I referenced prior posts by myself and others to answer your question.

Which question? The one about the ‘largest unit that could be called a community’? Which post specifically answered that?

Of course, at this point I am criminally glib, but, alas, I have only so much time.

Since you didn’t make even a single concrete point about the article you’re critiquing… yeah, I’d have to agree.

My argument has been that frameworks inherently objective and transcendent, those seeking truth, even if they have erred in doing so, view marriage in a manner that is entirely foreign to your voluntaristic formulation.

So… if a ‘framework’ doesn’t view marriage in a particular way, that’s prima facie evidence that it’s not ‘seeking truth’?

As families and communities are the basis for human life…

Ah, but is there only one possible way for them to be constituted? That’s the case that needs to be made, no?

At no point did I ever suggest the matter was rooted in communal tradition alone.

On the other hand, you’ve referenced airy ‘frameworks’ and ‘truth’… but given no specifics about their content, or how they are constituted. I’ve been posing questions to try to pin down what you are talking about, and you’ve spent a lot of words – literally thousands – trying to dismiss my questions.

If maybe you could try advancing your case a bit, you might be amazed at how productive a conversation can be.

At the core of the argument I’ve made about marriage is that its emerging understanding represents a triumph of the will, a means to validate and officially recognize the choice of sexual partner(s) that are made rather than a new relationship with a grounding in a transcendent framework.

Translation: “Triumph of the will” means people marry who they want to marry….which is hardly a revoluationary idea since marriage entails the willful consent of two individuals (even in arranged marriages, the concept of will is there). But it’s a nice rhetorical slight of hand to use a phrase that echos the famous Nazi propoganda film.

In terms of argument, you don’t need marriage to ‘validate’ a choice of sexual partner. What does this even mean? Do my sexual partners get free parking upon ‘validation’? While some SSM advocates have pointed out the disconnect in the law that ‘recognizes’ heterosexual partners but leaves no easy spot for gay ones, the core argument is more pragmatic. Without the right to access marriage law, partnerships are unduly handicapped by the state. Donald Trump’s wife, for example, doesn’t need her relationship ‘validated’. She needs access to the legal obligations Trump has as her spouse. In fact we quite often disapprove quite a few marriages that are unquestionably legal (examples, the marriage that comes after a drunken night in Vegas, the Anna Nicole Smith type marriage of a younger woman to a wealthy much older man).

On the second point, Mr. Lee was not looking for only sexual gratification; he wanted a monogamous homosexual relationship, but found no homosexual monogamy after looking strenuously for twenty years.

Which again returns to the ‘so what’ question. I give you again the hypothetical community or demographic group where 80% of men are unfaithful louts. Does marriage appear as some type of ‘group right’ when the level of faithfulness surpasses some threshold? Does it likewise disappear after that should the level fall below it? There are no homosexual men who have long term monogamous relationships? Nowhere, even in their older years after youthful inclinations towards sexual excess have been spent? How do you know that? Even if that happens to be so, how do we know its an ‘iron law’ rather than simply a transitory nature of society? At your core I think you’re dressing up a pop-right wing sociology argument as a philosophical one.

The deeper assumptions are, of course, important, but you can let them emerge as needed rather than throw up a wall of words. Think small and you’ll get better, more probing conversation.

You’re right that I don’t want to engage your argument in the sense that I’m not going to trot out my entire philosophy and all of the reading that undergirds it. You’re not writing a dissertation. Posting is a different genre. Learn its rules.

You object to me using Ray as an example, but his was just the most recent posting. I was not talking about the content of his post, but its form. If you prefer, use Pentamom as your model. No one does more with fewer words. Ray and Boonton are too prolix. David is much more economical. He’s also a good model for you.

I don’t think I mischaracterized the conversation between David and Pentamom. They both made some reasonable claims and were sorting out the limits of their claims. What broke the conversation is that Pentamom got impatient and accused David of making sophistical arguments and then David got steamed and walked out. I think if they had been a little more patient with each other, they would have gotten further along in the distinctions they were trying to make. One thing I admire about both of them is that they admit when they get something wrong.

Reread my post. I didn’t claim that “Lee’s account does not illustrate any evil because it doesn’t involve murder, theft, or adultery.” I said, “Murder, theft, and adultery are intrinsically evil. You can’t engage in them without destroying something. Homosexuality in and of itself destroys nothing.” There’s a difference. I’m asking what exactly homosexuality destroys. Every answer I’ve heard spins back around to another cause, usually promiscuity.

Homosexuality and hypersexuality are, of course, separable. Ask the millions of lesbians and gay men who are not promiscuous. The idea that they are a small number that “deviate from the norm or general homosexual culture” is belied by the fact that gay Christians have participated in a Christian culture that rejects promiscuity and promotes upright relationships and families. That’s what my church is like, and we’re far from alone.

@Boonton: At the core of the argument I’ve made about marriage is that its emerging understanding represents a triumph of the will, a means to validate and officially recognize the choice of sexual partner(s) that are made rather than a new relationship with a grounding in a transcendent framework. The latter could be many things: natural law, Christian tradition and theology, or even the totalizing realization of a Hegelian truth in the unfolding of history, born as it is by a synthesis of the thesis and antithesis. The triumph of the will manifests itself in various ways, including ethics. Rather than submit to a transcendent tradition or framework that is external and compelling, modern ethics are even relativized to the individual. I don’t think that I can describe this better than David Bentley Hart in his Athiest Delusions:

“To be entirely modern (which very few of us are) is to believe in nothing. This is not to say it is to have no beliefs: the truly modern person may believe in almost anything, or even perhaps in everything, so long as all these beliefs rest securely upon a more fundamental and radical faith in the nothing–or, better, in nothingness as such. Modernity’s highest ideal–its special understanding of personal autonomy–requires us to place our trust in an original absence underlying all of reality, a fertile void in which all things are possible, from which arises no impediment to our wills, and before which we may consequently choose to make of ourselves what we choose. We trust, that is to say, that there is no substantial criterion by which to judge our choices that stands higher than the unquestioned good of free choice itself, and that therefore all judgment, divine no less than human, is in some sense an infringement upon our freedom. This is our primal ideology. In the most unadorned terms possible, the ethos of modernity is–to be perfectly precise–nihilism. . . .Even when we shed the moral and religious precepts of our ancestors, most of us try to be ethical and even, in many cases, “spiritual.” It is rare, however, that we are able to impose anything like a coherent pattern upon the somewhat haphazard collection of principles and practices by which we do this. Our ethics, especially, tends to be something of a continuous improvisation or bricolage: we assemble fragments of traditions we half remember, gather ethical maxims almost at random from the surrounding culture, attempt to find an inner equilibrium between tolerance and conviction, and so on, until we have knit together something like a code, suited to our needs, temperments, capacities, and imaginations. We select the standards or values we find appealing from a larger market of moral options and then try to arrange them into some sort of tasteful harmony.”

I would hasten to add that Hart says nothing neither new nor original in this polemic, but only what much of philosophy has been saying, both secular and Christian, for over a century. Philosophers as diverse as Nietzsche to Alasdair MacIntyre have made similar observations. Back to the matter at hand, while every single person arguing in favor of redefining marriage must implicitly accept this voluntarism, your post aptly demonstrates the veracity of this statement. Your analysis of the issue draws upon a bricolage or moral traditions that are incoherently conflated, such as Platonism and Buddhism (that is, unless you are a devote Platonist and Buddhist who has managed to meld the traditions, but I doubt it), even movies. You do not draw upon these frameworks because you find them true and objective, but because they suit your imagination and needs. Behind your appeals to them are an appeal to your own will, masked as it is. I would at this point reiterate what I have argued in the past: this is nihilistic, an appeal to an example set forth in a movie is not a serious argument, and your own willed truth, your opinion devoid of appeals to the transcendent, are no basis for policy and law as they would be tyrannical. You never adequately addressed any of this, except to repeat and expound upon your opinions. This is not a serious response, and I think that you have so internalized the nihilism of the will that you are unable to actively engage ideas that defy this framework.

As for your comment regarding the testimony of one Mr. Lee, a homosexual of twenty years, you mischaracterize (again) the point of that post. You contend that it is a poor argument because it is an appeal to an anecdote and that Mr. Lee’s experiences are such because he was only looking for sex and not monogamy. Both points are false. I remarked that this example was an illustration, not proof. As such, anecdotes, as long as they are not atypical, serve the purpose. On the second point, Mr. Lee was not looking for only sexual gratification; he wanted a monogamous homosexual relationship, but found no homosexual monogamy after looking strenuously for twenty years. He even addresses your contention that redefining marriage would be good for homosexuals, arguing that this is a front to legitimize an inherently destructive lifestyle.

@Mr. Ingles: I referenced prior posts by myself and others to answer your question. You either did not consult them, hence the charge of possible indolence, or you ignored them, hence the charge of dissembling. Perhaps this was a bit harsh, but I expected you to scroll up and read what I had previously typed in order to continue the discussion rather than forcing me to repeat myself.

As for your contention that you are not a nihilist, I will have to disagree. You’ll have to scroll up to prior posts and my response to Boonton for more on the matter. As for the article you cite, it contains so many unquestioned assumptions, such as its internalization of the assumptions behind game theory and simplistic descriptions of the ethical frameworks inherent in various theologies. No philosopher of metaphysics, ethics, or religion would take this seriously, for various reasons, most of which are tangential to my point. Nevertheless, it reflects the same willed choice of ethical systems, a bricolage of social scientific research with its own unstated philosophical assumptions, that are nihilistic. Of course, at this point I am criminally glib, but, alas, I have only so much time. I suppose I can only say that this assertion is unimportant to the matter of discussion.

Regarding community, you confuse quite a bit of what I argued. Self-rule does not constitute the right to choose one’s own truth. Your reading of this assumes the very willful voluntarism that I have critiqued — as if we choose what is true or right, whether individuals, communities, or the state. Your question is coherent only if I am equating truth to a choice of the community, whether it involves marriage or the legitimacy of witch burning. I have responded to this irrelevant question multiple times and will do so only once more. My argument has been that frameworks inherently objective and transcendent, those seeking truth, even if they have erred in doing so, view marriage in a manner that is entirely foreign to your voluntaristic formulation. As families and communities are the basis for human life — not a political drama on the corporate level of hundreds of millions, or on the level of the individual, as if he or she were their own mini-deity, deciding what is true and demanding maximum allowance to express choice — to redefine marriage either as part of a grand corporate social project, an expression of will on the corporate level, or for the individual, is a violence against those basic units of society, the family and community. At no point did I ever suggest the matter was rooted in communal tradition alone. That has been your repeated and your abusive straw man, and you have consistently ignored my appeals otherwise. As such, this will be my last response to you, as you have demonstrated that you cannot argue in good faith, whether by choice or accident (My guess is the latter). Repeating myself every other day is rather exhausting and wasteful.

You also hold me to a standard that you refuse to submit yourself to, despite being the one with the intent to radically change the law from the status quo. This is a bizarre sleight of hand, as if I am the revisionary radical. You have couched your advocacy in an appeal to a legal framework, but have never made the philosophical case to justify this legal framework. As for your repeated insistence that you are a not a nihilism, if you do not have a justification that is not maximizing individual choice, then it is certainly nihilistic, and it is ironically no more legitimate than changing a law to maximize the choices of the community or the state. The onus, as it were, is upon those who would change the status quo. But as for me, my case, as I have stated appeals to natural law, which would be more accessible to you, and the revelation of God, which would be less so. There is not enough space to make in arguments in length and it would be pointless to do so, as seasoned scholars would do a much better job than I could do so here in this short space. You may seek them out on First Things or elsewhere for their lengthy cases. I have already referenced Professor Wilson. Robert George at Princeton writes quite a bit about natural law. The Catholic Church, of course, has internalized natural law arguments in its Aquinan approach to philosophy. Nonetheless, one thing that I can do is point out that your claims conflate natural law with what happens in nature. They are not the same thing and this confusion only illustrates how unprepared you are to have a discussion on the matter.

On your argument regarding the effects of redefining marriage, I have addressed this in prior responses to your claims. You don’t think it’s a radical revision, merely an extension. That is, however, because you have accepted the emergent definition of marriage that I have critiqued. For you, it is a natural extension of an existing arrangement, but only because you have already internalized the contractual formulation of marriage. And your claim regarding the impact of few numbers of possible homosexual couplings also ignores my prior contentions. Change the social understanding of something and the practice is changed. The way something is viewed precludes some things and adumbrates others. You have so internalized the idea that only the rights of the individual matters that you ignore culture. And to reiterate, this is the third time I have had to make this argument and the second time you have selectively ignored it.

As for grammatical errors, I generally don’t edit these posts. They are long and I write them fairly quickly.

@Michael:

You aver that my approach is a mistaken. I will simply state that to address the matter of why we think the way we do, it is important to look at the deeper assumptions that often underlie our thinking, assumptions that all too often go unquestioned. This does not degrade the discussion in the least and does not preclude dialogue. In fact you make a similar appeal yourself in making that vague generalization that historians, which you leave unnamed, claim that marriage has changed throughout history and that this is just another arbitrary shift. Dismissing my entire post, which actually involved references to various scholars to support my view (and I could name more), because you either do not want to engage my argument or are unable to do so does not invalidate it. You go on to use Mr. Ingles, describing his response as targeted. I would submit that his response ignores much of what I have argued and lacks any sense of precision. In fact, his insistence that I characterize truth as based upon the willful claims of the community is abusive in the extreme. You similarly mischaracterize the discussion between pentamom and Mr. Nickols. The latter made clearly sophistical claims masquerading as argument. Pentamom identified this. They did not talk past one another.

You then make an interesting claim that I would like to address. Essentially, you argue that Lee’s account does not illustrate any evil because it doesn’t involve murder, theft, or adultery. This claim is rather reminiscent of what Lee calls the “break my leg test”–if it doesn’t hurt anybody, it isn’t evil. If this is your argument, he certainly does address it. But for my part, I can comment that it only makes sense in the context of a voluntarism — yes, that word again — the idea that one can do whatever they want, in fact, that they are validated by their choices, as long as they don’t harm or impede upon other willful individuals. As a Christian, I cannot agree with this formulation of evil. Lee previously and most other homosexuals he knew pursued behaviors that were destructive to the body and soul. The alienation and slavery to the passions that come with an extremely promiscuous and hypersexualized lifestyle are certainly evil, even if people only do these evils to themselves. You comment that homosexuality is not the cause, hypersexuality is. This presumes that they are separable. Lee claims that in his twenty years of experience, they cannot be. Perhaps he is wrong, but you do not make a convincing case otherwise. As he states, in theory homosexuals can be largely monogamous, but this isn’t what it is like in practice. That there are a small number of individuals who deviate from the norm does not invalidate the norm or the general homosexual culture at large.

At this point I must be off. I, too, have a trip and will be gone for the week. Nevertheless, I think that there is little left to say on the matter. Boonton may ignore my characterization of his thought and repeat his points, replete with references to popular culture as they may be, but that does not constitute a response. Mr. Ingles continues to mischaracterize my position and lead me down some rabbit hole of an irrelevant question regarding witches. Michael seems to dismiss my response to him as too abstruse, but neither engages it nor validates his appeal to history.

Like most who disapprove of homosexuality, Lee describes gay men. Just once,…

Indeed except I would insert the word ‘some’ above which makes the whole thing meaningless from a philosophical POV. Suppose 90% of some demographic group is made up of lowlifes. So what? Suppose 90% of black men from the tiny African country of Erubia have numerous affairs and never take care of their children. Do you ban all marriages where an Erubian man is the groom? Is that just to the 10% of Erubian men who are or will be loyal husbands and good fathers?

No doubt the answer will be “No you don’t ban Erubian men from marriage based on some transitory demographic statistics”. But are 90% of gay men in the US all flamboyant hair dressers who split their time evenly between promiscuity and chatting with fans of The View? Even if they were why should that say anything about the 10% who aren’t?

I’m leaving town tomorrow and don’t have time to get into the details of the errors I’m finding in your reasoning, so I’d rather ask you to look at how you enter the debate. You like to produce long dissertations with lots of filiations to show us how complexly your thought links up to all the deep reading and deep thinking you’ve done. Lots of people fresh from graduate school make similar mistakes. I recommend that you shift modes from seminar paper to dialogue.

For an example, take a look at Ray’s last post (11:28 a.m.). He answers your points succinctly and in a targeted way, without trying to drag the whole kitchen into the conversation. He also points out where you all might be talking past another. You, too, have sometimes claimed that you and someone else were talking past one another, but you seem to think this state of talking past is about different assumptions while Ray thinks it’s about communication. In other words, he’s trying to find ways of getting onto the same page with you so that you all can actually exchange ideas and sort through assumptions. You might engage with him and others on that level rather than linking his word choices up to something else in your philosophical system so that you can accuse him of nihilism or something. (I notice that you’ve now called me a nominalist. It’s fun to have big words! ;->)

As a side note, I observe that, as I suspected, you misread Ray’s use of the word “preference.” Notice that when he explains what he meant, Ray spells out different possible replies and asks for clarifications on some points. This again is an attempt on his part to get onto the same page so that you all can talk more productively.

Earlier in this thread, David and Pentamom were talking past each other and were not able to get onto the same page. David is usually good about trying to find ways of getting on the same page, but I’ve noticed that he doesn’t try as hard as he used to. He’s gotten worn down. He failed utterly on this thread, but at least he was aware that he wasn’t trying very hard and mentioned that he wasn’t. I think Pentamom is one of the more delightful conversants here and have told her so more than once, but here she failed to imagine that David might mean something other than what she took David to mean. She wasn’t quite herself either, though she showed some awareness in her last comment on David.

As for the “intrinsic evils of homosexual acts,” I read Lee’s reminiscence and observe the following things.

I see no case being made for anything being “intrinsically evil.” He describes a culture and a lifestyle, but that’s not the same thing as something being “intrinsically evil.” Murder, theft, and adultery are intrinsically evil. You can’t engage in them without destroying something. Homosexuality in and of itself destroys nothing. When you say, “not all of these evils affect every homosexual, not all gay men are insatiably hypersexualized, for instance, but they are common enough,” you are admitting that homosexuality is not the problem, hypersexuality is. And that’s a point you and I can agree on.

Like most who disapprove of homosexuality, Lee describes gay men. Just once, I’d like to see someone just talk about lesbianism.

There are plenty of gay men and lesbians who do not inhabit the culture and lifestyle Lee describes. Many of them are Christian. Lee wants to argue that every example of healthy homosexuality is window dressing for some porn store. Too many of us have more positive experiences to believe Lee.

I don’t make much hey out of historical analysis in this debate. For example, Brian English over on the Illinois thread has been asking if SSM why not incest and eagerly cites ancient Egypt as a historical example where incest marriages were acceptable. But how trustworthy is historical precedent and the accumulation of human knowledge? Dozens of cultures have declared certain leaders either gods themselves or descended directly from gods. The spectrum of customs range widely and looking at history, I don’t see much to trust. For example, eunuchs have been created for hundreds of years for reasons that are mostly pretty petty. Why should I trust the moral standards society 700 years ago that deemed SSM unacceptable but the mutiliation of small boys perfectly swell if it kept girls from having to sing soprano parts?

In terms of homosexuality being a ‘really modern’ idenity…again what does the last 3000 years of ‘science’ have to say for itself in this regard? It took roughtly 1500 years for science to agree that the cliterous existed and even existed and even Freud less than 100 years ago was botching up women’s sexuality. If our knowledge of roughly half of the human race has such a spotty record why would we trust our wisdom to properly notice and catelogue a human feature that impacts maybe only 5% or less of the human race?

But for the nihilist — what else can we call one who argues that all visions are rooted in preference…

Which is, of course, not what I said. Nor was I “dissembling or lazy”. I asked why your vision should be preferred. You could answer that question with an answer like, “because my vision more closely corresponds to reality than any other”, or “because my vision leads to better real-world outcomes than any other”, for example.

I assure you, I am not even a little bit nihilist – as you could have ascertained by, say, following the links I gave you before. For whatever good it might do, I’ll even give you another link where I specifically reject nihilism and delineate why.

Now, with that presumption out of the way, we can look at some of your other points.

No one is making the claim that truth is found in communal standards. This is the third time I have repeated this clarification. To use the analogy of burning witches, as if I am arguing this, is not relevant.

But since truth is, well, truth – there’s an objective reality out there, which we labor to apprehend (gosh, I guess I’m not a nihilist) – how we determine truth is important. That’s exactly why I asked about witch hanging (not, you’ll note in passing, “burning”). As C.S. Lewis put it: “…surely the reason we do not execute witches is that we do not believe there are such things. If we did–if we really thought that there were people going about who had sold themselves to the devil and received supernatural powers from him in return and were using these powers to kill their neighbours or drive them mad or bring bad weather–surely we would all agree that if anyone deserved the death penalty, then these filthy quislings did?”

Apparently you are agreeing that a community cannot decide its own truth regarding witches, independent of the federal government? That’s what I get out of your statement quoted above, anyway. Correct me if I’m wrong. But that means that a community’s “right to self-rule” is not absolute, that there are some legitimate limitations on a community’s authority.

My questions are aimed at establishing what those limitations are. Apparently we both agree that a community doesn’t have the right to criminalize witchcraft. (If we dont’ agree about that, say so explicitly.) But apparently you think a community can criminalize – or at the very least, refuse to recognize – same-sex marriages. Can you explain the principled difference? (Especially since you’re trumpeting marriage as “a sacred vocation”, which brings in religious-liberty issues… there are modern sects which claim same-sex relationships to be sacred vocations, too.)

(Say… in the thousands of words you’ve written since I asked, you never did answer my question: “What’s the largest unit that can be considered a ‘community’, by your lights?”)

Anyway, after another accusation of nihilism, you state:

I will argue that [my defense of the institution of marriage] is a defense of the default and natural arrangement for human life…

And you’re unavoidably making a truth-claim there. To put a really sharp focus on my question – which I’ve asked many times before, in multiple ways – why should I accept your truth-claims about the nature of marriage, yet reject the truth-claims of the Puritans about witches?

Note: I’ve rejected nihilism and such. I’m not asking for an aesthetic case. I’m kinda hoping for some evidence, or at least a clear statement of principles and an argument developed therefrom. Ideally both.

But you’ve definitely got a case to make about “the default and natural arrangement for human life”. For example, a certain amount of polygamy would be expected, based on nature – in mammals, the degree of size disparity between male and female corresponds pretty linearly with the degree of polygamy. Then again, drawing from nature and history is a lot trickier than it looks. There are even cases of long-lived cultures that practice polyandry into the present day.

Now, you clearly consider marriage to be “a sacred vocation and a means of nurturing and extending kinship”.

I am not the one advocating for a radical revision of the most fundamental of human institutions as part of a Fabian impetus toward historical progress, a risible and unsubstantiated dogma, but strenuously calling for caution in light of your hubris and certainty that this will not have adverse effects.

I’m still not willing to concede that this is a ‘radical revision’. Same-sex marriage is definitely an extension of the existing scheme, but I don’t see the consequences as being as dire as you seem to fear.

For one thing, it doesn’t remove or interfere with any heterosexual option. If that’s really the “default and natural state”, people will still do so. Especially if they con
sider marriage to be “a sacred vocation and a means of nurturing and extending kinship”. While I’m an atheist (note: not a nihilist), I’m monogamously (and monandrously) mar
ried, with kids, and I consider it a fine state and one I heartily recommend and encourage. It’s just that I can’t quite see my way clear to legally mandate it.

For another, homosexuality isn’t really all that common. Even if every homosexual couple got married, numerically speaking you’re not going have a lot of them. Indeed – since you brought up second-order effects – it may wind up working against the legitimization of homosexuality; if the option is available, but only a small percentage of homosexuals take advantage of it (as has been argued on this site already), it may act to stigmatize homosexuals.

That’s about it for the meat of things. A few side issues follow, feel free to ignore.

For your part, while I hasten to compare computer code to society…

That’s the second time you’ve used the phrase “hasten to” in a way that I can’t quite parse. I suspect you mean “hesitate to”; if you “hastened to”, that would mean you were eager to do so. You might want to examine your spell-check settings.

In any case, regarding your list of five “prominent” “academic ethicists”… I’m afraid I’m underwhelmed. I suppose the fault is mine – I really should have specified “presently living” and not “died eight or more years ago”. Even then, I can’t find actual endorsements of eugenics, let alone “the right to kill one’s child up until a certain age”[1], from any of them but Singer. Singer I expected, of course, and he’s certainly ‘prominent’ – but that’s mostly because he’s notorious, not mainstream.

[1] Unless you’re talking about abortion, in which case I’ll simply state that I understood you to be talking about ‘killing one’s post-partum child’, and we can debate abortion elsewhere.

Isn’t the above a caricature (or stereotype) as well?

I don’t think so. He isn’t saying there is no such thing as the effeminate hairdresser. Clearly such characters do exist in real life. But the difference is that he knows enough to know that the most dramatic and noticable example of a class should not be taken as the standard member of the class. I would venture to say that the majority of gay men are closer to the Robin Williams rather than the Nathan Lane character from the Bird Cage.

johnnyboy

Marriage exists to bind two people together. Why would binding two people together be desireable? Because it’s a human instinct…part of human nature if you will. We can spend all day if you wish talking about why that might be. We can bring in theologians, we can bring in evolutionary psychologists, and all matter of speculators and guessers inbetween but the fact of the matter is that just as gravity exists…even if we are only half sure we understand why….this desire of individuals to bind themselves to others also exists.

Now by your standards, I think this desire is somewhat consumerist in the sense that people are motivated to be happy. But happiness is elusive and if you have the mentality of putting yourself first it becomes even more elusive. But as far as the state is concerned marriage’s rules should be ‘consumerist’. We insist that people voluntarily marry each other, the idea of ‘assigning’ husbands and wives to each other is deeply problematic, for example. You can take this to imply that picking a spouse is like picking a sofa from the store…..in some ways it is but in other ways it isn’t. Just because you can make a working analogy between the two doesn’t mean you’ve made a working equation.

But by definition in order for two people to bind together successfully you need their coorporation. I suppose you could force marriages but you can’t force successful marriages and successful marriages take a lifetime, and even then they may be failures. Platonically I define marriage as the ‘ultimate intimate’ because it is an endpoint on a logically built line of human relationships. Marriage would be the most intimate relationship possible between two individuals who still remain two individuals. It’s a somewhat Platonic definition because whatever example of a marriage you may want to cite, it is probably possible to see that such a marriage could be a bit closer without destroying the individuality of its members. (BTW, the opposite end of this line with be misanthropy….the individual who removes himself as much as possible from all other humans….it too would be a Platonic ideal as the most misanthropic individual you can find will almost certainly have some relationships with other individuals). So marriage, to use a phrase that I liked when I saw it in a Catholic News Service article, is properly spoken of as ‘attempted’ at all times except maybe after a marriage has ended by death.

So please don’t make too much of my business analogies. I’m not saying being married is the same as owning a coffee shop. It is like owning a coffee shop, though, in the sense that to be successful at it one probably has to give some of his life to it and as any Buddhist should be able to tell you to give your life to something requires ditching transitory wants and desires. The transitory ‘itch’ to suddenly own a bar or nightclub or bookstore must be ditched if one is to be successfully owning a coffeshop…. But anlogies only go so far. Some people don’t give much to their business but strike it rich through pure luck. I’m not sure the same thing can happen with a successful marriage….if its successful, then you’ve given to it…..there’s no overnight wonders like Facebook or Napster in the world of marriage IMO….

Anyway, the individual remains free to be as superficial or as deep as they please (or are capable of being). No one says the flighty, superficial “get rich quick scheme of the week” type person may not own a coffeeshop. In fact quite often in marriage or business undertaking the venture transforms the immature person into a more mature person. Jiggling around rules do not make people more mature. No fault divorce, for example, IMO, only makes marriage failures more visible it doesn’t actually make marriages failures….Divorce Italian Style demonstrates that people can be as silly and immature with the most serious marriage laws possible as they can in any Las Vegas/LA cheap marriage/divorce circus.

It is, however, brutally honest, a testimony of a man who spent twenty years as an active homosexual.

You seem enamoured of the fallacy of the ancedote. A man who wants to be ‘hypersexual’ won’t find much positive in SSM anymore than he will in regular marriage. The institutions are clearly designed for long run committment and the hypersexual person is almost certainly going to run into a problem as the chances of having a single partner who is equally hypersexual at all times is pretty slim. The attempt at marriage, though, is probably a positive thing. I do suspect that notable fillanders like Bill Clinton and Newt Gingrich probably had fewer affairs because they were married than if they were just ‘bachler politicians’. But nonetheless we can say their attempts at marriage failed (or at least Newt’s did, it seems Clinton’s attempt has a 2nd wind and isn’t knocked out yet). Another area where I think the analogy works is that failed attempts at marriage are not a bad thing anymore than failed attempts at business. The potential rewards of success, IMO, are pretty great and merit even many failures to achieve.