“Foes of gay rights are now seen by the press as fighting the bad war, roughly analogous to Vietnam,” wrote Fred Barnes in The Weekly Standard. “Pro-lifers are waging the good war, like World War II.” Timothy Dalrymple has an excellent post examining this analogy and shares a story that most evangelical editors can relate to:
Consider this little bit of anecdotal information. As an editor and director for a large religion website now, I can tell you: It’s substantially easier to find Christians and evangelicals to write on the abortion issue than it is to find ones who will write on same-sex marriage. Academics in particular are terrified that anything critical of homosexuality or same-sex marriage will come up before hiring or tenure committees. One of the first subjects we addressed in our “Public Square” at Patheos was the same-sex marriage debate, and nearly every person I approached to write on the topic had to ask himself or herself: “Am I willing to give up the next job, the next promotion, the next award, because of my views on this topic?”
In academic circles, you can question the morality of abortion and still be tolerated. But if you question the morality of homosexuality, you are an oppressor and an opponent of human rights. They’re perfectly justified in rejecting you, since your opinion is not only factually wrong but morally wrong, reprehensible and oppressive. By rejecting you, they’re not being prejudicial or intolerant; they’re protecting the rights of gay faculty and students.
Ah, but we just have to wait until these evangelicals are established in academia. They have to remain silent now, but once they gain tenure they find their courage to speak truth to power, right?
Sadly, no. I catch flack every time I point it out but it’s the shameful truth: Most evangelicals serving in the secular areas of academia will always be too frightened to stand up for unpopular moral truths. Though they may be our allies in secret, we have to relinquish the hope that they’ll slip from their Ivory Towers and come to our aid in the Public Square. We can stop looking to them for support; they ain’t coming. The most we can do is hold the line, and pray that God will ensure that future generations of evangelical academics are born with backbones.
November 30th, 2011 | 9:32 am
What many people fail to grasp is the relatively straightforward truth that standing against same-sex marriage is a pro-life position. If we want to defend the personhood of the unborn child, we will stand against the notion that same-sex couples have a right to marry. I posted on this subject on my blog a week or so ago: http://alastairadversaria.wordpress.com/2011/11/18/abortion-and-personhood/.
November 30th, 2011 | 9:37 am
I love how religious conservatives never for one second consider the possibility that the reason their dogma doesn’t get any respect in academic circles is because scholarship is a disciplined process designed to identify and weed out bias (rather than an exercise in reinforcing all of one’s current opinions), and therefore, their thinking may just be biased. Of course, it’s easier to whine about “discrimination” and “thought police” than to provide actual evidence to support your point of view, or substantive responses to academic criticism. Then again, if you hold a belief solely based on biases and erroneous assumptions, it is impossible to do those things.
November 30th, 2011 | 10:10 am
Well *I* love it when people like Nick put forth an obvious possibility and assert that people such as myself would “never for one second consider” it. Of course I consider the obvious, Nick, and so do others. But an obvious *possible* interpretation is not always the best explanation, and the more time you spend in academia (I spent 15 years) the more you recognize that it’s dominated by its own trends and biases. Honestly, I cannot recall a single time in those 15 years in academia when I encountered a thoughtful, constructive, evidence-based argument that same-sex marriage should be legitimated by the state. What I found, time and again, was a combination of sentimentalism and sloganeering, preening moral self-satisfaction and bristling enmity for anyone who disagreed. It’s the opponents of same-sex marriage who have to construct an argument, because the proponents can appeal to the prevailing moral fashions and slime the other side as bigoted and intolerant.
November 30th, 2011 | 10:47 am
The same silencing of thought occurs in the classroom. In constitutional law, one has to generate only a possible rational basis for limiting marriage to a man and woman in order to uphold the laws. When I ask a class of 100 kids to try to imagine any rational basis for such limits, I get no takers, even when I emphasize they don’t have to actually agree with the reason. No one will even attempt it, and the look of fear and anger on faces is remarkable.
If I articulate the most basic rational argument (you need a man and a woman for a completed reproductive system, and all human beings are products of such systems, and children are uniquely in need of stable parents) – only a smattering of less than 10% of the students are willing to say this is at least a possible rational argument. The rest claim that this argument is as irrational as saying only green haired people can marry.
I know they are lying. That’s the scary part. They think they have to lie to avoid being tainted by homophobia.
November 30th, 2011 | 10:51 am
As a European, I sometimes feel that the debate over same-sex marriage has become seen in the United States, primarily as a religious issue and this is why feeling has become so acrimonious.
In France, a far more secular country that the United States, it has been treated, for the most part, as a juridical question.
The Civil Code contained no definition of marriage, but Article 312 “The child conceived or born in marriage has the husband for father” has been treated as a functional definition by jurists, including the three most authoritative commentators on the Civil Code, Demolombe (1804–1887), Guillouard (1845-1925) and Gaudemet (1908-2001), long before the question of same-sex marriage was agitated.
In 1998, a colloquium of 154 Professors of Civil Law, including Philippe Malaurie, Alain Sériaux, and Catherine Labrusse-Riou – in other words, most of the country’s leading jurists – unanimously endorsed this interpretation of the Civil Code. This led to the introduction of civil unions (PACS) for same-sex and opposite-sex couples in the following year.
Le doyen Carbonnier (1908–2003) set out, in tabular form the law relating to unregulated cohabitation, PACS (both of which are open to same-sex and opposite sex couples) and marriage, (which is confined to opposite-sex couples. He could find no significant difference between a PACS and a marriage, other than the presumption of paternity. To summarise his conclusions: (1) Mandatory civil marriage, makes the institution a pillar of the secular [laïque] Republic, standing clear of the religious sacrament (2) The institution of republican marriage is inconceivable, absent the idea of filiation, enshrined, not in Church dogma, but in the Civil Code (3) The sex difference is central to filiation.
In 2005, the French Senate published a report, in which it said “Preserving the presumption “is est pater quem nuptiae demonstrant” adopted in all European legislation as Ms. Frédérique Granet-Lambrechts, professor at the Robert Schuman University of Strasbourg, told your reporter, Article 312 of Civil Code provides that a child conceived or born during the marriage has the husband for its father.
The presumption of paternity of the husband rests on the obligation of fidelity between spouses and reflects the commitment made by the husband during the celebration of marriage, to raise the couple’s children. The report presenting the order to the President of the Republic rightly points out that ” it is, in the words of Dean Carbonnier, the ‘heart of marriage,’ and cannot be questioned without losing for this institution its meaning and value.”
It comes as no surprise, therefore, that the country’s two highest courts, the Cour de Cassation and Le Conseil Constitutionnel both rejected a claim to Same-Sex Marriage on equality grounds
November 30th, 2011 | 11:00 am
It is not just peer pressure. Frankly it is a position that is not fun to hold. One can be as enthusiastic as one likes about pro-life because of the circumstances. Gay marriage is different. It is about saying “no” to people one has more sympathy for then animosity(I never felt animosity toward individual gays; gay rights I did resent simply because when they tribalize a vice they start becoming parties to vendettas like any other tribe).
The fact is part of what they say is true. Fornication of any kind has been given a disproportionate amount of odium in a society that allows vicious gossips, ambitious social manipulators and the like to go unpunished by public opinion(the CIA for instance never considered Pride, Avarice, Envy or Wrath to make people to easy to blackmail to my knowledge; a consideration whose reasoning is practically obvious but theologically absurd) . And while I do not know what it is to be homosexually attracted, frankly it is awful sometimes to be involuntarily celibate and still have to live with Thou Shalt Not Look At Billboards.
I don’t expect gays to be comforted by my sympathy; they certainly would think it patronizing. The point is that pressing this issue doesn’t just feel like one is unpopular with people whose opinion one really doesn’t care about. It makes one unpopular with oneself.
November 30th, 2011 | 12:21 pm
Timothy Dalrymple: I recently had a long, thoughtful email exchange on this topic with an old professor of mine. She refused to address any factual, philosophical, or theological issues at all — natural law, sociology, Christian traditions or doctrines (much less any other religious tradition, such as Islam), biology, or even the simple fact that no culture anywhere in the world at any time has considered homosexual relations to be the basis for marriage. It simply came down, she said, to the idea that two people who loved each other should be able to marry because love is the basis for marriage — although, of course, it isn’t (or is only one possible reason for marriage) in a large part of the world and for most of history. People who did not see this were simply wrong and unenlightened, and their point of view did not need to be considered in the least — for any reason, no exception. She is an Episcopalian, and she said she viewed the inevitable collapse of the Anglican Communion over this as sad but unavoidable. I asked, didn’t she even consider that this viewpoint was that of a minority of elite, white, Western members of her church, as well as a complete departure from the teachings of Anglicanism and all the previous teachings of Christianity, and that she was perhaps guilty of cultural imperialism against the MUCH larger numbers of non-white, Third World members? Nope. They were wrong, end of story. And this from the sort of person who thinks academic freedom must be defended at all costs, whatever weird thing people publish or advocate. All ideas are sacred! But I have noticed that the belief that all ideas are valid often paralyzes people in real life, because ideas frequently oppose each other. I think they believe that allowing people of the same sex to marry should make everyone happy, which is their goal in life. They don’t want to say no — unless you try to force them to. Then they will say no to YOU.
November 30th, 2011 | 1:21 pm
I think this is by far the most interesting passage in the Dalrymple article:
It raises the question in my mind whether there are matters of right and wrong that are so difficult to understand that “ordinary folk” have to take them on faith. For example, there is a philosophy professor who sometimes writes on another blog who is a committed Catholic and follows the Church’s teachings regarding contraception. However, he says no matter how much he studies Humanae Vitae, he doesn’t find it persuasive. Clearly, millions of Catholics do not find the Church’s teachings against contraception persuasive. (Probably most of them have not studied them in depth the way this philosophy professor has, of course.)
If it is true that it is so difficult to make a case against same-sex marriage that the majority of people won’t believe you even if you succeed logically, then it is difficult to blame academics who won’t take a (futile) stand and harm their careers. But maybe it’s the case that the case against same-sex marriage succeeds “logically” only if you already believe in it, in which case it is like the logical proofs for the existence of God—arguments that are compelling only if you already believe them.
November 30th, 2011 | 1:45 pm
Gail Finke –
Is ‘academic freedom’ the same thing as ‘the belief that all ideas are valid’?
November 30th, 2011 | 2:05 pm
David French at the Corner comments on the article and makes a good point about today’s perception of marriage:
“After more than a generation of no-fault divorce, the very concept of “traditional marriage” is seeping out of our cultural DNA, replaced, sadly, by the core conviction that marriage is no longer a covenant, but a contract — specifically a contract for the fulfillment and enjoyment of adults.”
http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/284483/do-we-have-pro-life-good-war-and-anti-ssm-bad-war-david-french#more
November 30th, 2011 | 2:25 pm
Sallyr,
“I know they are lying. That’s the scary part. They think they have to lie to avoid being tainted by homophobia”
I doubt many are lying. Some are reluctant to speak; some feel that you are probably right but are little confused in the moment and perhaps always. The fact is that experience typically trumps ideology. The more gay people you know and know well, the harder it is to think that they are different enough that they don’t have the same dreams and aspirations that you do.
Contemporary American culture values romantic love more than just about anything else. Students who have gay friends who share the same interests and passions are going to believe that those gay friends are normal because they *are* normal. Those students are going to stand by the friends they know and love even when some teacher asks them to keep in mind some abstract concept.
You’re losing the argument against homosexuality and gay marriage not because the thought police are creating fear but because your position makes less and less sense.
—
Gail,
“But I have noticed that the belief that all ideas are valid often paralyzes people in real life, because ideas frequently oppose each other. I think they believe that allowing people of the same sex to marry should make everyone happy, which is their goal in life.”
Like Sallyr, you’re coming at the question from the wrong end: the debate about gay marriage is not about “ideas”; it’s about experiences. Gay people have been forging lifelong relationships forever. They now live openly and exclusively enough that people are experiencing just how normal they are. Since so many gay couples are married in all but name, society might well call the relationship what it is, a marriage.
November 30th, 2011 | 3:00 pm
Ray — I believe it has come, in practice, to mean that, though that is not what it ought to mean.
November 30th, 2011 | 3:36 pm
Ray,
Definitionally, no. Practically, yes, at least in the humanities and social sciences. The answer may be practically no in hard sciences and engineering; having been a literature major, I can’t really comment.
November 30th, 2011 | 4:12 pm
Michael –
The question I ask is not whether they agree with the explanation I give. The question is whether the explanation is “rational”, whether one agrees with it or not.
At this point in the class, we have discussed what a rational argument is, (based on evidence, relevant to the question, logically consistent, e.g.) and that it is quite acceptable to reject a rational argument for many reasons (for policy reasons, moral reasons, or because you think you have a better explanation).
This is why I do not believe them when they overwhelmingly vote with a show of hands that the explanation is not rational.
I think they really mean they do not like the explanation, which is a completely different question. When I ask what makes the explanation irrational, I have not gotten a coherent answer. I believe, though cannot prove, that if the vote was a secret ballot, it would be quite different. I just don’t have the time to do the experiment.
November 30th, 2011 | 4:49 pm
I find the problem in discussing this has four different presuppositions of who a “homosexual” is before any theological conceptions of sin manifests.
1) The “homosexual” as a stigmatizing figure that must be shunned from the group.
2) The “homosexual” as a character (healthy or unhealthy) who fulfills the role of a third sex in a society.
3) The “homosexual” as a person who has an attraction for people of the same sex.
4) The “homosexual” is a cipher allowing for a destruction and desecration of all mores and customs.
When initiating any conversation, one of these four options are immediately presupposed and must be dealt with before any actual discourse can commence.
What frustrates this effort is that being contentious, all parties hold prejudices towards the other options and subsequently, the bearers of those options.
For example, alluding to the Christian morality on sexuality immediately signals to the non-believer that you hold presupposition 1. Whereas, most Christians hold and argue from presupposition 2- the same presupposition most over-30 supporters of “homosexuality” hold onto it; they argue over the health of the character but not the character itself.
What often happens is that options 2&3 are held but 1 (for Christians) and 4 (secularists) are prejudiced onto the other when both parties engage each other because 1 and 4 from the same inner-pagan fantasies of a world without the revelation of the Cross.
Those under-30 are more likely to hold onto number 3, which is the Christian position, but they have the illusion that they are supporting 4 by attempting to practice 4. This is where the real battleground lay.
What needs to be done is uproot the notion in all Christians that option 2 is something more than an imposed fiction. There is no “homosexual” like there isn’t a “heterosexual.” All conjugal acts are habits that require two individuals to commence. It does not follow that character informs inclination or that health can be determined by these artifices imposed upon the acts. There is no “healthy sex”. There is no “rigid sexuality.” There are conjugal acts that people engage and the Christian moral is that all these conjugal acts are to be thought of as debts between two and that the debt must be even: which is best manifested in the creation of one human life from the debt between two.
Which is why we insist and expect the Christian man to be as chaste as the Christian woman.
But neither can or should the Christian expect the law to enforce its moral completely in a true secular (as in “of the times”) setting because it does not hold to the old pagan hierarchy of relations that would allow the more powerful to take from the less powerful, especially in sexual acts. How many customary laws allowed for rape, concubinage and other practices that have not a moral in the Christian ethic? It should be no surprise that the old “chivalry” literature is rife with tales of adultery, rapine and same-sex acts as a display of dominance. This is what, or should be what, the Christian rejects utterly. Yet, since we have not the obligation to celebrate this sort of incontinent and cupid life; neither does anyone have an obligation to adhere to ours. What sins we commit and what reparations we make are placed before the Lord of Song and not Caesar for this reason: it is God’s business to be the final arbiter, not ours.
Our mission is to uphold the general Truth, and the general Truth is that a pairing of two people of the same sex do not produce offspring- it is a “bad omen” for the lack of transcending life- in the act itself, so it is outside of our jurisdiction of congress and is to be avoided. But how these acts are ultimately judged and of what fruit they bear is to God’s providence and we are to respect that and them as self-evident to their humanity.
November 30th, 2011 | 5:39 pm
Sallyr,
“I think they really mean they do not like the explanation, which is a completely different question. When I ask what makes the explanation irrational, I have not gotten a coherent answer.”
I think you’re right that the students are not sticking with your definitions and are relying instead on the common sense notion that “rational” means an explanation that you like. I think you’d find that if you offered a rational defense of slavery, child labor, or the torture of puppies, students would also fail your test in roughly the same numbers. Students, like most people, have trouble staying with the kinds of abstractions you’re trying to teach no matter what the subject is.
The trouble with attacks on homosexuality or gay marriage is that the logic behind the attacks is divorced from a growing number of people’s experiences with real gay people. This is why gay rights will succeed and someday seem completely obvious while abortion will never seem right despite the most fervent wishes of some liberals. There’s just no way of avoiding the fact that abortion kills a living thing.
November 30th, 2011 | 5:39 pm
Chesterton said, “The madman is not the man who has lost his reason. The madman is the man who has lost everything except his reason.” Moral judgments are not made by individuals entirely on the basis of reason, isolating and ignoring all other mental faculties.
November 30th, 2011 | 7:16 pm
Note the definition of bigotry has changed in recent years: it’s no longer holding to any position inflexibly, intolerantly, and irrationally, it’s now holding to the “wrong” position, no matter how tolerantly and intelligently it may be expressed; conversely, the person with the “right” social and political opinions cannot be a bigot, even if he is screaming in hate at his adversaries.
I don’t think the conclusion we should draw from this article is that Evangelical academics are extraordinary in their lack of backbone; the conclusion which should be drawn is that the contemporary academic environment produces spinelessness because it is under a cloud of social and political oppression. Nazi Germany wasn’t much worse. If jobs are denied people when they express certain opinions, pretty soon the only ones left are those who don’t express them. Those who have families are in a particularly difficult position; the world holds hostages against them. Taking an unpopular stance in the current academic environment is tantamount to saying to the University Gestapo “Come and get me”.
November 30th, 2011 | 7:35 pm
I do love Nick and Michael’s assumption that academics *must* be right about everything, and so every view that they reject must lack good arguments on its behalf. Academics have been left-wing for a long time: they were, for example, among the most likely to be enamored of the Soviet Union, both in the 1930s and in the 1980s. The only place you will find Marxists today is in the academy. So I don’t have the same faith in the rationality of academics as you do.
The last time I checked, most of the press is pretty hostile to the anti-abortion position, too. The way the press or academics see something is not always the way it is; we all know that marriage ballot measures have generally fared better than abortion ballot measures (although it is hard to tell because there have been far fewer of the latter and they have involved many different issues surrounding abortion, whereas the marriage amendments have usually involved marriage alone).
November 30th, 2011 | 9:38 pm
“Gay people have been forging lifelong relationships forever. They now live openly and exclusively enough that people are experiencing just how normal they are. Since so many gay couples are married in all but name, society might well call the relationship what it is, a marriage.”
Doesn’t that beg the question? This view assumes that homosexual “lifelong relationships” are the same as heterosexual marriage. But that’s exactly what opponents of same sex marriage object to. They find the difference between traditional marriage and homosexual “lifelong relationships” significant enough to warrant distinguishing the two.
And it’s not just an abstract distinction: It’s about experiences, as you note. Empirical, existential differences between the male and female experiences of being in the world underlay significant gender differences of the experience of romantic relationships. This means that heterosexual couples experiences will differ from those of homosexual couples. For example, homosexual couples will never have to consider birth control or abortion, or face unwanted pregnancy as the result of same sex infidelity. These are biological and emotional facts of life.
So supporters of same sex marriage can’t rely on experience to falsify their opponents’ claims. It’s quite possible that living among openly gay couples and individuals might lead some heterosexual gay marriage supporters to the conclusion that gay relationships are indeed significantly different from their own, regardless of whether they continue to regard gay relationships as normal.
You’ve also noted, correctly, that our culture’s emphasis on romantic love as the necessary and sufficient condition for marriage creates a kind of logic that makes the identification of straight and gay romantic relationships inevitable. But it’s only inevitable to those who accept the view that marriage can be summed up as a more or less permanent romance; and not many people, gay or straight, see things that way once they’re past adolescence. Same sex marriage is still in its early days. I’d be cautious about making predictions, especially about the future.
November 30th, 2011 | 9:39 pm
PS My comment is directed to Michael.
December 1st, 2011 | 3:49 am
Surely, what is evident is a confusion between disapproval of homosexual unions and rejection of same-sex marriage.
Thus, to refer again to the French experience, the 154 law professors who unanimously opposed SSM were also overwhelmingly in favour of civil unions for both same-sex and opposite-sex couples.
The question they addressed was “What is the state’s interest in marriage? Why does marriage exist, as a legal institution? What is the unique legal rôle of marriage?”
The answer, in the words of Carbonnier, was “The heart of marriage is not the couple, but the presumption of paternity” [« le cœur du mariage, ce n'est pas le couple, c'est la présomption de paternité » ] This was the answer also adopted by the Senate in 2005.
Such a view, implying no judgement on the value or otherwise of homosexual relationships, as such, still commands wide support in French academic, especially legal, circles, especially as PACS (Civil Unions) are becoming increasingly popular with opposite-sex couples, accounting for over 90% at the last count
It is significant that, in a country so committed to the principle of laïcité as France, no one has suggested that Carbonnier’s views, or those of the courts, are either the result of religious convictions or an attempt to import them into their interpretation of the Civil Code.
December 1st, 2011 | 11:00 am
I do love Nick and Michael’s assumption that academics *must* be right about everything, and so every view that they reject must lack good arguments on its behalf.
Is that their assumption or is their assumption simply that they are right here. Look Timothy Dalrymple writes:
But an obvious *possible* interpretation is not always the best explanation, and the more time you spend in academia (I spent 15 years) the more you recognize that it’s dominated by its own trends and biases
But this doesn’t address the question. It’s totally possible that academia may be totally dominated by all types of trends, fads, and biases AND also be right about gays! In other words, just because the judge is biased doesn’t mean the accused is innocent. The failure of the anti-SSM and anti-gay-rights crowd may very well be because they don’t have much in the way of valid arguments.
That’s certainly been the case on this blog. Numerous attempts have been made to engage anti-SSM advocates only to see arguments exposed as shoddy, false, or not even coherent just get brought up again and again. (If this is not the case, then why do you guys allow Blake to always end up as your champion here. Do you all really think he is the best spokesman for your ‘arguments’??? Really?) At a certain point, one has to wonder if the anti-gay-rights crowd simply has no good arguments to offer.
Notice Timothy write that he doesn’t have trouble finding academics to write articles critical of abortion. Maybe the reason academics don’t ‘fear’ writing about abortion as much as writing about being anti-gay rights is the same reason you’ll have a hard time finding biologists who don’t want to write articles questioning whether AIDS is caused by the HIV virus. Because the arguments have been made and they all have been found to be bad or wanting.
sallyr
In constitutional law, one has to generate only a possible rational basis for limiting marriage to a man and woman in order to uphold the laws.
One ‘only’ has to generate a possible rational basis? How do you figure that since while gender based discrimination isn’t subject to the strict scrutiny race is, it is subject to scrutiny greater than most other things.
Perhaps the reason you get no takers is because you’ve manufactured an artificial universe where you assume quite a few other arguments have been settled in a way most others would not settle them.
If I articulate the most basic rational argument (you need a man and a woman for a completed reproductive system, and all human beings are products of such systems, and children are uniquely in need of stable parents) – only a smattering of less than 10% of the students are willing to say this is at least a possible rational argument. The rest claim that this argument is as irrational as saying only green haired people can marry.
It may be a possible rational argument but it doesn’t seem to be very convincing. SSM wouldn’t prevent or disallow opposite sex couples from getting married. It’s not like we have some quota that limits the number of marriages we can have each year so allowing SSM would mean some wanting different sex couples would have to be told to wait in line. If you think these are drop dead, stunning arguments you’re making against SSM I think you’re grossly overestimating yourself.
Pentamom
Ray — I believe it has come, in practice, to mean that, though that is not what it ought to mean.
I don’t think academic freedom has ever meant ‘all ideas are equally valid’. The fact is even the hardest of the sciences suffer from fads, mental ‘lock in’ , ‘group think’, ‘biases’ and any other word you want to toss out there. It has always been and always will be the case that some ideas will be quite lonely in acedmia and others will be quite popular. Since that’s how the system works, “My ideas aren’t popular” is NOT evidence of discrimination or unfair treatment.
Maxim
Nazi Germany wasn’t much worse
Yes it was.
I’d like to form a Sylvia Path award for Conservatives who shame themselves with stupid Nazi analogies and comparisions. Path was the poet who compared her troubled relationship with her father to the Holocaust.
Charming Billy
Doesn’t that beg the question? This view assumes that homosexual “lifelong relationships” are the same as heterosexual marriage. But that’s exactly what opponents of same sex marriage object to. They find the difference between traditional marriage and homosexual “lifelong relationships” significant enough to warrant distinguishing the two.
Are all heterosexual marriages ‘the same’? Legally Kim Kardashian’s marriage is the same as Joe’s or yours or anyone else’s. Is it really the same in all other respects? If its not must the law make a distinction?
December 1st, 2011 | 11:17 am
Michael PS
The answer, in the words of Carbonnier, was “The heart of marriage is not the couple, but the presumption of paternity” [« le cœur du mariage, ce n'est pas le couple, c'est la présomption de paternité » ] This was the answer also adopted by the Senate in 2005.
You’ve cited this quite often and I think you demonstrated very well how France takes a more judicial view of marriage than the US does….but this still just doesn’t strike me as very convincing.
At best it seems *an* interest in marriage. The state also has an interest in the couple itself. The economic union of the couple, for example, promotes economic security and reduces risk…note traditional marriage vows “In sickness and in health, for richer or poorer…” note children aren’t even mentioned but the benefits of risk sharing are. If the ‘heart’ of the state’s interest was just in presuming paternity, well we have DNA testing today for those cases where paternity is in dispute and then the state would have little interest in lifelong marriage. It would only need marriage, at most, until the youngest kid becomes an adult. I dare assert your beloved Carbonnier was full of hot air on this one!
December 1st, 2011 | 11:45 am
“In constitutional law, one has to generate only a possible rational basis for limiting marriage to a man and woman in order to uphold the laws.
One ‘only’ has to generate a possible rational basis? How do you figure that since while gender based discrimination isn’t subject to the strict scrutiny race is, it is subject to scrutiny greater than most other things.
Perhaps the reason you get no takers is because you’ve manufactured an artificial universe where you assume quite a few other arguments have been settled in a way most others would not settle them.”
I respond – I “figure that” because the courts have held that the category of homosexuality is not subject to higher standards of review that are applied to race and gender. Laws that treat people differently based on homosexuality are therefore upheld so long as there is some possible rational basis.
I submitted a comment yesterday that never got posted in which I explained that in class we discuss what is necessary for an argument to be “rational” in legal terms. i.e. – it has to be based on relevant and material evidence and it has to be logically consistent.
We also discuss the fact that just because an explanation is “rational” one does not have to agree with it. We all reject “rational” policies for many different reasons – because we object to them on moral grounds, or because we have a better explanation, or one that produces better outcomes.
But there is a difference between something that is rational even if I reject it, and something that is just simply irrational.
So when I ask the students if my offered explanation is rational, and the great majority of the students raise their hands to say it is not rational, that is surprising. I have never had a student explain in a coherent fashion how it is irrational. That is why I don’t believe the poll based on the raising of hands. I suspect the result would be different if there was a secret ballot, but have not had time to perform the experiment.
December 1st, 2011 | 12:04 pm
Charming Billy,
“They find the difference between traditional marriage and homosexual “lifelong relationships” significant enough to warrant distinguishing the two… For example, homosexual couples will never have to consider birth control or abortion, or face unwanted pregnancy as the result of same sex infidelity. These are biological and emotional facts of life”
Those facts of life certainly make the two kinds of relationship different, but they are minor differences; they don’t lie at the center of long-term, marital relationships. I’ve had many a long conversation with gay couples that have been together for decades, and the relationship issues we discuss are similar to the issues I discuss with straight friends. You’re right, however, that fear of pregnancy does not arise in conversation, and so we spend more time discussing the emotional and psychological damage produced by infidelity. To me and to most people, the emotional and psychological damage caused by infidelity is a lot more central to the health of a relationship.
“It’s quite possible that living among openly gay couples and individuals might lead some heterosexual gay marriage supporters to the conclusion that gay relationships are indeed significantly different from their own, regardless of whether they continue to regard gay relationships as normal”
It’s possible, and indeed I’ve read people whose experience has in fact led them to think so. That’s not been the experience in my church, however. We’re a Methodist reconciling congregation that accepts gay singles and couples as full members of the church, and we’ve found our devotion to the gospel enriched by their presence.
“But it’s only inevitable to those who accept the view that marriage can be summed up as a more or less permanent romance; and not many people, gay or straight, see things that way once they’re past adolescence.”
As you say, most of us know the difference between “permanent romance” or mere passion and a long-term relationship built on romantic love that is focused on devotion, caring, and support. Social historians use the term “companionate marriage,” which is a term I’ve never liked, but the distinction is useful nonetheless. People don’t go into marriage anymore merely for economic reasons. It is precisely this shift in the meaning and use of marriage that has made the prohibition against gay marriage so untenable.
“Same sex marriage is still in its early days. I’d be cautious about making predictions, especially about the future”
It is and it isn’t. As I say, gay couples have been getting together in one form or another for a long time. Conditions became right over the last century for gay marriage to emerge because of the rise of companionate marriage, the anonymity of cities, the wealth of Western nations, and the communication made possible by mass culture. To get rid of gay marriage, you’re going to have to get rid of all of those conditions. That kind of change is inevitable, but I’m not looking forward to it!
December 1st, 2011 | 1:09 pm
sallyr
I respond – I “figure that” because the courts have held that the category of homosexuality is not subject to higher standards of review that are applied to race and gender. Laws that treat people differently based on homosexuality are therefore upheld so long as there is some possible rational basis.
Certainly as a teacher of Constitutional law you know this has nothing to do with the legal arguments for SSM. This might only be applicable if we were talking about a law that said “homosexuals may not marry”. But the legal arguments over SSM concern gender discrimination. A man wants to marry a person, the law says no because that person is a man. The law isn’t asking whether they are straight or gay (we’d assume two straight men wouldn’t care to get married to each other but that’s just an assumption). Even if you disagree with this argument I really can’t see how you couldn’t be aware of it. Please don’t tell me this is news to you!
Other than that I agree with you an argument may be rational but one may still disagree with it. I’m not sure I agree with:
So when I ask the students if my offered explanation is rational, and the great majority of the students raise their hands to say it is not rational, that is surprising.
Probably because they are not seeing the connection. Since SSM does nothing to inhibit straight couples from getting married and having kids, they are having difficulty seeing how whether or not your argument really is a rational state interest in prohibiting SSM. In fact, to me it seems like the opposite. Wouldn’t the state’s interest in healthy child rearing be in seeing gay couples NOT getting married to members of the opposite sex thereby producing troubled and frayed marriages complicated by children?
That is why I don’t believe the poll based on the raising of hands. I suspect the result would be different if there was a secret ballot, but have not had time to perform the experiment
I notice an interesting pattern here, people here complain bigotry against homosexuals is being overblown yet they love to push the ‘there’s bigotry against me’ button with the faintest of evidence.
Notice how you assumed a vast academic conspiracy to suppress anti-SSM opinions is keeping your students from agreeing with you in public (although it oddly isn’t keeping you from being hired to teach them!). Yet what is your evidence? You ask a question and discover no one agrees with you when you think they should?
Instead of a secret ballot, why not come up with a few rational arguments for policies that discriminate based on race, religion, national origin etc.? I suspect your students suspect a policy that they feel is very ‘wrong’ will likely not have rational arguments in its favor. While they may accept intellectually that a wrong policy may nonetheless have rational arguments in its favor, actually being able to see this in practice is a much more difficult skill to cultivate. The human mind is such that when in doubt it would rather fall back on things it wants or ‘feels’ are right. Thinking in a rigerous manner takes practice, skill and effort.
December 1st, 2011 | 1:15 pm
sallyr
I respond – I “figure that” because the courts have held that the category of homosexuality is not subject to higher standards of review that are applied to race and gender.
I hope you also see that this would open the door to a lot of potential laws being passed that many would find very dubious constitutionally.
For example, imagine a law that asked any different sex couple seeking to get married if either of them had ever had a homosexual experience…even a fantasy and then denied a license to any who answer yes. I could probably come up with a ‘rational basis’ for such a law. The state would want to avoid ‘Jim McGrevy’ situations where a gay person marries a straight person only to have the marriage blow apart….often after kids have been produced and are harmed. Of course this would probably be overkill but still its a ‘rational reason’ for such a law and as you say since homosexuality is not subject to higher standards of review a court couldn’t strike it down simply because its poorly thought out, seemingly unfair, or just a bad policy.
December 1st, 2011 | 1:16 pm
“Those facts of life certainly make the two kinds of relationship different, but they are minor differences; they don’t lie at the center of long-term, marital relationships.”
Oh, but they do. Just because people don’t realize how essential they are, doesn’t mean that they’re not woven into the very foundations of every marriage (not to mention every relationship) capable of producing children.
December 1st, 2011 | 1:51 pm
Pentamom,
I’ve known gay couples that have been together twenty and thirty years, some with kids, some not. I just don’t see significant differences between the relationship I have with my wife and the relationship they have with their partners.
What essential differences do you see in the long-term relationships of the gay couples you are close to?
December 1st, 2011 | 2:13 pm
Before we redo the whole SSM argument, which has been done on a thousand threads…can we try to address the issue raised on this one?
Does it really seem plausible that a vast conspiracy of bigotry exists in academia against anti-SSM advocates that doesn’t exist against pro-lifers? That’s Dalrymple’s thesis after all. That he has trouble finding academic writers critical of SSM and gay rights because of bias which doesn’t exist against anti-abortion academics.
Might not the counter thesis be better? That the reason he has trouble finding such writers is because the anti-SSM side is simply plagued by crappy arguments? Academics whose trade is supposed to be professionals at making good arguments don’t want to tarnish themselves for the same reason neurosurgeons wouldn’t want to appear on the same stage as ‘psychic surgeons’.
To accept this counter-thesis, one needn’t necessarily accept that there are no arguments against SSM. But one would have to be honest about the quality of arguments thus presented. The impression I get is many people who oppose SSM simply oppose it and are happy to enlist just about any argument against it regardless of its quality. A strategy of, say, throw everything including the kitchen sink at it…something’s gotta stick! That’s a fine strategy for a political party or a blog or simple web site but it’s not the type of thing people who want to be taken as serious academics would care to be associated with.
December 1st, 2011 | 2:25 pm
pentamom/michael
I’ve known gay couples that have been together twenty and thirty years, some with kids, some not. I just don’t see significant differences between the relationship I have with my wife and the relationship they have with their partners.
Let’s say for the sake of argument that there are significant differences. Maybe you can’t see them, maybe they all but invisible to both you and them. What does that have to do with legalized SSM?
I can see why that would be a serious theological concern and why a church would take a deeper view. But then churches have always taken a deeper view of marriage often asking their members for more than what the state simply requires. Why does the above assertion require leaping to the level of the civil law rather than simply remaining a reality for church?
December 1st, 2011 | 3:29 pm
Michael
You’re right that there’s a lot of overlap between heterosexual and homosexual relationships at every level, from one night stands to life long monogamy. Lifelong gay marriages resemble lifelong straight marriages, for instance,
However the outcomes can differ markedly based on physiology, as I noted. It remains to be seen just how much physiology will influence the long term development of gay marriage as a socially and legal accepted practice. Its behavior in captivity may be very different than in the wild, so to speak.
I suspect that as gay marriage becomes more respectable, it proponents will have to accept some of their critics’ views. Specifically, it seems reasonable for moderate same sex marriage supporters to admit that there is indeed a difference in kind between, for instance, a childless by choice same sex couple with an open relationship and a traditional married monogamous heterosexual couple with a house full of kids.
As I said, there’s overlap between same sex couples at every level. So a heterosexual couple with no kids and an open marriage resembles the former gay couple just as a monogamous couple resembles the latter. The former, gay or straight, is strictly companionate while the other is something more, or at any rate, different. I would argue furthermore that the latter, gay or straight, is more socially valuable would merit greater recognition and protection.
If this is true it seems that same sex marriage supporters are going to have chose between a model of marriage that accepts most claims to the status of marriage or one that limits the status of marriage to those relationships that merit special recognition based on their greater social value. Gay marriage supporters will have to focus more on the ideal of marriage as a stable child rearing unit producing social boons for all, and less on gay marriage as a way to extend benefits to homosexuals as a special class. (Or as a stick to beat traditional Christians with, for that matter.)
The problem is, as I see it, is that gay marriage supporters tend to focus on gay marriage as a way to secure rights and privileges for a protected class, rather than as a way to contribute to society. That approach obligates gay marriage supporters to claim the status of marriage for same sex relationships that are relatively frivolous in order to safeguard gay rights. When same sex marriage supporters point out that equally frivolous heterosexual relationships enjoy the status of marriage, it doesn’t really help their case as much they seem to think it does.
December 1st, 2011 | 3:43 pm
Boonton,
“Before we redo the whole SSM argument, which has been done on a thousand threads…can we try to address the issue raised on this one?”
Well, I’ve given my answer to Dalrymple above. Let me rephrase it. Every conflict is between two goods. In gay marriage, some people want marriage to be open only to heterosexuals while others want it to be open to homosexuals. The reasons for believing marriage should be restricted to heterosexuals are melting away.
In abortion, the conflict is between a woman’s control over her own body and the child’s chance to live. That is a conflict that everyone feels and will never go away.
“Why does the above assertion require leaping to the level of the civil law rather than simply remaining a reality for church?”
In this context, I’m not especially interested in civil law. I think it’s important for Christians to support gay marriage for Christian reasons.
December 1st, 2011 | 5:16 pm
Certainly as a teacher of Constitutional law you know this has nothing to do with the legal arguments for SSM. This might only be applicable if we were talking about a law that said “homosexuals may not marry”. But the legal arguments over SSM concern gender discrimination
I answer: Your argument is not with me. The courts without exception do not apply heightened scrutiny to laws limiting marriage to a man and a woman. If you disagree with that, take it up with them.
I claim no “conspiracy” about anything. I simply note that students are presented with a rational argument and for some reason claim that they cannot see the rationality of it. Again, draw your own conclusions.
December 1st, 2011 | 5:28 pm
Michael PS,
I don’t think gay rights supporters are likely to come around to French way of thinking. Gay rights activists in the US have invested heavily in gay marriage as their chief legal weapon for securing gay rights. As long as it works for them, they’re not likely to set it aside, even if an alternative approach a la the French would be better for everyone.
Michael,
“The reasons for believing marriage should be restricted to heterosexuals are melting away.”
Yes, but the reason you’ve given (Conditions became right over the last century for gay marriage to emerge …) are purely sociological. And, as you’ve admitted, reversible. Do you think there are reasons to support same sex marriage that aren’t relative sociological conditions?
December 1st, 2011 | 5:40 pm
I mean to say ” relative TO sociological conditions”. My eyesight’s poor and this grey screen’s hard to see.
December 1st, 2011 | 6:14 pm
Charming Billy,
“It remains to be seen just how much physiology will influence the long term development of gay marriage as a socially and legal accepted practice.”
I have no idea what you’re driving at here. How does anyone’s marriage change their physiology?
“Gay marriage supporters will have to focus more on the ideal of marriage as a stable child rearing unit producing social boons for all, and less on gay marriage as a way to extend benefits to homosexuals as a special class.”
Some couples have children. Others don’t. Christians insist that whether the couple has children or not doesn’t matter; what matters is life-long fidelity and support. Christians should apply those rules to any couple, gay or straight.
December 1st, 2011 | 6:16 pm
Sallyr,
“I simply note that students are presented with a rational argument and for some reason claim that they cannot see the rationality of it.”
Try presenting a rational argument for slavery, child labor, or the torture of puppies, and students will also tell you that they cannot see the rationality in your argument. The problem with students is their weak grasp of logic, not their fear of criticism.
December 1st, 2011 | 7:32 pm
I think the problem is that it is not up to Christians to “stand against” homosexuality, for just the same reason it is not up to Orthodox Jews to “stand against” people eating non-kosher food.
It’s a bad war because their sin is none of our business.
As long as we have freedom of religion in America, we have to tolerate the fact that some people believe religions that glorify some pretty awful things. Humanists, Unitarians, and various pagan groups all make an idol out of sexuality – and they have a right, legally to do that.
We should focus our efforts not on restricting their right to be bestial, but on restricting their efforts to make others be bestial with them.
December 1st, 2011 | 8:38 pm
Michael,
“I have no idea what you’re driving at here. How does anyone’s marriage change their physiology?”
Women get pregnant. Men don’t. Marriage can’t change that physiological fact, but that fact can marriages and it will change same sex marriages heterosexual marriages in different ways.
“Some couples have children. Others don’t. Christians insist that whether the couple has children or not doesn’t matter; what matters is life-long fidelity and support. Christians should apply those rules to any couple, gay or straight.”
Life long fidelity and support are necessary but not sufficient conditions in a variety of relationships, be they marital, parental, sibling, or amicable. What makes marital relationships distinct is the expectation of child rearing.
However it’s probably unhelpful to construe this expectation as a quasi legal requirement that all married couples live up to a set of rules. It’s more a matter of expecting to happen what does in fact in fact happen. Namely, that couples, overwhelmingly heterosexual but with a small minority homosexual, do in fact from long term monogamous unions and have children.
This behavior is distinct from other social behaviors. We distinguish it with the name marriage. The name and the behavior itself shouldn’t be confused with other behaviors that contain similar elements but result in different outcomes. Marriage is too important to be redefined.
December 1st, 2011 | 8:47 pm
PS ” Christians insist that whether the couple has children or not doesn’t matter; what matters is life-long fidelity and support. Christians should apply those rules to any couple, gay or straight.
It seems to have been pretty important to Christ that marriage was seen as both a faithful life long union and a union between a man and a woman. When asked if there were other acceptable alternative arrangements he didn’t include either divorce or homosexual unions among his options.
December 1st, 2011 | 9:15 pm
Charming Billy,
“Yes, but the reason you’ve given (Conditions became right over the last century for gay marriage to emerge …) are purely sociological. And, as you’ve admitted, reversible. Do you think there are reasons to support same sex marriage that aren’t relative sociological conditions?”
I didn’t say that the reasons to support gay marriage are sociological. I said that the reasons that it’s *become easier* to support gay marriage are sociological. In every era, you can find gay couples forming long-term relationships. The desire has always been there. And in every era, you can find some people tolerating the existence of those long-term relationships. The broader society, however, could easily reject those relationships because they didn’t personally know any gay people. All of that changed with companionate marriage, urbanization, middle-class wealth, and mass culture.
It has always been right to support people who form faithful, supportive, long-term relationships, and it’s always been wrong to condemn people in them. The only thing that has changed is the majority’s ability to see the rightness of supporting those kinds of relationships.
December 1st, 2011 | 9:47 pm
Charming Billy,
“Women get pregnant. Men don’t.”
Ok. But I still don’t see how that could possibly make a significant difference. Can you provide an example? How have the physiological changes you and your wife have experienced made your relationship different from that of a gay couple that you know?
“Life long fidelity and support are necessary but not sufficient conditions in a variety of relationships, be they marital, parental, sibling, or amicable.”
By fidelity, I mean sexual fidelity. One can’t be sexually faithful to a parent, sibling, or friend, only to a spouse.
“When asked if there were other acceptable alternative arrangements he didn’t include either divorce or homosexual unions among his options”
He was never asked whether there were other acceptable arrangements. He was asked whether a man could divorce his wife, and he said no.
You’ll notice that he didn’t address the question of whether women could divorce their husbands. Today, however, most divorces are initiated by the wife. Why? What changed?
You’ll also notice that Jesus reiterates what Genesis treats as something that *really* needs explanation—the idea that a man could leave his family and give his primary loyalty to someone outside his birth family, a wife. Genesis provides the just-so story of the rib because that change in primary loyalty is so threatening to the old social order.
For Jesus and Genesis, the real mystery at the heart of marriage is the change in primary bonds, and that change is something every genuine couple, gay or straight, understands.
December 1st, 2011 | 10:08 pm
Some couples have children. Others don’t.
No gay couple has children together.
Pretending that a “gay couple” can “have children together” is not a harmless lie. Every motherless child, every fatherless child, deserves to have their loss not only recognized, but deserves to have the importance of that loss acknowledged. No child should be forced to hide or repress grief so that a parent can play out a fantasy, however pleasant that fantasy.
The relationship between a child and a same-sex parent, and the equally important yet distinctly different relationship between a child and that child’s opposite-sex parent – these relationships are important. They matter. And they’re not interchangeable.
These relationships should not be denied, minimized, justified away. Yes, it is true that, thanks to the sexual revolution, it is now common for kids to be estranged from one or both of their real parents, and it is also common for kids to grow up absent one of these relationships. But common doesn’t equal right, and just because children endure hurtful things “all the time” doesn’t make it right to deliberately deprive a child of one of the most important, most precious, most valuable relationships a human being can have.
December 1st, 2011 | 10:30 pm
Boonton, Despite the rather condescending tone you take at times, for me, your arguments tend to be of the “rational but with which I fervently disagree” variety sallyr talks about. But your ridiculous strawman that “gay marriage won’t keep any straight people from marrying” is not only grating, it’s incredibly silly. No one on this thread or anywhere else has made such a stupid argument. The argument is that gay “marriage” will weaken an already damaged institution by redefining it in a way that makes it even more subject to individual whim and less sacred (for lack of a better word) than it’s already become in our therapeutic, egoistic culture. Now you can agree or disagree with that argument, but it is asserting nothing like the proposition that gays marrying will prevent heterosexuals from marrying.
December 2nd, 2011 | 1:27 am
Nick, Sallyr, Michael PS, Tim, Michael, Pentamom, Fred, Michael PB, Maxim, Mike P, Charming Billy, Boonton, Blake–Dudes, did you even read Joe’s post? It wasn’t about gay marriage. It was about Joe’s perception that evangelical professors are cowards, unwilling to put their names to positions that might jeopardize their jobs. Did you read that, I mean the “putting their names to” part? That ring any bells with y’all? Don’t you find it at least a little curious that you’re commenting anomalously on a blog that talks about the cowardice of refusing to be publically identified with a position? If you see a shoe that fits here, put it on folks.
Joe, when I came up for promotion (I was already tenured) to full professor the departmental committee recommended promotion but the college committee recommended to the dean and provost that the promotion be denied. They didn’t put this in writing of course, but they had objections that I wrote for “First Things.” My sympathetic (to me) dean ignored the university committee’s recommendation (I had also made noises about talking with lawyers to my departmental chair) so I was promoted but should that have happened today I doubt the outcome would be the same (at least without making more than just noises about talking with attorneys).
I would expect that any academic sociologist or political scientist who wrote an article critical of same-sex marriage would be denied tenure just as anyone in those fields who wrote an article laudatory of Jim Crow laws would be also denied. Both are positions that academic society holds repellant. You won’t be let in the tree-house if you don’t honor the taboos.
Don’t be too hard on the young teachers, Joe. As a military man, how many people do you know in the military who refused orders they knew to be illegal or immoral? Some yes, maybe. But not a lot, right?
December 2nd, 2011 | 4:07 am
Charming Billy
“I don’t think gay rights supporters are likely to come around to French way of thinking. Gay rights activists in the US have invested heavily in gay marriage as their chief legal weapon for securing gay rights. “
That is true enough; the other side of the picture is that opposition to SSM has come very largely from those who oppose “gay rights.” Notice how many of those opposed to SSM are also opposed to civil unions, for either same-sex or opposite-sex couples.
That is why an essentially juridical question has become so divisive.
December 2nd, 2011 | 8:48 am
Charming Billy
Life long fidelity and support are necessary but not sufficient conditions in a variety of relationships, be they marital, parental, sibling, or amicable. What makes marital relationships distinct is the expectation of child rearing.
Yet marriages which distinctly lack this expectation are not seen as distinctly lacking. When the 70 yr old widow or the infertile couple get married no one views this as ‘less of a marriage’.
Contrast this with a person who starts a ‘hobby business’ which never makes a profit. Every year he plows some of his savings to cover this businesses losses. This is viewed by many as a defective business….the IRS will cease to even view it as a business and say its a mere ‘hobby’ and stop letting him deduct his losses.
However it’s probably unhelpful to construe this expectation as a quasi legal requirement that all married couples live up to a set of rules. It’s more a matter of expecting to happen what does in fact in fact happen.
Indeed, how exactly do you have a law that says married couples have to ‘expect’ to have children? Will the perpetually pessissmistic woman who just believes ‘something will always go wrong’ and she won’t ever have a child be banned from the alter? Hmmmm. Anyway if this is really true why do traditional marriage vows lack any mention of children?
Fred
Boonton, Despite the rather condescending tone you take at times, for me, your arguments tend to be of the “rational but with which I fervently disagree” variety sallyr talks about.
Fair enough, its perfectly acceptable to say in a discussion something like “I don’t think that’s right, but I’m not sure why so I’ll think about it more for now”. That rarely happens…..although it would probably be better if it did more often.
The argument is that gay “marriage” will weaken an already damaged institution by redefining it in a way that makes it even more subject to individual whim and less sacred (for lack of a better word) than it’s already become in our therapeutic, egoistic culture.
I’m not sure this is a rational argument in terms of what sallyr was talking about. It’s basically isn’t saying anything about the law itself but about people’s feelings. Or more than that speculation about possible motives for the law or speculation about what people will think about a law. You’re essentially saying that a law permitting SSM is motivated by ‘individual whim’ therefore it will cause individuals to take marriage whimisically. That says nothing about a SSM law itself but your speculation about possible motives behind it.
Mike
Nick, Sallyr, Michael PS, Tim, Michael, Pentamom, Fred, Michael PB, Maxim, Mike P, Charming Billy, Boonton, Blake–Dudes, did you even read Joe’s post? It wasn’t about gay marriage. It was about Joe’s perception that evangelical professors are cowards, unwilling to put their names to positions that might jeopardize their jobs
I did, which is why I put forth the counter-hypothesis. Evangelical professors don’t want to sign onto anti-SSM articles for the same reason NBA members don’t want to play on the Harlem Globetrotters or professional boxers won’t take a gig doing professional wrestling. The arguments against SSM are pretty crappy and academics don’t want to associate themselves with it least they end up looking less like academics and more like Fox News pundits of the week.
You are focusing on the assertion that Tim D. has trouble getting evangelical academics to write aganst SSM and gay rights but ignore the fact that he has no difficulty getting them to write against abortion.
I’d like to contrast the double standard here in your claim to discrimination. Your story is basically not that you were denied tenure or a promotion….in fact you got it! Yet you’re claiming victimization because….well some people didn’t want to give you the promotion and you speculate it its because of you write for “First Things” and you think if it happened today, you would be denied the promotion. Maxim here took it a step beyond claiming that life for First Thingers in academia is pretty close to Nazi Germany.
On the flip side, when the topic of gay rights appears blanket assertions against gays fly fast and furious. Blake, for example, can almost always be depended upon to make some assertion like “All gays want to force people to consider their relationships normal”. Yet if I even mention the word ‘homophobia’ I know the first reaction will be intense scoffing and dismissals of simply being politically incorrect. In fact right here on this thread the only discussion of anti-gay bigotry by those opposed to gay rights has been to dismiss it all as an unfair consipiracy to silence non-bigoted critics of particular policies. Yet if you applied the same standards gays would be able to claim discrimination for simply thinking that people like you may have quietly opposed their application for a promotion which they eventually got anyway.
December 2nd, 2011 | 10:00 am
Notice how many of those opposed to SSM are also opposed to civil unions, for either same-sex or opposite-sex couples.
Last I heard, only a tiny percentage of people opposed to same-sex “marriage” also opposed civil unions.
Among these, there are three groups or rationales:
–one that simply thinks homosexuality should be illegal or at least kept in the closet, period;
–one that argues that homosexuality does not need a civil union, because unlike marriage the rationale for having an institution does not exist (there being no societal interest in supporting the family unit that will – or in this case won’t – result from the union), and
–one whose argument is based on the recognition that the left routinely uses “creeping” strategies – that is, the argument that there is every reason to believe civil unions are not going to be an end in themselves, but just a “foot in the door” (a statement supported by a long string of things gays “only” want – we only want to be allowed to live our lives has turned out to be surprisingly open-ended, in terms of what is “necessary” in order to “just” live a life).
There is some overlap between the three groups, but they are not the same.
December 2nd, 2011 | 10:08 am
Mike — what Joe’s post was or wasn’t about is fairly immaterial to whether Michael makes any sense in asserting that the issues surrounding child-bearing are not essential to long-term sexual relationships just because his married friends don’t discuss it with him and may not be aware of how important it is. My comment addressed what it addressed, nothing else.
My disagreeing with someone who agreed with someone who disagrees with Joe’s underlying premise that the modern gay rights movement should be opposed, really has little to do with what I think about Joe’s point — with which I agree. So I really didn’t need the lecture.
December 2nd, 2011 | 10:14 am
Gay people have been forging lifelong relationships forever. They now live openly and exclusively enough that people are experiencing just how normal they are.
You know I was in favor of gay marriage until I actually saw the ways in which they treat their children (and must treat their children, in order to perpetuate the fantasy).
I thought they were normal people, “just like me”, til I got to know them in the places where they themselves like to congregate “as a community”.
A heterosexual couple has no conflict between love and starting a family: one leads naturally to the other. A gay couple has a tension, and the question is how to resolve this tension.
I believe it is up to the gay couple to accept this tension (as opposed to trying to deny it). But they want to pass it on to their kids instead – someone has to live without something, and it sure as anything isn’t going to be the gay man, who is entitled to “have it all”.
But starting a family is not a narcissistic endeavor, and anyone who can’t do it in a mature family should not be sanctioned or recognized by the state. Any couple that deliberately blurs the line between ‘caring for’ and ‘exploiting’ is not entitled to be described as “a good parent”, nor should they be described as “loving” or “committed”. They are none of these.
The argument that denies the central conflict and insists, instead, that we measure what the adult is “entitled to” by measuring against what other families have, necessarily involves obscuring the question of just who ends up inheriting the conflict. Denial, minimization, and justification are the basis upon which such a family must be built – in other words, the gays are forcing the other family members to live a lie.
There is no reason for a mature person to argue that because they do not feel love toward their child’s mother or father, that therefore the child does not need a relationship with that mother or father (or, as gays argue, any mother or father). We rightfully reject this argument when heteros try to treat children as if they were transferable commodities; there is no reason why being gay should mean your child owes it to you to compensate you for what nature has not given you.
Any argument that fails to address the actual conflict and its ramifications must be viewed as not only inadequate, but dishonest: the difference between gay unions vs. heterosexual ones is that gays can only reproduce parasitically, and cannot provide for all the child’s needs.
Gay unions are not the same in kind as real kinship-based family units, and cannot be made so. No government has the authority to force its citizens to believe or pretend to believe things that are not actually true.
December 2nd, 2011 | 10:19 am
Michael,
“Ok. But I still don’t see how that could possibly make a significant difference. Can you provide an example? How have the physiological changes you and your wife have experienced made your relationship different from that of a gay couple that you know?”
The gay male couples I know (and I know quite a few) have an attitude towards infidelity ranging from ambivalent acceptance of the inevitable to embracing it as a perk. My straight marriage, and more importantly, my wife, could not support this attitude. Why should male/male and male/female unions have such a different attitudes toward infidelity? I think biology has to be taken into account in any explanation.
“He was never asked whether there were other acceptable arrangements. He was asked whether a man could divorce his wife, and he said no. ”
It’s clear to me that “The disciples said to him, “If such is the case of a man with his wife, it is better not to marry” (Matthew 19:10) is a request for clarification. Marriage was nearly universal in this culture, so the statement has the force of replying “Well, if that’s the case, you might as well just walk everywhere” in reply to someone advocating very high gas taxes, for instance. Nearly everyone drives and has a car, or needs to, in our culture. So “you might as well just walk everywhere” is a deliberately unrealistic option, intended to call into the question the plausibility of the interlocutor’s assertion and elicit a more realistic option. Jesus calls their bluff, as usual, and says the only options are, in fact, unrealistic, or at least undesirable from the point of view of the culture.
“You’ll notice that he didn’t address the question of whether women could divorce their husbands. Today, however, most divorces are initiated by the wife. Why? What changed?”
First of all, what has changed is that women can now initiate divorce. There was no legal way for a woman in Jewish law to initiate divorce, so the question “Is it lawful to divorce one’s wife for any cause?” amount to asking if divorce, in general, is possible for any cause, since the only sort of divorce recognized was a male initiated divorce.
In Matthew 19 Jesus is indeed specifically replying to the question of the legality of divorce. However, in order to address divorce, he naturally has to include marriage in his discussion. So although the question he addresses specifically references divorce, it’s reasonable to think Jesus’s answer reveals something about his attitude toward marriage.
Although this passage is source for the Christian doctrine of marriage, the question of legalism Jesus addresses shouldn’t be overlooked: Jesus firmly rejects the legalism of his interlocutors’ question. He redirects them away from a casuistic “hardness of heart” that, in the end, only makes it easy to avoid confronting the imperative of God’s will. Instead he brings them face to face with God’s intention for marriage: a permanent life long union of man and woman that manifests the image of God in a way that no other relationship can match. Clearly marriage is the most fundamental relationship for humans, for it both completes and fulfills our own nature as humans and seals and manifests our relationship, our “likeness” with God. And it does all this by means of God’s will and action, not through our legalistic bean counting and insincere, self centered motivations,.
.
“You’ll also notice that Jesus reiterates what Genesis treats as something that *really* needs explanation—the idea that a man could leave his family and give his primary loyalty to someone outside his birth family, a wife. Genesis provides the just-so story of the rib because that change in primary loyalty is so threatening to the old social order.”
You’ll have to “flesh” this out a bit. I don’t see how citing the Genesis passage highlights the difficulty of coming to terms with a shift in primary loyalty through marriage.
“It has always been right to support people who form faithful, supportive, long-term relationships, and it’s always been wrong to condemn people in them.”
I agree. But I still think Christian marriage is a male/female union. I can’t see anyway around that. I realize that to Christian same sex marriage supporters my view looks like exactly the sort of legalism and “hardness of heart” Jesus condemned in Matthew 19 and Mark 10, but I can’t see how, given Jesus’ words about “male and female” and the “image of God”, you can construe them as including same sex relationships; or as using the male/female bond as a metaphor for all faithful, supportive, long-term erotic/sexual relationships. That seems to me to be spiritualizing the passage rather than understanding it in a non legalistic. way.
December 2nd, 2011 | 10:21 am
Nazi Germany wasn’t much worse
Yes it was.
Yes, the Holocaust didn’t built over time – it wasn’t made up out of small ethical choices – it just sprung fully-formed from Adolph Hitler’s forehead.
One day, everything was fine. The next, all the Jews were gone, and nobody knew where they went.
Except of course it didn’t really work that way. The Nazis built their Utopia-that-turned-out-badly out of the same sorts of stuff we’re dealing with here -building utopias through coercion, denying reality, pressuring people into all sharing a common ideology, etc.
That is why Nazi analogies tend to spring up: we use comparison-contrast as an analytical tool because it’s an effective tool.
It would be better if we all addressed specific comparison-contrast issues honestly (even when it involves admitting things like “yes, there is a similarity in kind, but the difference in scale does matter”) instead of just trying to say “oh you violated the Godwin’s game-rules, you’re out of the argument – go sit on the sidelines”, which always struck me as a very silly game.
December 2nd, 2011 | 10:35 am
Boonton,,
“Yet marriages which distinctly lack this expectation are not seen as distinctly lacking. When the 70 yr old widow or the infertile couple get married no one views this as ‘less of a marriage’.”
No one you or I know. However infertile marriages have traditionally been viewed as a disappointment, if not defective. Cf. the Bible. Many African societies also, for example, think of marriage in this way.
In any case, I was at pains to note that the “expectation” of child rearing wasn’t a matter of applying rules but rather expecting, based on experience, that certain relationship usually do, and should, work out in predictable and desirable ways. That is, expectation as confidence, or as both a statistical regularity and a moral aspiration.
For example, most parents love their kids, and vice versa. We expect this both because it usually turns out this way in fact, and also because we think it works out this way for the best.
This isn’t controversial, but because gay marriage has become such a contentious issue, the same kind of “expectation” for long term male/female relationships is muted. I’m saying it shouldn’t be. Marriage, as committed child rearing relationship, is too important to soft pedal because it’s politically incorrect to talk about it honestly.
December 2nd, 2011 | 10:41 am
Blake, for example, can almost always be depended upon to make some assertion like “All gays want to force people to consider their relationships normal”. Yet if I even mention the word ‘homophobia’ I know the first reaction will be intense scoffing and dismissals of simply being politically incorrect. In fact right here on this thread the only discussion of anti-gay bigotry by those opposed to gay rights has been to dismiss it all as an unfair consipiracy to silence non-bigoted critics of particular policies.
You are saying it is not true that the goal of gay rights is to make people accept homosexual relationships as normal?
You are saying that it is not true that they justify using coercive force to this end?
As far as “homophobic”, how seriously would you take me if I ignored your substantive points and merely ridiculed you as Christophobic? I’d probably sound pretty silly to you, because it’s a childish ad hominem response.
The Left needs to stop trying to get its way by avoiding the actual topic. It’s especially pernicious when you use fake diseases to try to “diagnose” people. Conservatives are always either “phobic” or “repressed” or “anxiety ridden” or some other contagious-sounding thing, aren’t they? The Left can’t just accept that some people have different values – they have to come up with disease metaphors to try to dehumanize those people they can’t “tolerate” or “coexist with”.
May I digress for a moment? My personal favorite: conservative families aren’t closer or tight-knit: they are enmeshed – suggesting something inappropriate, and used in contexts that suggest dysfunctional relationships. That’s left wing “tolerance”. In other words, I don’t take you seriously when you throw around disease metaphors, because I don’t think I’m the one with the irrational fears.
There is no such “disease” as homophobia. Having different values from you does not make me diseased, and it says more about your fears than mine that you need to “diagnose” me.
December 2nd, 2011 | 10:50 am
Last I heard, only a tiny percentage of people opposed to same-sex “marriage” also opposed civil unions.
I think this is clearly false. Many anti-SSM proposed amendments also explicitly or implicitly included civil unions. The only time anti-SSM seem to embrace civil unions is as an argument against a proposed adoption of SSM. I suggest looking at voting records. Look at state representatives who vote against SSM citing Civil Unions, then look at when those states adopted Civil Unions and how those same representatives voted on them back then. More often than not I’d bet you’ll find anti-SSM reps who cite civil unions today were the ones against them back then.
December 2nd, 2011 | 10:52 am
Indeed, how exactly do you have a law that says married couples have to ‘expect’ to have children?
You are confusing how licenses work.
A person may apply for a driver’s license, then choose not to drive. This is like what a childless couple does.
But gay marriage is more like arguing that, because that person over there has a license but uses it only as an ID, that it is therefore wrong to say that having a driver’s license is about driving. Obviously it’s about having an ID.
But getting a license and not using it is not the same as not being qualified for a license and wanting one.
The childless couple is qualified to start a family, but does not do so. The gay couple is not qualified to start a family, because there is no way to give them our sanction without also sanctioning things that should not be sanctioned. Gay couples are not eligible for the procreative benefits of marriage.
If gays want to be recognized, they need to find an honest (rather than a fraud-based) way of resolving the conflict – for instance, being permitted to “split” the benefits of marriage, so that the procreative benefits are shared with one’s co-parent while the “partnership” benefits are shared with one’s lover. Such an arrangement already has a template: most “stepfamilies” have exactly such split benefits (although stepfamilies are also eligible for the full benefits of procreation, even these benefits may be limited if either parent has a prior commitment where the first spouse has first claim).
But what gays want is nothing less than the right to commit fraud at will.
December 2nd, 2011 | 11:04 am
Michael PS
Bien sûr. It’s a juridical matter. And this is why, as a traditional Christian living in a non Christian society, I still think I could find a way to live with legally recognized gay unions that afforded decent protections to same sex couples, who after all, love and cherish each other as much as anyone. Provided, of course, that same sex marriage supporters didn’t call in the heavy artillery every time someone got their feelings hurt.
However, both sides have so much invested in the issue that compromise isn’t an option, and victory for one side spells total defeat for the other.
Mike Linton,
My comments are indeed anonymous and maybe even impertinent but take I issue with your description of them as anomalous.
December 2nd, 2011 | 11:39 am
Blake,
We’ve discussed this a couple of times before, so I’ll be brief.
I agree with you that significant losses occur whenever children are raised by someone other than their birthparents. My wife and I are raising two adopted children, and so we’re well aware that, while we are their ‘real’ parents, the children will always grieve the loss of their birthparents.
Previous generations of adopted parents were taught to ignore the grief and the attachment to the birthparents, but my wife and I have followed the current thinking that it is healthier for the children to talk about their grief and attachment.
I agree with you that couples raising non-biological children must be aware of these issues and act on the best interests of the children first and always. Like you and for the same reasons, I’m no fan of surrogacy. I would be happy to make it illegal.
One difference between you and me is that you like to talk in big generalities while I prefer to talk about the actual Christian community I am a part of. And so I’ve told you the stories of three couples in my community, but you never respond to those. You just stay on the attack rather than trying to have a dialogue.
Couple one: Gay men who have been together more than twenty years and have raised two sons that they adopted after the boys had been bounced from one foster home to the next for five years. The couple was able to get one grandmother into their lives but not the birthmothers. One might argue that a straight couple might have made for a more complementary, gender-balanced set of parents, but no such parents stepped up. Aunts and female church members did what they could to provide feminine input.
Couple two: A woman married, had two children, divorced, and then entered a long-term, ongoing lesbian relationship. The children continue to know and visit their father.
Couple three: A lesbian couple had been together several years and decided to have a baby by enlisting the help of a friend who is the acknowledged birthfather and who remains part of the boy’s life.
It seems to me that all three couples are exemplary. I’m not sure what you’d have them do differently. In the meantime, I believe that the Christian community that these couples belong to is responsible for sustaining these couples in their relationship and in their child-rearing. I’m not sure what you think our congregation should do otherwise.
One final point: you’ve described before the welcoming community you were once part of, and it is very different from the reconciling community I belong to. You seem convinced, however, that all such communities are alike. This assumption seems unwarranted to me.
December 2nd, 2011 | 11:58 am
Mike Linton,
Some months ago, Joe posted a column asking whether people should post anonymously. Several people gave thoughtful and entirely reasonable answers about why they choose to post under other names. You might consider some of those answers rationalizations of their “cowardice,” but perhaps there are some legitimate reasons that are not motivated by cowardice. Maybe you’d like to take a more charitable view.
Secondly, as you know, conversations follow their own paths, not always staying on topic, much like you decided to introduce the issue of anonymous posting into a conversation that had been about other subjects.
December 2nd, 2011 | 12:23 pm
Pentamom,
“whether Michael makes any sense in asserting that the issues surrounding child-bearing are not essential to long-term sexual relationships just because his married friends don’t discuss it with him and may not be aware of how important it is.”
Of course my married friends talk about the difference kids make to their relationship. When did I say otherwise?
I was married several years before my wife and I had children, so I know as well as you do how important the difference is. Making a marriage work has a whole other dimension when raising kids. But the same is true for the gay couples I know who have kids.
You seem to be saying that gay couples with kids are essentially different from straight couples with kids. I’ve asked you for an example so I might understand how, but you haven’t answered. Why?
What do you and your gay friends talk about?
December 2nd, 2011 | 12:27 pm
Michael and Blake,
I agree with you both, it seems, that all things being equal it’s best for children to be raised by a loving, intact, biological family.
The problem is, of course, that things rarely remain equal. Like Mike, I know several gay couples who are raising children and, for a certainty, are providing more stability, love, and nurture than these kids would have had they remained in their birth familes. Although I must take issue with the third couple Michael describes. I don’t think this is a responsible way to bring children in the world. I believe every child deserves to be brought up their mother and father in the same family and parents should make every effort to ensure this. But I don’t know that I’d want to contribute to a situation where discouraging this might result in harm to the children produced by this arrangement.
December 2nd, 2011 | 3:50 pm
Blake
The childless couple is qualified to start a family, but does not do so….
Get real, a marriage license is by no means a ‘license to have kids’. It is by NO MEANS a certification that the married couple are ‘qualified to have kids’. In fact quite a few people who most certainly should NOT be having kids are perfectly free to get married.
Charming Billy
Provided, of course, that same sex marriage supporters didn’t call in the heavy artillery every time someone got their feelings hurt.
Might we recall it was the anti-SSM commentator on this page who compared the current situation to be like ‘living in Nazi Germany’.
Michael
We’ve discussed this a couple of times before, so I’ll be brief. …
I think you’re wasting your time trying to engage Blake on this subject. whenever he is called out on it he retreats.
In brief, no SSM or gay couple has EVER denied a child their biological birth parents nor could they whether or not SSM was legal or not. (Barring criminal kidnapping, of course).
December 2nd, 2011 | 4:58 pm
Charming Billy,
“Why should male/male and male/female unions have such a different attitudes toward infidelity? I think biology has to be taken into account in any explanation”
Oh, ok. I thought you were saying something different earlier. Sure. In general, men are more promiscuous, and that tendency is doubled in a gay relationship.
“The gay male couples I know (and I know quite a few) have an attitude towards infidelity ranging from ambivalent acceptance of the inevitable to embracing it as a perk”
Are these gay male couples churched? I’m talking about the difference made when gays are accepted into a Christian community. I’m not talking about gays in general.
“It’s clear to me that “The disciples said to him, “If such is the case of a man with his wife, it is better not to marry” (Matthew 19:10) is a request for clarification. Marriage was nearly universal in this culture”
I think your answer here demonstrates the danger of using this passage as an exhaustive account of marriage. As you say, marriage was universal, but Christians changed that when they encouraged celibacy.
“First of all, what has changed is that women can now initiate divorce. There was no legal way for a woman in Jewish law to initiate divorce”
Exactly. Which is why again that Jesus’s answer is not exhaustive, unless you think that women shouldn’t be able to ask for divorce even in cases of adultery.
“Clearly marriage is the most fundamental relationship for humans, for it both completes and fulfills our own nature as humans and seals and manifests our relationship, our “likeness” with God.”
I wouldn’t put it that strongly. Christian celibacy makes marriage less fundamental.
“You’ll have to “flesh” this out a bit. I don’t see how citing the Genesis passage highlights the difficulty of coming to terms with a shift in primary loyalty through marriage”
What Genesis is at pains to understand is why a man would leave the family that raised him to start a new household. It explains this odd change in loyalty by saying that he must leave his family in order to complete himself through another person. This is the fundamental question that Genesis is answering. While gay couples are obviously not male and female, they are completing themselves outside their birth family nonetheless.
“I can’t see how, given Jesus’ words about “male and female” and the “image of God”, you can construe them as including same sex relationships; or as using the male/female bond as a metaphor for all faithful, supportive, long-term erotic/sexual relationships. That seems to me to be spiritualizing the passage rather than understanding it in a non legalistic. way”
I wouldn’t say that I’m “spiritualizing the passage” but focusing on the essential message, which has to do with that shift in primary loyalty from birth family to spouse.
“Although I must take issue with the third couple Michael describes. I don’t think this is a responsible way to bring children in the world.”
I don’t like the path the third couple took as much as I do the paths the first two did. I’m glad that they acknowledge the birthfather and keep him in the boy’s life, but I don’t like the intentional creation of separation from the father anymore than I like heterosexual surrogacy arrangements.
One thing I dislike about the way Blake and others handle this question is that they say that homosexuals are the problem rather than saying that surrogacy is the problem.
—
Boonton,
“I think you’re wasting your time trying to engage Blake on this subject. whenever he is called out on it he retreats”
That’s been my experience, too, but hope springs eternal.
“In brief, no SSM or gay couple has EVER denied a child their biological birth parents nor could they whether or not SSM was legal or not.”
You’re right if you mean that a gay couple can’t legally block the rights of birthparents. But a couple can hide or actively dissuade a birthparent from involvement, and that is a serious problem. One problem with Blake’s typical style of argument is that he doesn’t make distinctions between kinds of problems.
December 2nd, 2011 | 11:18 pm
Dear Boonton: I didn’t claim to be an unwitting victim of any thing, I was putting a face on a situation that Joe was alluding to. I am quite happy to take a controversial position and the possible heat that comes with it , like this one: anonymity, except when giving away money, is usually badge of cowardice. And Michael, I think the editors of First Things are encouraging bad character when they allow it.
Don’t be of bad character folks. You have names. Use them. Without them you’re just playing games, and silly ones at that.
December 2nd, 2011 | 11:20 pm
One problem with Blake’s typical style of argument is that he doesn’t make distinctions between kinds of problems.
All children should have relationships with their birth parents, if it is possible.
But above and beyond that, all children need and deserve a mother and a father.
There are many problems with gay marriage. One of those problems is that we have not addressed the question of where all the children that gays want and need are going to come from. Are we going to create an underclass of rental women, a la The Handmaid’s Tale? Where are all the eggs and wombs going to come from?
Another problem is that if we accept the notion that breaking a link between biological parents and their offspring is something that can be done for reasons of preference (the parents’ preference) rather than reasons of need (the child’s need), we are formalizing and codifying a major shift in human rights – away from the child and toward those who would buy and sell children (I won’t honor them with the title “parents”, because they are neither biological parents nor do they meet the standards required of legitimate adoptive parents). Right now, adoption is legitimized by the idea that it’s about what is best for children in crisis. Gay marriage requires shifting this burden so that what is best for the parent can be prioritized over what is best for the children – because there aren’t enough adopted kids: gays will have to deliberately manufacture orphans (and indeed have already started doing so). Ethically, there’s a difference between a child orphaned accidentally vs. a child who is an orphan because his circumstances were deliberately arranged that way.
Then, of course, is the problem that gay marriage requires all of us – as a society – to pretend that somehow being motherless stops hurting if you’ve got a “second father”. Because the whole idea of a gay couple making a family is built out of lies, it is naturally vulnerable – a single child saying “but the emperor has no clothes!” could completely destroy the illusion. The children of gays must be raised with the taboo as absolute: one must never, ever, under any circumstances, ask whether or not a “loving” parent would deliberately deprive a child of the chance to have a father, because neither the parent nor the child really wants to confront the fact that “love” is rather conspicuously not what their relationship is really all about.
December 2nd, 2011 | 11:28 pm
“Yet marriages which distinctly lack this expectation are not seen as distinctly lacking. When the 70 yr old widow or the infertile couple get married no one views this as ‘less of a marriage’.”
No one you or I know. However infertile marriages have traditionally been viewed as a disappointment, if not defective.
This entire argument confuses how licensing works.
To get a license – whether it’s a marriage license or any other kind (driver’s, hunting, fishing, etc.) you do not have to prove you are going to use it in a particular way. You have to prove you are eligible.
A relevant question is whether, if they did have children, would there be any impediment to the state bestowing its blessing and sanction (not to mention subsidizing the family thus created through various benefits)?
In the case of the childless couple, the answer is, no, there is no impediment.
In the case of the gay couple, the answer is, yes, there are some problems.
For one thing, granting to a gay couple the ‘presumption of paternity’ (that is, the legal right to be presumed the father of your spouse’s child) is in conflict with the child’s right to have a relationship with both biological parents. Only a judge has the right to break the bond between a child and his biological parents, and the judge is only supposed to do it when it’s in the child’s best interests.
For another thing, the entire reason why subsidies are necessary is because procreative activity itself is not equally divisible: men and women cannot share equally in the costs, risks, and burdens. Changing the law so that a man may hire a woman to use as breeding stock, while giving all the benefits to someone else instead of that woman, is not only unfair to the child, it’s also exploitation of the woman, and fraud on the part of the man who is receiving benefits that he’s not entitled to.
Whatever benefits gays might be entitled to, they are not rightfully entitled to procreative benefits.
December 3rd, 2011 | 8:28 am
Mike Linton,
Even though you are using your full name, you are not actually contributing to the conversation. You’re just lecturing us, as Pentamom put it. I and some of the other “cowards,” on the other hand, are not playing your “game” and are having an actual dialogue. Perhaps you should take your grievances to the editors whose rules the rest of us are willing to follow.
December 3rd, 2011 | 12:04 pm
I see what you mean now. But if Genesis is a just-so story to explain the shift in primary loyalty, it seems just as valid to see it as a just-so story to explain why the male female bond is the primary human relationship, rather than the parental bond, same sex bond, fraternal bond, etc. At any rate that’s how I see it. I would be interested to know if the phrases in the Hebrew original of “So God created man in his own image,in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them” imply a conjunctive relationship; i.e. “in the image of God he created him; THEREFORE male and female he created them.” This help clarify matters greatly.
December 3rd, 2011 | 12:12 pm
Michael,
“Are these gay male couples churched? I’m talking about the difference made when gays are accepted into a Christian community. I’m not talking about gays in general. ”
No. They’re unchurched and hostile to Christianity. But that describes most of my friends. The couples I’m thinking of are ones I know, rather than know of. I know OF several churched faithful gay male couples.
December 3rd, 2011 | 1:25 pm
Mike Linton
“I am quite happy to take a controversial position and the possible heat that comes with it , like this one: anonymity, except when giving away money, is usually badge of cowardice. And Michael, I think the editors of First Things are encouraging bad character when they allow it.
Don’t be of bad character folks. You have names. Use them. Without them you’re just playing games, and silly ones at that.”
So, my bad character, specifically my cowardice in posting anonymously, weakens my ability to reason validly, rendering my most painstaking conclusions into so many “silly games”. Therefore, when I conclude that the above quote is a classic, museum quality, write-it-in-the-sky, fallacious ad hominem argument I am reasoning defectively. However, if I used my real name in this post, this would remove the logical defect that follows from by bad character, rendering my conclusion valid.
Now I’m just confused. If I only I were as brave as you, I’m sure I could think so much more clearly.
December 3rd, 2011 | 8:05 pm
Boonton,
“Might we recall it was the anti-SSM commentator on this page who compared the current situation to be like ‘living in Nazi Germany’.”
I’m not talking about rhetorical heavy artillery. I mean legal sticks and stones. For instance the photographer in New Mexico who was fined thousands of dollars for declining to photograph a gay wedding.
I’m willing to deal with my resentments and irritations outside of the courts. Self pitying, self dramatizing displays of pseudo-martyrdom (which, as you’ve noted aren’t confined to gay rights supporters) are counterproductive, and frankly, an embarrassing admission of emotional immaturity. Furthermore, they distract attention from genuine cases of victimization.
December 4th, 2011 | 1:50 am
Blake,
“One problem with Blake’s typical style of argument is that he doesn’t make distinctions between kinds of problems”
After quoting me, you go one to illustrate my point. I don’t know how intentional this repetition was, so I’ll illustrate how you have once again managed to ignore what I was saying in order to propagate your lie that gay marriage requires that everyone lies.
“There are many problems with gay marriage. One of those problems is that we have not addressed the question of where all the children that gays want and need are going to come from.”
This is your first lie. I have in fact addressed this question, I have described three paths that my gay friends have used, and I have even explicitly asked you to explain your objection to each one.
“Gay marriage requires shifting this burden so that what is best for the parent can be prioritized over what is best for the children – because there aren’t enough adopted kids”
This is your second lie. I have shown you gay couples that are doing precisely what society allows straight couples to do, so you cannot lay the burden at the feet of gay couples. If one of your problems is surrogacy, then you need to change the laws for all people who use surrogacy. As I say at the top of your post, you have difficulty making distinctions among types of problems. Your problem with gay marriage is really a problem with surrogacy. Get rid of surrogacy, and gay marriage can remain. If your real goal is getting rid of gay marriage, then attack gay marriage itself, but don’t continue to lie about the relation between gay marriage and surrogacy.
“Then, of course, is the problem that gay marriage requires all of us – as a society – to pretend that somehow being motherless stops hurting if you’ve got a “second father”. Because the whole idea of a gay couple making a family is built out of lies”
This is your third, most frequently repeated, and most pernicious lie. All three of the couples I have described to you more than once do NOT pretend that the absence of birthparents doesn’t matter. All three of the couples actively involve the missing birthparents. STOP LYING ABOUT GAY MARRIAGE. Start making distinctions about what the real problems are.
“neither the parent nor the child really wants to confront the fact that “love” is rather conspicuously not what their relationship is really all about”
This is your final lie in this particular post. All three of the couples I have described are committed, loving parents, but I really don’t see how you can read the story about the first couple, which I have laid in front of you a number of times, and say that their relationship is not about love. To adopt children as old as five, who have bounced from one foster home to the next, is to know that you are adopting kids who are going to have a lot of trouble, and those kids have had trouble. They’ve had attachment issues and learning disabilities. As I’ve mentioned before, the first child’s mother was smoking crack during pregnancy. The couple knew all this and adopted both children anyway. Stop lying about the motivations of couples like this.
December 4th, 2011 | 2:12 am
Charming Billy,
“it seems just as valid to see it as a just-so story to explain why the male female bond is the primary human relationship, rather than the parental bond, same sex bond, fraternal bond, etc.”
I’m sure that it is intended to illustrate both. Up until recently, the Christian response to homosexuality was to urge marriage to a member of the opposite sex. The view was that homosexuality was only an impulse. Only in the last century has the broader culture and only recently has the Roman Church decided that orientation is permanent and that marriage to the opposite sex should not be encouraged. The Roman Church now recommends chastity, which is an implicit acknowledgment that for some people the male female bond is not the primary human relationship.
“I would be interested to know if the phrases in the Hebrew original of “So God created man in his own image,in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them” imply a conjunctive relationship; i.e. “in the image of God he created him; THEREFORE male and female he created them.” This help clarify matters greatly”
That is a great question. I wish I knew the answer to that one, too.
“No. They’re unchurched and hostile to Christianity. But that describes most of my friends. The couples I’m thinking of are ones I know, rather than know of. I know OF several churched faithful gay male couples”
You might try to going to church with the latter and talking to them more about both their faith and their relationships. Christianity makes a difference in our lives after all.
Your explanation of what is so wrong about Linton’s attitude was brilliant. Thanks.
December 4th, 2011 | 9:36 am
Michael
You’re right if you mean that a gay couple can’t legally block the rights of birthparents. But a couple can hide or actively dissuade a birthparent from involvement, and that is a serious problem.
I agree this might indeed be a problem in individual cases. At the end, though, one has to ask not about the gay parents or surrogate parents but about the duties and obligations of birth parents. If a gay couple is fighting a biological mother for custody of her child, the biological mother will almost always win unless she has excetionally dysfunctional problems.
Blake, though, consistently fails to recognize the obligations of birth parents. For example, he loves to cite The Birdcage as an example of the harm done to children of SSM (although the movie actually had no children, and technically no SSM). He has even cited the mother as a ‘hero’ in the movie. Reasoning? Well in one scene she looks wistfully away and says she regrets not bothering to raise her son. Of course she wasn’t denied her son by any custody battle, she just cared more for her business. To the degree the ‘child’ has been harmed by no access to his biological mother, its almost entirely due to the mother’s nature and decisions.
The other issue is, of course, equating individual cases to an entire class. It’s like watching a TV show about a man who killed his wife and concluding that men are evil or knowing a couple that had a nasty custody fight and concluding that women are vindictive.
Blake
There are many problems with gay marriage. One of those problems is that we have not addressed the question of where all the children that gays want and need are going to come from. Are we going to create an underclass of rental women, a la The Handmaid’s Tale?
Well not too long ago Andrew Sullivan posted a survey of same sex couples from various cities. The gist was about 30% have kids living with them. The more interesting fact was that cities without legal SSM were no higher than cities in anti-SSM states. So it would appear legalizing SSM has no impact on SSP (same sex parenting, which is what you’re really talking about). But in answer to you’re question, “Not my problem”. What if you told me some couple down the street was infertile but really, really, wanted a kid….I’d shrug and say “that’s sad, not my problem though”. I see no need to create a class of forced ‘breeder women’ for them why would I for SSM couples?
A relevant question is whether, if they did have children, would there be any impediment to the state bestowing its blessing and sanction (not to mention subsidizing the family thus created through various benefits)?
Let’s think about this, would we feel good about a marriage of 70 yr olds if some advance in biotech made it possible for them to have kids…but didn’t extend lifespan or put off the ravenges of old age? If you gave some 70 yr old a hunting license and heard on the news he was out in the woods and bagged a deer, you’d probably think “good for you old man!”. If your 70 yr old widowed mother told you she was getting married to the nice man who lives next door, you’d feel good. If she told you she was taking drugs to make her ovulate and seeing a fertility specialist in order to conceive…you’d probably be horrified and even turn against the marriage.
December 4th, 2011 | 9:43 am
Charming Billy
I’m not talking about rhetorical heavy artillery. I mean legal sticks and stones. For instance the photographer in New Mexico who was fined thousands of dollars for declining to photograph a gay wedding.
You’re talking about discrimination laws and they work in both directions. A gay photographer who usually does SSM ceremonies who denies a Catholic couple service because he disagrees with the Roman Catholic Church’s stance on gay marriage is no less subject to the same laws.
I’m willing to deal with my resentments and irritations outside of the courts. Self pitying, self dramatizing displays of pseudo-martyrdom (which, as you’ve noted aren’t confined to gay rights supporters) are counterproductive, and frankly, an embarrassing admission of emotional immaturity.
I agree, however our comments exist here and I see much more of this among the anti-SSM advocates here. Blake, for example, has compared himself to victims of historical anti-Jewish laws at least 3 times here. No one here who advocates for SSM behaves like that. I can’t speak for the set of all people who exist who may agree with SSM. But when your own house is out of order its not good form to complain about the roudy neighbors three blocks away.
December 4th, 2011 | 10:41 am
Another problem is that if we accept the notion that breaking a link between biological parents and their offspring is something that can be done for reasons of preference (the parents’ preference) rather than reasons of need (the child’s need),
Which illustrates a key problem with Blake’s style, confusing the ancedote with reality. What makes this even more interesting, though, is that he never actually bothers to even tell us what ancedote he is talking about? Is this a gay couple he knew when he went to a church that had SSM ceremonies? Is he talking about a fictional couple as when he often cites The Birdcage or The Kids are all Right as real?
Before you can say anything about SSP, you have to ask how a kid ended up there to begin with. Was he adopted because his biological parents were unfit or unwilling? Is one of his biological parents in the same sex couple? If so then insisting the kid not be raised by that couple by definition denies him his ‘human right’ to his biological parent! Was he produced by artificial insemination (which would apply only to lesbian couples) or a surrogate? Was he ‘brought and sold’ on a black market?
At this point one has to realize, if they are honest, that the stories for any particular individual will vary widely. Trying to generalize from cherry picked examples to an entire class is a pretty obvious fallacy.
And if we take Blake’s line of argument seriously, it’s not just SSM that falls under the chopping block. Almost all adoptive parents are suspect. Most adoptive parents I know are very uncomfortable with their children finding their birth parents. Most were either very cold to it or were outrightly vehemently opposed to it when their children were minors. Taking Blake’s argument seriously, these people would be near criminals, violating their children’s ‘human rights’. A mother who insists her small son call his stepfather ‘dad’ likewise is not exercising parental authority over her child but is abusing him because she is ‘making him lie’. Which all flies in the face of common sense which holds that parenting is something one has to do. It’s not simply a status conferred by biology. The man who fathers a child but does nothing to raise the child ceases to be a father in the meaning of the term that is relevant to this conversation. The man who takes up a child and raises him is a father regardless of biology. Our language often confuses this because we use the term to denote both the relationship and the biological fact rather than having two different terms for each. To tell a man who raised a child to adulthood that he does not merit the title father, whether he is gay or not, is a pretty bold thing to do. In fact something you probably shouldn’t do unless you’re ready to lay fists on the line. Regardless, its something you shouldn’t do unless you have something really good to back it up.
Blake is an extreme case but I notice this pattern of ‘throwing the baby out with the bathwater’ is common in others who argue against gay marriage. For example, the insistence that marriage is not ‘about the couple’ and that romantic love has nothing to do with it flies in the face of thousands of years of human history and tradition. It’s at odds with both the Bibilical view of marriage as well as almost all traditional wedding vows from multiple different religious and cultural traditions. Yet because SSM must be opposed no matter what, its ok to toss this all overboard or dismiss it as mere window dressing.
December 4th, 2011 | 2:25 pm
Blake is an extreme case but I notice this pattern of ‘throwing the baby out with the bathwater’ is common in others who argue against gay marriage.
I notice that gay marriage advocates spend a lot of time making generalizations about “those who argue against gay marriage” and precious little time actually addressing the issues.
Your whole case is based on “if you don’t give us what you want, it proves you hate us”, isn’t it? Without that as a founding assumption, your whole argument falls apart.
December 4th, 2011 | 2:31 pm
And if we take Blake’s line of argument seriously, it’s not just SSM that falls under the chopping block. Almost all adoptive parents are suspect.
This is a serious misrepresentation of my argument.
Adoption is unavoidable, when it is about finding the best possible home for a child who is without an adequate home.
Gay marriage is not like adoption, though, because it is not only not about finding the best possible home for children, it is about changing the rules so that what is best for the people who wish to buy children is prioritized over what is best for the children themselves.
Gays of course cannot answer the argument, “what is it about being gay man (woman) that makes your child no longer benefit from having a mother (father)?” Of course it is a fallacy that just because a man does not need or want a woman, that his child will not need or want a mother. It is not only a fallacy, it is a sign of serious maturity issues – the would-be parent is unable to separate his needs from his child’s..
A child’s needs don’t change just because the parent is different from other parents. Adoption should be about what is best for the child – therefore, gay parents should be expected to enter into “coparenting” arrangements with members of the opposite sex, and those who are too narcissistic to separate their own wants should be classed as too immature to be ready for adoption.
And, of course, we should do something about the way gay couples use fraud and parasitic reproduction strategies to force children into unhealthy family situations.
December 4th, 2011 | 2:34 pm
You lie when you say I am hostile to gays.
I am hostile to liars and parasites.
There is nothing about being gay that makes you need to covet what is not yours.
But the act of forcing a child to pretend that having “two mommies” is as good as having a real intact family is why I refer to gays as “building families out of lies”.
No child should have to live with those sorts of taboos – because it’s neither natural nor healthy for any “community” to support a family structure in which preternaturally mature children are expected to support their infantile and emotionally needy parents. In healthy families, parents take care of the children, not the other way around.
December 4th, 2011 | 2:38 pm
In other words, it isn’t being gay I mind.
It’s being so enamored of your own genitalia that you lose your sense of priorities – to the point where you start violating other peoples’ boundaries in toxic ways.
Which would have nothing to do with homosexuality at all, except that the so-called “gay community” has been making arguments that require us to believe that emotionally abusing your children and building family structures out of coercive forms of make-believe is somehow an essential part of being gay.
December 4th, 2011 | 6:41 pm
Blake,
Your whole case is based on “if you don’t give us what you want, it proves you hate us”, isn’t it? Without that as a founding assumption, your whole argument falls apart.
Is this really the best you can do?
Adoption is unavoidable, when it is about finding the best possible home for a child who is without an adequate home.
But sometimes it is avoidable, sometimes it entails a judgement call. And even when it is unavoidable adoptive parents still have to address the issue that the children are not their biological offspring. This runs right into your assertions about ‘making children lie’ and ‘denying them their biological parents’. You have no reason why adoptive parents aren’t as subject to your rules as SSP would be. And at the end of the day you would throw busloads of children into the ditch for the sake of making an anti-SSM case.
Gays of course cannot answer the argument, “what is it about being gay man (woman) that makes your child no longer benefit from having a mother (father)?”
Who said they have to answer it? Again as I’ve pointed out to you over and over no gay parent has ever nor could ever deny a child a biological mother and father. Accuse me of hate all you want you have never once produced even a single example to the contrary, let alone demonstrate that your assertions apply to an entire class rather than simply individual cases.
December 4th, 2011 | 9:20 pm
Who said they have to answer it?
The only legitimate adoption is the adoption that takes the child’s best interest into account
These children are not a public resource, here for you to harvest. They are human beings with rights of their own – and they have the right to expect their guardians to act in their best interest.
Again as I’ve pointed out to you over and over no gay parent has ever nor could ever deny a child a biological mother and father.
Are you suggesting that you can buy an egg, rent a womb, and/or buy anonymous sperm, but the child “isn’t denied a biological mother and father” because you are willing to allow him to search for his missing parent?
Seriously? Are you dishonest enough to make such an argument?
And are you willing to state further that children are allowed to speak honestly and openly about their real feelings about not having a mother or father, and they don’t have to worry at all about their stepfather locking himself in the closet with Pirin tablets, or the “gay community” classing them with the hateful, homophobic, evil crowd?
Are you saying there are no taboos holding them in check? Is that what you’re saying?
December 4th, 2011 | 9:26 pm
“Those facts of life certainly make the two kinds of relationship different, but they are minor differences; they don’t lie at the center of long-term, marital relationships.”
Oh, but they do. Just because people don’t realize how essential they are, doesn’t mean that they’re not woven into the very foundations of every marriage (not to mention every relationship) capable of producing children.
Procreation is what makes marriage a different kind of union from merely friendship or lovers.
Procreation is what turns ordinary lovers into a kinship union – the joining of two family trees into a single family tree, through the act of making a child.
If procreation were not part of marriage, then marriage would have no function and serve no purpose.
But marriage does have a function, and does serve a purpose: it supports the couples who choose to engage in the act of making a family.
Under current rules, it supports biological families – couples who commit to marriage before procreating enjoy all sorts of advantages. The women are less likely to be exploited. The men are less likely to be estranged. They both find support to assist them over the rough spots and encourage them in their commitment.
Most importantly: children born to married couples do better – including the most important measure: they are less likely to be abandoned by one or both parents.
Gay marriage would undo all of the above: by changing the rules to strike procreation from the definition of marriage, it would encourage the wealthy to exploit women and buy babies. Instead of encouraging the health and cohesion of biological families, it would encourage the exact opposite – baby-farming, parasitic reproduction, and scavenging.
December 4th, 2011 | 9:50 pm
STOP LYING ABOUT GAY MARRIAGE. Start making distinctions about what the real problems are.
Do the children of gay couples have the chance to have both mother-relationships and father-relationships? Are these relationships with both kind of parent as real, as strong, and as healthy, as what children in an intact family experience?
And for those who don’t (which is all of the ones who are forced to pretend that they’ve “got two mommies”), what is the rationale?
Is there any reason why these kids have to do without a father-relationship (mother-relationship), other than the selfishness of the parents who didn’t care enough about them to provide them with a good daddy (mommy)?
There are only two reasons why a child has “two mommies” instead of a mother and father. The first is that the child’s parent just didn’t care enough to do the work of finding and providing a good daddy. The second is that the parent’s lover is more important – the child can do without so that the lover can covet more than s/he is entitled to.
This is why it is not a lie to say that gay marriage is built out of lies. It is.
The core of “gay marriage” is a narcissistic fantasy – with the gay couple at the center of their imaginative universe, with all other family members forced into the kafkaesque role of being expected to act out someone else’s drama.
It is the very antithesis of a healthy family: some peoples’ needs – and desires and whims – are central, while other peoples’ needs are simply ignored-denied.
It is built upon a core lie: the family lies about who the child’s parents are, and what it means to be a parent, and what it is to be a family.
Biological families are not exploitative. Women who marry their baby’s father do better than women who have babies out of wedlock. Regardless of what some feminists say, marriage benefits women as much as men. (If you doubt this, try reading the liberal fantasy “A Handmaid’s Tale”, by Margaret Atwood – where, bizarrely, the author imagines that it is conservatives who wish to reduce less-affluent young females to nothing more than breeding stock…..)
The “two mommy” or “two daddy” structure is a lie because it is about expelling the child’s mother or father in order to allow a stranger to come in and use the child in ways that are primarily about the well-being of the stranger. A parasite might take good care of its host, but that doesn’t make it any less parasitic.
And I call it “parasitic” because there is no way to arrange such a pseudo-family that is not, at its heart, about stealing nourishment from the child to nourish the adults.
December 4th, 2011 | 11:30 pm
Blake,
“I notice that gay marriage advocates spend a lot of time making generalizations about “those who argue against gay marriage” and precious little time actually addressing the issues”
You addressed this comment to Boonton, but here’s the thing: You only speak in generalities and never address specific cases, even when asked to. You’d rather lie about a whole class of people than tell the truth.
“This is a serious misrepresentation of my argument. Adoption is unavoidable, when it is about finding the best possible home for a child who is without an adequate home. Gay marriage is not like adoption, though, because it is not only not about finding the best possible home for children, it is about changing the rules so that what is best for the people who wish to buy children is prioritized over what is best for the children themselves”
Again, you address this comment to Boonton, but it is another outright lie. The first of the three couples I described above adopted their children. Explain to me how their home was not the “best possible home” for those boys that straight couples had refused to adopt for the first five years of their life. How many five-year-olds have you adopted? How many babies born to crack addicts have you adopted? How many more lies are you willing to tell?
“Adoption should be about what is best for the child – therefore, gay parents should be expected to enter into “coparenting” arrangements with members of the opposite sex, and those who are too narcissistic to separate their own wants should be classed as too immature to be ready for adoption”
And yet all three of the gay couples I have described have done just such a thing, and yet you continue to lie about the consequences of gay marriage. Where does your honesty live?
“You lie when you say I am hostile to gays”
Oh, really? I suppose it was some other guy named Blake whose first contribution to this thread was to say, “I think the problem is that it is not up to Christians to “stand against” homosexuality… their sin is none of our business….We should focus our efforts not on restricting their right to be bestial, but on restricting their efforts to make others be bestial with them”
How do your gay friends respond when you say things like this to them?
“Procreation is what makes marriage a different kind of union from merely friendship or lovers. Procreation is what turns ordinary lovers into a kinship union – the joining of two family trees into a single family tree, through the act of making a child”
Reread the Bible. That’s not what it says.
“But marriage does have a function, and does serve a purpose: it supports the couples who choose to engage in the act of making a family. Under current rules, it supports biological families – couples who commit to marriage before procreating enjoy all sorts of advantages. The women are less likely to be exploited. The men are less likely to be estranged. They both find support to assist them over the rough spots and encourage them in their commitment”
You’re thinking like a social scientist, not a Christian.
“by changing the rules to strike procreation from the definition of marriage, it would encourage the wealthy to exploit women and buy babies. Instead of encouraging the health and cohesion of biological families, it would encourage the exact opposite – baby-farming, parasitic reproduction, and scavenging”
Why do you continue to lie and place these ills at the feet of gays? IVF, surrogacy, designer babies, and selective abortion—all these things were created to benefit straight people and to satisfy their selfish desires. Gays have nothing to do with it. CLEAN YOUR HOUSE AND STOP SCAPEGOATING THEM.
“Do the children of gay couples have the chance to have both mother-relationships and father-relationships?”
Yes, they do. Reread the descriptions of three of the gay couples I know.
“There are only two reasons why a child has “two mommies” instead of a mother and father. The first is that the child’s parent just didn’t care enough to do the work of finding and providing a good daddy. The second is that the parent’s lover is more important – the child can do without so that the lover can covet more than s/he is entitled to”
The lies just keep coming and coming from you. Tell me which of the three families I’ve described actually meet either of these reasons? You can’t because you’re lying about them.
“It is built upon a core lie: the family lies about who the child’s parents are, and what it means to be a parent, and what it is to be a family”
And yet none of the families I’ve described are lying about who the biological parents are. The only person lying is YOU.
“Biological families are not exploitative.”
Really? Are you sure you want to make such a ridiculous claim?
Never mind. I withdraw the question. I forgot who I was talking to.
December 5th, 2011 | 7:17 am
Are you suggesting that you can buy an egg, rent a womb, and/or buy anonymous sperm, but the child “isn’t denied a biological mother and father” because you are willing to allow him to search for his missing parent?
No I’m suggesting if you rent out your womb, sell your egg or sperm YOU are DENYING YOUR child biological parents.
There are only two reasons why a child has “two mommies” instead of a mother and father. The first is that the child’s parent just didn’t care enough to do the work of finding and providing a good daddy.
Strange, does ‘daddy’ have no duty to his biological offspring? Again Blake claims to be for children here, but he would throw them under the bus in a heartbeat if it furthered his anti-SSM agenda. Note how in his analysis of The Birdcage he initially claimed the biological mother was a hero! A woman who admitted she had no interest in raising her son for over twenty years. At the end of the day Blake’s stance can be summed up as “bio-parents uber alles” and “the bioparent does no wrong”. As I pointed out, embrace this idea at your own risk. It has consquences that extend far beyond SSM and SSP.
I’m just not seeing what other explanation there can possibly be here. Blake rails against the existence of a huge industry 95% of whose customers are not gay on the grounds that its a gay conspiracy. If I railed against Jews in finance while ignoring the fact that 95%+ of financiers are not Jewish I’d be called anti-semitic for good reason. Yet if we just go ahead and say Blake is an irrational homophobe, well that’s insane ‘political correctness’ and ‘hating’ people who simply disagree.
Michael
Why do you continue to lie and place these ills at the feet of gays? IVF, surrogacy, designer babies, and selective abortion—all these things were created to benefit straight people and to satisfy their selfish desires. Gays have nothing to do with it.
Indeed, IVF clinics and the like benefit much more from straight marriage than SSM. For one thing there’s much more straight marriage than SSM. For another thing consider all Blake’s ‘benefits’ to marriage like economic stability. All those things make it easier to have the economic resources to demand ‘designer babies’, ‘womb renting’, or heroic measures to counter infertility.
December 5th, 2011 | 12:09 pm
Michael / Blake
You’re thinking like a social scientist, not a Christian.
And not a very good social scientist. When people talk of ‘studies’, they almost always are abusing the concept of the average. On average, people who work at McDonald’s make less than those that work at IBM. But the manager of a McDonald’s makes more money than the lowest paid person at IBM.
With this in mind, we see two problems with Blake’s use of social statistics:
1. As I pointed out before, the harm he would do isn’t just limited to SSP/SSM couples and adoptive ones. Suppose I pointed out that ‘studies’ show the children of black families score 15% less on the SAT and other various metrics relative to the children of black-white mixed families. By Blake’s reasoning, that would make every black woman who marries a black man guilty of child abuse. After all, by ‘selfishly thinking of her genitales’ and choosing to marry a black man instead of a white one, she harmed her children by 15%. Ditto for the black man who opted to marry a black woman instead of a white woman. What’s good for the goose is good for the gandar here. If Blake would manage SSM by running averages there’s no reason to limit that principle to just gay couples. All couples would and should be subject to his calculations. We are back to the concept of ‘scientifically managed marriage’….a concept Chesterton trashed nearly 100 years ago in a very good book called Eugenics and Other Evils (You can get it for free for your Amazon Kindle!).
2. Even if we accept this line of thinking, it incorporates an error. What needs to be considered is not ‘the average’ but the marginal. In other words…..
Consider Pentamom who has 5 children and a girl she knew back in High School….PentaEgg. PentaEgg donated an egg to a fertility clinic 5 times when she was in her 20′s. Blake conducts his review of various studies and concludes that the 5 children from PentaEgg would be better off with their biological mother. After all, Pentamom has exceptionally great kids so she raises the average up high for all biological moms.
Since the world has gone insane and elected Blake to be ultimate dictator, his will will be done no matter what. It’s discovered that PentaEgg’s children went to 5 different places. 1 is with a same sex couple. 3 are with different sex married couples who were infertile. 1 is with a single woman who wanted a kid but was infertile. PentaEgg, meanwhile, has not married but had one kid out of wedlock in her early 30′s. She’s currently between jobs, in debt but other than that a reasonably OK person.
Blake’s child welfare swat team swoops in reclaiming the Egg kids from their various adoptive families and happily reuinites them with PentaEgg….whose a bit surprised to see she now has a total of 6 kids to take care of but then Blake is our fearless leader….
What this silliness illustrates is that the proper comparision isn’t between the expected outcome of Pentamom versus the various adoptive families. Its what is the expected outcome of the various adoptive families against PentaEgg! Blake would compare an ideal father and assume a baby created from a sperm donar who got $20 would be just as good as that ideal father because, well, he is the ‘biological father’. All Blake would end up accomplishing is both harming the individual children’s best interest AND causing the average quality of biological parents to fall.
December 5th, 2011 | 9:52 pm
Yes, they do. Reread the descriptions of three of the gay couples I know.
If they are raising their kids within a healthy mother-father intact family, then they’re not what I am talking about (and you know it).
I am referring to the exploitative practice of forcing children to play along with a dysfunctional fantasy where the child is expected to pretend, first, that he “has two mothers” or “has two fathers”, and, secondly, to pretend that “having two mothers” (or two fathers) is just as “valid” or just as “good” as having an intact family.
Having two mothers or fathers is NOT as valid or as good. Having one of each is better, and when heteros try to force kids to confuse the boundaries between “parent” vs. “stepparent”, it has been quite rightfully called child abuse. Why does being gay entitle anyone to be held to a different standard?
(The real answer: “because my rights as a gay person – to have all the positive experiences that a hetero person has – is more important than my child’s right to have a caretaker who actually guards his interests, as opposed to USING his vulnerability in order to take advantage of him. In fact kids don’t even have any right to not be taken advantage of. They’re just kids – they’re here for us to do with as we will, right?”“)
December 5th, 2011 | 9:55 pm
Some couples have children. Others don’t. Christians insist that whether the couple has children or not doesn’t matter; what matters is life-long fidelity and support.
That’s fine, but marriage includes procreative supports.
Gays are eligible for the life partnership benefits, but not for the procreative benefits – they can only use such benefits fraudulently. They should either ask for the right to *split* such benefits (as stepfamilies sometimes have to do, when stepparents are forced to accept that their spouse’s first wife or husband gets certain benefits), or they should accept that their unions will be childless.
There is no reason why gays should be entitled to any “right” to engage in fraud (against society, family, and their own children) in order to claim benefits that aren’t rightfully theirs.
December 5th, 2011 | 9:57 pm
One final point: you’ve described before the welcoming community you were once part of, and it is very different from the reconciling community I belong to.
The fact is, gays are exploiting children, and all people – gay or straight – of good will should be horrified, and want to shut down the legal loopholes that enable this.
You are welcome to mischaracterize this as being about hating gays, but it isn’t. There are gays out there who are *not* all about coveting what rightfully belongs to heteros, and I have no beef with them at all – only with the ones who justify harming and exploiting children for their silly political agenda.
December 5th, 2011 | 10:09 pm
Dear Boonton: I didn’t claim to be an unwitting victim of any thing, I was putting a face on a situation that Joe was alluding to. I am quite happy to take a controversial position and the possible heat that comes with it , like this one: anonymity, except when giving away money, is usually badge of cowardice. And Michael, I think the editors of First Things are encouraging bad character when they allow it.
Don’t be of bad character folks. You have names. Use them. Without them you’re just playing games, and silly ones at that.
My computer is under attack again. That is why I came back to this thread even though it has “turned the page” (isn’t on the front page of the blog any more) – visiting all the sites where maybe I’ve made someone angry?
This isn’t the first time and won’t be the last – it is part of having an unpopular opinion, in a time and place when people quite literally cannot stand to hear you criticizing the “gay community”, and there are people who quite literally think anyone who criticizes must be shut down and/or punished.
If you read through these comments you will see just how irrational people get when they can’t refute the points I make. They start with straw man arguments and talking points, and move upward toward the hysterical (my favorite example on this thread: is Boonton really going back to where I once pointed out, in the film Birdcage, that the mother was the only character who expressed any concern for Val’s point of view? Did that really burn THAT BADLY?).
I do not know who would attack me. It could be someone here or at another site. It could be someone who posts regularly or someone who only reads and never posts. It’s also possible that I am paranoid, and the attacks on my computer have nothing to do with my outspoken opposition to various controversial causes. I may never know. There are a number of ways to get someone’s computer information – it’s not hard. But I do not have to make it any easier than necessary. I do not give out my name because it is already difficult enough to stay with the actual substance of a debate, when those who cannot rebut the actual points I bring up invariably want to change the subject to me personally.
December 6th, 2011 | 11:57 am
I am referring to the exploitative practice of forcing children to play along with a dysfunctional fantasy where the child is expected to pretend, first, that he “has two mothers” or “has two fathers”, and, secondly, to pretend that “having two mothers” (or two fathers) is just as “valid” or just as “good” as having an intact family.
First, who is forcing who anywhere? Exactly what census have you conducted of all SSP families to discover that all are forcing kids to think their situation is as good as other hypothetical situations?
Second, a good principle in child rearing is to discourage comparisions like this. Even within the class of families you approve of (male-female married couples) there’s a huge array of differences between families. It’s very common for kids to start comparing themselves to other families and then bring that back to their parents. As a general rule, parents should discourage kids from running with the idea that their family is inferior to others. Whatever the case may be, it rarely a good idea to cultivate the idea that your family is inferior because it lacks something. Even if its objectively true that the family would be better if, say, daddy didn’t walk out or mommy didn’t die or whatnot, the fact remains objectivity isn’t always good. Sometimes you have to be subjective and if you’re a member of a team you have to feel your team is the best in the world. Period.
Gays are eligible for the life partnership benefits, but not for the procreative benefits – they can only use such benefits fraudulently. They should either ask for the right to *split* such benefits (as stepfamilies sometimes have to do, when stepparents are forced to accept that their spouse’s first wife or husband gets certain benefits), or they should accept that their unions will be childless.
This seems pretty unclear. Blake seems to be saying you can ‘split procreative benefits’ if you’re creating a stepfamily situation. So yea if you marry a woman who already has kids you’ll have to take on some of the responsibilities of being a parent to those kids. If you can’t handle that you shouldn’t marry her. This would seem to work with ‘two mommies’ as well.
Again Blake seems to be pushing a double standard here. It is basically biological parents can almost never do anything wrong, different sex parents come in second and gay parents are always wrong no matter what the circumstances. At this point let’s call a spade a spade, Blake is a bigot.
They start with straw man arguments and talking points, and move upward toward the hysterical (my favorite example on this thread: is Boonton really going back to where I once pointed out, in the film Birdcage, that the mother was the only character who expressed any concern for Val’s point of view? Did that really burn THAT BADLY?).
Didn’t burn me at all, it burns you very badly. Note how the mother get’s Blake’s credit and the gay parents get his blame. In the movie though, its the gay parents who put on an absurd ruse all for the sake of helping Val get the approval of his girlfriend’s family, something which is important for Val but of no value to them. The biological mother, though, not only didn’t bother with her son as he was growing up but can’t even be bothered to show up to dinner on time in order to help Val out with his future inlaws. She, though, is ok in Blake’s book because she wistfully mentions once that she regrets totally neglecting her son for his entire life. That’s nice.
I think this is hardly a straw man but reveals a lot about your character and the blindness you have to reality. On the contrary to your assertions, I have tried very hard to examine each of your arguments fairly probably a hundred comments that have spanned at least have a dozen threads. More often than not it is you who refuse to address valid points, refuse to address questions, refuse to confront facts presented to you whether they be ancedotes or data.
I’m willing to admit that I might be blinded a bit ‘by the heat of battle’ so to speak. So I’ll leave it to other’s who frequent these comment boards to comment. Have I given Blake’s arguments a fair shake? Have I distorted his positions? Have I misunderstood a point he has been trying to make? Certainly if I’m as bad as you claim, you’ll find quite a few who will leap to your defense and perhaps find a way to explain my errors to me in a way that works better than your efforts.
Re: Using real names versus our internet handles…..
I recall Joe’s post arguing in favor of using real names. I got on the internet in the MOO/MUD era when everything was all text and it was standard to use a handle (we’re talking even pre-web internet days). Now in the Facebook age it seems using real names is the norm. I don’t object to anyone knowing my real name and I do think real names can keep discussions less heated. On the other hand, I like my handle so I’m not inclined to change it unless there’s a good reason. Anyone who wants to converse with me via real names is welcome to email me at Gmail using my comment name.
December 6th, 2011 | 2:54 pm
Blake,
As you know, I’ve largely stopped commenting on this site because I found so few people capable of having an interesting conversation. I decided to comment on this thread because I think Sallyr has some interesting ideas, and I wanted to engage her in conversation. I was pleasantly surprised by Charming Billy, who had plenty of interest to say and who was capable of real dialogue. I thoroughly enjoyed my conversation with him and learned much.
The last thing I wanted to do was get stuck in another conversation with you. I say this not because of your “outspoken opposition to various controversial causes” or because I “cannot rebut the actual points [you] bring up.” I say this because you are apparently incapable of dialogue. Talking with you is a little like talking with Bartleby. You just keep repeating yourself without responding to what has actually been said. I don’t know exactly what your problem is, but it’s not about ideology. Maybe you think you’re listening and responding, but most times you’re not.
“You are welcome to mischaracterize this as being about hating gays, but it isn’t. There are gays out there who are *not* all about coveting what rightfully belongs to heteros, and I have no beef with them at all”
How could I “mischaracterize” you as “hating gays” after you started this thread by saying “I think the problem is that it is not up to Christians to “stand against” homosexuality… their sin is none of our business….We should focus our efforts not on restricting their right to be bestial, but on restricting their efforts to make others be bestial with them.”
What other group do you describe as “bestial”?
December 7th, 2011 | 8:52 am
Almost 24 hours has passed, I repeat my challenge. Anyone here who feels I have honestly not given Blake’s arguments a fair hearing please step forward now. Not asking you to necessarily agree with me on SSM or anything else. Just evaluate whether Blake’s been given a fair hearing.
December 8th, 2011 | 3:45 am
Michael: Are these gay male couples churched? I’m talking about the difference made when gays are accepted into a Christian community. I’m not talking about gays in general.
It has been reported in the media that Penn State’s Sandusky had been regularly attending a Methodist Church until the scandal broke out.
Accepted in a Christian Methodist community and churched indeed.
I wonder if it had been Michael’s church, Michael could have probably been Sandusky’s best friend, and would have thought Sandusky was a great guy all through these years.
And I say this not because we have any indication that Michael has a pedophile psychology like Sandusky, but because Michael is probably the blindest person on this blog in respect to facing problems with people who go to church, namely if these people have a homosexual problem.
Michael likes to believe that people would never have a perverse and perverted sexuality simply because they merely attend a church.
How wrong he is in that respect!
In fact, what the Sandusky case shows is that people who go around being extremely blind about sexuality problems, including signs that there are problems, are very dangerous to society. Sandusky could not have acted for all these years if others didn’t look the other way or didn’t think “oh, just because he’s nice when I see him, he must be nice with everyone else.”
Fundamentally, this is Michael’s position about any person with a homosexual psychology who attends church, and it’s a very harmful and dangerous position.
December 8th, 2011 | 5:10 am
HarrietJ,
If you’re Roman Catholic, then you’re on really dangerous ground here with your cavalier and unwarranted accusations about my views. You might want to think especially about the role First Things had in Marcial Maciel scandal, the way Neuhaus and Weigel defended him for as long as they possibly could and accused anyone who raised questions about Maciel as being bigoted toward the Roman Church. And you might consider that they defended Maciel so vigorously not because he was a priest, but because he was a conservative leader. You might want to take care of your own ideological blinders.
When I was a teenager, I was a counselor at a camp for kids with chronic diseases. The counselors were all wonderful people, a bunch of do-gooders. One of the counselors was Jim, a charismatic person everyone loved to be around. Later, Jim got a job as a teacher and was very popular. He was so beloved that when the first charges of pedophilia came, the court was packed with students and their families supporting him and declaring that the charges couldn’t possibly be true. They persuaded the jury the first time but not the second. When I talked to my camp friends, we all agreed we were shocked but not surprised. We shared stories about some of his oddities, including those his girlfriends had reported at the time.
“Michael likes to believe that people would never have a perverse and perverted sexuality simply because they merely attend a church”
I can see why you might like to jump to that conclusion. It’s fun to caricature people you disagree with. But I belong to a small and very intentional church community. It’s not at all like the large, anonymous Roman church I grew up in. We spend a lot of time with each other following Wesley’s methods of soul-sharing. There’s a lot of conversation and deep discussion. If there is a pervert among us, then he or she is hiding it very well. I’ve not talked to anyone who gave me the feeling that Jim did.
“In fact, what the Sandusky case shows is that people who go around being extremely blind about sexuality problems, including signs that there are problems, are very dangerous to society.”
I haven’t followed the Sandusky case very closely. I’m not a college football fan. But is it true that the people around that case were “extremely blind about sexuality problems”? Do you have any evidence for that claim, or are you just making it up to score points? I thought in fact that part of the scandal was that Paterno was known for his moral rectitude. I think most people assumed that Paterno was the kind of guy who would never be “blind about sexuality problems.”
December 9th, 2011 | 3:53 am
==============================
Michael: You might want to think especially about the role First Things had in Marcial Maciel scandal, the way Neuhaus and Weigel defended him for as long as they possibly could and accused anyone who raised questions about Maciel as being bigoted toward the Roman Church. And you might consider that they defended Maciel so vigorously not because he was a priest, but because he was a conservative leader.
You mean all these people who are accepted into Christian communities and churched did this? (I don’t know what this scandal refers to, but I imagine it is bad concerning all the people you mention).
Just like Sandusky who was accepted in your own Methodist church is alleged to have done horrible violations to so many youngsters? And so are many of the people accused of having covered up the crimes in various ways?
The point I want to score is how dangerous your discourse is when you say that just because someone with a homosexual problem goes to a church, they are not hiding anything bad about them. And obviously this applies to anyone else.
December 9th, 2011 | 4:00 am
===============================
Michael: “I haven’t followed the Sandusky case very closely. I’m not a college football fan. But is it true that the people around that case were “extremely blind about sexuality problems”? ”
===Yes, it is. Try reading about the case if you want to know what is being alleged about whom. Wouldn’t that make more sense, writing comments based on knowledge and not lack of it?
December 9th, 2011 | 4:36 am
==============================
Michael: “But I belong to a small and very intentional church community. It’s not at all like the large, anonymous Roman church I grew up in. We spend a lot of time with each other following Wesley’s methods of soul-sharing. There’s a lot of conversation and deep discussion. If there is a pervert among us, then he or she is hiding it very well. ”
How small is your church?
Are you suggesting that if someone from your church cheated on their taxes, you would certainly know? If they cheated on their spouses, you would certainly know? If they gave a person a sexually sleazy look somewhere, you would certainly know? If they were a bad parent in a situation, you would certainly know? If they covered up for a homosexual that was doing something unethical, you would certainly know? Do you claim to know everything the people in your church do that’s unethical or harmful, or is your claim that they never do anything unethical or harmful to anyone?
“We spend a lot of time with each other”
Exactly how much time per week do you spend with how many people?
In my life, I have come across a large number of people who think they know their friends very, very well and they don’t (in cases with proven evidence).
A related question that needs to be much more addressed in society refers to how much a spouse knows about the attitudes and behaviors of an abusive spouse. Researchers are doing studies that show that there are many who turn a blind eye, who go into denial, who even enable abusers and then claim they didn’t know anything was going on. The same is true for spouses that cheat. The question of how much one knows about other people is not trivial.
I can’t get inside your head, I can’t know how well you can perceive signs that something is amiss about a person’s psychology, or how much you would be fooled by someone trying to fool you, even eagerly cooperate in fooling yourself, but the way you talk here about the homosexuals in your church *sounds* extremely fanatical. That was one of the points I wanted to make.
December 9th, 2011 | 8:14 am
Well challenge is up, not a single person I take it feels Blake has an honest case against me.
December 9th, 2011 | 11:03 am
HarrietJ,
You mean all these people who are accepted into Christian communities and churched did this? (I don’t know what this scandal refers to, but I imagine it is bad concerning all the people you mention)
To quote you, “Try reading about the case if you want to know what is being alleged about whom. Wouldn’t that make more sense, writing comments based on knowledge and not lack of it?”
But to respond less obnoxiously than you have, Fr. Maciel founded the Legion of Christ, was accused of pedophilia, and fathered several children, some of whom he abused. He was supported by Pope John Paul II as well as Fr. Neuhaus, the founding editor of First Things, the journal whose website you are commenting on. George Weigel also supported Fr. Maciel; Weigel contributes a weekly column on this site. Pope Benedict finally removed Fr. Maciel from active ministry when he took office.
“Are you suggesting that if someone from your church cheated on their taxes, you would certainly know?”
What a stupid series of questions to ask. Of course, one never knows for sure what’s going inside anyone. Who said anything different? I know you’re enjoying caricaturing my response, but get real. Surely you recognize that small, active churches differ from large, anonymous ones. In small towns and small offices, everybody knows everybody’s business. Of course, secrets remain, but they’re harder to maintain. Is that still an “extremely fanatical” thing to say?
“The point I want to score is how dangerous your discourse is when you say that just because someone with a homosexual problem goes to a church, they are not hiding anything bad about them.”
Did I say that? Are you sure? This is a reading comprehension test now. Let’s see how well you do. Don’t make me miss Alessandra.
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