Fewer than a third of American adults eat the recommended amount of fruits and vegetables, according to a new study by the Centers for Disease Control (CDC). The government’s goal is for 75 percent of Americans to have two servings of fruits and 50 percent to have three servings of vegetables each day by 2010. (A serving is a cup of leafy greens or a half-cup of other fruits and vegetables.)
It can’t help their cause to have presidents (George H. W.) who say things like “I do not like broccoli. And I haven’t liked it since I was a little kid and my mother made me eat it. I am President of the United States, and I’m not going to eat any more broccoli.” Many of us also remember that during the Reagan era, the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) tried to reclassify ketchup as a vegetable to help schools meet federal standards for reimbursable school lunches.
Columbia University law professor Michael C. Dorf has looked at the ketchup fiasco in an article that examines the concept of a “‘natural kind’—a grouping with a sharp boundary determined by nature itself.” The objection to the USDA, Dorf posits, was not that ketchup isn’t ‘really’ a vegetable. It is, in fact, largely composed of tomatoes, which are vegetables. (Okay, they’re a fruit, but close enough to a vegetable for our purpose here.) “Vegetable” is not, therefore, a “natural kind,” since it could encompass items picked directly from a tree or processed into a tangy spread for hamburgers. Dorf concludes “The objection was that through the redefinition, the Department sought to permit states to avoid responsibility for providing healthy meals to kids.”
This brings us, strangely enough, to same-sex marriage, as Dorf later turns his definitional analysis thither:
A large number of people oppose same-sex marriage on what appear to be definitional grounds. Marriage is an institution between one man and one woman, they say. Thus, by definition, people of the same sex cannot marry. (Federal law and many state laws do, in fact, define marriage exactly this way, but those who make the definitional argument do not rely on these laws; they propose that there is a deeper, universal definition of marriage that would hold true regardless of what the law said.)
. . .Maybe when people say that marriage must be defined as an institution between one man and one woman, they mean something like the following: “The relationship between one man and one woman that has traditionally been recognized as marriage has certain characteristics, such as its essential role in raising children, that would not be served, or not be served as well, by extending the definition to encompass same-sex couples.”
If that is what same-sex marriage opponents mean, then no harm results from the use of the definitional point as a kind of shorthand, so long as they are prepared to make actual arguments on the merits. They must be willing, in other words, to accept same-sex marriage if their assumptions about same-sex couples, child-rearing, and other issues prove to be false.
The full article is worth a read. Its clear yet subtle argument makes a nice change from the political and moral bludgeoning that occupies much of the marriage debate. Dorf in fact builds up to same-sex marriage not only by looking at ketchup, but also at various other examples of purported “natural kinds,” such as planets, species, elementary particles, and fetuses. “On this [same-sex marriage], as on so many issues, much depends on political leadership,” he concludes. “When political leaders substitute tautologies for analysis, it’s not surprising that ordinary citizens do the same.”
I suppose it would help first to have a president who’s likely to know what a “tautology” is.