By David Carlin
In view of his recent opinion on same-sex marriage, I have two questions for Attorney-General Patrick Lynch, one of them philosophical, the other sociological.
The philosophical question ¬ more specifically, the epistemological question ¬ is this: You say, as do many other advocates of same-sex marriage, that the right to same-sex marriage is a "basic human right." But how do you know this?
The most famous proclamation of rights ever written, the American Declaration of Independence, asserted that the rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness were "self-evident truths." Reading this, I know where Jefferson and the other Signers believed that they acquired their knowledge of these rights. And knowing this, I can ask myself: Are these rights really self-evident? When people tell us where their would-be knowledge comes from, we can begin a rational debate.
But I really have no idea where Patrick Lynch and others get the idea that same-sex marriage is a basic human right. They assert the existence of this right, but they don't tell us how they came to know it; they don't tell us where we too can look and find this right for ourselves.
Surely they cannot mean that the right to same-sex marriage is a "self-evident" right; for if it were, then the vast majority of the human race would acknowledge it, whereas in fact the vast majority denies it. The notion that same-sex marriage is a basic human right is a novel idea that is currently fashionable in a few very affluent countries of Western Europe and North America. The rest of the world thinks it an absurd idea, as would all our ancestors if we could put the question to them.
Beware. If you gratuitously assert that there is a "right" to same-sex marriage, others will be free to assert gratuitously that there is no such right. Indeed, others will be free to make unsupported assertions that homosexuality is a great crime deserving severe punishment. The game of making gratuitous assertions of rights can turn out to be a very dangerous game. Nazis can play the game as well as liberals.
Enough of my philosophical question; now to sociology. In your official opinion, Mr. Attorney-General, you acknowledge that under Rhode Island law recognition of same-sex marriages performed outside this state can be denied if these marriages are "odious by the common consent of nations." You say, if I understand you correctly, that this principle of odiousness would bar recognition of "bigamous marriages" but not of same-sex marriages.
And so I ask my sociological question: Where did you get the very strange idea that the "common consent of nations" finds bigamy odious and same-sex marriage non-odious? Some slight acquaintance with the history of human marriage would reveal that precisely the opposite is true. For many thousands of years, hundreds if not thousands of societies considered polygamy a perfectly fine form of marriage (indeed, they usually considered it superior to monogamy), while until just a few years no human society (not even the homosexuality-tolerant societies of ancient Greece) showed the least inclination to tolerate same-sex marriage.Your opinion, it appears, is based partly on a gratuitous philosophical assertion and partly on an astonishing amount of historical ignorance.
Surely, Patrick, you and your staff can do better than that.
(David Carlin, the author of the book Can a Catholic Be a Democrat?, is a professor of sociology and philosophy at CCRI. He can be reached at drcarlin@hotmail.com.)
(This column originally appeared in The Providence Visitor)
