In the spring of 1858, after an epic fight in the U.S. Congress, Kansas was denied entry into the Union as a new state. (It was eventually admitted in January 1861.) It’s a complicated story, unknown to most Americans today. But for some reason I have thought of this episode several times since last week’s election.
The shortest version of the story is this. As a territory caught up in the struggle over slavery, Kansas was at the center of national politics for the second half of the 1850s. In 1857, a pro-slavery state constitution popularly known as the “Lecompton constitution” (for the town of its origin) was sent to Washington as an application for Kansas statehood. But the Lecompton constitution, the product of many electoral frauds, was not a genuine expression of the will of the territory’s people, and so Sen. Stephen Douglas of Illinois, breaking with most of his fellow Democrats including Pres. James Buchanan, fought alongside Republicans in Congress to defeat the acceptance of it. For his great exertions, Douglas was lionized by anti-slavery journalists like Horace Greeley of the New York Tribune, who wanted to install the Illinois Democrat at the head of a grand new coalition, absorbing the fledgling Republican Party, that could face down the pro-slavery South.
But as Lincoln and other Republicans knew, Douglas did not care a fig about opposing slavery, and that any grand coalition he led would reflect his views, not theirs. His opposition to the Lecompton constitution was purely procedural: that it hadn’t accurately expressed the people’s will. For years both before and after the Lecompton fight, Douglas consistently treated the slavery issue as having no moral weight whatsoever. It should simply be settled on whatever terms suited the interests of people in each state or territory. What Lincoln referred to as Douglas’s “don’t care” policy on slavery was in fact a profound betrayal of the Declaration of Independence, and would most likely lead over the long haul to the spread of slavery rather than its inhibition, and to its perpetuation rather than its end. So the “Lecompton moment” for Lincoln and the Republicans was a critical one, when they had to reject Douglas and what he stood for, even as many anti-slavery voters felt some gratitude toward him. Thus Lincoln set out to destroy Douglas’s credibility with the friends of freedom in the 1858 Illinois Senate campaign, an objective he achieved even though he lost the election itself. The soul of the Republican Party, and with it the soul of the country, was at stake.
We have our own kind of Lecompton moment upon us in the struggle over same-sex marriage. The editors of the Wall Street Journal are playing the role of Greeley, writing on Friday in “Democracy and Gay Marriage” that the courts should stay out of the question of same-sex marriage, that “Americans don’t need or want court orders. They’ve shown themselves more than capable of changing their views and the laws on gay marriage the democratic way.” The Journal’s editors appear to be quite content with the defeats suffered by the defenders of marriage as our civilization has always known it, so long as the defeat comes through the right procedure. It would not have been a strain, if the editors had been capable of enunciating a substantive principle, for them to note that while the right procedure was used, the result was deplorable, and that conservatives must remain devoted to victory in this cause.
Except that perhaps, to many on the Journal editorial board, the result was not deplorable. Yesterday the paper gave op-ed space to a college freshman, Sarah Westwood, to lecture her elders in the Republican Party: “Republicans don’t have a future unless they break up with the religious right and the gay-bashing, Bible-thumping fringe that gives the party such a bad rap with every young voter.” This essay was so poorly reasoned, and so ill-mannered, that the only explanation for the editorial lapse of judgment in publishing it is that it did not run against the grain of the editors’ prejudices.
But I was not going to comment on Miss Westwood’s essay—for decades of teaching such students, and sometimes advising College Republicans, have made me forgiving of youthful folly—until an even more immature piece appeared in the Journal today, by the all-grown-up staff columnist Bret Stephens, whose writing on many subjects I enjoy. Here is Stephens today:
Fellow conservatives, please stop obsessing about what other adults might be doing in their bedrooms, so long as it’s lawful and consensual and doesn’t impinge in some obvious way on you. This obsession is socially uncouth, politically counterproductive and, too often, unwittingly revealing.
Also, if gay people wish to lead conventionally bourgeois lives by getting married, that may be lunacy on their part but it’s a credit to our values. Channeling passions that cannot be repressed toward socially productive ends is the genius of the American way. The alternative is the tapped foot and the wide stance.
Also, please tone down the abortion extremism. Supporting so-called partial-birth abortions, as too many liberals do, is abortion extremism. But so is opposing abortion in cases of rape and incest, to say nothing of the life of the mother. Democrats did better with a president who wanted abortion to be “safe, legal and rare”; Republicans would have done better by adopting former Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels’s call for a “truce” on social issues.
These lines could only have been penned by someone who has not spent an hour of his life considering the moral dimensions of either the marriage issue or the abortion issue. They are embarrassingly vapid reflections, reminiscent of nothing so much as Stephen Douglas’s “don’t care” policy on slavery.
Some other occasion would be better for explaining to Mr. Stephens, Miss Westwood, and the Journal editors that abortion and same-sex marriage, like slavery, are founded in falsehoods about the human person, and why same-sex marriage is as much an assault on liberty and limited government as abortion is on life itself.
For now we may stick to the more practical question of electoral politics, and ask of these writers why they want the Republican Party to become at once less principled, more like the Democrats, and smaller and weaker than it is now. In last week’s election, as Ryan Anderson and Andrew Walker have shown, the defense of marriage ran more strongly in the blue states of Maine, Maryland, Minnesota, and Washington than the Romney-Ryan ticket did. A Romney campaign with a better ability to speak persuasively on these issues might have produced victory for him nationally, and for marriage in these states. Or maybe not. But one thing is sure. Surrendering the principles that animate the social-conservative base of the Republican Party—after the fashion of the “truce” once proposed by Mitch Daniels—would be to make the error that the Republicans led by Lincoln avoided 154 years ago. It would purchase nothing but the diminution of the party, and of conservatism in America. And this without even a Stephen Douglas to recruit as a heroic new leader.
UPDATE: Only after posting the above did I see what my friend Joe Knippenberg posted about Miss Westwood’s piece earlier today. I recommend Joe’s reflections, with which I happily associate myself.
November 13th, 2012 | 2:56 pm
[...] Our Lecompton Moment – Matthew Schmitz, First Thoughts Can't Find What You're Looking For? [...]
November 13th, 2012 | 5:04 pm
So well put, although you kind of ruined my day with the Bret Stephens quote.
It is astounding how many–even on the Right–are indifferent to having our government redefine the very natural rights it was created to protect. Does a computer get to redefine the value of the man who programmed it?
As Tocqueville’s contemporary Fr. Francis Grund once wrote, you need only change the morals and habits of the American people and you could change their government utterly without altering a single word of their constitution.
I was introduced to my favorite defender of marriage, Douglas Farrow, through an article he wrote for Touchstone magazine. Farrow understands in no uncertain terms why this debate strikes at the heart of our freedom. It is so discouraging to see the Wall Street Journal treat writers like you and Farrow as if they are the troglodytes of the movie Mississippi Burning.
Farrow’s Touchstone article was somewhat heavy reading. A friend of mine read it but said he couldn’t quite sum up what Farrow was saying, although he liked the article a great deal. The following is my attempt to draw a picture summing up that article.
November 13th, 2012 | 9:30 pm
The Lecompton comparision seems especially strained given that the anti-SSM side has made a lot of hey out of ‘the will of the people’ as expressed in anti-SSM ballots as opposed to ‘elitist judges’ or ‘out of touch legislators’. Now that SSM has started winning not only elections but direct ballots we discover it’s all just a ‘procedure’..
So how does this actually compare to slavery and Kansas? Unlike Lecompton, I haven’t heard anyone argue that the ballots won on electorial faud. I suppose you have a point that someone who makes an anti-SSM based on a case against judicial activism would have little to oppose by SSM becoming legal through totally non-judicial means.
But I think the comparision is more self-serving than anything else. Anything to pretend you’re Lincoln fighting slavery or Churchill fighting Hitler. Where this doesn’t work so well is that anti-SSM were all too happy to embrace the ‘proceduralists’ when they were arguing against SSM via attacking judicial activism and arguing in favor of allowing ballots banning SSM to stand. This is a bit like arguing in favor of settling arguments by sword fighting, until one realizes that the other side has acquired some better swordsmen and now it’s suddenly barbaric to use sword fighting to settle such arguments!
November 15th, 2012 | 12:40 pm
Excellent points about how same-sex marriage is a moral offense against human dignity, but it needs to be more clear why this is so. Same-sex marriage means taking a materialistic view of human beings as property, designed and sold by labs rather than created naturally and equally through sexual reproduction.
We need people to be aware that marriage means allowing the couple to conceive offspring together and that the ultimate demand by same-sex marriage activists is to be allowed to create children with someone of the other sex (and by transgender activists, to be allowed to reproduce as their chosen sex). People aren’t aware that labs are working on ways to coax stem cells into viable sperm for a woman or eggs for a man, and if they are aware, they often seem to think we have to let people do it if they want to. It is the same attitude of Douglas, that if someone wants to own slaves, we have to let them, or if a state says it is OK, or the people say it is OK, then it’s OK. But it isn’t OK and it isn’t inevitable, we need to explain to people why it is unethical and wrong and would be terrible public policy to allow.
Please let me know what you think of my proposal to resolve the marriage debate with what I call The Egg and Sperm Civil Union Compromise. It preserves marriage as a man and a woman through a combination of three laws that prohibit genetic engineering (the Egg and Sperm law), affirm marriage’s conception rights, and federally recognizes state Civil Unions as long as they are defined as “marriage minus conception rights” so they are not equivalent to marriage and affirm the unique right of marriage to conceive offspring together.
November 15th, 2012 | 1:28 pm
@John Howard
In a related matter a commenter by the name of “Hardcastle” posted the following over at NRO. I haven’t given it much thought, but at first glance, I like it:
The discussion here has touched on artificial insemination several times, and I do have a suggestion to improve our public policy concerning it. My suggestion would not resolve all the problems associated with artificial insemination, but I believe it would rectify a lot of them and produce a net good.
I believe that all sperm donors should be held financially responsible for their children unless and until an adoptive father, married to the mother, is ready and willing to replace him. Mothers should not be allowed to bargain away their children’s rights to the biological father’s support. Sperm banks, naturally, would have no power to affect such rights and would be required to reveal the father’s identity upon the child’s request. A sperm donor would thus be placed on notice that even if the mother wants nothing from him, a time bomb in the form of his child is standing by.
The result would be that sperm donations would cease, other than in situations where a replacement father stood ready to adopt. And that situation would ordinarily arise only when a woman can conceive, but her husband is infertile. One consequence of this policy would be that It would become far less likely that sperm donors would produce hundreds of offspring, with siblings who don’t even know they are related living in the same communities.
Although I have reservations about sperm donation even pursuant to my policy, I can’t see how, as a practical matter, to stop it altogether. And I think my suggestion is entirely fair to the sperm donors — no less than we expect from others who father children. Our legal system stands ready to ruin divorced fathers, even in situations where the mother has unilaterally broken up the marriage. Why do we let sperm donors off the hook?
November 15th, 2012 | 3:03 pm
I don’t think it’s all that much better if a husband is there to adopt the sperm donor’s child, I think we should prohibit gamete donation altogether. It would be politically hard to do, because so many people know someone who availed themselves of it to have their wonderful bundle of joy, and we don’t like to call our friends horrible people. I’m sure a similar thing happened at the end of slavery, where people knew slave owners and didn’t think they were bad people, so saying slavery was wrong was an insult to their friends. But slowly things changed. Your suggestion might be part of the incremental change going forward.
That said, my proposal doesn’t touch on the subject of donor conception. Nothing that is currently done to have children is affected by my proposal, only things that haven’t been done yet, like cloning and genetic engineering and attempting same-sex and transgender procreation using stem cells. It is consistent with ending gamete donation someday in the future in that it affirms that marriage is the right to conceive people, but it doesn’t actually prohibit unmarried people from doing it anyway.
November 19th, 2012 | 10:28 am
I’d like to know what the author thinks of my suggestion, please. Does he agree that same-sex procreation should be prohibited or does he think we should let labs attempt to make offspring for same-sex couples? Does he agree that marriage should protect and affirm the couple’s right to conceive offspring together? And does he agree that Civil Unions that are defined “marriage minus conception rights” would be constitutional and not mirror marriage and would affirm the unique meaning of marriage? There is so much to chew on here, I can’t fathom why he’s afraid to tackle the subject.
November 22nd, 2012 | 9:29 am
[...] Theocon crowd at First Things mag fears the Wall Street Journal is slipping away from them on this issue, and they’re having a fit about it. [...]
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