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Gay marriage, divorce, hypocrisy

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At CT, Harry is contemplating the possible ways out of the hypocrisy charges that would seem to accompany divorced opponents of gay marriage. Along the way, he considers one possibility:

One might, of course, believe nevertheless that divorce should be legal, because one might recognise that some marriages fall so far short of the ideal that it is better that they end, even though this does harm to the institution

The last phrase here seems potentially wrong. I think it’s potentially consistent with a generally conservative view of marriage that some marriages should end–namely, those that make a farce or mockery of institution through how short they fall of its ideals. The end of those very bad marriages actually strengthens the institution of marriage. This is potentially consistent with the view that divorce is far too common. All we’re doing is simply submitting another fact for consideration: marriages fall into two categories, the salvagable and the unsalvagable. Divorces in the former category harm the institution of marriage, divorces in the latter category reinforce it. We don’t have a perfect tool for sorting out those two sorts of marriages, but we might develop some pretty functional imperfect ones.

Here’s my attempt:

1) There exists platonic ideal of marriage X.

(as a non-subscriber to this view, I won’t attempt to specify all the conditions of X, but for the purposes of this argument we’ll assume it contains, amongst other things, the stipulation that the parties to the marriage are one man and one woman and they don’t hate each other. It is also probably permanent, the but amongst the internal criteria, this criteria does not always necessarily trump to the other two mentioned criteria.)

2) It’s good for society when the actual practice of marriage is as closely aligned with X as possible.

3) Non-participation in the institution of marriage isn’t ideal, but it’s less threatening to the institution (and therefore society) than the existence of marriages that fall well short of X.

4) Gay marriage is easy to legally prevent before the fact; marriage between men and women who hate each other is not. Therefore, both bans on gay marriage and divorces between people who hate each other both serve the same goal–strengthening the institution of marriage.

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