Visitors, students and staff gathered at the Karl Anatol Center Thursday to listen to guest speaker John Corvino discuss where same-sex marriage lies within political and social definitions of marriage.
The Center for First Amendment Studies helped sponsor the event, along with the philosophy, political science and religious studies departments.
Corvino, who is the chair of the philosophy department at Wayne State University in Detroit, is the author of several works that revolve around same-sex marriage and homosexuality.
Corvino explained the verbal dispute on same-sex marriage and talked about the New Natural Law argument, which says that marriage cannot exists between people who cannot consummate their union through sex.
Corvino also discussed objections and counter-objections to the New Natural Law argument. He argued that same-sex marriage is and should be considered marriage without any “exclusivity.”
“I think a lot of people who are opposed to same-sex marriage have given up the legal fight, at least in this country,” he said. “We are going to have same-sex marriage in this country, but they still want to [teach] that such relationships are wrong … they still want to teach the same in their churches [and] they still want to teach that to their children.”
During the presentation, Corvino presented two views of marriage: the conjugal view, which defines marriage as a union between man and woman, and the revisionist view, which defines marriage as an emotional union of two people, of any gender, who commit mutual care and may engage in whatever sexual acts they find mutually agreeable.
Corvino said, although the New Natural Law view is the strongest and most developed argument for maintaining marriage, it fails in a number of ways. Corvino offered the Bob and Jane metaphor as an example.
“Imagine a young couple … engaged to be married, and a few weeks before the wedding there is a tragedy,” Corvino said. “Bob is in a car accident and becomes paralyzed from the waist down in such a way that he will never be able to engage in coitus … they [still] decide to get legally married and spend the rest of their lives together.”
His question to this scenario was, “Were Bob and Jane married?” According to the New Natural Law argument, because of a lack of coitus, or sex, in their relationship, the answer would be no.
“The New Natural Law lawyers seem to be treating marriage as if it has some kind of essence that’s out there to be grasped or understood or discovered, rather than a social institution that we invent,” he said. “Marriage is a social institution and social institutions are things that human beings create, and that therefore, human beings can change.”
Senior psychology major Mario Nava, who attended the event, said he agreed with Corvino that sexual intercourse shouldn’t be necessary for a bond between two people that care for each other to be justified.
Mark Petrakis, a University of California, Los Angeles alumnus who attended the event, said although Corvino’s talk was interesting, he still finds himself on the fence about the issue.
“There’s a level of intellectual seriousness in his presentation and exploration on the whole question of marriage,” Petrakis said. “There’s a real philosophical seriousness about it that I think is really lacking in the contemporary discussion about marriage and marriage policy.”
