citing William Saletan's recent Slate article on the same topic, the good professor tries to put liberals in another box, saying we can't formulate a coherent defense of same-sex marriage without defending the concept of traditional family.
Oh yes we can.
Traditional family structure is great. I certainly enjoy mine. Parents who violate that structure with incest, infidelity, or inattention do ill to their children and to society. But making "traditional family" the core value in a debate about sexuality or social policy is problematic on two levels.
First, taking "traditional family" as a core principle says to every childless couple and single person, "You're doing something wrong." When folks ask me how I like married life, I say it's great, but I don't feel the need to universalize the maxim of my and my wife's personal action. Marriage and parenthood are great, but so is a loving relationship where you choose to focus your energy on great enterprises other than raising a future Supreme Court Justice. So is foregoing marriage altogether to concentrate on a career of public service or invention. So are any number of lifestyle choices that don't involve crime or debauchery. Enshrining "traditional family" as a broad basis for public policy unnecessarily denigrates other reasonable ways to live one's life.
Second, traditional family doesn't cover every situation where we might debate the appropriateness of intimate relationships. Consider bosses and employees, or teachers and students, or randy farm boys and sheep. We feel varying degrees of unease over such relationships, even if no traditional family structure is being perverted. Some principle besides "traditional family" seems to inform that unease.
I suggest that other principle is power... or more specifically, our understanding that intimate relationships shouldn't be based on power.
Power is at least as good a reason to ban incest as traditional family. Parents having sex with children violate the fundamental trust and proper order of the traditional family. But such vile parents also misuse their enormous power over their children. Incest is reprehensible on either count.
But power also explains our opposition to other sexual malpractice better than traditional family. Prostitution mingles with sex the coercion of wealth (by johns and pimps). Young single teachers enticing their middle-school students into sexual activity abuse the power and trust given them not just by families but by an entire community. Office managers and commanding officers who fraternize with underlings struggle to keep their affection separate from their authority. And even if you come from a close, loving family with a long tradition of boffing sheep (just like Great Grand-Daaa-aaa-d used to do!), you're still doing it with a critter that can't consent (and even if it could... come on! that's gross!).
I'm not saying traditional family is not valuable or relevant. It is. If you need any other argument than the sanctity of family to deter you from having sex with your kids, you need help.
I am saying that power, or circumspect use of power and respect for personal autonomy, can make an equally effective argument against incest as traditional family can. Power can also effectively justify other limits on sexuality that traditional family cannot. Best of all, power provides this philosophical guidance without imposing a mindset that says, "If you don't marry someone of the opposite sex and make babies, you're a failure."
Cory: As I said in a comment on the SDP blog, you and I seem to be struggling to disagree. I think that the traditional family is the right model for all marriages and families. You think this is too restrictive and would exclude gay marriage for example. Since I am on record as supporting same sex marriage, I have to disagree with the latter and I do.
Aristotle wrote the first and still best account of the natural family. It consisted, as he saw it, of three distinction partnerships (koinonia in Greek): the marital partnership, the parent/child partnership, and the master/slave partnership. For all kinds of reasons, we can ignore the third. What about the first two?
Aristotle saw the husband as the dominant partner, but he also the essence of the relationship in mutual service. He saw it as a genuine partnership based on reasoned agreement between husband and wife. That was astoundingly liberal, for his time. The rule of parents over children was more authoritative than that (one doesn’t reason with children about running out into the street), but at the same time the obligation lay primarily on the parents to nurture the children. That is the natural family and it is the root of the traditional family. To be sure, the family is almost always a product of culture, and families will differ in many respects from one culture to another.
Today we see the marital relationship as one of equality. I cautiously endorse that as an advance over Aristotle. I see it as an advance largely because it better serves the natural function of that partnership.
The question for proponents of same sex marriage is whether it can function in the way described above. I have heard a lot of arguments by my conservative brethren to the contrary. All of them seem to me to be weak. Is there any reason that two men or two women cannot live in a marital relationship that satisfies Aristotle’s account? I don’t think so. Is there any reason that a gay couple cannot responsibly nurture children? Again, I don’t think so.
The very fact that gay marriage is an issue means that there is something called marriage that both sides recognize as valuable. Arguing that traditional marriage must be put aside as a standard in order to recognize gay marriage makes political enemies of those who value traditional marriage. Arguing that gay marriages can in fact be traditional marriages recognizes an agreement among both sides on the most fundamental issue.
ps. We certainly agree that the issue of power is an appropriate one in all sorts of relationships, but most of those you mention have nothing to do with families. Besides, if we can butcher and eat sheep, why can't we boff them? There is more to it than mere power.
Saletan notes the reason that the power issue isn't enough in the case of incest. What about a grown man and his grown daughter, or an adult brother and sister? We outlaw incest in these cases because see it as a fundamental offense against the idea of the family, and this is one place where we are still prepared to make a stand. That stand, in favor of the ancient family, is one of the core principles of decency.
Ken, you're wrong.
"Decency" is a moral paradigm, not an ethical one. Nobody, either here or at SDP has cited any proof that the traditional family is a successful model for reproduction. If modern western civilization is an example of human evolution, explain why genocide is still an accepted practice for imperial presidents to change the minds of those with which he disagrees.
Omnisexuality is as natural as blackbird pie.
Larry doesn't know where babies come from.
Ken, i live in a community where heterosexuals are euphemistically referred to as "breeders." Just because humans have the ability to reproduce like minx doesn't mean we should.
Ken, I agree that we're working awfully hard to disagree on an issue where we 95% agree. But I still think there's a problem in the value hierarchy you establish.
I note that Aristotle's founded the family on, as you say, "genuine partnership based on reasoned agreement." That line suggests Aristotle agrees with me that power or autonomy is central to determining whether an intimate relationship is acceptable. An intimate relationship does not become unacceptable simply because it does not produce children to complete the "traditional family" picture. An intimate relationship does become unacceptable (or at least warrants counseling and repair) if the partners do not act in genuine partnership and reasoned agreement. Again, the power principle answers more questions and provides broader guidance than the traditional family principle.
On sheep: indeed, eating them is a greater assertion of power than boffing them. I hadn't thought of that. Hmm... maybe the difference is that intimate relationships assume respect and partnership, whereas the food chain does not? Sex in this case is recreation, while eating is survival? My advocacy of power and consent as the core principle in determining proper sexual relations does not mean I would advocate that same principle in determining how we eat or how we raise our kids. Restraining your kid from running out in the street, without offering a discourse on the dangers of traffic and the cost of medical care, is fine. Now pass the mutton....
But I do think the power issue is enough to address incest, certainly between parent and child. Even when we become adults, our parents still hold powerful sway over our psychology (ask Luke Skywalker). I suspect even the most rational parents (let alone the ones considering having sex with their kids) have a hard time seeing their children as anything other than their offspring, their subordinates in the family structure, their little babies. That's a hard thesis to test (do we have case studies on incestuous relationships and the rationalizations involved?), but the parent-child power dynamic, established from the cradle, imprinted on the child's first memories, seem inescapable and thus render a healthy incestuous relationship so extremely unlikely as to justify legal proscription.
Brothers and sisters get weirder. I might have to stretch too hard to make the power argument here. I could content myself with accepting family as the primary argument in this case... and indeed, rather than reasoning with siblings considering incest, I'd rather just say, "Gross! You're family! Knock it off!" But that one case where family seems the easier argument doesn't outweigh the numerous others -- childless couples, homosexuals, polygamy, bestiality, prostitution -- where power works as well as or better than family as a reason for limits.