Sat, Aug 21/04
Wake up, Maggie

Margaret Somerville continues to blow my mind. Back in May, 2003, she asked a legitimate question — "Should marriage be primarily a child-centred institution or an adult-centred one? — but then, as I wrote at the time, summarily concluded that it is the former and, as a result, that gay marriage should be a no-go.

Two months later (in an open letter to Svend Robinson) she was still portraying it as a choice society must make, but her words more obviously betrayed the foregone conclusion at work (note my emphasis):

If we focus on adult individuals' commitment to each other and public recognition of that commitment (as the courts have done), we can conclude that restricting marriage to opposite-sex unions and having a separate but equal institution for same-sex unions would be discrimination. If, however, we focus on the inherently procreative nature of an opposite-sex union and the absence of that feature in a same-sex union, we can regard the two types of union as different but equal.

And here we are again: how exactly is an opposite-sex union inherently procreative? Most opposite-sex unions can and probably do result in offspring, I'll admit, but not all of them can, or do. They can't if the woman is 75 years old, for instance, or sterile, and they (hopefully) won't if the couple isn't interested. Am I supposed to consider a married woman who's on the pill "procreative" at the same time as she's taking all necessary steps not to procreate? I think not. A married couple is no more inherently procreative than two carbon atoms on the sidewalk are inherently fissionable.

And yet, 13 months later, in August 19's National Post (in response to Colby Cosh's somewhat dubious "gay marriage will lead to polygamy" column), there's this: "The Central feature of marriage is an inherent biological reality — that a man and a woman can together procreate." She's not even phrasing it as a question now  — marriage is about procreation, and hence, about children, notwithstanding that she's never even attempted to prove it. (For those who don't understand the original meaning of "begging the question," this is pretty much the gold standard example of it.) Even if it were true, I don't see how it would be evidence against gay marriage specifically. It seems to me it would be evidence against allowing marriage for anyone except willing young men and women of proven, leporine fertility.

Lee Iverson, a computer engineering professor at UBC, puts the issue about as straightforwardly as it can be put:

Margaret Somerville is a very intelligent woman and an almost always astute and observant analyst on issues of ethics and moral behaviour but on the issue of gay marriage she seems to have been blinded by some religious or moral dogma that doesn't allow her to examine the logic of her own arguments.

She sure does, Dr Iverson. It's about time she came clean about where these ideas are coming from, because they certainly aren't coming from logic, as one would have expected from someone in her field.