President Obama has come out in support of gay marriage today in an interview with ABC news. Well, that’s not quite right. He actually was in support of it back in 1996 before his position then “evolved” toward opposition. Today the dissembling ended, which may be good for the president’s conscience, but what importance it should hold for the rest of us I fail to see.
President Obama, for all his accomplishments, is not a moral theologian, a religious leader, or even (whatever some have thought) a prophet. He is a politican responding, reasonably enough, to political pressures. The impatience of the well-connected and wealthy gay lobby in the Democratic party forced the president’s hand. To call his move “courageous”—or to call “oppressed” the gay citizens whose outsize purchasing power and political influence has propelled their cause—is a long stretch indeed.
The courageous stand would have been to buck the ossifying, self-complimenting elite consensus and come out strongly for marriage, but Obama, here as on most matters, very sincerely agrees with the establishment. The correct opinion is not always the courageous one, and when it comes to gay marriage the President’s view is neither.
Beneath this political circus, of course, a real moral and philosophical question lies. What is marriage? Is it merely a way of signaling our social approval of committed love between any ordering of two (or more) people? Or is it a definite institution ordered toward the rearing of children and defined by permanence, exclusivity, and sexual complementarity? I think the latter. President Obama, barring further evolutions, thinks the former.
My advice to the president is that he lead those who agree with him in arguing civilly, that he examine the views of his opponents without resorting to charges of bigotry or bad faith. This is not a plea; it is a warning. If the Democratic party decides to declare war on religious institutions and private citizens who recognize the natural truth of marriage, it will have a very messy fight on its hands.
Of course, Americans do not want to offend their gay friends and family members. But nor do they want to see religious groups and other actors—Catholic charities, Pentecostal soup kitchens, the Boys Scouts of America—bullied into silence. If believers take a courageous stand—if they refuse to simply comply or shut down but instead force the state to shut them down—Americans’ tentative (and still minority) support for gay marriage will begin to fracture.
May 9th, 2012 | 4:06 pm
Matt,
You know how I feel about this, but I have the urge to post a small dissent for your readers who may not fully agree with your views. I just wish you could see that your definition of marriage is compatible with gay couples having the right to marry! How could you deny what we both agree is a wonderful institution to your friends, to OUR friends–or even to strangers. You define marriage as “a definite institution ordered toward the rearing of children and defined by permanence, exclusivity, and sexual complementarity.” Gay couples have this. I know it, I’ve seen it, it is good. Come on, Matt! I believe in you! You must see how your definition includes gay couples, and for the betterment of our society.
I’m not gonna touch the part about Pentecostal soup kitchens, so I’ll leave it at that.
May 9th, 2012 | 4:06 pm
“The courageous stand would have been to buck the ossifying, self-complimenting elite consensus and come out strongly for marriage,”. By “coming out” for gay marriage (or reaffirming support) neither Obama nor anyone else need choose between “marriage” and “gay marriage” because they are in fact the same things. The distinction is as false as distinguishing between “citizens” and “gay citizens”; a distinction without a material difference.
May 9th, 2012 | 4:08 pm
President Obama, for all his accomplishments, is not a moral theologian, a religious leader, or even (whatever some have thought) a prophet.
And President Bush was none of these things, and President Romney, if there is one, will be none of these things, either if he gets elected and opposes same-sex marriage. Nor is North Carolina, or any of the 29 other states who have banned gay marriage, made up of moral theologians, religious leaders, or prophets (although there may be some of those among the voters).
I know of no religious organization that has been “bullied into silence” on the issue of homosexuality or same-sex marriage, nor do I expect any religious organization to be “bullied into silence.” If the Supreme Court rules 8-1 (with the dissenting vote from one of the most conservative justices) that the Westboro Baptist Church can scream “God hates fags” at military funerals, I don’t see that the Catholic Church or any other organization will be silenced.
I note that Obama said this was his personal position, and marriage should be left to the states, so I really don’t see that his statement will have any impact, except perhaps on the November election, and probably not even that.
May 9th, 2012 | 4:15 pm
Thank you Matthew. Finally somebody with some sense.
May 9th, 2012 | 4:27 pm
[...] Previous |Home| Obama Less Wrong [...]
May 9th, 2012 | 4:31 pm
So, Molly A, what in the world does sexual complementarity mean to you?
May 9th, 2012 | 4:35 pm
I also find it odd to read your “warning” about supporters of same-sex marriage using “force” on this matter; it’s odd since opponents of same-sex marriage already are actually using force (the coercive power of the state) to force same-sex couples into “silence”.
May 9th, 2012 | 4:42 pm
@bobster haha, well it’s a b.s. notion anyway,”sexual complementarity,” let’s be real. You’ll say it has a basis in natural law or worse, the Bible, and I’ll say natural law is whatever the arguer thinks “natural” means and I don’t happen to have a problem with gay sex. So let’s just skip the back and forth and say… sex is a pretty inadequate basis upon which to deny rights to a minority group in our society.
May 9th, 2012 | 4:45 pm
“This is not a plea; it is a warning. If the Democratic party decides to declare war on religious institutions and private citizens who recognize the natural truth of marriage, it will have a very messy fight on its hands.”
careful what you wish for:
http://rachelheldevans.com/win-culture-war-lose-generation-amendment-one-north-carolina#disqus_thread
She is right, you can win the war but it will cost you a generation.
May 9th, 2012 | 4:48 pm
So, Molly A, what in the world does sexual complementarity mean to you?
bobster,
Aside from the quite obvious biological aspect of complementarity, what does it mean? Is there any more to it than that? Are men always leaders and women always followers? Are men doctors and women nurses? Are women nurturing and men not nurturing? Certainly it requires a fertile man and a fertile woman to make a baby (although with today’s technology, they need never meet each other). But what about fertile men who marry infertile women, or infertile men who marry fertile women?
May 9th, 2012 | 5:25 pm
Hey Molly, hope you’re well (if you are the Molly A, I’m guess you are!). I just wanted to make a comment about your argument, because I can’t help but notice an apparent (perhaps only apparent) self-contradiction. On the one hand, in your first comment, you have said that the reason Matt should support marriage is that:
“You must see how your definition includes gay couples, and for the betterment of our society.”
On the other hand, when someone pushed you on what you thought the “sexual complementarity” meant – with the clear implication that this would not be compatible with gay marriage – your response was:
“well it’s a b.s. notion anyway,”sexual complementarity,” let’s be real.”
That seems to me to be a problem with at least your original charge to Matt. Does his definition fit, or does it not? You seem to contradict yourself.
May 9th, 2012 | 5:28 pm
“sexual complementarity”: voluntary compatible sexual needs and fulfillment. Two heterosexual persons of the same gender lack “sexual complementarity” because their sexual needs and fulfillment cannot come from each other voluntarily. Two homosexual persons of opposite gender similarly lack “sexual complementarity”. It’s pretty straight-forward.
May 9th, 2012 | 6:09 pm
“I note that Obama said this was his personal position, and marriage should be left to the states, so I really don’t see that his statement will have any impact, except perhaps on the November election, and probably not even that.”
That’s what I find so interesting about this announcement by the president, David. He is, essentially, just giving the country his opinion, and though he refuses to let his DOJ defend DOMA in court, he’s seeming to give a very states’-rights, and very Clintonian, position.
Which, of course, makes his pandering all the more obvious. “States can do what they want,” he says, “but I won’t like it one bit!” It’s an attempt to mollify his base, and open up the checkbooks of wealthy Democratic gay donors. There is nothing else new here.
May 9th, 2012 | 6:11 pm
Matthew,
You write:
Of course, Americans do not want to offend their gay friends and family members.
As someone who discusses this with gay friends often, none take offense at my argument that the government does not have the authority to redefine marriage by virtue of the reasoning contained in the Declaration of Independence.
Here’s my advice to marriage supporters: if you worry that your argument might offend your homosexual friend, then you are probably using the wrong argument. Start with the inarguable point that marriage only exists because it takes a man and a woman to create new life. If it weren’t for that fact, we wouldn’t even have the word. And so marriage is pre-governmental and therefore the government does not have the authority to redefine the family that created it any more than the computer program has the authority to recreate is programmer.
And finally, don’t be sensitive. Remember these words:
In the absence of faith, we govern by tenderness, and tenderness leads to the gas chamber. ~ Flannery O’Connor
May 9th, 2012 | 8:17 pm
President Obama has done a Romneyesque flip-flop on gay marriage, and has finally arrived at the position taken years ago by Dick Cheney.
May 9th, 2012 | 8:25 pm
[...] President Obama is Wrong on Gay Marriage – Matthew Schmitz, First Things/First Thoughts [...]
May 9th, 2012 | 9:21 pm
Matt,
How can you ask your opponents to engage in a civil discussion, and then immediately issue a “warning” (which is, if I’m not mistaken, only one small step from “threat”) and then preëmpt any meaningful discussion by declaring that your side of the argument is backed up by some “natural truth?” I’m not even sure what you mean by “the natural truth of marriage.” Coyotes engage in homosexuality. They do not (to my knowledge) engage in marriage. If anything homosexuality is the natural truth here.
What your use of the phrase does reveal is a truth about your view of gay marriage, and (at the risk of bullying you into silence) homosexuality in general: that it is unnatural. This is an understandable and common belief. In Leviticus, homosexuality is called toevah. Whatever your interpretation of that word is, it’s not a glowing endorsement of the practice. Our culture has been built up since our ejection from Eden to value a masculine ideal and a perversion of that ideal is uncomfortable to confront. I get it. But you also have to understand that no matter what you hear on Fox, gayness isn’t a choice, at least not for everyone, and supporting legislation that bans gay couples from marrying sends a message to all gay people that they are less than straight people.
This kind of message rolls of my shiny gay shoulders. I have a good gay life, with lots of gay support and gay love. But say you’re a gay teenager (here it comes) in a less than supportive environment. This is just the kind of message that slips under your skin, germinates, and one day inspires you to leave a cold, swinging corpse for your parents to find when they get home from work. And I haven’t ready any articles recently about boy scout suicides inspired by gay bullies.
Let’s get back on topic here. We’re were talking about marriage… Marriage is in a horrible state right now, I won’t disagree with you. But the threat isn’t coming from gays, it’s coming from society at large. Divorce rates are sky high, and many straight couples are saying “to hell” with the whole institution in favor of long-term cohabitation. Marriage needs to be defended as a moral ground for American society and the best way to defend it is to swell the ranks of happily, healthily married couples. Let gays into the club, we will fight for the strength of the institution of marriage with every solemn vow and ecstatic kiss you grant us. And if you won’t let us in, at least admit that the reason for keeping us from marrying is because of your distaste for our kind.
Jews get married, Muslims get married, hell even Mormons get married. Marriage is not an exclusively Christian institution. It comes with legal and financial privileges that there is no constitutional basis for denying to a certain cross-section of humanity. If gay marriage is legal, and a church refuses to marry a gay couple, that’s perfectly fine, we’ll go to a justice of the peace, or go on a cruise (you know how we love cruises) and ask the captain to marry us. Gays don’t want a war on religion, if anything, we’re just trying not to lose the war that some religions are trying to wage against us.
As far as courage goes, I’d say the president’s position took a fair amount of it. Look at the vote in North Carolina. This is an election year, and even completely bland statements and actions are fodder for vicious political backlash. There’s nothing quite like a discussion of a “moral” issue like homosexuality to energize the conservative base, and while Obama may have gotten some more gay money from his “coming out” on the issue, we would have backed him anyway. The fact that he came out in support of gay marriage was clearly a political calculation based on Biden’s good morning america gaffe. But then again so was his refusal to support gay marriage outright during the first 4 years. At the end of the day, he’s a politician, don’t try to read too much into his character from something like this.
May 9th, 2012 | 10:35 pm
One of the things that I find most offensive in this right wing articles about gay marriage, is how politicians who support it do it for preasure of the “well connected gay lobby in the Democratic” party. Is not that million of heterosexuals think it is a question of elementary justice to treat homosexuals as equalls before the law, nor that there isn´t such a thing as “well connected religious homphobic lobby in the Republican party”. Meanwhile, as some admit even here, the support for gay marriage increases poll after poll among the public…or maybe is just the polls are manipulated by the evil and welll connected gay lobby.
May 10th, 2012 | 12:52 am
President Obama has already demonstrated that he has no regard for his duty to obey and implement the law. Thus, he refuses todefend and enforce the Degense of Marriage Act, which is a Federal statute. He will use executive orders to Federal agencies to force the IRS, Social Security Administration, HUD, HHS, and DOD to enact gay marriage programs, in defiance of DOMA and the Constitutional authorities of Congress.
He will also issue irders that punish churches, the Boy Scouts, and other organizations for their positions opposing gay sex and gay marriage. He is implicitly saying he will deny appointment to any Federal office of anyone who openly disagrees with his position on gay marriage, including Federal judges. That is not far fetched: there was an attempt in the California State Bar to ban all opponents of gay marriage from being appointed to the bench.
Obama has taken this step now because he knows he is likely to lose the election, and this action will secure support in his retirement. Just as some people claimed Clinton was the first black president, Obama will be called the first gay president.
May 10th, 2012 | 4:55 am
David Nickol wrote
“But what about fertile men who marry infertile women, or infertile men who marry fertile women?”
Alain Mirkovic, a leading jurist and supporter of SSM, summarises his opponents’ argument, very fairly, in this way, “With regard to procreation, either natural or imitated in the case of adoption, [opposite-sex couples] may indeed procreate (or make as if they had procreated, by means of adoption), while the latter cannot. If some male-female couples do not breed, it is for reasons peculiar to them, subjective (advanced age, pathologic infertility, choice not to have children); same-sex couples cannot procreate together due to objective incapacity. The difference in situation justifies the difference in treatment, namely access to marriage.”
“Make as if they have procreated,” in other words, they present to the child, and to the wider community, the model of the natural (procreative) family, which, some experts assert, makes the establishment of the parental bond between the adopters and the adopted child possible or, at least, easier and spares adopted children the additional difficulty of having to integrate into a “non-standard” family, however loving
As between the couple themselves, whether such a marriage is void for essential error depends on the facts of the case and varies between jurisdictions.
May 10th, 2012 | 6:27 am
Dan
Opposition to SSM is quite unconnected to any views one might hold on homosexual unions.
If we are talking about civil marriage, formal legal definitions of marriage are hard to come by, but, since civil marriage was introduced a little over two hundred years ago, most commentators, long before the issue of SSM was first raised, have found a functional definition of marriage in the rule that “The child conceived or born in marriage has the husband for father.” This rule 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. Many people regard this rule, which makes the paternity of the child clear, certain and incontestable, as lying at the heart of marriage and they believe that it cannot be questioned without losing for this institution its meaning and value.
Thus, many jurists, whilst fully supporting Civil Solidarity Pacts, for same-sex and opposite-sex couples alike, nevertheless maintain (1) Mandatory civil marriage, makes the institution a pillar of the secular 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.
You may, or may not, find this argument convincing, but it has nothing to do with the morality of gay relationships.
May 10th, 2012 | 6:33 am
< I just wish you could see that your definition of marriage is compatible with gay couples having the right to marry! How could you deny what we both agree is a wonderful institution to your friends, to OUR friends–or even to strangers. You define marriage as “a definite institution ordered toward the rearing of children and defined by permanence, exclusivity, and sexual complementarity.” Gay couples have this. I know it, I’ve seen it, it is good. Come on, Matt! I believe in you! You must see how your definition includes gay couples, and for the betterment of our society.
If it is true that there is no difference between a mother and a father, and if it is true that there is no difference between a biological tie and a non-biological tie that has been cemented with dollars and/or legal resources, then this is true.
But then, why isn’t it true for everyone?
May 10th, 2012 | 6:34 am
How can you ask your opponents to engage in a civil discussion, and then immediately issue a “warning” (which is, if I’m not mistaken, only one small step from “threat”) and then preëmpt any meaningful discussion by declaring that your side of the argument is backed up by some “natural truth?”
Marriage links two family trees, uniting two families into one.
Gays are not kin. They can never be kin. Gay marriage is about forcing people to recognize gays as kin, and their families as the same as families based on biological kinship.
This involves forcing people to tell lies.
You are welcome to believe that kinship doesn’t matter, but it is not clear to me what gives you the right to force me into believing (or pretending to believe) that kinship doesn’t matter.
May 10th, 2012 | 6:42 am
I also find it odd to read your “warning” about supporters of same-sex marriage using “force” on this matter; it’s odd since opponents of same-sex marriage already are actually using force (the coercive power of the state) to force same-sex couples into “silence”.
Then how come you’re talking?
It is accurate to refer to the use of force, because same-sex marriage advocates want to strip us of our right to have and articulate our views on marriage.
Same-sex marriage is based on the belief that marriage is primarily about celebrating and recognizing the beliefs of lovers, which is demonstrably one aspect of marriage. But those who believe it is not all there is to marriage are already experiencing coercive force that not only intends to silence, but actually does.
The gay marriage agenda has behaved as if it believes it can only succeed if people do not hear the arguments in favor of traditional views on marriage.
Perhaps it is because they cannot explain why they think they have the right to punish people for believing things that contradict their own beliefs, when their whole platform pretends to be about “freedom” (and that “freedom” is supposedly to be extended to “all”). But they are the ones violating other peoples’ right to live in freedom: they are trying to deliberately create both social and legal forces dedicated to hurting and punishing anyone who dares to believe that marriage is and ought to be (and ought to remain) the basis of ordering, protecting, legitimizing, and supporting the founding and maintaining of kinship structures
May 10th, 2012 | 9:39 am
Responding to a comment way back somewhere: “Natural law” does not refer to the “Wonderful World of Nature” or somesuch. It refers to the laws of human nature. It does not refer to “coyotes” or caterpillars or whatever.
The teleological order of the human body is a part of that human nature, and as such is part of the natural basis for marriage.
May 10th, 2012 | 9:45 am
How can anyone plausibly believe his ‘view’ that each state should decide the issue for himself? DOMA, which he refuses to defend in court and which he wants to see repealed, contains a clause that makes clear that the Full Faith and Credit Clause does not apply to same-sex marriages. Letting a small number of states impose their view of marriage on the other states, even when those other states have voted definitively to retain the normal definition of marriage, is not federalism.
If DOMA violates the equal-protection clause, then so do state constitutional amendments. Obama wants marriage redefined everywhere- so his phony ‘evolution’ is not yet finished.
May 10th, 2012 | 9:45 am
Michael PS,
My question really is about the concept of the complementarity of the sexes. It seems to me it is a purely biological notion. Setting aside reproduction and sexual intercourse altogether, is there something about each and every man that can only be “complemented” by, and only by, a woman? Is there something about each and every woman that can be “complemented” by, and only by, a man? I think in times past, the answer would have been yes. From the 1912 Catechism of the Catholic Church:
What are the qualities that men have and women lack, and vice versa? It is a question I certainly can’t answer. There may be qualities that are more prevalent in men (say, upper body strength), but that does not mean that many women aren’t stronger than many men. I do not think it can be claimed that differences in average capabilities of men and women amounts to “complementarity of the sexes.”
More from the Catechism:
Now, this is what Michelle Bachman seems to have been saying when she made a speech saying she was submissive to her husband. But when she was asked to explain the statement, she said that she and her husband regarded each other with “mutual respect.” It seems to me that “mutual respect” is not what is meant by, “Man is called by the Creator to this position of leader, as is shown by his entire bodily and intellectual make-up.”
So my point is that while there is no contesting the reproductive complementary of the sexes, setting aside this purely biological (although of course very important) relationship, I see no significance to the “complementarity of the sexes” arguments about same-sex relationships.
Let me grant for the sake of argument that sexual activity between two men or two women is immoral for the reasons the Catholic Church says it to be. I see no reason why it would not be the case that the perfect companion, “soulmate,” or whatever you want to call it for a man might not be another man, or for a woman might not be another woman.
May 10th, 2012 | 10:15 am
Mathew wrote:
“President Obama, for all his accomplishments, is not a moral theologian, a religious leader, or even (whatever some have thought) a prophet. He is a politician responding, reasonably enough, to political pressures.”
Obama’s evolution on gay marriage is much like Elizabeth Warren’s claim of Native American ancestry – the gaming of a corrupt system for personal benefit. By being a woman and Native American, Warren got a jobs at several good law schools because she was a double minority. Obama coming out for gay marriage after gay marriage is a now a non issue in North Carolina is nothing more than checking the necessary box to keep the White House for 4 more years. The Gay Movement is spinning his evolution is a profile in courage. Well, as with anything else in life the Gay Movement is free to think whatever they want. Out of compassion for their fellow gays, the Gay Movement might want to ask the gays in North Carolina if they too agree this was a profile in courage.
As for:
“If the Democratic party decides to declare war on religious institutions and private citizens who recognize the natural truth of marriage, it will have a very messy fight on its hands.”
They’ve already declared war with them over abortion. That fight has been messy and has in recent years spilled over into denying the entire country of their constitutionally protected right of Religious Liberty. All in the name of choice.
Now in the name of fairness for everyone, Obama has evolved on a issue that really only benefits him (pause to laugh)– from WaPo:
“A review of Obama’s top bundlers, who have brought in $500,000 or more for the campaign, shows that about one in six publicly identify themselves as gay. His overall list of bundlers also includes a number of gay couples who have wed in jurisdictions where same-sex marriage was legal.”
Obama also said but it really isn’t hyped that believes states should decide the issue. 33 out of 50 already have. In fact every time same sex marriage goes up for a vote, it gets shot down. Even in California. So unless Obama and his crack legal team can come up with another new interpretation of the Commerce Clause that mandates gay marriage across all 50 states – all that has been achieved here with Obama’s evolution, besides the filling of coffers for Obama, is another chance for the Gay Movement to beat up on their fellow Americans for not seeing things their way.
In other words, same old, same old.
May 10th, 2012 | 10:35 am
To those readers that are not participants in the gay seminar I wish to demonstrate something in reading these comments. I am not going to waste any time engaging these silly arguments. My argument is not against the gay seminarians, who have a completely different view of reality and liberty than one grounded in the view of a Creator and Fallen Man. My argument is against the folks on my side, which was manifest perfectly in Mitt Romney’s pathetic reaction to Obama’s statement yesterday.
First I’m going to paste some comments below. Then I am going to paste two quotes, one from C.S. Lewis and one from Flannery O’Connor that well sums up what is going on in these comments. Then I’m going to provide a link to Romney’s comments wherein he tries to come up with an answer that is sensitive to the comments you see above. Then I’m going to suggest what Romney should have said. Then I’m going to offer a conclusion.
Okay, here are the selection of comments on this post:
Here the reader suggests the government isn’t redefining marriage; marriage has always meant “gay marriage.” By “coming out” for gay marriage (or reaffirming support) neither Obama nor anyone else need choose between “marriage” and “gay marriage” because they are in fact the same things. The distinction is as false as distinguishing between “citizens” and “gay citizens”; a distinction without a material difference.
Here the reader suggests that defenders of marriage are just evil: opponents of same-sex marriage already are actually using force (the coercive power of the state) to force same-sex couples into “silence”.
Here the reader suggests that anything based in natural law or revelation is a laughable joke: @bobster haha, well it’s a b.s. notion anyway,”sexual complementarity,” let’s be real. You’ll say it has a basis in natural law or worse, the Bible, and I’ll say natural law is whatever the arguer thinks “natural” means
Here the reader suggests that procreative complementarity is a minor point masking the larger oppression of women: Aside from the quite obvious biological aspect of complementarity, what does it mean? Is there any more to it than that? Are men always leaders and women always followers? Are men doctors and women nurses? Are women nurturing and men not nurturing?
Here the reader suggests that sexual complementarity refers to sexual pleasure: “sexual complementarity”: voluntary compatible sexual needs and fulfillment. Two heterosexual persons of the same gender lack “sexual complementarity” because their sexual needs and fulfillment cannot come from each other voluntarily. Two homosexual persons of opposite gender similarly lack “sexual complementarity”. It’s pretty straight-forward.
Posted without comment: I’m not even sure what you mean by “the natural truth of marriage.” Coyotes engage in homosexuality. They do not (to my knowledge) engage in marriage. If anything homosexuality is the natural truth here.
Posted without comment: supporting legislation that bans gay couples from marrying sends a message to all gay people that they are less than straight people.
And again: This is just the kind of message that slips under your skin, germinates, and one day inspires you to leave a cold, swinging corpse for your parents to find when they get home from work.
Here the reader says you have a choice–support us or admit you are the heirs of lynch mobs: Let gays into the club, we will fight for the strength of the institution of marriage with every solemn vow and ecstatic kiss you grant us. And if you won’t let us in, at least admit that the reason for keeping us from marrying is because of your distaste for our kind.
Here’s the C.S. Lewis quote: The very idea of freedom presupposes some objective moral law which overarches rulers and ruled alike. Subjectivism about values is eternally incompatible with democracy. We and our rulers are of one kind only so long as we are subject to one law. But if there is no law of nature, the ethos of any society is the creation of its rulers, educators and conditioners; and every creator stands above and outside his own creation.
Here’s the Flannery O’Connor quote: In the absence of faith, we govern by tenderness, and tenderness leads to the gas chamber.
Okay. Now watch Mitt Romney’s trying to appeal to everyone while conceding Obama’s argument in principle (i.e. that marriage doesn’t really mean anything)..
Taking all of the above into consideration, this is what should come out of the mouth of a conservative politician in the midst of an election who actually has confidence in his own principles:
“Look, clearly the President is doing all he can to get voters’ minds off his economic policies, but for the President marriage is just another political jump ball for government engineering. If you wonder what damage the government can do in this effort to redefine marriage, look no further than the damage it has done to our economy. The issues are different but the reasoning is the same.”
Conclusion: 1) We aren’t going to convince our opponents, and that should never be our political objective; 2) You don’t win cultural or political wars by letting your opponents frame the debate and then scrambling to come up with answers to their arguments; 3) Conservatives politicians have to stop compartmentalizing issues; they need to think in terms of a moral reasoning that applies to economics just as much as it does marriage. That’s the way you make sense, and that’s the only compass that will get you where you want to go.
May 10th, 2012 | 10:57 am
[...] the best analysis of the announcement comes from Matthew Schmitz in the First Thoughts blog for First Things [...]
May 10th, 2012 | 11:14 am
“But what about fertile men who marry infertile women, or infertile men who marry fertile women?”
There are at least three ways this differs.
For one thing, there is a categorical difference between an infertile individual vs. a fertile individual who wishes to participate in an infertile coupling. Infertile individuals, unlike infertile couplings, have not voluntarily creating their infertility. The infertility problem is not a couples problem but an individuals’ problem – one that exists whether he marries or not.
We have determined somewhere along the line that human beings have a right to reproduce themselves, and I do not contest that as a right, but I do not think it follows that all human beings therefore have a right to reproduce themselves in any way they wish – even if that means treating their partner as disposable and their child as a commodity. I don’t think it’s at all unreasonable to say that people with physical infertility issues are entitled to use procedures that would be unethical and should be illegal for people to use for reasons of convenience.
Also, infertile people as a class have never demanded that we grant them a right to have adultery recognized and condoned. Most infertile people try to adopt. If any have ever argued that, because they are infertile, that gives them the right to engage in whatever parasitic practices are most convenient to them, regardless of how others are hurt or whether those practices involve lies or fraud.
Perhaps most importantly, infertile couples are not inherently in conflict with the “child’s best interest” standard. Gay couples are. Gay couples require two things that are not healthy or desirable: they require that their children forgo the experience of having a father or mother (which is ironic, given that the entire basis of the gay rights claim is that it’s unjust to expect anyone to live without the opportunity to participate in relationships that are innately valuable and/or are valued by society). Then, what is even more offensive is that they expect their child to star in ridiculous films like “The Kids Are Alright”, or participate in studies designed to prove that the children of gays don’t suffer. In other words, they require the child to act as if no loss has taken place – they seriously expect to maintain the fiction that having “two mommies” is just as good as having a mother and a father, and the child is not even granted the option of having any different opinion.
It’s dysfunctional. And I think it will eventually be recognized as abusive. The right to “not live a lie” is not something gays can claim for themselves but deny to their children. Infertile couples don’t need to do anything of the sort: they are capable of providing a better home for a child than a couple that is only “infertile” because it insists on prioritizing its political/emotional agenda over its children.
May 10th, 2012 | 11:17 am
Douglas Johnson,
“Masking the larger oppression of women”? Where did you get that? My point is that old notions of the roles of men and woman have largely broken down to the point where sexual complementarity refers to the biological fact that it takes a man and a woman to reproduce.
You say that I “suggests that procreative complementarity is a minor point,” whereas what I actually said it was “very important”:
May 10th, 2012 | 11:32 am
Hello David,
“Setting aside reproduction and sexual intercourse altogether, is there something about each and every man that can only be “complemented” by, and only by, a woman? Is there something about each and every woman that can be “complemented” by, and only by, a man?”
Yes and yes.
And you are correct: This was once the teaching of the Catholic Church. But it’s still its teaching today, too.
If we are to talk of rights, I would say that children’s rights must be considered, too. In this case, the right to be raised by a (hopefully virtuous) mother and father. From time to time, that may not be possible: A parent dies, or must be removed because (s)he is abusive, or criminal. Gay couples can’t provide that. And it is true that too often, married (heterosexual) couples selfishly place their own goals over that right, too.
Children are a natural end of marriage. Marriage is about more than that. But without children, it would not exist.
May 10th, 2012 | 11:32 am
Blake,
Thank you for your thoughts, but you are not addressing the point I am raising. Let’s forget about same-sex couples and same-sex marriage. Aside from reproduction (which is, of course, very important), is there anything that remains to older notions of the complementarity of the sexes? Is the husband the head and leader of the household? Should a wife be “submissive” to her husband? Are there qualities (other than obvious biological ones) that all men have and no women have? If a woman has a more successful career than a man and the woman has a baby, is it wrong for her to go back to work and for the father to be the stay-at-home parent?
May 10th, 2012 | 11:50 am
Douglas Johnson:
Great quotes. Here’s another one from Dryden:
What weight of ancient witness can prevail / If private judgement hold the public scale?
-John Dryden
http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.2307/1261194?uid=3739656&uid=2129&uid=2&uid=70&uid=4&uid=3739256&sid=47698988551737
Between you and I, we have coyotes in our neighborhood. Have you ever seen what they’ve done to house cats and poodles? You can’t blame the coyotes or consider them lesser animals on the food chain. Like all animals, coyotes do what comes naturally to them as no animal has free will.
As for your observations with Mitt. Yup, you nailed it. But, we’ve got to run this race with the horse we’ve got. Mitt’s ours.
Obama’s gay gamble is precarious – North Carolina’s Amendment 1 passed 2 to 1 among African Americans voters. African Americans understand better than any group in America the destruction the government’s good intentions have had on the family. All Obama did yesterday was really issue another good intention from the government. To make any movement on it, he’ll have to do more than what’s he’s doing.
Meanwhile for the last 3 years, African Americans have observed Obama being silent on the 69% abortion rate of African American babies in NYC , the plight of inner city children only growing more desperate, ok with a crippling 65% rate of illiteracy among African American 3rd graders nationwide, a Great Depression level of unemployment among young African American males as a real loss of wealth among the African American middle class. Then there’s the fact most church-going African Americans don’t attend Black Liberation churches. That’s the most problematic as with gay marriage concerns morality and Team O can’t dimiss African Americans who don’t support it – racists. Team O knows that it was the African American pastors who got together with the Mormons in California to shoot down Prop 8 in the same election where Obama carried the African American vote as well as California.
Obama cannot win re-election without the African American vote. Besides his skin color, what reason has he given to them to vote for him in November?
May 10th, 2012 | 11:51 am
David Nickol,
As I said in my comment, I think it is a waste of time for me to argue with someone who has an entirely different view of reality than I do.
I think you and others posting here provide excellent examples of how your side thinks. On that basis I think you and the rest of the seminar provide value.
That said, Blake is more apt to engage your arguments and I learn a lot from Blake. But even Blake is not changing the opinion of any of his opponents; rather he’s explaining how their rhetorical sleights of hand work. I have shared his comments with friends in town who find themselves flatfooted at times in this debate. And so once again, I urge all of you to keeping commenting.
May 10th, 2012 | 12:04 pm
David Nickol
That the complementarity of the sexes refers to anything other than procreation I find difficult to comprehend.
The quotation from the Catechism of 1912 appears at variance with St Augustine’s Literal Commentary on Genesis (IX 5), in which the learned author, having observed how much more suitable a male friend would have been for company and conversation [Quanto enim congruentius ad convivendum et colloquendum duo amici pariter quam vir et mulier habitarent?] says, “I cannot think of any reason for a woman’s being made as the man’s helper, if we dismiss this reason of childbearing.”[Quapropter non invenio ad quod adiutorium facta sit mulier viro, si pariendi causa subtrahitur.]
In an earleir passage in the same work (III.22) St Augustine insists that, in the order of grace, “the woman too, who is female in the body, she too is being renewed in the spirit of her mind, where there is neither male nor female, to the recognition of God according to the image of him who created her (Rom 12:2, Eph 4:23, Col 3:10, Gal 3:28). Women, after all, are not excluded from this grace of renewal and the refashioning of God’s image…” which, again, does not sit well with the notion of complementarity, in any sense other than the physical. Both as a Christian and a Platonist, St Augustine insists, throughout his works that there is no distinction of sex in the mind or spirit (mens, animus).
As for the 1912 Catechism, as Pascal well observes, ““If the ancient Church was in error, the Church is fallen. If she should be in error to-day, it is not the same thing; for she has always the superior maxims of Tradition from the hand of the ancient Church; and so this submission and this conformity to the ancient Church prevails and corrects all.”
May 10th, 2012 | 12:10 pm
“My question really is about the concept of the complementarity of the sexes. It seems to me it is a purely biological notion. Setting aside reproduction and sexual intercourse altogether,”
But why would you do that? How can you meaningfully address human sexuality while excluding a fundamental aspect of what it means to be human? We ARE biological creatures who engage in intercourse and reproduction just as we ARE spirit.
“Setting aside the laws of physics, why can’t we apparate with wands?”
May 10th, 2012 | 12:15 pm
This was once the teaching of the Catholic Church. But it’s still its teaching today, too.
Richard M,
Thanks. I believe you are correct, and Catholic thought sees sexual complementarity as more than a biological matter. But what no one has ever succeeded in explaining to me is what are those things that men have that women lack, and women have that men lack, that make a male-female pair complete? It seems to me to assert the complementarity of the sexes, it must be that all men have qualities that allwomen lack, and all women have qualities that all men lack. When it comes to reproduction, we know that this is true. Or at least we know that, while not every male-female pair is capable of reproduction, only male-female pairs can reproduce and no male-male or female-female pair can reproduce. But for all aspects of relationships besides the sexual ones, what are the complementary characteristics that all men (but no women) have, and all women (but no men) have?
May 10th, 2012 | 12:16 pm
Mrs. Jackson,
Thank you for that excellent response to my comment. I can’t do the number crunching myself, but to your point the question is what percentage of the black vote does Obama need to win re-election? I think in 2008 he had over 90%. If that fell to 80% would that lose him the election? Would 75% do it? I don’t know the answer, but if his support among black voters would have to fall below 75% to be decisive, then I don’t think he has much to worry about. If 5-7% drop would prove decisive then perhaps he does have something to worry about with regard to his comments yesterday.
All that aside, thank you again for you comment.
May 10th, 2012 | 12:34 pm
Here, a very good article about the question of “redifinition” of the supposed traditional marriage:
http://bleedingheartlibertarians.com/2012/05/victory-through-lexicography/
Enjoy.
May 10th, 2012 | 12:47 pm
is there anything that remains to older notions of the complementarity of the sexes? Is the husband the head and leader of the household? Should a wife be “submissive” to her husband?
Yes, there is something to older notions of the complimentarity of the sexes – and just for the record, the most “traditional” families I know are mutually submissive; the woman is “submissive” to the husband in his areas but she has her own authority in her areas.
I actually came to believe this is why we imagine God as male even as most people insist God has no particular gender and/or “has both genders” in him. A woman simply can’t be a patriarch – a much-maligned term, but there are times when we want what only a patriarch can give us; we don’t want a “partner” or a “friend” but a husband, a protector, a man, a father – things that we tried to argue were merely social constructs, except that all attempts to make them into social constructs have failed – because it turns out that being male or female is not just a bunch of behavioral choices, but also is implied in things like how our chemistry operates and how our brains are structured, and I think there’s also something to the reality that men separate from mothers in a way that women do not necessarily separate from fathers, because these relationships are different (though I do not think we yet have the information we need to really understand these relationships – and won’t until we start studying these questions with open minds, instead of pre-determined desired outcomes and political agendas).
Likewise, I don’t think men can be mothers. Men can be nurturing, but only in their own way. I am always amused at the film “Birdcage” because apparently the filmmakers see, and expect us to see, something maternal in Albert (“He’s practically a breast”) – when in fact, despite having a character that is practically nonexistent apart from its parody of females, he really isn’t maternal in substance, only in that he parodies maternal gestures. He admires the sleeping boy and he makes a fuss over what to serve for dinner, but he is oblivious to basic questions of the child’s well-being; the mother shows more of the distinctly “feminine” type of concern for Val’s well-being in five minutes onscreen than Albert does in the whole movie. And I absolutely believe that’s related to scientific studies showing that men and women respond differently to a baby being thrown up in the air: women show more anxiety and more sense of attachment to the baby. These are real things, and they’re not irrelevant.
To have two men is like having an organism with two heads and no heart, or two hearts and no head. I don’t mean to make any statement about men as more “rational” or anything, only that a family is like an organism, and families segregated to use and then expel the females are not healthy; females have a role to play within a family.
Gay marriage is based upon an ideal that says sexual pleasure is the primary thing a marriage is based on. I don’t believe that, and that is the basic reason why we differ on the issue of gay marriage. I think of social units as entities that support us and enable us to flourish. Families are the best social unit precisely because biology is not a choice – a family is strong precisely because my mother stays my mother no matter how I feel about her, and I continue to have certain obligations to my mother just because she’s my mother.
Or, to put it another way, a man can show up on my doorstep or call me and say “I am part of your family tree and I am researching my genealogy”, and I feel compelled to at least be polite to him: his reason for being here is legitimate, and most people would think I should cooperate, but even those who don’t think I should recognize the legitimacy of his being here. You can’t do that if your “relationship” to someone isn’t biological. You can’t show up on someone’s door and say “I am related to your kin” and then it comes out that the “relationship” isn’t a real biological tie. You’re wasting that person’s time. Family is a thing, it’s real, you can ignore it or try to wish it away but I’m not obliged to do any such thing.
If we recognize family as the social unit, then marriage has a role to play above and beyond merely celebrating the sexual feelings of lovers. The idea that marriage is “just” about love is only really going to be compatible with the idea that government is our basic social units – the idea of “liberating” people from family – because that’s essentially what gay marriage does: it “liberates” people from the obligations that come with things like how, if you’re going to make a baby with a woman, you have a certain obligation toward that woman. And toward the baby.
Sexual complimentariness was expressed in the 18th century in terms that didn’t even require men and women to like each other. They didn’t spend time together. Men went to pubs and women visited each other at home, and this was considered normal (because, after all, what do men and women have in common?). In affluent households they’d go so far as to split up into different rooms after dinner. But I read somewhere once that nature opted to make us efficient, not fair – how true it is; whether it “had” to be this way or not, whether we evolved or were created, we are designed in such a way that men are better at some things and women are better at other things. I don’t mean to imply that all women are good at “girl things” or that I want women to go back into the kitchen and be barefoot and pregnant (I think the technological advances of the 20th century have enabled a world where we can do much better than that, and both men and women can and should pursue productive pursuits outside of the domestic sphere), but I do think that the reason why gay marriages are statistically more likely to break up than hetero ones is because the feelings of pleasure one gets when one has sex are not what defines sexual complimentarity, and are not going to sustain a marriage. Sexual pleasure granted too much weight actually destroys a marriage, because most of marriage and family is about a bunch of people working together to ensure the flourishing of both the social unit and the people within it, and if pleasures can’t be kept in their place those pleasures will destroy the social unit. And by “in their place” I mean precisely the point where one person’s pleasure comes into conflict with the rights, needs, obligations, and so on, of the other individuals and/or the social unit as a whole.
May 10th, 2012 | 12:58 pm
It seems to me to assert the complementarity of the sexes, it must be that all men have qualities that allwomen lack, and all women have qualities that all men lack.
Science is piling up quite a bit of evidence that men and women think and process information differently, communicate differently, parent differently, nurture differently, relate to others differently, and so on.
Of course it’s been established that their brains differ in structure, and their chemistry is different.
And of course it’s been established that father-daughter relationships are not the same as mother-daughter relationships. It’s also been established that father-son relationships are different than mother-son relationships. (This isn’t just a point about parenting: all men and all women were first sons and daughters).
I wonder if you ever read <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Motherless-Daughters-Legacy-Second-Edition/dp/0738210269/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1336668942&sr=8-1"the book I recommended awhile back? There is reason to believe that girls are seriously affected when they have no mother for reasons that have to do with specifically mother-daughter issues. There are a host of other books about sons missing fathers. Same-sex relationships matter. And yet, mother-daughter relationships are not the same as father-son relationships.
To argue that genders are interchangeable is simply unsustainable. There is too much evidence – and the quality of the evidence is much higher than the stuff gay rights activists like to try to pawn off as “proof” that kids aren’t harmed by the way they’re treated by gays and lesbians.
But evidence is not enough, when people simply don’t want a thing to be so.
May 10th, 2012 | 1:06 pm
Sergio Mendez,
Thank you for posting that link.
I think everyone here not part of the gay seminar should read that post as an example of what happens when your side tries to argue on our terms. It’s contrived, confused, and as such no one will stick with it beyond a few paragraphs.
Another point I’d raise to folks on my side: using the term “traditional marriage” is as bad as using the term “gay marriage.” Both concede the point that SSM is a kind of marriage. It has nothing to do with marriage. Just say “marriage.” Only say “marriage.” The debate is whether or not the government should redefine marriage.
May 10th, 2012 | 1:06 pm
Let me grant for the sake of argument that sexual activity between two men or two women is immoral for the reasons the Catholic Church says it to be. I see no reason why it would not be the case that the perfect companion, “soulmate,” or whatever you want to call it for a man might not be another man, or for a woman might not be another woman.
But how does that differ from friendship?
But when a man marries a woman, they are more than just friends. They are kin. They join two families in marriage, and they consummate the marriage with the act that is designed to continue the growth of the family.
Gays argue on the one hand that marriage “is not about procreation”, but it is clear that they are trying to copy this pattern and pass it off as if that is what gay marriage is to be like. But it’s counterfeit, it’s based on lying – and on forcing others to lie. The contradiction makes no sense to me; I can only find a few possible explanations, and all of them are unflattering (are they lacking in self-awareness, trying to fix the hole in their heart through gestures that are doomed to fail? Or are they politically cynical, and really out to sabotage the entire idea of marriage and family unit once they have won the “right” to have their vision of family imposed upon everyone else?)
May 10th, 2012 | 1:10 pm
I have shared his comments with friends in town who find themselves flatfooted at times in this debate. And so once again, I urge all of you to keeping commenting.
Thank you for the compliment. Really what I am trying to do is discover the truth. I look for others to tell me where I am wrong. I find it frustrating when they simply evade the core questions.
I’d like to hope my own arguments have improved somewhat over time. Oddly enough, I find my family life improves as I think about what it means to be part of a family and to have reciprocal obligations. It turns out I am a selfish jerk :( but then some of you have been saying that for a long time ;>
May 10th, 2012 | 1:25 pm
Blake,
I’d like to hope my own arguments have improved somewhat over time. Oddly enough, I find my family life improves as I think about what it means to be part of a family and to have reciprocal obligations. It turns out I am a selfish jerk :( but then some of you have been saying that for a long time
This is tremendous! In a way it reminds me of the man who said “Anyone who believes in the total depravity of man can’t be all bad.”
By the way, I Emailed one of your comments to a friend this morning who was wrestling with a point you made (and who hosts a talk radio show in one of our nation’s largest metro areas). I said “this guy is smarter than me on the debate, but he’s more philosophical about it.”
May 10th, 2012 | 1:31 pm
Blake,
You don’t by chance use the screen name Hardcastle anywhere, do you?
May 10th, 2012 | 1:35 pm
Douglas:
Excuse me, but I think the article I posted is very clear, whatever your position regarding it is. What is contrived and confused about it? Could you actually cite examples or specific points? I think, anyways, the debate is not if the goverment can define marriage, but can deny some citizens the right to arrange legal unions with specific benefits or not (or in other words, grant some privilideges for some citizens, heterosexual, and deny them to others, homosexuals).
May 10th, 2012 | 1:38 pm
“Catholic thought sees sexual complementarity as more than a biological matter”
Yes, if you exclude the Fathers
May 10th, 2012 | 2:30 pm
[...] appreciated the way that Matthew Schmitz’s blog post on First Things articulated the fundamental question behind the debate about gay marriage. “Beneath this [...]
May 10th, 2012 | 2:31 pm
Good thing we’re protecting marriage from Gays, now who’s going to protect it from Congress?
http://blogs.lawyers.com/2012/05/couple-considers-divorce-to-keep-disability-checks-coming/
May 10th, 2012 | 2:51 pm
To Douglas Johnson,
Two of the comments you critiqued in your post (at 10:35 am) were mine, so I’m going to reply to you on those.
You wrote:
“Here the reader suggests the government isn’t redefining marriage; marriage has always meant “gay marriage.” By “coming out” for gay marriage (or reaffirming support) neither Obama nor anyone else need choose between “marriage” and “gay marriage” because they are in fact the same things. The distinction is as false as distinguishing between “citizens” and “gay citizens”; a distinction without a material difference.”
I reply: Not quite. You add something to my comment that is not mine. My comment does not addressed how culture has ALWAYS seen marriage; that is your idea. My comment only asserts that the distinction is false an immaterial. A same-sex marriage is functionally indistinguishable from any intentionally childless marriages; whatever distinction “remains” is immaterial.
You wrote:
“Here the reader suggests that sexual complementarity refers to sexual pleasure: “sexual complementarity”: voluntary compatible sexual needs and fulfillment. Two heterosexual persons of the same gender lack “sexual complementarity” because their sexual needs and fulfillment cannot come from each other voluntarily. Two homosexual persons of opposite gender similarly lack “sexual complementarity”. It’s pretty straight-forward.”
I reply. No; again you invent an emphasis that my comment actually lacked. Sexual pleasure is an element of complementarity in any event (hetero- or homosexually), but my definition did not refer to that. The expression I used is “needs and fulfillment” which is broad and includes concepts like companionship, intimacy, love, safety, reproduction. Any given couple has it’s own basis for complementarity. I did not narrow the scope of that.
May 10th, 2012 | 3:00 pm
But evidence is not enough, when people simply don’t want a thing to be so.
Blake,
I am still looking for exactly what (setting aside the obvious biological differences) every man has that no woman has, and every woman has that no man has. Saying men can’t be mothers and women can’t be fathers, or saying men and women think differently, does not help. Also, answers along the lines of “men tend to do better at” (math, science, spatial perception) don’t define what every man has that no woman has, and what every woman has that no man has. If men tend to be better at math, there are nevertheless many women who are better at math than most men. If a woman who is poor at math wants a husband who complements her by having good math skills, not just any man will do. The man she falls in love with may be worse at math than she is.
So I am looking for the qualities or traits that every man has and the deficits that every woman has (and the other way around for both) so that every man is complementary to every woman and vice versa.
In brief, I am looking for someone to name the complementary qualities of men and women.
May 10th, 2012 | 3:19 pm
There is a common fallacy I’m seeing here: that any cognizable difference can be the basis of different legal treatment; this is false. If it were true, differences in gender, race, or religion would justify legal discriminations by the State.
Michael PS wrote (regarding a David Nickol comment) that, “If some male-female couples do not breed, it is for reasons peculiar to them, subjective (advanced age, pathologic infertility, choice not to have children); same-sex couples cannot procreate together due to objective incapacity. The difference in situation justifies the difference in treatment, namely access to marriage.” (quoting an Alain Mirkovic)
The difference in situation justifies the difference in treatment only if it’s a material difference. In this case, the difference is immaterial. If some couple cannot reproduce due to an “objective incapacity” why does the gender of the couple make a difference? Are brown cows materially different under the law from black cows? Why is a same-sex couple materially different from a different-sex couple if they are the same in every other significant respect?
Blake wrote similarly: “there is a categorical difference between an infertile individual vs. a fertile individual who wishes to participate in an infertile coupling.” Likewise there is a categorical difference between a red-hair person and a blond person, but this categorical difference is not and should not be legally significant. Why is this categorical difference legally significant?
Blake also wrote that, “Science is piling up quite a bit of evidence that men and women think and process information differently, communicate differently, parent differently, nurture differently, relate to others differently, and so on. Of course it’s been established that their brains differ in structure, and their chemistry is different.” As before: from a legal standpoint: so what?
In another place Blake wrote that “infertile people as a class have never demanded that we grant them a right to have adultery recognized and condoned.” Neither do same-sex couples. They demand to be treated equally; nothing more. Nothing more is needed. State recognition of a marriage is not condoning: it’s merely recognition that it exists.
Blake continued: “infertile couples are not inherently in conflict with the “child’s best interest” standard. Gay couples are. Gay couples … require that their children forgo the experience of having a father or mother”. This is nonsense. If same-sex couples marry and have children by any means, then those children are as likely to be well cared for as any other children. If the couple never has children, no children’s welfare is affected at all.
May 10th, 2012 | 3:25 pm
Douglas Johnson,
per:
“but to your point the question is what percentage of the black vote does Obama need to win re-election? I think in 2008 he had over 90%. If that fell to 80% would that lose him the election? Would 75% do it? I don’t know the answer, but if his support among black voters would have to fall below 75% to be decisive, then I don’t think he has much to worry about. If 5-7% drop would prove decisive then perhaps he does have something to worry about with regard to his comments yesterday.”
In 2012 it’s not so much how much of the black vote will go for Obama but how many will turn out. In 2008 there was record turnout for Obama among black voters – something like 14% as opposed to 11%
Obama doesn’t have to worry about losing the black support or blacks suddenly voting Republicans, his worry is much more simple : He has to worry about a 3-5% decline in turnout on Election Day.
Again the question becomes what reason is he giving blacks to vote for him besides his skin color?
May 10th, 2012 | 3:36 pm
Wow I guess I didn’t realize just how differently we saw the world. This is a debate between those who would serve their Creator and those who serve Creation. Following Mr. Johnson’s example I’ll eschew responding to any arguments I deem silly.
Since all the cool kids are doing it, I’ll use a quote too: “Almighty God created the races white, black, yellow, malay and red, and he placed them on separate continents. And but for the interference with his arrangement there would be no cause for such marriages. The fact that he separated the races shows that he did not intend for the races to mix.”
- Leon M. Bazile, judge in the case leading to SCOTUS hearing Loving v. Virginia
On harm to children: one could argue that a child born to interracial parents will come to harm because they could face race-based rejection, not directly identifying with either of their parents or those parents families. Personally, I see this argument as equally ridiculous as the argument against two mothers or fathers. But let’s look at the morality of having children in the first place. If we consider the avoidance of harm or suffering (even potential suffering) to be good, and we don’t count pleasure missed by the nonexistent as harm (they are nonexistent so they cannot experience harm) then we should argue against the creation of any children at all, since they will inevitably add in one way or another to the total amount of suffering in the world. So basically the continuation of human existence depends on the preservation of marriage rights for gays.
I’m sure you philosophers will have a good time tearing that apart.
I’ll leave you with two links of my own. Take them for what you will:
http://www.unassistedchildbirth.com/misc-articles/milkmen-fathers-who-breastfeed
http://www.amazon.com/My-Two-Moms-Lessons-Strength/dp/1592407137
May 10th, 2012 | 3:59 pm
Blake,
You addressed the question raised by this fellow earlier, but I thought I’d highlight another point about it:
I reply: Not quite. You add something to my comment that is not mine. My comment does not addressed how culture has ALWAYS seen marriage; that is your idea. My comment only asserts that the distinction is false an immaterial. A same-sex marriage is functionally indistinguishable from any intentionally childless marriages; whatever distinction “remains” is immaterial.
Notice his last sentence. Since some married couples don’t have children, then the government should use that as the new standard–the new ideal–around which marriage should be redefined.
Look how well what he wrote ties in with what Eve Tushnet (who is gay) wrote on her blog:
And finally, unlike easy divorce, same-sex marriage would change the fundamental ideal of marriage. Even the most ardent defenders of divorce today view it as a necessary evil, a response to the tragedy of marriage failure. Same-sex marriage by contrast, would say that the ideal marriage is gender neutral – not a way for boys to become men by marrying and pledging to care for women. It would say that the ideal marriage includes children only when they have been specially planned and chosen – children would become optional extras rather than the natural fruit and symbol of the spouses union. It would say that the ideal family need not include a father – a message that is especially pernicious in a country where one-third of births in 2000 were to unwed mothers. And it would say (because who can imagine that most homosexual couples would wed?) that marriage itself is optional, not the norm – that marriage is for heroes, and since you and I aren’t heroic, we must not be called to marry. Any one of these changes would be destructive. Put together, they are a recipe for disaster, a recipe for revisiting and surpassing the harm done to families by the “sexual revolution.”
May 10th, 2012 | 4:38 pm
Sean Samus
“If some couple cannot reproduce due to an “objective incapacity” why does the gender of the couple make a difference?”
But what creates the “objective incapacity” of same-sex couples is precisely that they are of the same sex. It is implicit in the description “of the same sex” that such couples are infertile.
That is what distinguishes their case from cases of subjective incapacity, and Merkovic gave examples of these, “advanced age, pathologic infertility, choice not to have children.” These are conditions peculiar to individuals, not the characteristics of opposite-sex couples as a class.
In fact, “infertile couples” do not form a readily identifiable class at all. Each case would have to be examined individually, a process that would be burdensome, expensive, intrusive and litigious; some conditions that, in the past, were irremediable are now treatable and it would be a bold legislator who attempted to anticipate advances in reproductive medicine and assisted reproduction.
Laws are enacted for the general case and anomalies are the price that legislators pay for simplicity and certainty.
May 10th, 2012 | 5:35 pm
Catholics in the United States, it seems to me, recognize some kinds of “real” marriages as well as some kinds of “false” ones. Sacramental marriage (the indissoluble union of a baptized man and woman) is the highest form. Next would be natural marriage (the indissoluble union of a man and a woman, one or both of whom are not baptized), and civil marriage, the legal union of a man and woman.
Those in civil (legal) marriages may or may not be in sacramental or natural marriages. Given the rate of divorce and remarriage, very roughly half of people who are civilly married have been previously married and are divorced. So in the eyes of the Church, about half the time, civil marriage unites a man and a woman in adultery, because they cannot contract a second sacramental or natural marriage.
I wonder why it is that—with half of all civilly married people actually not “really” being married at all (in the eyes of the Church) and living in adultery—it is so vital to make sure that perhaps 2% to 4% of the population have no right to civil marriage. In the eyes of the Church, the very small number of same-sex couples who get married would be committing something like homosexual fornication, which is of course sinful in the eyes of the Church, but the divorced and remarried are actually committing adultery—an offense against marriage itself.
Then, of course, in the United States there is a 50% divorce rate. Approximately 40 percent of children are born out of wedlock. Of mothers with two or more children, 28% of them have children by two or more fathers. Given these and other such statistics, it is difficult for me to see the prospect of a fraction of 2% to 4% percent of gay people entering into same-sex marriage as much of a threat to anything. Yet it seems to me that many people would rank same-sex marriage as a greater threat to marriage and the family than a 50% divorce rate or a 40% illegitimacy rate or a 28% rate of women with children by two different fathers.
May 10th, 2012 | 10:20 pm
No argument, however clever, will defeat the growing acceptance of homosexuality and gay marriage.
Arguments crumble in the face of experience. Once people meet gay couples that love each other enduringly and well, and once they meet gay families that are healthy and happy, arguments crumble. People are left with a simple decision—love and accept gay couples and families or reject them.
And so, with each generation, we see more and more individuals accepting gays, gay couples, and gay families.
Institutions like churches and governments, meanwhile, have another simple decision—accept and include gay couples and families or reject and exclude them. And so you see even the Roman Church softening its stance a little bit at a time. Remember the revolt against the new catechism become it was too soft on its stance against homosexuality? Remember when the debate concerned insurance benefits and civil unions?
The big lie is that the acceptance of homosexuality and gay marriage is some grand innovation.
The truth revealed by history is that gays have always been among us and have always established relationships insofar as they were able. Does anyone really want to return to previous eras when men married without loving their wives and women married without loving their husbands?
The truth revealed by Scripture is that marriage is about ending finding that other part of yourself, a part so intimate that Genesis describes your partner as being of one flesh, separated at the point of creation. Genesis goes on to explain that your intimacy with your partner is so strong that you are willing to separate yourself from the family you were born into. Only then does Genesis mention the creation of children.
Remember that Genesis describes the creation of the sexes as a means not to create children but to end loneliness.
It’s odd to hear Christian conservatives make utilitarian arguments in favor of so-called traditional marriage. They turn marriage into a set of laws about paternity and societal stability.
Christians would do better to remember that Jesus recalled us to the purpose of marriage as explained in Genesis. Marriage is about God’s indissoluble union of two people into one. Anyone who has seen gays in a long, committed, faithful relationship recognize that they have seen the union of separated parts that Genesis describes.
May 10th, 2012 | 11:17 pm
Douglas Jonshon:
I will like to add Eve Thusnet comment, because it is incredibly absurd (regardless if he or she is gay).
Same-sex marriage by contrast, would say that the ideal marriage is gender neutral – not a way for boys to become men by marrying and pledging to care for women.
Didn´t knew that you become men by marrying ad pledging to care for women. I guess it turns out that catholic priests and men who plan to remain single or remained single during their whole life’s were not really men. Funny coming from people who assume that manhood is some inherent reality that depends on your chromosomes. But very telling for those, like me, who think that gender is not the same than sex, or that it is a social construction (In this case, some absurd moral imperative, where one is a man when one decides to “take care” of women). Then you complain when one observes the tendency of religious conservatives of seeing marriage as a patriarchal institution.
It would say that the ideal marriage includes children only when they have been specially planned and chosen – children would become optional extras rather than the natural fruit and symbol of the spouses union.
Since when is it an obligation for married couples to procreate? And isn´t it wise to plan for such things, you know, to be sure one can actually take care for bringing into the world such creatures? That kind of irresponsible thinking about kids and procreation is, sincerely, unbelievable.
It would say that the ideal family need not include a father – a message that is especially pernicious in a country where one-third of births in 2000 were to unwed mothers.
First at all, who said that it is ideal to have a father in a family? What is inherently wrong with unwed mothers (and how Eve Thusnet knows that the father is not present raising his son just cause he is not married?). And finally, don´t you note that in a gay couple there are two persons, not one single mother or father, raising a kid?
And it would say (because who can imagine that most homosexual couples would wed?) that marriage itself is optional, not the norm – that marriage is for heroes, and since you and I aren’t heroic, we must not be called to marry. Any one of these changes would be destructive. Put together, they are a recipe for disaster, a recipe for revisiting and surpassing the harm done to families by the “sexual revolution.”
Marriage is not optional? Is Thusnet suggesting that the government should pass a law forcing us to marry? That sounds insane to me. If anything sounds like a recipe for disaster, it is clearly the idea that society or government can force individuals how to live their lifes or if they have to live married.
May 10th, 2012 | 11:44 pm
Please don’t pin this on the “gay lobby”. Such a lobby is actually very small and has too little influence to have pulled off such a coup. This is due to the straight pro-promiscuity, pro-sterility and the cause-confusion (in this case of custody, artificial procreation and the “discrimination” of refusing the positive right of affirmation)-so-the-state-can-impose-order lobbies. The former wants to attack their consciences with a strike at the historical, world-wide model they can’t or refuse to hold their relationships (or want for their relationships) up to. The latter simply wants more power. Both camps are rampant throughout much of modern liberalism and libertarianism and is encroaching into conservatism too.
May 10th, 2012 | 11:55 pm
“But what about fertile men who marry infertile women, or infertile men who marry fertile women?”
Tired tactic. The possibility of something, however small, is significantly different than the absence of something.
May 11th, 2012 | 12:05 am
Notice his last sentence. Since some married couples don’t have children, then the government should use that as the new standard–the new ideal–around which marriage should be redefined.
Some couples have relationships without love. Does that mean that love is not part of marriage?
Some couples have relationships without sex. Does that mean that sex is not part of marriage?
The key to this question is to recognize the difference between “AND” and “OR”. All of these things – family, love, sex – are part of marriage. An infertile couple does not require that we strike “family” from the definition of what marriage is.
But gay marriage does require that we either redefine marriage to exclude family-making as part of what it supports (and thus both forcing us into a position where we have to punish people for refusing to give up their beliefs, and also damaging the institution itself in that it is no longer able to give support to procreative couples) …
… OR …
… we have to change the definition of what a “family” is so that people who are not related by kinship can claim to be discriminated against if they or their social unit members are exposed to the belief that kinship units are more “family” than non-kinship units.
(Which also damages the institution, as it replaces its safeguards against adultery, exploitation of women, abandonment of children, etc. with new rules that legitimize adultery, exploitation of women, abandonment of children, etc.)
Marriage is powerful because it equalizes family members: if you are going to use a poor woman to make a baby, and you want your heir to be legitimate, you have to elevate that poor woman in status and grant that you have obligations toward her, and she has rights. That is what gay marriage wants to avoid: the intention is to keep the good parts of family, while making the obligations optional – for the affluent members of the family. While they talk of “equality”, really it is inequality that is being promoted: some family members will have the power to do all sorts of things to the family tree and to other family members, who will in turn have no voice and no role – and may be thrown out of their own family tree altogether.
It’s also worth noting that men use marriage, too. Marriage enables men to designate their intention to make an heir and it links that heir to the paternal line. Despite the best efforts of the social engineers, it remains true that a man who intends to start a family almost always marries the mother (if not beforehand, then at least after the fact); that a man who chooses to become a father is a better dad – and has a better and stronger link with his child – than a man who is being forced by paternity actions and court orders to provide support, and that a child with married parents is going to have more support, better relationships with, and better “flow of resources” from the paternal family than a child born out of wedlock. And what we should be taking away from this is not that we should do more to engineer other peoples’ family ties; what we should be taking away from this is that we should not be acting as if no harm is done when a child is born into any situation other than to married biological parents who intend to keep him. Any other situation involves loss and worse for the child.
The gay marriage debate hinges on the idea that “families come in all shapes and sizes”. But they don’t. Families come in one shape – triangular. Mother, father, child. Any other arrangement involves that this first real family be broken and rearranged – and it always comes out that for every person who gains an advantage by such rearranging, there is at least one person who experiences loss.
May 11th, 2012 | 12:07 am
An infertile couple does not require that we strike “family” from the definition of what marriage is.
BTW a gay couple would not necessarily require that we strike “family” from the definition of marriage is, either, if they accepted that children do not ever ‘have two mommies’, and that it’s wrong to force kids to participate in such a shamefully egocentric fantasy.
May 11th, 2012 | 12:10 am
The big lie is that the acceptance of homosexuality and gay marriage is some grand innovation.
The innovation is the belief that a child “can have two mommies”.
Throughout most of history, men wanted women to do the domestic work. Gay men did not feel the need to falsify genealogy so that they could pass themselves off as “the same as” a hetero family. If they wanted an heir, they married a woman – they did not feel constrained to “love” her, and they did not feel that they needed their lover to be their child’s mother.
I ask this again – I am still waiting for one of the pro-SSM to answer: if marriage “isn’t procreative”, then why can’t gay people need to pretend they are just as good at being procreative couples as heteros, right up to the point of forcing their kids to play out a fantasy that the absent men or women, fathers or mothers, are not necessary or even desirable to a healthy functioning family unit?
May 11th, 2012 | 12:43 am
It’s odd to hear Christian conservatives make utilitarian arguments in favor of so-called traditional marriage. They turn marriage into a set of laws about paternity and societal stability.
Since we have religious freedom in America, the essential question to me is “how does gay marriage impact me?”
I do not have the right to tell you how to live your life. If you want to consider yourself married, that’s your business. IMO it becomes my business only at the point where your intentions impact me – for instance, when you want to impose your definition of marriage on all of us, I lose my ability to believe that the essence of marriage is linked to the essence of family, and it’s also a strong move toward weakening the ability of families to remain cohesive (that is, it’s a strong move in favor of weakening social units relative to the government as rival social unit.)
Plus, there are questions of whether the children involved are being deprived of equality under the law – SSM requires that we recognize (even if we only recognize in language heavily laden in euphemism) that there are two types of children in America: the children who are “wanted”, who are entitled to all the rights and privileges found in family law textbooks – and children who are not wanted, who are not really entitled, but are to be grateful for anything above and beyond a life in the most miserable foster care environment.
Does it change my belief that homosexuality is wrong? Yes, I believe it is wrong, but only in the same way gluttony is wrong – and it’s not my business to go around telling people when and whether they can or can’t eat Snickers bars, or how many beers they can have before they’re the wrong sort of drunkenness. So I don’t need to defend my beliefs here. The issue at hand is whether we should legalize gay marriage, not whether gay people should or should not have sex.
May 11th, 2012 | 12:48 am
What are the qualities that men have and women lack, and vice versa? It is a question I certainly can’t answer.
I recommend you find a lesbian and ask her why she has to love a woman, and can’t love a man.
Or ask a gay man why it has to be a guy, and can’t be a woman.
Of course, if it is true that men and women are interchangeable, they won’t be able to answer the question.
But I suspect they will agree with me that there are in fact differences between men and women, and those differences are not irrelevant; their real argument isn’t really that men and women “are the same”, so much as that they are the creators and benefactors and therefore these kids they have created and/or that they are caring for should be grateful for what they do get, even if it isn’t perfect – after all, aren’t there other kids who have even less? (If there are kids starving in Africa, then who are you to complain if I don’t feed my kids enough to make their tummies full – when at least I feed them something, right?)
May 11th, 2012 | 12:59 am
On harm to children: one could argue that a child born to interracial parents will come to harm because they could face race-based rejection, not directly identifying with either of their parents or those parents families.
That argument was put forward, but it was rejected because there has never been a time in the USA when we really believed it.
Bans on interracial marriage have always been specific to blacks, and have had features such as banning blacks even when they’re almost entirely white (“one drop”). At the same time, the same group of people who insisted that blacks were separate races also had a long history of interbreeding with them.
The argument was rejected as being without merit. If the ban on interracial marriage had in fact covered all races – making it a crime for a Hispanic to marry a Jew – that would suggest that we really do value “racial purity”, and the argument would be entirely different (how it would turn out depends entirely upon how you weight the assumptions, since we are now into the realm of the completely hypothetical). I would be interested in seeing whether orthodox Jews have been forced against their will to recognize and accept marriages of their members to non-Jews.
May 11th, 2012 | 3:45 am
Michael wrote
“It’s odd to hear Christian conservatives make utilitarian arguments in favor of so-called traditional marriage. They turn marriage into a set of laws about paternity and societal stability.”
But we are talking about civil marriage, which is, precisely, a set of laws about paternity and societal stability and nothing else.
Surely, no-one will deny that the state has a clear interest in the filiation of children being clear, certain and incontestable. It is central to its concern for the upbringing and welfare of the child, for protecting rights and enforcing obligations between family members and to the orderly succession to property. To date, no better, simpler, less intrusive means than mandatory civil marriage have been found for ensuring, as far as possible, that the legal, biological and social realities of paternity coincide. And that is no small thing. It is also quite irrelevant to same-sex couples.
As for Michael’s exegesis of Genesis, it is not unworthy of remark that, amidst the manifold ritual provisions made by the Divine Lawgiver of the Jews for the various offices and transactions of life, there is no ceremony prescribed for the celebration of marriage.
May 11th, 2012 | 5:52 am
David Nickol
It is very easy to see what does or does not constitute a “real marriage,” by looking at the only element that is common to all jurisprudence, ancient and modern, that employs the term. As much as they may differ in the incidents of marriage, its formation and dissolution, the number of wives that a man may have, it is a universal rule that the child conceived or born in marriage has the husband for father.
Catholics are being quite consistent in applying the term to the unions of the remarried divorced, where this universal element has a rôle to play, whilst refusing it to the unions of same-sex couples, to which it has no application.
That is why, in Europe, some jurists have argued that in Belgium and the Netherlands, where the rule is confined to opposite-sex couples, they have conceded the name, but not the substance of marriage to same-sex couples, with obvious implications for the international recognition of such “marriages.”
May 11th, 2012 | 9:32 am
I recommend you find a lesbian and ask her why she has to love a woman, and can’t love a man.
Or ask a gay man why it has to be a guy, and can’t be a woman.
Blake,
I have to say, this is a totally bizarre response. First, no one is arguing that there are not differences between men and women. Second, why would it be necessary or even desirable to quiz a lesbian or a gay man about those differences. Why not a straight man or woman. We’re talking about an alleged “complementarity of the sexes.” If there is such a thing, it would be straight couples to whom it would be most important. Men and women would form couples because of complementarity. Gay couples would form in spite of complementarity.
Also, men and women could be different in may ways without being complementary.
Jack Sprat could eat no fat.
His wife could eat no lean.
And so between them both, you see,
They licked the platter clean.
Jack Sprat and his wife are complementary, but what if Jack Sprat could eat no fat and his wife loved well marbled meat? Or she was a vegetarian.
It looks very much like no one can come up with differences between men and women, aside from the obvious physical ones, that make men and women complementary. Certainly no one in past discussions has ever done so. It seems very much to me that the complementarity of the sexes is an outmoded concept dating to times when men were supposed to be breadwinners and women were supposed to be homemakers, when men voted and women didn’t, where men were educated in all kinds of fields but women, if they were educated at all, learned “women’s things” (like home economics).
As I have said, if by the complementarity of the sexes is meant that only a male and female pair can reproduce, then who could disagree. Obviously it is of tremendous importance, and no one would claim that when it came to reproduction, gender made no difference. But as for non-sexual relationships, or sexual relationships where no reproduction is expected, intended, or sought, the complementarity of the sexes seems to have no identifiable meaning.
May 11th, 2012 | 10:05 am
Charles writes:
Please don’t pin this on the “gay lobby”. Such a lobby is actually very small and has too little influence to have pulled off such a coup. This is due to the straight pro-promiscuity, pro-sterility…
This is key if we are to understand who we are debating and what we are talking about.
The contraception culture, abortion, and the redefinition of marriage all make the same demand: the separation of sex from procreation.
The average male college student who just wants to sleep with as many of his female classmates as possible and is blissfully happy with an environment where women want the same thing, intuitively knows that the redefinition of marriage is for him even if he’s completely incapable of explaining why.
Here’s the thing: He doesn’t want sex that brings new life with life-changing consequences and responsibilities. What he wants is gay sex.
No, he doesn’t want to sleep with a man, he just wants a world where he is completely free to behave exactly as he wants without the consequence of new life. He wants a world where conception is rare (contraception), and where it’s remedy is widely available and culturally sanctified (abortion).
And yet the remaining threat was marriage–that looming institution where his Sandra Fluke utopia comes to an end and the sex he wants is inextricably tied to the responsibilities of creating new life. But then along comes a movement to redefine marriage. The redefinition only demands one thing: the cultural severing of marriage from having anything in particular to do with the creation of new life.
After a generation of this our confused college student rolls over in bed one morning and asks his Fluke-du-jour “Hey, what did people used to get married for anyway?”
“I don’t know,” she says with a giggle. He’s in heaven.
(By the way, I saw a tweet once that captured all of this perfectly and with plenty of characters to spare: “I’m against marriage in general, but I support gay marriage.” Just. perfect.)
May 11th, 2012 | 10:12 am
Catholics are being quite consistent in applying the term to the unions of the remarried divorced, where this universal element has a rôle to play, whilst refusing it to the unions of same-sex couples, to which it has no application.
Michael PS,
I certainly understand the argument that—for those who feel marriage was ultimately ordained by God—marriage can only be between a man and a woman. My point, though, is that for Catholics, the divorced are no more capable of getting married than same-sex couples. If civil marriage is to be brought into line with the Catholic idea of marriage, then civil law must permit no remarriage after divorce.
I think you and I have touched on this before: Does anyone deny that in jurisdictions where same-sex marriage is legal, same-sex couples who take advantage of the law and legally marry are not legally married? One might argue that the civil law is out of step with God’s law in permitting civil same-sex marriage. But one might also argue that civil law is out of step with God’s law in permitting divorce and remarriage. Could US law tolerate Catholics refusing to recognize the legal rights of legally remarried divorced individuals? I really don’t think so. It is the legality of the marriage that counts before the law. So while I understand that Catholics want to see legal marriage and “Catholic marriage” be brought into conformity, they are actually quite different. Catholics seem to have no problem accepting the legal marriages of those who are not “really” married. (I am talking here about everyday situations in, say, a Catholic organization hiring workers for nonreligious jobs, and providing spousal benefits.)
it is a universal rule that the child conceived or born in marriage has the husband for father.
It may be a good rule, or it may have been a good rule that has outlived its usefulness now that it is extremely easy to determine paternity. I can’t see how Blake could stand for this, since if a married woman has an affair with someone other than her husband and a child is conceived, the law that recognizes the woman’s husband as the father instead of recognizing the true biological father is a legal lie.
May 11th, 2012 | 10:14 am
David Nickol,
I thing you should run with this. Call in every radio show you can. Become a pamphleteer. Get yourself on television. Keep the message short and sweet: We must redefine marriage because there is no significant difference between men and women.
If I had the means I’d write the check to make it happen.
May 11th, 2012 | 10:39 am
We must redefine marriage because there is no significant difference between men and women.
Douglas Johnson,
But that is not my message at all! Of course there are significant differences between men and woman. I am raising the question—which no one seems to want to answer—as to (1) whether those differences extend beyond to obvious biological differences (which I acknowledge are very important), and if they do, (2) whether those differences make men and women complementary.
It seems to me that one need not believe that—aside from the obvious biological differences—it is necessary to maintain that men and women are complementary in order to oppose same-sex marriage. It seems that for the anti-same-sex marriage argument, the “complementarity” of reproduction should be sufficient. However, I take it that those who oppose same-sex marriage are making as their argument against it some kind of complementarity that goes beyond the biological. There are qualities or traits that all men have that no women do, and vice versa, which mean that, setting sex and reproduction aside, a same-sex couple can’t have a marriage-like relationship.
Forget about same-sex marriage. Answer the question as to how, in a heterosexual marriage, men and women are complementary.
May 11th, 2012 | 10:41 am
thank you, Douglas Johnson, thank you:
“After a generation of this our confused college student rolls over in bed one morning and asks his Fluke-du-jour “Hey, what did people used to get married for anyway?”
This is the future I see when marriage is redefined to include same sex “marriage”. An already weakened and damaged institution continues to be chipped away, its meaning blurred and obfuscated. This redefinition is not so much a threat to my own marriage (the usual question thrown out to opponents of gay “marriage”), but then I was married 30 years ago in a society that understood and supported the institution. It is future generations—my children and grandchildren—whose understanding of marriage is under threat, and that then threatens their society and civilization. Marriage and family are basic institutions, and I think our tinkering will be disastrous.
May 11th, 2012 | 10:55 am
Here’s the thing: He doesn’t want sex that brings new life with life-changing consequences and responsibilities. What he wants is gay sex.
Douglas Johnson,
The wish to have sex without consequences goes back millennia, whereas the concept of “gay people” is a very recent development. Your attempt to brand all selfish sex as “gay sex” only serves to vilify gay people. The idea that heterosexual couples who use contraception are having “gay sex” is pure nonsense.
May 11th, 2012 | 11:52 am
Note that Romney also opposes civil unions that are “identical to marriage.” One would think if you approve of couples adopting children you would want, for the sake of the children, the couple to be in as stable and binding a union as possible.
May 11th, 2012 | 12:18 pm
Peg,
“I was married 30 years ago in a society that understood and supported the institution.”
By 1980, marriage had already been greatly transformed. The change in marriage is not due to the sweaty imaginings of the male college student, as Douglas has surmised. It was transformed largely by women who wanted better treatment and a better deal. Read nineteenth-century women’s descriptions of marriage. Read Mary Wollstonecraft from the eighteenth century. Even today, it is women, not men, who ask for divorce.
In the meantime, ask young people why they don’t believe in marriage and the answer usually reflects how bad their parents’ marriage was. And you find young people saying that not just today but going backwards through several generations now.
The shift in marriage has nothing to with homosexuality, pornography, contraception, or even no-fault divorce, any of the favorite bug-bears. The shift occurred long before any of that.
Christian morality concerning fidelity remains as relevant as ever, but the fight over gender roles, including homosexuality, has distorted the conversation.
May 11th, 2012 | 1:06 pm
David Nickol
“It may be a good rule, or it may have been a good rule that has outlived its usefulness now that it is extremely easy to determine paternity…”
Be that as it may, my point is that the rule is the only constant that applies across legal systems.
We talk, after all, of “polygamous marriages” and “monogamous marriages.” The implication is that they share some defining characteristic in common that makes the term “marriage” applicable to both. What they share is that the children of the wife or wives are accepted, without enquiry or proof, as the husband’s children, subject to his paternal authority.
Without it, the term marriage has no meaning, but a mere emotive force.
May 11th, 2012 | 3:18 pm
Forget about same-sex marriage. Answer the question as to how, in a heterosexual marriage, men and women are complementary.
It’s quite clear that no answer will be satisfactory to you, so why bother?
The real question is, why should anyone have to convince you that their belief is correct, before they have the right to believe it?
May 11th, 2012 | 3:29 pm
it is a universal rule that the child conceived or born in marriage has the husband for father.
It may be a good rule, or it may have been a good rule that has outlived its usefulness now that it is extremely easy to determine paternity.
Unfortunately, real life data completely shatters that assumption.
The evidence is more compelling than ever that kids born to married parents are better off than kids born to parents where the father has not signaled in advance his intention to make a family.
In fact, the available evidence seems to confirm that marriage serves men well in this capacity. It’s easy to see how marriage protects women from being treated as mere “gestational carriers” (remember when left wingers used to spin paranoid fantasies about how those evil Evangelicals wanted to reduce women to mere breeding stock?), and it’s easy to see how the statistics prove that children born to married couples are less likely to be abandoned by one or both parents.
But maybe – just maybe – the flip side to that is that men don’t like being forced into unwanted parenthood any more than women do?
Men signal when they are ready to make a family – and who they intend to make a family with – through the act of entering into a procreative contract (that is, marriage). It remains as safe as ever to assume that every child born within marriage is a wanted child – and every child born outside of marriage was not wanted, not intended, and probably isn’t going to be treated as well.
Which, in turn, is the basis for the gay claim that it is okay if they mistreat their children, since mistreating one’s children has become commonplace ever since the “sexual revolution” normalized out-of-wedlock birth and began the process of separating marriage from childbearing (a process that gay marriage advocates seek to finalize, as gay marriage is the ultimate separation of sex and childbearing from obligations or commitments).
You can force a man into court, and maybe even force him to pay child support, but you can’t force him to love a child he did not want – and you can’t force his extended family to recognize that child at all.
And since the obligation to pay child support has been effectively dissociated from the reciprocal rights to decision-making power, real visitation time, and real influence into and over that child’s right, it’s also safe to assume that the child is, effectively, the mother’s “pawn” in a conflict that would not even be taking place if we had maintained those supposedly useless social norms that used to prevent exactly this sort of situation from arising.
May 11th, 2012 | 3:31 pm
And since the obligation to pay child support has been effectively dissociated from the reciprocal rights to decision-making power, real visitation time, and real influence into and over that child’s right,
Mean to say “into and over that child’s life”.
May 11th, 2012 | 3:37 pm
I can’t see how Blake could stand for this, since if a married woman has an affair with someone other than her husband and a child is conceived, the law that recognizes the woman’s husband as the father instead of recognizing the true biological father is a legal lie.
That’s why adultery used to be considered a serious business.
Yet another casualty of “the sexual revolution”: the abolition of adultery laws.
Since the idea that whatever adults do is okay – no matter how it affects the children – clearly leads one to conclude that adultery is a purely private matter, and it’s wrong to judge. Just because it destroys entire families – and causes real harm to both the children and the injured spouse – what is that compared to your right to have sex the way you like, when and how you like?
May 11th, 2012 | 3:40 pm
Note that Romney also opposes civil unions that are “identical to marriage.” One would think if you approve of couples adopting children you would want, for the sake of the children, the couple to be in as stable and binding a union as possible.
It is a character flaw in Romney: he does not speak from principle, but from a desire to “have it both ways” as far as possible.
He will say whatever he thinks the voters he needs to convince want to hear – even though, in this case at least, he ends up sounding confused and incoherent.
I don’t even know if the man is conservative. I don’t know what the man is, other than an “etch a sketch”.
May 11th, 2012 | 3:56 pm
“sexual complementarity”: voluntary compatible sexual needs and fulfillment. Two heterosexual persons of the same gender lack “sexual complementarity” because their sexual needs and fulfillment cannot come from each other voluntarily. Two homosexual persons of opposite gender similarly lack “sexual complementarity”. It’s pretty straight-forward.
Very straightforward indeed, if you assume that sexual pleasure is the important thing.
But I don’t think sexual pleasure is as central as you think. Admittedly, I thought sex was very important indeed when I was in my early 20s, but I have found that as I grow older, my priorities change, and I tend to see that change as being progress rather than loss. Acts of selfishness that once seemed justified are now sources of regret. Relationships (especially those involving familial obligations) that once were taken for granted are now recognized as more fragile than originally thought.
I’ve watched older members of my family grow old and younger ones grow up. I’ve watched adopted ties break and biological ones endure. I’ve watched the effect of breakups – and, particularly heartbreaking, the effect of breakups when non-biological ties are involved; I’ve seen it happen within my own family that kids who were taught to use words like “grandma” and “grandpa” and “aunt” and “uncle” and “brother” and “sister” were abruptly informed that those people are no longer related, now that Mommy and the person formerly known as Daddy no longer love each other.
Meanwhile, my views on sex have changed, too. It seems to me that sex is important at one stage of a person’s life, and for particular reasons. This is how it should be. But I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the people I have known who are older, and are still as obsessed with sex as a twentysomething, are also people with a string of broken relationships behind them. There is a time for finding a partner and a time for making children – and then a time for growing up and focusing one’s effort on providing for those children, and for the next generation. That’s my view. I won’t ask you to live it, but I will ask you to accept that I have as much right to my view as you have to yours, and when you’re redesigning institutions, I don’t mind if you want institutions to reflect your legitimate needs, but when you’re confusing “want” with “need” – and at the same time expecting that I’ll just give up basic rights so that you can fulfill a wish-list based on your vision of how life ought to be – that’s not fair, and it’s not “equality”.
May 11th, 2012 | 3:57 pm
The wish to have sex without consequences goes back millennia, whereas the concept of “gay people” is a very recent development. Your attempt to brand all selfish sex as “gay sex”
You might want to look at where the term “gay” comes from – and what it actually means – before you say that.
The “gay nineties” weren’t about homosexuality. They were about “being gay” – that is, pleasure without obligation (of the sort that today we call “partying”).
May 11th, 2012 | 4:01 pm
It’s quite clear that no answer will be satisfactory to you, so why bother?
Blake,
Apparently no answer will have to be satisfactory, since it looks like no answer is all I am going to get.
The real question is, why should anyone have to convince you that their belief is correct, before they have the right to believe it?
People don’t have to convince me their beliefs are correct, but if we are going to have a discussion, people have to explain what they mean by the terms they use. Bobster said, “So, Molly A, what in the world does sexual complementarity mean to you?” I just want to know what people mean by sexual complementarity. I am perfectly fine with people responding, “Sexual complementarity means that it takes a male and female to reproduce.” I can’t argue with that definition. But people such as yourself seem to be implying it means more than that. If it does mean more than that, then say what it means. In times past it seems to me it meant something. Men were supposed to be fathers plus breadwinners and the authority within the family. Women were supposed to be mothers plus housewives who obeyed their husband as an authority. The husband was the provider and the “decider.” The wife was the homemaker and the “helpmeet.” Men were to be rulers, and women were to have their impact on the world by raising their boy children to be men, and being helpers to men. In this way, men and women had complementary roles. Men needed women to do the jobs that women do, and women needed men to do the jobs that men do.
If that is what people think is still true, fine. If not, someone should say so.
Basically all I have been saying is, “If you want to use the concept complementarity of the sexes, please tell us what it means.” Saying men and women are different, or men can’t be mothers and women can’t be fathers is not an answer. Let’s have some examples of how men and women are complementary.
May 11th, 2012 | 7:11 pm
David Nickol,
“The wish to have sex without consequences goes back millennia, whereas the concept of “gay people” is a very recent development.”
Indeed, but that doesn’t mean the selfish heterosexual isn’t merely using the homosexual as the public face of his own goals.
May 11th, 2012 | 8:01 pm
Basically all I have been saying is, “If you want to use the concept complementarity of the sexes, please tell us what it means.”
Then you need to be far more specific about what was wrong with the answers you’ve already been given.
If you’re looking for something specific, please don’t phrase it as a question.
May 12th, 2012 | 2:47 pm
David Nickol, I will admit that words matter and that we should understand what the words we use mean. The concept of complementarity is a plunge into some pretty deep water.
Its’ use regarding sexuality is obvious and as you have said its traditional cultural usage was obvious until recently.
The reasons for the change are many; the wealth of the developed countries, technology, reliable contraception and the ideas and mindsets that ensued from education and the explosion of the means to communicate those ideas are a few of the changes that have gotten us to where we are.
I just read of one example of where we are. Argentina, which allowed ssm a few years ago, has now ruled that a persons gender will be decided not by any societal or institutional criteria but by the person themselves. If you have been a man and now decide that you are a woman, presto, chango you’re a woman.
When I read this nothing in my life seemed to change, no rumbling of the earth and no roiling black clouds appeared on the horizon.
What I did find was an irony in your demand for an exquisitly exact definition of the word complemenarity in a world more Humpty Dumpty like ( When I say a word it means etc.)
than one that would understand your question.
My own experience, limited as it is, confirms your concession that there is a difference between men and women. It is a difference that is even touted by feminists, depending on their purpose. You know the list: if woman ran the world it would be a more peaceful, woman are more caring, more sensitive to the needs of others etc.
My list, born of experience and observation, would share some of theirs;
woman teach the habits of intimacy, of the unembarrassed touch, both emotional and physical. Woman are more sensual their bodies more open to their children. Woman teach and speak more of shared experience. Woman are power and life.
Men, while capable of some of these things, in there own way, find their strengths a step removed. Men teach of the world and of the other. Most guys don’t do this in deliberately but they do it when they wrestle with their kids or throw them up in the air and then safely bring them back to earth. It is intimate but expressed in a different way. there is a degree of exposure to danger, faux danger for sure but it hints of real danger the kind that exists in the world outside.
Men in a way are the outsider brought inside to the world of the intimacy of mothers and children. This is the real complementarity, the blending of the interior with the exterior.
May 12th, 2012 | 5:31 pm
“But even Blake is not changing the opinion of any of his opponents; rather he’s explaining how their rhetorical sleights of hand work.”
This is a key assumption in the culture wars: Your “opponents” do not engage in an honest dialogue; they rely instead on “rhetorical sleights of hand.” They don’t actually believe what they’re saying, and they don’t come out of a coherent and thoughtful tradition.
If I believed that, I wouldn’t talk to anyone at all.
“Marriage links two family trees, uniting two families into one. Gays are not kin. They can never be kin. Gay marriage is about forcing people to recognize gays as kin, and their families as the same as families based on biological kinship”
What should I call the error in this line of reasoning? Is it a “sleight of hand” or just sloppy thinking? I’m inclined toward the latter.
Outside the Hapsburgs, no one enters a marriage as “kin.” Husband and wife are made kin in the act of marrying, in the act of taking the vows and pledging their lives to each other. They are not made kin by successful procreation. They are not made kin when they consummate their marriage. They are made kin when they take the vows.
In making those vows, they separate themselves from their kin. The idea that “Marriage links two family trees, uniting two families into one” is a lovely sentiment, but it rarely works that way and the notion isn’t biblical. Genesis says, “For this reason a man shall leave his father and his mother, and be joined to his wife.” In marriage, we “leave” our families and create a new, third, family.
This new family is created because, again in the words of Genesis, we have found the other part of ourselves, the “flesh of our flesh,” a “helper,” because it is not “good for us to be alone.”
The idea that marriage is primarily about procreation makes sense if your goal is to defeat gay marriage, but the idea is unbliblical and counter-intuitive. People dream about a life-partner, not merely someone to help them raise a family. This is why attitudes toward gays have changed so dramatically. Once you see a couple making a life together, it becomes increasingly difficult to pretend that they aren’t married.
May 13th, 2012 | 2:32 pm
This is a key assumption in the culture wars: Your “opponents” do not engage in an honest dialogue; they rely instead on “rhetorical sleights of hand.”
It’s not an assumption.
It’s an observation.
The gay marriage debate relies on rhetorical tricks, and falls apart when examined honestly.
One trick: insisting that the dialog stay zoomed in close on the rights, feelings, and needs of the gay persons, and excluding everyone else. That’s dishonest. Gays aren’t the only stakeholders, but SSM supporters focus on trying to delegitimize any other stakeholder concerns.
Another trick: applying a double standard when talking about intangible and controversial entities and “rights” – is it oppressive to deny someone to have the chance to have a relationship that is part of normal human experience? Do people have the right to participate in things that society values? What about issues of identity? What about the right to live honestly, to “not live a lie”? When gays talk about what they are entitled to, they compare themselves against a perfect state. When you point out that their kids have just as much “right” to relationships, social normalcy, intact identity (integrity in self and family), and honesty in one’s personal relations, then suddenly instead of looking up to ideals for what one has a “right” to, we are told to compare that child against kids in foster homes.
That’s dishonest, too.
Here’s another one: is marriage procreative? I keep asking SSM supporters if they’d be okay with the title ‘marriage’ if it included all the life partner benefits, but excluded procreative benefits (for instance, the right to be presumed the father of your spouse’s child). Of course this is mostly ignored, but sometimes people will abruptly stop pretending marriage isn’t procreative and start demanding their right to expect people to pretend they are procreative couples, same as heterosexuals. So the question “is marriage procreative?” is yes and no – depending on whether the SSM supporter needs it to be for him to use whichever talking points he wants to use at that given moment. Marriage becomes procreative when you point out that if it isn’t procreative, there’s no reason why any child should ever have to pretend to “have two mommies”; after all, there’s no reason why the mother can’t love another woman but supply a male father for the child – if she really loves that child. But no, that’s not what you really want, is it? What SSM supporters really want is the right to legitimize adultery as a means of reproduction, and the right to be exempted from existing laws and norms that say stepparents don’t have the same rights as biological parents. Never mind why those laws and norms exist; SSM supporters are focused only on what they want (remember: no other stakeholders matter).
Or here’s another dishonest rhetorical trick: are men and women interchangeable? If there were no difference between a man and a woman, there would be no reason why a lesbian would “have” to love a female – she could in fact marry a feminine man just as easily. “As long as he’s loving, what’s the difference”, right?
SSM supporters aren’t content to settle for recognition – they want to cherry-pick which marital and familial obligations apply to them, without sacrificing any of the benefits and rights and privileges that are normally associated with those obligations. More taking and less giving for them (and who cares if that means more giving and less taking for other members of the biological family?)
That’s why they have to lie – and force their kids to live a lie. Because they’re too selfish to do what’s right for their children, and they’re too selfish to do what’s right for the mother of their child.
And btw this selfishness and this being comfortable with lying and this overweening sense of entitlement can’t be blamed on homosexuality, because a lot of SSM supporters are straight, and a lot of gay people are disgusted by the way gay rights advocates behave.
May 13th, 2012 | 8:12 pm
“The gay marriage debate relies on rhetorical tricks, and falls apart when examined honestly”
So there’s not a single person who is honest and believes in gay marriage. That’s convenient for you.
“One trick: insisting that the dialog stay zoomed in close on the rights, feelings, and needs of the gay persons, and excluding everyone else. That’s dishonest.”
That’s not a trick. That can be an assumption or a starting point. It can even be an error, but it’s only “dishonest” if the person making the argument doesn’t believe it. Unless you have your own private definition of honesty.
“What SSM supporters really want is the right to legitimize adultery as a means of reproduction”
I’ve pointed out this simple fact to you any number of times, but you blithely continue to walk past the facts. Children enter into gay families by one of three routes: (1) one of their parents becomes gay, (2) the parents adopt, or (3) one of the parents employs a surrogate.
One of your favorite tactics is to confuse these three different families. Neither #1 nor #2 legitimizes adultery, but you keep pretending adultery applies to all three. It doesn’t. Unless you have your own private definition of adultery.
I notice that you didn’t respond to my point about your error in saying that “gays are not kin.” Does that mean that you have given up on this point and are quietly hoping that no one will notice?
May 14th, 2012 | 4:35 am
Michael
You blithely state that “They are not made kin when they consummate their marriage. They are made kin when they take the vows,” as if it were an uncontested proposition, but it was the subject of an impassioned debate between the Canonists of the Bologna and Paris schools, with the Legists taking a third possession.
The consequences of that debate survive, with many jurisdictions treating non-consummation as a ground of nullity, rather than divorce.
On the notion of kinship, we have the rule of the Civil Code that the reciprocal rights of support between parents-in-law and their children-in-law cease, if the marriage terminates without issue, but are otherwise perpetual. In other words, the childless widow(er) is no longer treated as part of their deceased spouse’s family
May 14th, 2012 | 5:01 am
[...] service programs when the state commands them to act against Christian belief. In line with my advice in response to Obama’s gay marriage announcement, Ryan T. Anderson offers a stirring [...]
May 14th, 2012 | 12:28 pm
Michael PS,
Thanks for making this distinction, and I’m sorry I didn’t get to your earlier response. My attention has been divided.
The term “marriage” is used in three ways. The first sense is the reality of marriage. What did God intend by creating marriage? This reality predates all human laws.
The second sense is the legal. Marriage law largely concerns property. The concerns you routinely introduce are all about property.
The final sense is the common sense experience. When you meet a couple that behave like spouses, then they feel married regardless of whether they have the papers. In the Anglo-American tradition, common law spouses were often recognized. On the other hand, Americans find it difficult to call “marriage” the kind of relationships found in Europe in which mistresses are considered acceptable. The Roman Catholic experience in the US is actually quite Protestant in many ways, and one result of this is that we concern ourselves more with the reality of marriage. The common sense understanding of marriage is actually closer to the reality of marriage than the legal definition is.
So I’m not being as blithe as you think. I understand that marriages have been annulled based on non-comsummation, but that’s just another case of the law following the interests of the wealthy, who care more about the disposition of property than they do about God’s law.
May 15th, 2012 | 3:10 am
Michael wrote:”Children enter into gay families by one of three routes: (1) one of their parents becomes gay, (2) the parents adopt, or (3) one of the parents employs a surrogate. One of your favorite tactics is to confuse these three different families. ” And as I have pointed out (every time), when one parent ‘becomes’ gay, that’s fine – as long as the child is still allowed to have strong, healthy relationships with both his mother and his father, and is not required to pretend his new stepparent is more than just a stepparent. In the case of adoption, the problem is obviously that the adoption industry is being forced by gay rights activists to prioritize the “rights” of the gay couples over the “best interest” of the children, and thus the adoption is not legitimate, but is only a case of selling human flesh, and should be recognized as a form of human trafficking (unless the child in question was somehow recognized as being unadoptable prior to the placement). And in the case of surrogacy, that is precisely why gay marriage should not be legalized – because real marriage protects women from exploitation, and protects children from abandonment, and if we allowed gay marriage, they’d employ surrogates (and the institution of marriage would be forced to support and legitimize the exploitation of women and the buying and selling of children under exploitative circumstances). Incidentally, don’t gays worry that their own children will judge them for their evil acts, the way so many of them judged their own parents so publicly and so mercilessly (and for far less)?
May 15th, 2012 | 11:50 am
“And as I have pointed out (every time)”
I share your frustration. Please find another way, more accurate way of describing your disapproval of gay marriage so that I don’t have to continue correcting the “lie” that people who have witnessed gays being good spouses and parents want to “legitimize adultery.”
“In the case of adoption, the problem is obviously that the adoption industry is being forced by gay rights activists to prioritize the “rights” of the gay couples over the “best interest” of the children, and thus the adoption is not legitimate, but is only a case of selling human flesh, and should be recognized as a form of human trafficking”
Gays stand in line for children like everyone else and receive children when it is their turn and after fit is assessed. It sounds to me that you’d like to judge them as a group and have them stand at the end of the line.
I notice that you didn’t respond to my point about your error in saying that “gays are not kin.” Or to your erroneous claim that people who have seen gays form long, healthy relationships and raise good children are “dishonest.” Does that mean that you have given up on these points and are quietly hoping that no one will notice?
May 16th, 2012 | 8:54 am
I notice you don’t actually address the substance of my claims.
May 16th, 2012 | 11:35 am
I addressed two of your claims: your repeated claim that remarriage and adoption can be described as adultery, and that adoption agencies are being forced to prioritize gay adoptions over straight ones.
I thought these claims by you had substance, but if you don’t, please direct me to those claims you have made that you think do have substance.
In the meantime, should I assume you have given on your other claims?
May 16th, 2012 | 6:09 pm
Blake,
You ask an interesting question above: “The real question is, why should anyone have to convince you that their belief is correct, before they have the right to believe it?”
Why does any same-sex couple need to convince you that their belief is correct? Why do they have to submit their lives to your beliefs? Especially since their marriage will harm no one.
To my definition of “sexual complementarity” you replied “Very straightforward indeed, if you assume that sexual pleasure is the important thing.” this is an odd comment considering that I never referred directly or otherwise to pleasure. I believe this is the logical fallacy called the “straw man” argument; it is a rhetorical sleight of hand. Not an assumption, an observation.
May 16th, 2012 | 6:10 pm
Michael PS,
I asked “If some couple cannot reproduce due to an ‘objective incapacity’ why does the gender of the couple make a difference?”
You replied that “what creates the ‘objective incapacity’ of same-sex couples is precisely that they are of the same sex. It is implicit in the description ‘of the same sex’ that such couples are infertile. That is what distinguishes their case from cases of subjective incapacity,”
Your answer is without a point. We agree that there are couples which objectively cannot reproduce. There are different reasons why these couples are unable to reproduce, some because they are same-sex couples. What is never stated is Why the law should distinguish between couples based on the reason why they cannot reproduce. If some are allowed to marry regardless of their incapacity to reproduce, then why not allow all? Clearly couples can be distinguished by the causes of their reproductive incapacity, but mere distinctions do not justify disparate treatment.
You also added that “advanced age, pathologic infertility, choice not to have children … are conditions peculiar to individuals”. Gender is an individual characteristic. Age, infertility, gender and choices are all attributes of individuals or couples, none are characteristics of couples as a class.
You also wrote that “In fact, ‘infertile couples’ do not form a readily identifiable class at all. Each case would have to be examined individually, a process that would be burdensome” for a variety of reasons you mentioned. What you omit is that identifying this class is also unnecessary. There is no purpose to identifying the members of this class because there is no purpose in distinguishing this class of couples from other couples.
You finish with “Laws are enacted for the general case and anomalies are the price that legislators pay for simplicity and certainty.” That is a pretty cavalier attitude to take, especially since the legislators are not paying any price for their simplicity or certainty; they impose that on others. If you were one of those “anomalies” I doubt you’d find that a satisfactory answer.
May 18th, 2012 | 5:25 pm
Blake, you wrote that “The gay marriage debate relies on rhetorical tricks, and falls apart when examined honestly.
One trick: insisting that the dialog stay zoomed in close on the rights, feelings, and needs of the gay persons, and excluding everyone else. That’s dishonest. Gays aren’t the only stakeholders, but SSM supporters focus on trying to delegitimize any other stakeholder concerns.”
Blake, any couples’ marriage has only two stakeholders; the couples. No one else has a stake in it. All married couples have a stake in the status of marriage as an institution, but since one marriage as a marriage does not adversely effect another as a marriage, there is no conflict between same-sex couples and different-sex couples.
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