I talk about gay mar­riage a lot because I believe that it has inter­est­ing fea­tures and con­se­quences beyond those com­monly sub­ject to dis­cus­sion. For exam­ple, in my Law Review arti­cle, “Same-​​Sex Mar­riage and the Fed­eral Spousal Priv­i­leges,” I argue that vari­a­tions in state laws deal­ing with gay mar­riage cre­ate a sit­u­a­tion where fed­eral courts may be faced with a novel choice-​​of-​​law ques­tion: To which state’s laws should a fed­eral crim­i­nal court look to deter­mine the valid­ity of a mar­riage for pur­poses of apply­ing the spousal tes­ti­mo­nial and com­mu­ni­ca­tions priv­i­leges to same-​​sex mar­riages under Fed­eral Rule of Evi­dence 501. (That arti­cle was fin­ished in April, 2009, and has not been updated since. I may update it soon and share it here if I can­not find a print pub­li­ca­tion inter­ested in car­ry­ing it.)

(I am not opposed to same-​​sex mar­riage on prin­ci­ple, but my posi­tion is much more com­pli­cated than can be expressed by a sim­ple answer to a “are you for it or against it” ques­tion. I will fully describe my, so far as I can tell, unique posi­tion on same-​​sex mar­riage in another post.)

Recently, another issue has caught my atten­tion. This one is not a legal issue, but a con­cep­tual one. I have always found myself a bit non­plussed when­ever I hear some­one men­tion his hus­band, or her wife. Despite the fact that I know that the speaker is gay and may even actu­ally have gone to the trou­ble of going some­where to get legally mar­ried (same-​​sex mar­riage is not legal or rec­og­nized in Key Mid­west­ern Swing State), it still strikes me as odd that a man should use the term “hus­band” to refer to his spouse, or a woman can be mar­ried to a “wife.” The reac­tion I have is one that, could it be summed up in a phrase would be “but he’s not really your hus­band, even though you two are mar­ried.” In other words, I feel like the speaker is or ought to be rais­ing his hands above his shoul­ders to the level of his ears and repeat­edly curl­ing the mid­dle and index fin­gers of both hands in a down­ward motion while say­ing the word “hus­band” or “wife”.

There’s a video on YouTube for every­thing:

This men­tal response of “there’s some­thing not quite right about that usage” is sub­tle, but con­sis­tent, which makes me think it is not incon­se­quen­tial and deserves inves­ti­ga­tion. There are two pos­si­bil­i­ties: either I sub­con­sciously do not accept a man in a same-​​sex mar­riage as a proper unit of the con­cept “hus­band”; or such a per­son is not prop­erly a unit of the concept.

The sim­ple def­i­n­i­tion of “hus­band” is “a mar­ried man”. And if def­i­n­i­tions were inter­change­able with con­cepts the mat­ter would be closed. But the con­cept actu­ally sub­sumes all the fun­da­men­tal prop­er­ties shared by its units. So the ques­tion is: is hav­ing a wife part of being a “hus­band”? Is being pos­sessed by her hus­band part of being a “wife”? Other con­cep­tual evi­dence sug­gests that it is. A gen­der neu­tral con­cept for a mar­ried per­son exists: “spouse”. It doesn’t carry all the fine points of the masculine-​​feminine rela­tion­ship and so is a broader con­cept than “hus­band” or “wife”.

Here’s where Rand’s Razor comes in. It directs to con­cep­tu­al­ize only to the point nec­es­sary, then stop. Fur­ther group­ings should be iden­ti­fied descrip­tively. Leonard Peikoff, “The Analytic-​​Synthetic Dichotomy” in Intro­duc­tion to Objec­tivist Epis­te­mol­ogy 94–96 (Plume 1990). Assum­ing “hus­band”, “wife” and “spouse” are all proper con­cepts, then there must be some­thing essen­tial and fun­da­men­tal to the con­cept “wife” other than the fact that wives are women. If not, then there would be no need for the con­cept “wife,” because this group­ing of female spouses could be iden­ti­fied more eas­ily in the descrip­tive terms I just used.

Addi­tion­ally, I am reminded of Hank Rearden’s walk home with the bracelet in Atlas Shrugged — the bracelet which he intended for his wife, but not the woman to whom he was mar­ried. These con­cepts “hus­band” and “wife” carry with them a great deal of other very sig­nif­i­cant fea­tures that deal with the inter­play of the mas­cu­line with the fem­i­nine. These fea­tures are, both in my expe­ri­ence and, I believe, as a mat­ter of prin­ci­ple, fun­da­men­tally dif­fer­ent in and, in some instances absent from, same-​​sex rela­tion­ships. In short, these con­cepts do not apply merely because a unit to which they are applied meets the def­i­n­i­tion. Men and women in same-​​sex mar­riages do not seem to belong in the con­cepts “hus­band” and “wife” because same-​​sex mar­riages have very dif­fer­ent rela­tion­ships and inter­per­sonal dynam­ics than opposite-​​sex mar­riages. There is cer­tainly a masculinity-​​femininity dynamic at work in same-​​sex rela­tion­ships, but it is very dif­fer­ent from the masculinity-​​femininity dynamic that is part of the het­ero­sex­ual marriage.

I see a few pos­si­ble conclusions:

1. Expand the con­cepts “hus­band” and “wife” by drop­ping those con­cepts’ cur­rent ref­er­ences to the gen­der of the unit’s spouse and the het­ero­sex­ual masculinity-​​femininity dynamic, effec­tively ren­der­ing them fully equiv­a­lent to the phrases “male spouse” and “female spouse”, even though Rand’s Razor would then dic­tate aban­don­ing the con­cepts “hus­band” and “wife” alto­gether in both gay or straight rela­tion­ships in favor of the descrip­tive iden­ti­fi­ca­tions within the mas­ter con­cept “spouse”;

2. Assume that “hus­band” and “wife” did not include the gen­der of the unit’s spouse and the het­ero­sex­ual masculinity-​​femininity dynamic as an essen­tial and fun­da­men­tal fea­ture of all units in the con­cepts in the first place, and then adhere to Rand’s Razor and aban­don “hus­band” and “wife” for gay and straight mar­ried peo­ple and use “spouse” as the con­cept and iden­tify sub­sets descrip­tively, despite the fact that “hus­band” and “wife” have ven­er­a­ble con­cep­tual pedigrees;

3. Describe gay mar­ried men as “gay hus­bands” (or some other descrip­tive vari­ant on the con­cept “hus­band”), even though this would be like say­ing “this is a hus­band, except that it lacks sev­eral essen­tial fun­da­men­tal fea­tures of hus­bands” and reads to me like a stolen concept;

4. Develop entirely new con­cepts for gay spouses, which would need to have a lot more dis­tin­guish­ing fea­tures than a sim­ple gender-​​specification, such as impli­ca­tions about the sex­ual dynam­ics involved, in order to jus­tify treat­ing them as con­cepts in their own rights;

5. Use the exist­ing con­cept “spouse”, which does not include gen­der or sex­ual dynam­ics, and merely use the descrip­tive “gay spouse” if fur­ther speci­ficity is needed.

If there is in fact a con­cep­tual prob­lem with includ­ing men mar­ried to other men in the con­cept “hus­band”, then num­ber 5 is my pre­ferred solu­tion. I would appre­ci­ate com­ments, but only if they deal with the con­cep­tu­al­iza­tion issue I am dis­cussing. I do not need com­ments telling me that I’m a homo­phobe because I refuse to treat gay mar­riages as con­cep­tu­ally equal to straight ones. I’ve already told you that I agree that they should be polit­i­cally and legally equal, and that’s not the issue I’m dis­cussing in this post.

Update: 12th April, 2010. There has been some mis­un­der­stand­ing about the pur­pose of this post. The pur­pose of this post is to explore the cause of my per­sis­tent, nag­ging neg­a­tive emo­tional response to same-​​sex cou­ples using the words “hus­band” and “wife”, be it sub­con­scious con­cep­tual error or some­thing else. Please review the comments.