The book’s final chapter (“Marriage and the Law”) concerns questions about what view of marriage should be reflected in our laws. Lee and George argue that because conjugal marriage is uniquely real marriage, it would be unjust for the law to say otherwise. This chapter includes rebuttals to several arguments for the legal recognition of same-sex relationships as marriages. For this reason, Lee and George often return to points established earlier in the book and apply them to the legal debate.

Review of Conjugal Union: What Marriage Is and Why It Matters by Patrick Lee and Robert P. George

Patrick Lee and Robert P. George’s new book clearly establishes that the case for conjugal marriage is not based on irrational prejudice or sentimental appeal to tradition. It is based on a series of sophisticated arguments that deserve to be answered.

In one of the classes I teach at Baylor University, we cover, among other topics, the issue of marriage. I begin by asking my students, “Is there a difference between these two questions: ‘How do you define marriage?’ and ‘What is marriage?’” Most of them say “no,” which implies that they believe that defining and discovering are pretty much the same sort of activity.

I then ask, “Is there a difference between these two questions: ‘How do you define a human person?,’ and ‘What is a human person?’?” Initially, most say “no,” but their confidence wanes once I press them: “So, suppose that Mr. X, a slave owner, defines a human person as ‘a human being of the Caucasian race.’ Is he correct in his definition?” The students quickly respond with an emphatic “no,” to which I reply, “But doesn’t that mean that defining and discovering are not the same activity? After all, your rejection of Mr. X’s definition implies that a definition can be wrong if it is inconsistent with the nature of the thing the definition was meant to describe.” We then move on to discuss the differences between nominal and real definitions, essential and accidental properties, and whether the law—in the case of marriage—should or should not recognize only those unions that are real marriages (whatever those may turn out to be).

Unsurprisingly, they all wind up agreeing in principle that the state should only recognize “real marriages,” just as our welfare policy should only try to remedy real poverty, our criminal law should only proscribe real crimes, our contract law should only honor real contracts, and our public school science classes should only teach real science. Regardless of the post-modern rhetorical sophistry they have uncritically assimilated from the wider culture, they inevitably confess, when pressed in just the right way, that they are closet realists. They viscerally grasp that the only intellectually legitimate answer to the question “Why should we believe what is real?” must be the real answer. The unreal answer, they apprehend, can never in principle be the right answer.

Of course, on the question of marriage and the law’s recognition of it, this is only a first step in addressing this question. After all, some of them support the legal recognition of same-sex partnerships as marriages, while others do not. Their disagreement, therefore, is not over whether the law should recognize real marriages; on that, they all agree. Rather, they disagree on what counts as a real marriage.

Framing the Marriage Question

This way of framing the question of marriage and its legal recognition, though it offers both sides of a contested question a common ground from which to argue for their positions, has been almost universally absent from the way the debate is presented in popular culture. And yet, this seems to be the only substantive question whose answer is capable of providing us with real direction in deciding what policy is the most just.

This is why the new book by Patrick Lee and Robert P. George—Conjugal Union: What Marriage Is and Why It Matters—is such an important philosophical contribution to both the legal and policy discussions on marriage. Published by Cambridge University Press, the book provides a careful and systematic defense of what is often labeled “traditional marriage.”

Because of our culture’s uncritical embrace of chronological snobbery—i.e., new is always better than old—the unfortunate term “traditional marriage” not only implies that “marriage” is merely a noun in front of which any adjective can be placed without affecting the noun’s substantive meaning; it also implicitly assumes the non-normativity of “traditional marriage.” Imagine, for example, one were to place the adjective “male” in front of the term “lesbian.” This would not merely modify the term “lesbian.” Rather, it would create a whole new term, referring to a different thing: a biological male who believes himself to be a woman who is sexually attracted almost exclusively to biological females. In this new term, “male” does not function like “tall,” “short,” “black,” or “white.” It is more like placing “dead” in front of “man” and pretending that a “dead man” is just a type of man rather than a whole new thing.

These examples illustrate what Lee and George maintain is a largely unevaluated assumption in the debate over marriage: the idea that placing “same-sex,” “gay,” “polyamorous,” or even “traditional” in front of the term “marriage” merely modifies the latter and does not affect its substantive meaning. Thus, same-sex marriage is not a new thing; it is merely a new sort of the same thing, as would be the case if we discovered a red-and-white-striped horse and concluded that despite its strange appearance it was still just a horse. Within such a conceptual framework, it seems to make sense for many people that when the government excludes same-sex couples from legally recognized marriage it is no different from the government excluding tall, short, black, or white opposite-sex couples from the institution.

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