My college prides itself on tradition. We have freshmen traditions, football traditions, and fraternity traditions, and a wonderful tradition of trying to impress others with how much tradition we have. My school even remains in the small minority of liberal arts colleges that uphold the tradition of focusing their energy on educating men. I am proud of all these wonderful traditions, but I am also proud of our tradition of critical thinking. This type of thought is the sign of the truly educated person, and critical thought does not allow tradition to exist for its own sake. A person who defends an old way of doing things by simply stating, “That’s the way it’s always been done,” is not thinking critically. And when people claim that they are receiving unfair treatment, this type of argument simply won’t do.
It is in this light that I consider the U.S. Supreme Court’s Friday ruling in the case of Obergefell v. Hodges, which held that same-sex couples share the same fundamental right to marry as opposite-sex couples do. In his opinion for the majority, Justice Anthony Kennedy discussed at length the high position marriage has enjoyed in the jurisprudence of the Court. For example, the Court has previously struck down laws barring prisoners and those who have failed to pay child support from wedding because the Court sees marriage as too fundamental to be prevented even in these cases. Naturally, Justice Kennedy had to admit that the Supreme Court, like the rest of society for much of history, has assumed that when it talked about marriage, it was talking about a union of one man and one woman. However, when he considered the rationale for holding marriage in such high regard in the eyes of the law, Justice Kennedy found no substantial reason to limit this fundamental right to heterosexual couples.
In his legal analysis, Justice Kennedy noted that marriage is a fundamental right because 1.) It is an intimate decision of any individual which represents a major aspect of that person’s identity, 2. ) few institutions have as much importance to peoples’ lives as marriage, 3.) marriage is a significant factor in giving recognition from the state to families, and 4.) marriage is a major part of the social order of this nation. After identifying and analyzing these four factors, Justice Kennedy saw no reason that same-sex couples could not enjoy these aspects of marriage. Thinking critically, the justice wrote that although, “The limitation of marriage to opposite-sex couples may long have seemed natural and just…its inconsistency with the central meaning of the fundamental right to marry is now manifest. With that knowledge must come the recognition that laws excluding same-sex couples from the marriage right impose stigma and injury of the kind prohibited by our basic charter.” In other words, one cannot defend the tradition of excluding couples of the same-sex from marriage simply by stating that this has always been the way of things. This tradition cannot exist for its own sake.
It is important as we as a society continue to discuss and debate this momentous decision that we practice this kind of critical mentality. We should not accept things as they are for that reason alone. Otherwise we risk injuring other groups that also deserve to have their rights respected. As Justice Kennedy himself realized, “If rights were defined by who exercised them in the past, then received practices could serve as their own continued justification and new groups could not invoke rights once denied.”
Tradition is important to me, as it is to all other students at Wabash. But tradition only works when we make sure it exists for a purpose, and that that purpose is actually served by that tradition.
