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.