Favorite Book of the Month
Minimizing Marriage: Marriage, Morality, and the Law (Studies in Feminist Philosophy)
Elizabeth Brake's "Minimizing Marriage" is one of the most interesting, well-written, and well-argued books about the future of marriage written in a long while. While there is a voluminous academic literature on same-sex marriage, surprisingly, little has been written about the disestablishment (abolition) of civil marriage (with the notable exception of Tamara Metz's "Untying the Knot") and its being replaced with a more inclusive, marriage-like status that doesn't privilege monogamy, different-sex or same-sex. Brake argues that the state can and should remain in the marriage business, so to speak, provided that it has a sufficiently neutral or public reason for offering such a legal status. That reason is the promotion of care in intimate relationships that do not have to only involve two persons or be premised upon a romantic or sexual relationship. Brake is a moral and political philosopher but she writes in a manner that is not only admirably jargon-free but she also includes real-world examples that make her work less abstract than it otherwise would be and therefore, more accessible to someone who isn't trained as an analytical philosopher. In short, I couldn't recommend this book more highly for anyone who is interested in where the debate over same-sex marriage is likely to lead.
Ron Den Otter, POLS Associate Professor