Paul Gillespie: Why equal doesn’t have to mean identical in marriage vote

“Must equal necessarily mean identical?” asked a letter writer to this newspaper on Tuesday. The question goes to the heart of ambiguities associated with political equality when confronted with the undeniable facts of human difference.

The referendum on same- sex marriage has pushed protagonists to clarify them. It has been a good exercise in raising awareness about values and institutions we normally take for granted.

Opponents of same-sex marriage assume equal means identical and therefore fear that passing the constitutional amendment will undermine the difference between it and heterosexual, procreating marriage. This is why they must link the issue to adoption and surrogacy.

They argue that natural differences between men and women and between homosexuality and heterosexuality make marriage equality between them a category mistake about gender that can lead only to suffering.

Against them, proponents of same-sex marriage say the measure brings legal equality to a minority that is otherwise discriminated against. It closes legal gaps and the constitutional position between civil partnership and marriage without changing either status, or those of adoption and surrogacy. They thereby assert the role of equality as a right in the liberal tradition, delivering a level playing field of opportunity to citizens.

That egalitarian tradition is central to European modernity. It drew on and abstracted from the particularities and status hierarchies of anciens régimes and ushered in homogenisation, commodification, democratisation and rights instead.

In doing so, it usually substituted norms of self-sameness – or identity – for those of difference which previously determined social and political regimes. This was the intellectual price of radical change that brought citizenship and inclusion to the previously excluded.

Political philosophies

Conceptually, various political philosophies have struggled with the issue of how to reconcile definitions of equality as identity or literal self-sameness with the human experience of individual difference.

Humans are not equal in their endowments or talents. Some are stronger physically or mentally, or more experienced emotionally, than others. What they have in common is their differences and their ability to express them individually. If you treat them the same, you will therefore do them an injustice.

This contradictory aspect of equality led Karl Marx to argue, when criticising the Gotha programme adopted by the German Workers Party in 1875, that the equal rights it proclaimed were in fact constrained by their emergence in a capitalist society.

That equal standard or right “is in fact an unequal right for unequal labour . . . It is, therefore, a right of inequality, in its content, like every right.”

He went on to say that only in a much more developed phase of communist society would it be possible to cross out this narrow horizon and substitute a principle fully recognising these differentiations: “From each according to his ability to each according to his needs!”

Boomerang

Inspired by this passage, the German philosopher and social theorist Theodor Adorno argued, in his

Minima Moralia

, written in 1945: “The familiar argument of tolerance, that all people and all races are equal, is a boomerang.”

Nazi exterminist racism against Jews (and gay people), based on sensory intelligence, arose from a determination to eliminate such difference. Adorno concluded: “An emancipated society . . . would not be a unitary state but the realisation of universality in the reconciliation of differences.”

In the same tradition, the literary theorist Terry Eagleton argues valuably that, concerning identity and difference, “it is not that they are equal individuals, but that they are equally individual. To this extent, any authentic concept of equality already implicates the notion of difference.”

Reconciling equality and difference thus focuses on the search for common values capable of guaranteeing individuality.

The liberal theorist of political equality John Rawls grounds his case on two principles of justice: giving each person an equal right to the most extensive liberty compatible with a similar liberty for others, and arranging inequalities reasonably to everyone’s advantage and attached to positions open to all. Robert Dahl adds that combinations of sympathy, egoism, empathy and rationality help construct such cultures and institutions.

Ireland’s national debate on same-sex marriage has in its closing stages raised many of these recurring themes. Especially interesting has been the mobilisation of younger voters dealing with them.

If the amendment is passed, we will have moved away from a position in which equal too often meant identical to a more genuinely pluralist one recognising human difference as a foundation stone of political and social equality. pegillespie@gmail.com