The movement toward same-sex “marriage” has every appearance of being an irresistible force, with recent elections indicating the inexorability of its spread across the Western world. Those who stand against it will be bowled over by it. The outcome is all but inevitable.
So say its proponents, at any rate. Sherif Girgis, Ryan Anderson, and Robert George beg to differ. Two years ago the three released an influential paper arguing that there is a solid and permanent reality to marriage that stands despite any social or political force that may challenge it. Although marriages differ widely in form and custom, and especially in each couple’s experience, there is nevertheless a stable and enduring core meaning to marriage itself that will endure any assault.
Their 2010 paper having been widely discussed and widely criticized, they have now extended it to book length in What Is Marriage? Man and Woman: A Defense, available for pre-order now, and scheduled for release tomorrow as an ebook (Kindle, Nook, iBooks), about two weeks from now as a paperback. The three authors are, as was to be expected, very much holding their ground, as is the marriage defense movement they are helping to lead.
Gay “marriage” versus man-woman marriage—it is as close as a social issue ccould come to “irresistible force meets immovable object.” No wonder there’s so much energy being released around it.
The question asked in the book’s title, What Is Marriage? is the right one, for whether marriage can or should be revised politically depends on what marriage is. If it is the kind of thing that’s open to revision, then there may be no need to stand in the way of its alteration. If not, then change may not only be politically unadvisable but essentially impossible.
And yet that question is also a step or two down the road from the starting block; for in the very question, “what is marriage?” there is the assumption that marriage entails some identifiable is-ness, some inherent or essential reality that defines it (pardon the repetition) definitely; that marriage, whatever it may be, actually is one thing and is not another. This assumption is open to debate.
The Western world in the twenty-first century is deeply infected with an unstudied democratic nominalism, meaning (for present purposes) that we tend to think our institutions, including marriage, can be whatever the majority says they are. We find it hard to conceive of something like marriage possessing or exhibiting any enduring and essential nature. How could it, after all? If biological species—including homo sapiens—are but today’s snapshot in a stream of populations that were once something else and likely will be again, how could mere behaviors be imbued with anything essential or permanent? Nothing is what it was yesterday; everything is becoming something else; and why not marriage, too?
So on that view one might wonder why a question like “what is marriage?” shouldn’t be discarded right off the bat. The right question could only be “what is marriage today?” And today’s answer could hardly be supplied through philosophical treatises like Girgis, Anderson, and George’s, but only by legislatures, plebiscites, and the courts. The same-sex “marriage” movement could move forward unresisted.
But there are reasons to recognize in marriage an unmoving, unchanging core essence or nature. Girgis, Anderson, and George take up the burden of showing that this is so, what that nature is, and why; band it seems to me they accomplish what they set out to do. They make a persuasive case that marriage necessarily involves a certain sort of comprehensive union that can only be achieved between a man and a woman. Their arguments are cogent; they handle objections deftly. It is a powerful book: marriage revisionists will find they are quite required to deal with it.
Or not. They could easily choose to ignore it, even if it’s all that I have just said that it is.
For let us imagine, if only for the sake of argument, that the authors have given us not just a good argument for conjugal (man-woman) marriage, but an absolutely unassailable case. Why should revisionists have to pay it any attention? They’ve already won the major public relations battles. Gradually—inexorably, it seems—they are making progress on one political front after another. Theirs is the irresistible force. They can press on regardless. What’s another book when victory is in your grasp?
The answer to that question resides on two levels, the first of which is (to my mind) determinative, the second more consequential yet.
On the first level there are the fatal contradictions in revisionist marriage—which, by the way, is not to be confused with the question of marriage for same-sex couples. The authors define this revisionism as
a vision of marriage as, in essence, an emotional bond, one distinguished by its intensity—a bond that points mainly inward, in which fidelity is ultimately subject to one’s feelings. In marriage so understood, partners seek emotional fulfillment, and remain as long as they find it.
This stands in contrast to the conjugal view they defend:
It is a vision of marriage as a bodily as well as an emotional and spiritual bond, distinguished thus by its comprehensiveness, which is, like all love, effusive: flowing out into the wide sharing of family life and ahead to lifelong fidelity.
Revisionist marriage has been around a lot longer than same-sex “marriage:” it is the form in which many heterosexual couples have been taking their vows (such as they may be) for decades, more or less since artificial contraception allowed childbearing to be decoupled from sex, sex from marriage, and of course marriage from childbearing. It was that decoupling that gave marriage the opportunity to be construed as being primarily of, by, and for the married pair. The same-sex marriage question is simply the same issue extended further in the same logical direction.
This revisionist view is fraught with fatal contradictions, discussions of which form a considerable proportion of the content of What Is Marriage? If, for example, marriage is essentially an intense and romantic friendship, what business does the government have being involved in it? How does such a marriage not interfere with, say, a partner’s friendship with his or her second-best friend? Other than, “my goodness, we’re not asking for that,” is there any principled reason not to invite that other friend in to be part of the same marriage?
But revisionism’s problems extend much deeper than that. Marriage is, the authors explain,
a human good with an objective structure, which it is inherently good for us to live out….
It is a human good. Its goodness stands upon, and flows out of, what we are as human beings. It is good to unite with another person in a comprehensive union. It is good for that union to be of the sort that uniquely completes the one biological function that depends on two persons, male and female. It is good for that union to be of the sort that can and usually does result in offspring, the effusive fruit of the couple’s love. It is good for those children to be raised by their biological parents. It is good for individuals, for couples, for children, for society as a whole, which by the way is the only reason it makes sense for government to be involved in marriage. It is not good to practice or propose any view of marriage that would undermine these goods, just because they are real goods.
They are good because of who we are as humans. And it is our humanity, not any three authors’ opinions, or any religious or conservative political group’s viewpoint, that is the immovable object against which the (seemingly) irresistible force of same-sex “marriage” is pressing itself. There is, after all, an answer to the question, “what is marriage?” In its core (not its accidents but its substance), that answer has been the same the world over in virtually all cultures: a fact which is easily understood in virtue of humans being humans in all cultures the world over.
I do not mean to suggest that there is something less than human about marriage revisionists. I suspect what we’re seeing in them is not a loss of belief in marriage as human, but rather a failure of confidence in marriage as good; and that it is this loss of confidence that leads them to be willing to toss the whole thing up in the air and start all over again. Marriage is a human good, but humans being what we are, not all marriages are good, or experienced as good. But now I have started down another trail, and I had better wrap up before I wander too far in a new direction.
I urge marriage defenders to digest this book. There are better and there are worse arguments in defense of marriage; and to the extent we are losing ground, it may be partly attributed to not knowing the difference. This book should be hugely helpful in that respect.
I do not know whether marriage revisionists will consider it necessary to contend with this book. For all I know, they’ll decide they can continue acting as if their movement is the irresistible force they suppose it to be. I think that they would do themselves a favor to read it, though; for in it they will find a charitably, rationally, and persuasively presented depiction of what they will eventually—inexorably, even—discover: that marriage is a distinctive human good; that it is good that it always involves the comprehensive, effusive union of a man and a woman.
(Also posted at Thinking Christian. Quotations from the book in this review were taken from an advance review copy which included a notice that it was subject to change prior to publication. Although this should go without saying, prior experience with this topic impels me to point out that if it appears I have not presented a complete defense of the conjugal marriage position herein, it is because that was not my purpose. I am rather hoping readers will obtain the book, which is where the arguments may actually be found.)
November 26th, 2012 | 9:03 am
I think the problem is even deeper than that and was indicated by Miss Anscombe in her 1958 paper, “Modern Moral Philosophy.”
“In present-day philosophy an explanation is required how an unjust man is a bad man, or an unjust action a bad one; to give such an explanation belongs to ethics; but it cannot even be begun until we are equipped with a sound philosophy of psychology. For the proof that an unjust man is a bad man would require a positive account of justice as a “virtue.” This part of the subject-matter of ethics, is however, completely closed to us until we have an account of what type of characteristic a virtue is – a problem, not of ethics, but of conceptual analysis – and how it relates to the actions in which it is instanced: a matter which I think Aristotle did not succeed in really making clear.”
The same is true of any ethical concept, based on the notion of “human flourishing.” It also has implications for jurisprudence and public policy.
November 26th, 2012 | 9:38 am
The following excerpt, famous or infamous as the case may be, taken from Engels’ “Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy [1886],” seems to me to embody quite comprehensively the marriage controversy:
“Part 1: Hegel
“The volume before us carries us back to a period which, although in time no more than a generation behind us, has become as foreign to the present generation in Germany as if it were already a hundred years old. Yet . . . all that has happened since then in our country has been merely a continuation of 1848, merely the execution of the last will and testament of the revolution. . . .
“Let us take an example. No philosophical proposition has earned more gratitude from narrow-minded governments and wrath from equally narrow-minded liberals than Hegel’s famous statement:
“‘All that is real is rational; and all that is rational is real.’
“. . . But according to Hegel certainly not everything that exists is also real, without further qualification.
“For Hegel the attribute of reality belongs only to that which at the same time is necessary: ‘In the course of its development reality proves to be necessity.’
“. . . Now, according to Hegel, reality is, however, in no way an attribute predictable of any given state of affairs, social or political, in all circumstances and at all times.
“. . . In 1789, the French monarchy had become so unreal, that is to say, so robbed of all necessity, so irrational, that it had to be destroyed. . . . In this case, therefore, the monarchy was the unreal and the revolution the real.
“And so, in the course of development, all that was previously real becomes unreal, loses it necessity, its right of existence, its rationality. And in the place of moribund reality comes a new, viable reality . . . .
“Thus the Hegelian proposition turns into its opposite through Hegelian dialectics itself: All that is real in the sphere of human history, becomes irrational in the process of time, is therefore irrational by its very destination, is tainted beforehand with irrationality, and everything which is rational in the minds of men is destined to become real, however much it may contradict existing apparent reality.
“In accordance with all the rules of the Hegelian method of thought, the proposition of the rationality of everything which is real resolves itself into the other proposition:
“All that exists deserves to perish.
“But precisely therein lay the true significance and the revolutionary character of the Hegelian philosophy (to which, as the close of the whole movement since Kant, we must here confine ourselves), that it once and for all dealt the death blow to the finality of all product of human thought and action. Truth, the cognition of which is the business of philosophy, was in the hands of Hegel no longer an aggregate of finished dogmatic statements . . . .
“And what holds good for the realm of philosophical knowledge holds good also for that of every other kind of knowledge and also for practical action. Just as knowledge is unable to reach a complete conclusion in a perfect, ideal condition of humanity, so is history unable to do so; a perfect society, a perfect “state”, are things which can only exist in imagination. On the contrary, all successive historical systems are only transitory stages in the endless course of development of human society from the lower to the higher. Each stage is necessary, and therefore justified for the time and conditions to which it owes its origin. But in the face of new, higher conditions which gradually develop in its own womb, it loses vitality and justification. It must give way to a higher stage which will also in its turn decay and perish. Just as the bourgeoisie by large-scale industry, competition, and the world market dissolves in practice all stable time-honored institutions, so this dialectical philosophy dissolves all conceptions of final, absolute truth and of absolute states of humanity corresponding to it.
“For it [dialectical philosophy], nothing is final, absolute, sacred. It reveals the transitory character of everything and in everything; nothing can endure before it except the uninterrupted process of becoming and of passing away, of endless ascendancy from the lower to the higher. And dialectical philosophy itself is nothing more than the mere reflection of this process in the thinking brain. It has, of course, also a conservative side; it recognizes that definite stages of knowledge and society are justified for their time and circumstances; but only so far. The conservatism of this mode of outlook is relative; its revolutionary character is absolute — the only absolute dialectical philosophy admits.”
The argument for same-sex marriage has a very long and very obnoxious pedigree: “All that exists deserves to perish.”
November 26th, 2012 | 9:40 am
Whatever the proportion of homosexuals in the population, it’s clear that it’s well under 10%. Of that, a smaller percentage are likely to marry.
The sheer energy conservatives put into this issue, when compared to efforts to, I dunno, inhibit divorce or convince people not to use contraceptives, or whatever, is remarkable. Even if they do win on this issue, how will that advance their goals in any significant way?
November 26th, 2012 | 10:01 am
Don’t be fooled by appearances, Ray.
The energy that churches put into inhibiting divorce and promoting healthy marriages in general is huge. It’s just not as public as this, simply because it’s done inside of churches, in counseling rooms, in marriage conferences, in small groups.
I would venture to guess that for every sermon preached on homosexuality or gay “marriage,” dozens are preached on healthy marriages for men and women. For every conference on the gay “marriage” issue I am quite sure there are hundreds for men and women to strengthen their marriages. The traditional publishing ratio (books and articles) is probably very similar.
It was the gay-rights community, not conservatives or churches, that made gay “marriage” a public policy issue. Once it became situated there in the public square, that became the appropriate place for us to work it through. Thus you see a lot of publicly visible conservative action on this issue. You do not our advocacy efforts for man-woman marriage because the public square is not the appropriate place for us to conduct those activities.
So while it may appear that we’re only interested in one thing, nothing could be further from the truth.
November 26th, 2012 | 10:04 am
Ray, I’m surprised to see this form of argument from you. As the Western approach to marriage has loosened, all for positive reasons, we see that the effects are mainly negative on the population at large: more single mothers, more women and children below the poverty line. Anecdotes about individual successes are ready at hand but statistically the loss is slow and continual. So if we redefine marriage entirely to mean whatever we want it to mean, how could the effects possibly be limited? Prior to this, the definition has held as it has been bent in ten different directions but this redefinition discards the old ideas entirely.
November 26th, 2012 | 10:04 am
Also, Ray: to “win on this issue” would mean to bring our culture back to a healthy understanding of marriage, which would have a profound impact on heterosexual marriage.
November 26th, 2012 | 10:19 am
It matters because it is a bizarre rejection of objective truth. “Gay marriage” as a concept denies the objective definition of marriage and, by its mere existence, everything else. Its proponents demand ingenuously that one justify the judgement, until recently universal among everyone in every culture throughout time and still the judgement of most people alive today, that marriage can only be between a man and a woman. They act as if — and I think they really believe — that definition is arbitrary and changeable. Say what I just said and you will be met with, at best, a blank stare and a bunch of beside-the-point justifications disguised as arguments, and at worst accusations of hate and oppression.
It’s important because it represents a nihilistic impulse to deny any reality outside the self and one’s own wants and desires. It is hard to think of many more obvious denials (although I can think of a few) of objective reality than this. But we do not live in a universe that allows whatever we want to be true to actually BE true.
November 26th, 2012 | 10:35 am
Tom Gilson,
I am not convinced. First of all, I have never seen a response by those who claim that same-sex marriage is impossible to the point that Catholics, at least, consider divorce and remarriage “impossible.” Has there ever been a movement to deny spousal benefits to divorced and remarried individuals as there has been for same-sex couples? Why are “impossible” marriages accepted in the case of the divorced and remarried, but “impossible” marriage for same-sex couples are out of the question?
It seems to me the religious opponents could use the divorced and remarried as a standard by which to deal with same-sex marriage. Surely no-fault divorce and changing attitudes toward the permanence and exclusivity of marriage have done far, far more damage than same-sex marriage could ever possibly do if it were universally embraced. Look at the numbers. And one of the complaints of the opponents of same-sex marriage is that relatively few same-sex couples actually marry. It reminds me of the Woody Allen joke at the beginning of Annie Hall (“The food is terrible!” “Yes, and the portions are so small!”). Gay marriage is such a bad idea! Yes, and so few gays get married, too!
It seems very clear to me that a great deal of the reaction to same-sex marriage is a visceral reaction to the idea of two persons of the same gender engaging in sex. We have it right here in a video that I just linked to recently. The preacher says:
I think for a very large number of people who oppose divorce and remarriage and also oppose same-sex marriage, there is a visceral reaction to homosexual activity that has nothing to do with morality that leads them to consider the prospect of a small minority of the estimated 4% of gay people getting married as a major blow to Western civilization, whereas a 50% divorce rate and a 41% out-of-wedlock birth rate are basically just social problems.
It is a kind of us-versus-them thing. The people who engage in premarital sex, or have abortions, or divorce and remarry are “people like us.” But homosexuals are “them.”
November 26th, 2012 | 11:05 am
It matters because it is a bizarre rejection of objective truth. “Gay marriage” as a concept denies the objective definition of marriage and, by its mere existence, everything else.
Gail Finke,
It seems to me there is no “objective definition of marriage.” Having read the essay version of What Is Marriage? I expect the book version to make a powerful case. But as I understood the essay, marriage is permanent. I think there is some hope among opponents of same-sex marriage that Girgis, George, and Anderson have written such a powerful and persuasive argument about what the definition of marriage is that all who read it and don’t embrace it will be deluding themselves or will simply be dishonest. If that is the case, then I expect What Is Marriage? to start a movement to end divorce and remarriage that, because it is based on objective truth, will eventually triumph.
The fact of the matter is that there is not going to be one utterly persuasive “objective” definition of marriage with which all people of intellectual integrity and good will will instantly agree with.
And the idea that there is one truth so solid and objective that to deny it is to deny truth itself is a bizarrely overstated position.
Once again, I would like to suggest being anti-Semitic as an analog to being anti-gay. Most contemporary Christians, and certainly Catholics, believe that the Incarnation and the Trinity are facts beyond question. Jews utterly reject both ideas, and yet Catholic do not accuse Jews of such a serious denial of reality that it amounts to nihilism.
I look forward to reading What Is Marriage? but there are going to be plenty of people who believe in objective reality and objective truth and who are intellectually honest who will not agree with Girgis, George, and Anderson. Opponents of homosexuality and same-sex marriage frequently claim that they are scoffed at or not treated respectfully, but they need to take a look at how respectfully they make their own case. It really is not respectful to claim you have objective reality on your side and that anyone who disagrees with you is deluded or disingenuous.
November 26th, 2012 | 11:08 am
David (@10:35 am), it sounds to me like you are unconvinced by poor arguments. I agree completely. Please see my second-to-last paragraph.
November 26th, 2012 | 11:32 am
Tom Gilson,
I think one of the things that must be said in fairness to the advocates of same-sex marriage or defenders of homosexuality is that very often they (we) are dealing with the worst arguments for traditional marriage, not the best. That is why I am looking forward to What Is Marriage? A common argument (stated or implied) is that if same-sex marriage is accepted, all arguments against any sexual automatically fail. If people are permitted to marry someone of the same gender, then (it is claimed) there is simply no argument against people marrying their parents or siblings, underage children, or dogs. I look forward to better arguments than that!
November 26th, 2012 | 11:51 am
Tom Gilson –
And divorce isn’t a public policy issue? Legalizing contraceptives isn’t a public policy issue? Why not fight those battles in the public square?
I honestly, truly don’t understand that. The only hypothesis I have so far is that conservatives are acting like a boxer who’s lost several big fights, and now is just looking to pick a fight with an opponent – any opponent – they think they can beat. As I said there, “I don’t see any effort whatsoever to put amendments into state Constitutions banning, say, IVF or divorce. I don’t even see grassroots efforts trying to petition for that. So, yeah. ‘By their priorities shall ye know them.’”
November 26th, 2012 | 12:00 pm
Ray,
Would you have the church fight these battles wisely or foolishly, on ground that can be won or on ground that realistically cannot? There’s just no good strategic reason for us to bring yet another big issue onto the political battlefields. The Church is accused often enough of being involved in culture wars (as if we started them). Would you have us multiply them still further? Then what would you say to such a thing, on a forum such as this one?
There are more appropriate ways for us to press these priorities; and yes, they are priorities. Do not be fooled, I have already cautioned you, by appearances.
November 26th, 2012 | 12:30 pm
“Why are ‘impossible’ marriages accepted in the case of the divorced and remarried, but ‘impossible’ marriage for same-sex couples are out of the question?”
There is an elementary equivocation on the word “impossible” here that does not pass the laugh test it is so dishonest. In the case of divorce, the impossibility raised is the lack of possibility that the Church, for good and sufficient reasons based in Scripture, may not recognize as marriage leaving one spouse for another. It has nothing to do with the physical conjugal act. The bar is spiritual, not physical.
In the case of homosexual marriage, the alleged impossibility—that word, it cannot be emphasized enough, is yours, not traditionalists—would arise from the claim that a conjugal act, which is a synonym for the marriage act, namely, heterosexual intercourse, is not possible between two members of the same sex. The objection to homosexual marriage arising from such a claim has everything to do with said physical act.
Now I have no doubt that bizarre and pathological arguments may be advanced to the effect that anal intercourse, fellatio, and cunnilingus are conjugal acts just as much as heterosexual intercourse. Arguments like that are testimony to human ingenuity and to everyday susceptibility to sophistry on the part of the (vincibly) ignorant. Whether they are taken seriously or rejected as ridiculous is not the point here. Your deliberate equivocation on the application of the word “impossible” is.
One must also distinguish, I think, between positive acts and negative ones and the judgments following therefrom. Divorce is negative in that it undoes a previous, legal state that is for some reason or other thought to be a mistake. Marriage is generally thought to be a positive state. it is not meant to correct a mistake. As a result, though a right to divorce is legally protected, such a right brings with it no claim on anyone else’s esteem or approval, nor does it encourage divorce or regard it as anything more than a bad thing and something to be avoided; and those, it is worth mentioning, are the sentiments of the many-times-divorced and the never-divorced alike. In the controversy over “homosexual marriage,” on the other hand, disapproval of same-sex unions is routinely slandered as the presenting symptom of a wholly invented mental illness called “homophobia” or spiritual malady called hatred.
And where on earth would you get the idea that feelings of disgust at anal intercourse and moral condemnation of it “have nothing to do with one another”? I’m sorry, you don’t get to sever the two simply because the reaction is absent in yourself. There could very well be something wrong with you. Whether there is or isn’t is again not the issue. The lazily peremptory way you declare that they are, of course, worlds apart in relation to one another is what is both amazing and appalling.
Morality has an affective component that is far more important as a guide to behavior, I would argue, than its propositional forms. Affective intuitions like disgust, shame, and remorse, as well as pity, sympathy, and generosity—many more might be mentioned—are essential in forming moral behavior and, note well, in forming moral judgments. In all likelihood they exist prior to any Decalogue; and they certainly are prior to any proposition of evolutionary psychology. God is merciful. We need not wait for the just-so investigations of Steven Pinker to ripen on the page before judging of immorality
It is not, for example, because of notions of “fitness” that cannibalism is disgusting; neither because it may involve murder (it doesn’t have to); to label something as murder is a propositional judgment that in itself does not instigate disgust or horror. Obversely, that cannibalism or coprophagia or sodomy are regularly observed among the beasts is no recommendation, I believe. It is our moral sense, if it is anything at all, that reacts in disgust to such acts by man or beast.
November 26th, 2012 | 12:46 pm
Tom Gilson –
Since when did God care about whether doing good was practical or convenient or realistic? What happened to 1 Corinthians 1:25?
As I said before, “I mean, if you manage to convince people of the evils of IVF and surrogacy and sperm donation, you do a lot of good by your lights. Not only do you block any prospective gay marriages from availing themselves of those techniques, but far more important (or at least numerous) you block innumerable straight marriages from sinning. And spreading your viewpoint on those issues would, allegedly, also fight gay marriage by cementing public opinion on the goods and nature of marriage.”
Ditto for divorce, contraception, etc. If you win on those, gay unions wouldn’t be a problem even if they were legally recognized in some sense.
November 26th, 2012 | 12:51 pm
Ray, You make the mistake of assuming SSM is correct and then talk about “banning” SSM as what those who disagree with you are doing. To put it simply for those putting the definition in their state constitutions, SMM makes no sense. There is nothing to ban. Making the definition law is an attempt to prevent redefinition and broad loss of meaning.
As to the misdirections from Ray and David not to mention many SSM advocates, either a position stands or does not stand on its own. “You didn’t fight this so you shouldn’t fight that,” is essentially an ad hominem.
David, as always comes up with the anecdote. And then generalizes it in a bout of mind-reading, not just of one person, but of an entire class. More and more direct ad hominem.
Can either of you gentlemen come up with a rationale for SSM and argue that rather than putting down those who disagree with you?
November 26th, 2012 | 12:56 pm
Ray, I’m sorry but in your most recent comment you deflected my previous questions to you rather than answering them. I think we’ll make more progress if we try to avoid tangents. I’ll be happy to continue with you when you explain to me what real, practical advantage you think there would be in the church pursuing the foolishly unrealistic strategy you urge upon us here.
November 26th, 2012 | 1:38 pm
@ Davids Nickol
It seems to me there is no “objective definition of marriage.”
It seems to me that premise, applied generally motivates just about every post you make.
In your view, there is no objective anything. It leads to some curious results a relentless dedication to curious fusion of nihilism and neophilia.
If you really believe marriage is devoid of meaning, then the appropriate response is to advocate its eradication, not its expansion.
@ Ray Ingles
“Even if they do win on this issue, how will that advance their goals in any significant way?”
What are these “goals” (actually, the right word is objectives, goals are quantifiable results) that you presume exist?
November 26th, 2012 | 1:39 pm
There is an elementary equivocation on the word “impossible” here that does not pass the laugh test it is so dishonest.
Joe Sansonese,
Might we attempt to maintain civility here? I am very interested in this discussion, which is why I don’t wish to see it deteriorate into an exchange of insults. If you really feel I am laughably dishonest, I don’t see any point in further exchanges between us.
November 26th, 2012 | 1:55 pm
Errata:
It leads to some curious results-a relentless dedication to a fusion of nihilism and neophilia.
November 26th, 2012 | 2:11 pm
Joe Sansonese –
So I should relent the next time one of my kids reacts with disgust at the prospect of finishing their vegetables? (Have I deadened my own moral instincts to the point where I will shamelessly eat salads?)
Were the white U.S. servicemen who reacted with visceral revulsion at the prospect of showering with black soldiers – back when segregated bathrooms were de rigueur in the southern U.S. – on to something?
Disgust is certainly a foundational element of moral judgment. It’s also undeniably and massively influenced by upbringing and training – and mere custom.
Should, say, eating insects be illegal? Or should we insist on evidence of harm beyond an exclamation of “Ick! I personally don’t like that!”?
November 26th, 2012 | 2:26 pm
Tom Gilson –
What ‘foolishly unrealistic’ strategy? Why not lobby for, say, a state-level amendment banning no-fault divorce?
This is widely considered to be a serious threat to marriages right now. And yet the last time First Things seems to have devoted much time to it was in 1997. Well, divorce in the U.S., at least.
Or, perhaps, a similar state-level amendment banning IVF. This, too, is considered to be objectively wrong by the Catholic Church and others – the product of a disordered understanding of the purpose and nature of sexuality.
The fact that both of these are popular with, or at least not particularly opposed by, the overall culture would make it hard going, true. But if the rising acceptance of same-sex marriage isn’t an argument for quitting that fight in the legal arena, why is it an argument for quitting those fights in the legal arena?
Again, considering that they directly affect far more people, and are already doing so, why are they not higher priorities than same-sex marriage?
November 26th, 2012 | 2:44 pm
“Disgust is . . . also undeniably and massively influenced by upbringing and training – and mere custom.”
That opinion, as they say, and a buck-and-a-quarter will get you a doughnut at Starbuck’s.
Disgust may be reinforced by society and custom, but it is there to begin with, and a good thing too.
The notion that your children are disgusted at eating their vegetables as opposed to disinclined to is ridiculous.
November 26th, 2012 | 3:00 pm
In your view, there is no objective anything. It leads to some curious results-a relentless dedication to a fusion of nihilism and neophilia.
Adam Baum,
If there is an “objective definition” of marriage, or art, or justice, or friendship, or any number of other things, why don’t we all agree on such definitions? Is it because some people are “objective” and other people are not? You seem to think the only alternative to absolute certainty is nihilism. I would say all these things exist, at least in some sense. And I expect there to be good and bad answers to questions like “What is art?” or “What is justice?” or “What is marriage?” But do I think there is an “objective” answer to the question “What is art?” No I don’t. I expect there to be wide agreement that certain things are art (paintings by Giotto, sculptures by Bernini, operas by Mozart), but I also expect there to be areas of dispute, and I don’t believe an “objective” person will be able to settle those disputes.
If you really believe marriage is devoid of meaning, then the appropriate response is to advocate its eradication, not its expansion.
I don’t think it is warranted to assume that I believe marriage is devoid of meaning because I deny it can be precisely and objectively defined. Or because I don’t agree to the definition you would give.
In any case, I think we should remember that we are always discussing two things here—(1) religious or philosophical marriage, and (2) civil marriage. They are far from identical currently, and part of the task for those who oppose same-sex marriage, it seems to me, is why civil and philosophical marriage must be identical in only some respects but not all respects. To repeat a familiar theme, why can civil marriage be dissolved by divorce when religious or philosophical marriage cannot be? And if there is a justification for religious and civil marriage not to be the same when it comes to permanency, why is there a compelling reason for civil marriage not to be open to same-sex couples even if religious of philosophical marriage is not.
November 26th, 2012 | 3:25 pm
I’ll be happy to continue with you when you explain to me what real, practical advantage you think there would be in the church pursuing the foolishly unrealistic strategy you urge upon us here.
Tom Gilson,
Consistency and credibility are at stake. As I have pointed out before, one of the five “non-negotiables” according to many Catholic voting guides is opposition to stem-cell research. And yet the source of embryos for stem-cell research is fertility clinics, where embryos are routinely created, frozen, and destroyed. Forgive me if I am poorly informed, but I have never heard of groups of pro-life Catholics gathering to say the Rosary outside fertility clinics. Sure, you will be able to cite Catholic statements against in vitro fertilization and other assisted reproductive technologies. But I think probably even many Catholics who could tell you the Church opposes stem-cell research could not tell you the Church opposes in vitro fertilization. No doubt a Catholic campaign against fertility clinics and in vitro fertilization would be unpopular in many quarters, but so what? If the Church cares about stem cells being harvested from “excess embryos” in fertility clinics, it out to care about the creation and destruction of those embryos as well.
Once again, if same-sex marriage is impossible, why is divorce and remarriage possible? Why can’t Catholic organizations refuse to pay spousal benefits to the divorced and remarried the way they refuse to pay them to couples in same-sex unions?
The Church, it seems to me, should be a witness to what it considers right and wrong, not a political organization that picks its battles based on what it can win and what political alliances it can make.
Some Catholics were quite annoyed with their fellow Catholics over this story:
I think there is some justification for saying the Church is too involved in politics and not interested enough in preaching the message of the Gospels. And I think it’s fair to expect a Church that let’s it be known in no uncertain terms that it opposes condom use in the midst of an AIDS epidemic in Africa to be willing to be vocal about other Catholic positions that in all probability would be less unpopular. I really do think that those in the Church who concern themselves with such things as “five nonnegotiables” in elections are driving people away from the Church. If it were up to me (which of course it never will be), I would opt for a larger, less pure Church than a smaller, purer one. It does not seem to me that Jesus instructed his Apostles to form a small but select group.
November 26th, 2012 | 3:54 pm
First, I am an evangelical blogger transplanted here from First Things’ former “Evangel” pages, so while I respect and generally agree with the Roman Catholic Church on these matters, I am in no position to speak for that Church.
Second, as an evangelical I come from a tradition where artificial contraception has never been frowned upon, much less pronounced to be sin. I see now that the Catholics were wiser than we were on this. It’s hard for me (from my tradition) to see how the use of artificial contraception is necessarily sin, but it’s easy now in retrospect to see the damage that’s been done through de-coupling sex and childbirth.
I thought it might be helpful for you to know that about me, as context if nothing else.
Ray, you asked,
Without going into it too deeply, I believe political action should be aimed toward the ideal but strategized according to the practical. I would dearly love to see no-fault divorce overturned in favor of some more sane policy. (I won’t go into details on what that might involve; that’s off subject.) I can’t see a way to get there from here, however; and I don’t think there would be much wisdom in opening up yet another front in the so-called culture wars.
David, you say “consistency and credibility are at stake.” I think we are being consistent (Catholics and evangelicals alike) in pursuing an overall policy of supporting marriage. I don’t mean we’re perfect, but generally speaking we’re on a reasonable path in this respect.
Consistency demands similarity of principle, not of strategy. Were the Allies being inconsistent when they invaded Normandy but bombed Germany? Hardly.
November 26th, 2012 | 5:30 pm
@David Nickol. Re an objective definition of marriage. Question: When Canada redefined the heterosexual element of marriage, the permanent element disappeared too. Why? Answer: Because the definition of marriage accords with something physically real and therefore unredefinable. If one part of the definition is wrong, the whole definition is wrong. The permanence of marriage is the physical permanence of parenthood. If parenthood is not legally understood to be heterosexual, it is not understood to be physically real and therefore there is no need for it to be permanent. Or exclusive. Children in Canada can no have more than two legal parents.
November 26th, 2012 | 5:38 pm
@David Nickol. Re civil divorce and civil same-sex “marriage”.
Legal provision for divorce exists outside of the definition of marriage. Marriage remains defined as being for life. Same-sex “marriage” requires changing the actual definition ie what marriage is. Marriage will not remain defined as being heterosexual.
November 26th, 2012 | 5:59 pm
Opposing contraception really did wonders for the credibility of the Catholic Bishops in the last election, didn’t it? If this article is best the anti SSM side can offer, gay marriage is a given and all that is left for it to triumph is a Supreme Court decision.
And no, the other side is not going to bother the answer the arguments. It does not need to.
November 26th, 2012 | 6:38 pm
When Canada redefined the heterosexual element of marriage, the permanent element disappeared too.
gentlemind,
I am not understanding you. Where marriage is permanent, there might certainly still be something akin to legal divorce—a kind permanent legal separation. But when divorce and remarriage are legal, as they certainly were in Canada before same-sex marriage was even dreamed of, marriage is not permanent.
I am going by the Catholic understanding, but also, I believe, by the understanding we will all find in our copies of What Is Marriage that will magically appear on our Kindles or iPads tomorrow. This is what we have already seen in the essay version:
If people are going to use the arguments in What Is Marriage? to attempt to prove that marriage cannot be between members of the same sex, and then turn around and justify divorce and remarriage, they are going to have to explain how the authors got it so right about gender but not about permanence.
Of course, the book is an expanded version of the essay, so perhaps the authors deal with divorce and permanence in some way that I am not anticipating. But “permanent and exclusive” appears to me to mean no divorce and remarriage. This is already the Catholic understanding, but what will make What Is Marriage? more powerful is that it makes the argument without appealing to religious faith. You might say it gives the “objective” definition of marriage. :P
November 26th, 2012 | 6:49 pm
Same-sex “marriage” requires changing the actual definition ie what marriage is. Marriage will not remain defined as being heterosexual.
gentlemind,
If marriage is permanent and exclusive, and remarriage after divorce is permitted then either marriage is not permanent and exclusive, or those who divorce and “remarry” are not really in a second marriage.
If we are going to be discussing What Is Marriage? then the discussion will be philosophical and not religious. Nevertheless, for the record, I would like to point out that both religious Biblical scholars and those interested more in history than religion are in agreement that the teachings of Jesus on marriage were uniquely his.
November 26th, 2012 | 7:13 pm
I have to say, after reading this, I may need to revise my Christmas list and include this book. :)
That being said, however, I’d like to add my two cents’ to the discussion, if that’s OK with everyone. Some context first: I’ve bounced back and forth quite a bit on this issue. Initially, I was against marriage revision/SSM solely for theological reasons (because I found the “slippery-slope argument” convincing); then, I went through a phase where I adopted the libertarian position, having seen the shortcomings of (the more vulgar expressions of) the slippery-slope argument; within the past few months, I thought a more REFINED version of that argument was pretty convincing; now, however, I’m back to a more libertarian position. So, I’ve seen some of the pros and cons of the arguments presented by both sides. However, I don’t think I’ve encountered the argument presented in this book.
Now, all that being said, I’ve got a question/assertion of my own that I’d like to toss out, just to see what the holes might be in this line of thought (assuming there are some, as I’m sure is the case): Why is a sort of conservative-libertarian approach unacceptable? I submit that there is an “objective” definition of marriage (God’s definition), but I would also submit that the Bible doesn’t necessarily require Christians to incorporate every aspect of biblical law into civil law. (And by saying that, I’m not necessarily implying that anybody here DOES think that.) Thus, civil marriage doesn’t HAVE to be defined in the same way that Christian churches may define religious marriage.
Instead, I would argue that there’s only really one reason for government to become involved in marriage- and family-related issues: To defend or reinforce the institution of the family if it begins to weaken. Why? Because the family is, along with the other mediating institutions of civil society, a great bulwark against the aggrandizement of state power, since it helps to teach the self-restraint that (as Burke noted) is necessary for individuals living in a free society; i.e., it performs the function of socializing individuals. (Without the family, this must either NOT be done at all, in which case society cannot exist, or it must be done by the state, which, as I see it, is the very essence of totalitarianism.) Another way to state it, I suppose, is that the family is essential to the protection of individual liberty. But is it not possible for same-sex couples to teach their children that same self-restraint, and thus to provide one precondition for individual liberty? I think so. So, when viewed from that angle (the family’s “sociological” purpose, I guess you could call it), I don’t think there’s any real ground for prohibiting SSM.
I think the REAL problem, as others have pointed out in this discussion already, is no-fault divorce. THAT is ultimately what has weakened the family most, and if conservatives want to stop the decay of the family, they need to do something about that most of all.
Thoughts?
November 26th, 2012 | 7:38 pm
The conjugal view they speak of does seem to go against remarriage after divorce. Second marriages, when previous spouse is living, can lead to issues of polygamy. There are couples that maintain a kind of relationship, including sexual, with an ex after remarriage. Even when that is not the case they are in some cases legally bound after divorce through alimony, child support, etc.
However personally I don’t think polygamy (concurrent or serial as in divorce-remarriage), as unpopular as this might be to say, doesn’t go against the traditional or essentialist idea of marriage in quite the way SSM does. They might be hesitant to say that as they’re likely going by Christian norms, but even by Catholic norms I think this would be sort of the case. Because a polygamous marriage would still have the union of sexes and assure the child has a parent of their gender. (By having at least one of each) Family is still inherent unlike SSM where family doesn’t naturally come from the actions of the parents. And Catholics have tolerated polygamy, of the Protestant serial kind or Muslim concurrent, in societies where we’re a minority.
SSM has basically no tradition behind it at all. The closest to a tradition involving transgenderism or temporary bonding unions. When the idea was discussed in the gay magazine “One”, in the 1950s, many of the gay men were against it. When Andrew Sullivan advocated for it in the 1980s many gays were still against it as assimilationist and narrow.
November 26th, 2012 | 8:59 pm
Also, I might add that as well thought-out as I’m sure the argument in “What Is Marriage?” most certainly is, it seems to me that it relies on a Thomistic sort of framework. If someone doesn’t really accept the validity of said Thomistic framework (like me), doesn’t that render the argument useless? Or am I wrong about the philosophical framework in which this argument is situated? The language used (“substance” versus “accidents,” e.g.) just SOUNDS so much like something Aquinas would say…
November 27th, 2012 | 1:25 am
@David NIckol:
“If there is an “objective definition” of marriage, or art, or justice, or friendship, or any number of other things, why don’t we all agree on such definitions?”
So we need unanimous agreement to assert truth? Have you never heard of the flat earth society? Does everybody have the same education and experience to comprehend the nature of things? Never heard that if you laid all of the economists in the world end-to-end, they’d never reach a conclusion? I suspect in your case, based upon a rather lengthy record of your prose, you simply reflexively disagree with the Catholic Church and reflexively agree with the secular popes of the state and popular culture.
“Is it because some people are “objective” and other people are not? You seem to think the only alternative to absolute certainty is nihilism. ”
No, I suggested that you are afflicted with nihilism, in that you constantly seek to displace things like marriage, based upon a need to embrace eccentricity and novelty, a disposition labelled as neophilia.
And yes, some people are more objective than others-they are more empirically oriented. The really objective ones are conscious and fearful of the epistemic gaps in knowledge. They learn the caution signs-and realize things like the doctor saying “there’s no evidence of cancer” isn’t the same thing as “there’s evidence of no cancer”, even when most people don’t make that distinction. A consequence of that development is to understand that one of things you should learn as you grow older is that not everything can be radically redesigned without unforeseen consequence-best expressed as “fools rush in where angels fear to tread”. Luther and Henry the Eighth asserted marriage was the proper province of the state and we are now seeing the fruition of that theory. Somehow I don’t imagine that either man ever expected that sodomy would be made the equivalent of the marital embrace.
November 27th, 2012 | 1:33 am
Marriage as defined in the Bible has been under attack ever since Judah refused to allow Tamar the right to conceive a child on behalf of her dead husband. Marriages as an institution was further destroyed when it became entangled with succession in medieval Europe, resulting in continual and widespread regicide, fratricide, and general murder (think Macbeth, who gained his initial kingdom by murdering Lady Macbeth’s original husband).
Circa 1070 Margaret of Scotland persuaded the Scottish church fathers to reject traditional biblical marriage, which would have permitted her husband’s kingdom to be inherited by her step son upon the death (murder) of Malcolm MacDuncan III if only she would become her step son’s wife. Her persuasive argument changed marriage laws throughout Europe in subsequent centuries and was one of the reasons she was canonized a Catholic Saint. But ultimately her impassioned argument was one of the most fundamental shifts from biblical marriage centering around ancestry and progeny and moving towards effection and choice.
Modern technology has so separated modern marriage from the be getting and protecting of children and promulgation of family lines that anything goes. As long as feckless heterosexual couples can have consensually childless marriages for financial benefit, or abandon spouses and children whenever convenient or desired, why not allow homosexual couples, potentially intentionally enhanced by children of choice, the ability to access the same economic benefits and dignities enjoyed by the feckless heterosexual couples?
Anyway, just wanted to add a perspective that this erosion of biblical marriage stretches back hundreds and thousands of years.
November 27th, 2012 | 2:26 am
“We find it hard to conceive of something like marriage possessing or exhibiting any enduring and essential nature.”
If the ideal marriage is a man and woman in a loving, committed relationship, raising their children and supporting each other until death parts them, then which of the below versions of marriage is the most deviant, the most not like a marriage?
- The wife who stays with her husband even though he spends his money maintaining mistresses
- The husband who adds another wife as soon as the last has become worn through childbearing
- The husband who fathers children and supports his wife but pours his affection on the young men he truly desires
- The gay couple who stay sexually faithful to each other until death while raising children they adopted
I know which of these marriages have been defined as marriage and which I’d rather see friends and family in. Do you?
November 27th, 2012 | 7:41 am
Michael, thanks for the question. When I wrote of “marriage” having an enduring and essential nature I meant marriage as an institution (that seems like the wrong word, not organic enough, but I can’t retrieve a better one this morning). I didn’t mean some particular marriage between two particular people, but marriage itself.
So the premise of your question is tangential to the point it’s addressing.
Having said that, all of those relationships are unhealthy in different ways. You have painted the last one in very bright colors, of course, but it still lacks the human good of comprehensive, effusive uniting of which Girgis, Anderson, and George speak. To support this kind of gay coupling is to undermine genuine marriage in the long run, even if it seems good for the pair. The best research we have now suggests that this relationship is not very healthy for the adopted children. And (although this was no part of these three authors’ analysis) there is also the immorality of homosexual sex.
November 27th, 2012 | 7:42 am
Meg, thank you for adding that additional historical perspective. We’ve been messing things up for a long time.
November 27th, 2012 | 8:31 am
Meg
An excellent point, but what is in issue in the debate over SSM is not “biblical marriage” (a very slippery term) or “philosophical marriage” (whatever that is) but civil marriage, an institution no older than 9 November 1791.
It was introduced in France, not coincidentally by the same Assembly that had just converted ten million landless peasants into heritable proprietors.
Its primary purpose is filiation: as the French Senate declared in 2005: “The presumption of paternity of the husband rests on the obligation of fidelity between spouses and reflects the commitment made by the husband during the celebration of marriage, to raise the couple’s children. The report presenting the order to the President of the Republic rightly points out that ” it is, in the words of Dean Carbonnier, the ‘heart of marriage,’ and cannot be questioned without losing for this institution its meaning and value.”
Not that this is a new principle; it goes back to the Roman jurist Paulus “is est pater quem nuptiae demonstrant “, [Dig. 2, 4, 5; 1] or “marriage points out the father.”
Why else would the law facilitate death-bed marriages or, even (in very rare cases) posthumous ones?
As Archbishop of Paris André Vingt-Trois told the National Assembly: “Even though it has not taken the modern form familiar in our civil legislation, there has always been a means of handing things down from generation to generation, which is the very basis of continuity and stability in a society. This transmission between generations is primarily effected by the family. It is the legal framework of family life that structures the transmission of life and shapes the future of society.” There would appear to be little difference between the Catholic concept of marriage and that enshrined in the civil code.
November 27th, 2012 | 9:32 am
I didn’t mean some particular marriage between two particular people, but marriage itself.
Tom Gilson,
Nevertheless, What Is Marriage? insists not just that marriage is a timeless institution, but that individual marriages are “exclusive and permanent.” Yet every one of the 50 states has no-fault divorce, and every country in the world except for Vatican City and the Philippines allows divorce and remarriage.
If philosophical marriage must be “exclusive and permanent,” it is undeniable that nowhere in the United States and almost nowhere in the world does civil marriage reflect philosophical marriage.
The most recent poll I can find shows 70% of Americans consider divorce “morally acceptable” with only 22% considering it “morally wrong.” The country may be evenly divided on “protecting marriage” by limiting it to one man and one woman (at a time) to make it conform to the philosophical definition of marriage, but how does anyone suppose a campaign would fare to eliminate civil divorce and bring civil marriage into conformity with the philosophical definition of marriage as “permanent and exclusive”?
Some are implying that while marriage properly defined is both heterosexual and permanent, the heterosexual nature of marriage is more important than the permanent nature. This seems to me to be equivalent to arguing that one of the legs of a three-legged stool is more important than the other two.
November 27th, 2012 | 10:00 am
So we need unanimous agreement to assert truth?
Adam Baum,
No, but we need close-to-unanimous agreement in order to have an “objective definition” of something like marriage, friendship, justice, or art. I am quite sure Girgis, George, and Anderson didn’t think, when they wrote What Is Marriage that they were merely writing down the “objective definition” of marriage.
I suspect in your case, based upon a rather lengthy record of your prose, you simply reflexively disagree with the Catholic Church and reflexively agree with the secular popes of the state and popular culture. . . . No, I suggested that you are afflicted with nihilism, in that you constantly seek to displace things like marriage, based upon a need to embrace eccentricity and novelty, a disposition labelled as neophilia.
Please don’t make me, personally, a topic of discussion. The question was whether there are “objective” definitions of concepts like marriage, art, and so on. Calling me a nihilist doesn’t contribute anything to clarifying that issue.
November 27th, 2012 | 10:09 am
Joe Sansonese –
You misunderstand. Disgust itself exists in humans from the start… but the targets of disgust are hugely influenced by “society and custom”. In fact, studying babies, they even have to learn to like the smell of milk. In Asia, rotten fish (and the oil therefrom) is a very common foodstuff. Whereas most Asians find the Western predilection for rotten milk (a.k.a. cheese) revolting.
I note you failed to address obviously learned disgust such as prevailed in the segregated South for a century or so.
An analogy – infants and toddlers have an inbuilt talent for learning grammar. But the specifics of what’s considered grammatical or ungrammatical varies widely among human languages. (Subject-object-verb? Subject-verb-object? Object-subject-verb? Object–verb–subject, even?)
Had to clean up vomit once or twice for the younger kids. Heck, I had to learn to choke down zucchini a few times after I got married, but now it doesn’t bother me. There are varying degrees of disgust, y’know.
Again, the fact that someone finds some particular thing disgusting – or not – is interesting but not normative. The question of actual harm is a whole lot more relevant.
November 27th, 2012 | 10:21 am
Tom Gilson –
So… how does this materially differ from “a boxer who’s lost several big fights, and now is just looking to pick a fight with an opponent – any opponent – they think they can beat”?
Why – specifically – do you think this particular issue is easier to sell than legal limits on divorce or contraception? Offhand, I can think of some uncharitable reasons (gays are a minority and some people find them icky) but I’m hesitant to assume something like that.
November 27th, 2012 | 11:17 am
David Nickol. Re remarriage. You have just said that marriage is not marriage – not permanent, not heterosexual, and not exclusive. That, ultimately, is the only argument for redefining marriage – that there is no such thing as marriage. That is also the result of redefining marriage haha
You are using the legal provision of remarriage to state that marriage is not permanent or exclusive. Polygamy also fits your approach as far as exclusivity is concerned. And here is why: a definition can only tell us what something does. It cannot tell us how many of that something it is permissible to have. That information can only exist outside of the definition. The definition (permanent, heterosexual, exclusive) tells us what marriage does. You wish to change what marriage does, whether you realise it or not. The legal definition of marriage is correct ie the same as the natural definition. Man-made law regulates it in a way that nature does not. That’s all.
November 27th, 2012 | 12:10 pm
You have just said that marriage is not marriage – not permanent, not heterosexual, and not exclusive.
gentlemind,
I really don’t understand your criticism, but I certainly haven’t said that marriage is not marriage. I solemnly affirm before all who read this that marriage is marriage!
What I am doing is contrasting “philosophical marriage” (my shorthand for “conjugal marriage” as defined in the book What Is Marriage?) with civil marriage. The authors of What Is Marriage? argue that there is such a thing as “conjugal marriage,” which is marriage truly and properly understood. They also make arguments why civil marriage should conform to “conjugal marriage.” But they do recognize a distinction between the two, as I assume everyone else does, as well. Conjugal marriage is permanent. Civil marriage is not. They do not deduce from this that civil marriage is not civil marriage. I presume they would say that civil marriage laws that permit divorce and remarriage are not ideal marriage laws. But I don’t think they would argue, as some seem to, that civil marriage simply can’t be modified to include same-sex couples. I don’t think they would deny that same-sex couples married in the Netherlands, for example, are not legally married in the Netherlands. I think they argue that civil marriage ought not to be changed to accommodate same-sex couples, because that takes it much farther from conjugal marriage.
Disclaimer: I have read the essay, but the book arrive just this morning, and I have read only the first few pages.
November 27th, 2012 | 12:15 pm
David,
“This seems to me to be equivalent to arguing that one of the legs of a three-legged stool is more important than the other two.”
So how is the argument to remove one of the legs any better? Is a two legged stool somehow more stable than a three legged one? Currently two of the three legs are rotted and termite-eaten so apparently removing the third leg shouldn’t matter at all.
Your argument seems to be that we should do away with legs completely and just label what remains a stool. That way any piece of material that any variety of legs might be attached to could be a stool.
No legs – stool.
One leg – stool.
Two legs – stool.
Three or more legs – stool.
Legs of various lengths and materials – stool.
After awhile the definition of a stool becomes so fluid that it is rendered useless. Why don’t we instead strive to make it as stable and rot resistant as possible? Nothing in the argument for homosexual civil marriages does that. It only adds to the instability.
November 27th, 2012 | 12:21 pm
Michael PS
An excellent point, but what is in issue in the debate over SSM is not “biblical marriage” (a very slippery term) or “philosophical marriage” (whatever that is) but civil marriage, an institution no older than 9 November 1791….It was introduced in France,…
Errr no civil marriage was not introduced in France in Nov of 1791. Perhaps you mean to say modern French civil marriage was introduced in 1791 but other countries besides France have the nerve to exist in the world and the concept of civil marriage to adjudicate various public matters such as inheritance, responsibilities for spouses etc. both predates modern French marriage and has been developed in nearly all countries.
Its primary purpose is filiation…
This is a very weak justification for civil marriage and a very weak argument against SSM.
1. For SSM there’s no harm in filiation purposes as SSM doesn’t produce biological children. You can still presume whenever a woman married to a man gives birth, it is the husband’s child.
2. Modern DNA testing and court decisions have eliminated the need for a filiation policy. Even before DNA, husbands have successfully challenged paternity of children their wives gave birth too.
Why else would the law facilitate death-bed marriages or, even (in very rare cases) posthumous ones?
This would make sense if marriage was mostly restricted to a class of nobility where the question of who is or isn’t the legitimate child of some person becomes very important in deciding who gets the crown or title or lands etc. But marriage has always been assumed to extend to the masses, not just royal families seeking to pass the crown down to the next generation.
November 27th, 2012 | 12:49 pm
Booton
Two points
1) Mandatory civil marriage, licensed and registered by the state existed nowhere before it was introduced in France during the Revolution. Of course, the legal consequences of marriage were recognized before then, but the state exercised no control over its formation or registration.
2) The current law on posthumous marriage dates back to 1959 in Republican France
Art. 171
(Act no 59-1583 of 31 Dec. 1959)
The President of the Republic may, for grave reasons, authorize the celebration of the marriage where one of the future spouses is dead after the completion of the official formalities indicating unequivocally his or her consent.
In this case, the effects of the marriage date back to the day preceding that of the death of the spouse.
However, this marriage may not involve any right of intestate succession to the benefit of the survivor and no matrimonial regime is considered to have existed between the spouses
As the spouse is excluded from the succession, it enables property inherited by the defunct from a family member (which cannot be disposed of by will) to be transmitted to the children of the couple, rather than passing to his collateral heirs.
November 27th, 2012 | 1:01 pm
David Nickol
Is the grant of a feu any less permanent, because the granter can irritate it for breach of condition?
Divorce could be seen, not a part of the marriage contract, but a remedy for its breach
November 27th, 2012 | 1:08 pm
“I note you failed to address obviously learned disgust such as prevailed in the segregated South for a century or so.”
I did not discuss it for the good reason that it is an obvious red herring and mostly false to begin with. The “visceral revulsion” you speak of is a characterization. You have no idea how they felt, if they experienced “disgust,” or if it was something else altogether. Permit me to present a more considered argument as to what that “something” might have been.
Of course they were “on to something,” as you put it. It’s usually called racism or or segregation or white supremacy, which is a thought-out ideology, not a spontaneous intuition, provoked by affronts to affronted, an ideology that followed rather predictably, I dare say, on a murderous Civil War that, quite apart from ending in defeat and surrender, left a million or so dead wounded, and without shelter or livelihood in the States of the Confederacy, that also left the South in conditions of desperate backwardness for nearly a century, its wealth sunk, its industries—even those prospects for industrialization and commerce that prior to 1860 were on the horizon—utterly destroyed, left banking and insurance nonexistent, left a one-crop economy dependent on backbreaking manual labor and hopelessly incapable of competing with new and cheap sources of cotton (Egypt and India), with insufficient revenues to fund schools and hospitals, helpless before the relentless acquisition of property and natural resources such as coal and timber by Northerners, subject to larcenous carpetbagging governments, to entire corps of Federal troops for a decade, and scattered everywhere, as far as the eye could see, a population immured in poverty, degradation, and hopelessness.
The fault for most of that was to be laid at the feet of white male Southerners, no doubt of it. But placidly to chalk up the very hateful attitudes of Southern soldiers towards Negroes to a fanciful “visceral revulsion” and ignore as unworthy of comment the century of extraordinary stress amounting to cultural and ethnic despoliation that had preceded and inspired their hatred is, well, a masterpiece of myopic abbreviation.
Consult “Huckleberry Finn” if you wish to understand the feelings of whites towards blacks in ante-bellum days. Disgust does not even begin to enter into the matter; and after the war, considering all that had occurred, it is shameless and more than a little lazy reductionism to suggest that, well, then surely, those white soldiers were disgusted simpliciter by blacks in the sense I intended, which I obviously have not made clear enough.
To begin with, the other examples you supply are examples of somatic disgust that do not rise above the breathtakingly obvious observation that, for instance, rotten eggs are nauseating. Certain smells and sights will nauseate a person, and will do so without his even being aware of from where they emanate, without any cognitive input, and absent the necessity to form a judgment of any sort whatsoever, moral or no. A person sound asleep can be sickened in that way. In summary, your examples are trivial and irrelevant.
Disgust need not be nor, in the event, WAS the moral sentiment I originally described as an “affective intuition,” somatic in origin, although it may have somatic effects, which indicates only that the pyramidal tracts connecting the cortex to the hypothalamus and points south are in working order: stimulate outrage in one and you may expect to stimulate physical discomfort in the other. An upset stomach following on eating some ill-prepared vegetable or other is not an “intuition,” as I should think, is obvious. “Disgust,” it is true, literally means something like “wrong taste”; yet, granting that one is not plonkingly literal-minded like the current vice-president, the word “taste” is not solely denotative, which is to say, not a matter of the palate alone but having connotations manifested in our higher faculties as well, reactions that are far more important to our humanity than a queasy stomach.
A sense of taste or of what is proper to a man or, if you will, what is suited to a creature made in God’s image, what in other words is “meet and just” in the words of the missal, such discernment, I say, is powerful and participates in forming moral judgments; and one might well wonder if joy as well as distaste arise in one’s bosom as gifts of the spirit, though of course such an explanation will not suit everyone who hears it.
Now what can I mean by “outrage”? And how may I put this briefly? Let me say it involves a perception of a patent disorder in the world, as, for instance, were one to witness the defacing of a work of art. Beforehand there was a purpose, a craft, and a design; afterwards, from the point of view of the artist’s clear intentions, perversion. Nor does the defacement even have to be gratuitously vulgar as is sometimes observed in graffiti. Were someone to alter the colors of a Monet, disgust would be an understandable, even a laudable, reaction; lascivious behavior toward a child is another occasion of disgust; sexual intercourse with animals is another; and, the crux of the matter, anal intercourse whether heterosexual or homosexual, is another occasion of non-somatic disgust in the majority of people. Which brings me to another point: the reaction I describe may be suppressed if by inattention and imprudence the desire for sexual satisfaction is not bridled. None of that has much to do with an upset stomach.
November 27th, 2012 | 1:52 pm
“No, but we need close-to-unanimous agreement in order to have an “objective definition” of something like marriage, friendship, justice, or art. I am quite sure Girgis, George, and Anderson didn’t think, when they wrote What Is Marriage that they were merely writing down the “objective definition” of marriage.”
Assume for the minute this true. Then the advocates of the redefinition have no ground to stand on-because there is no unanimity on the matter-the claim is always that opponents of redefinition are wrong because they won’t accept inevitability, not unanimity.
As a practical matter, we don’t need anything like unanimity. In the physical sciences, there was no unanimity is Pasteur’s time although he was true, and we know that while once nearly universally accepted, Newtonian mechanics and the Euclidian geometry of space seem to be wrong, even if relativity is some day displaced by string theory.
Most reasonable person, would not look as Serrano’s most infamous work and call it art. I’m guessing 80 plus percent of people would call it excrement. It wasn’t beautiful, appealing or the work of talent. Some bureaucrat, operating under the rubric of “art snobs” decided it was “art” and Serrano got the money.
“Please don’t make me, personally, a topic of discussion. The question was whether there are “objective” definitions of concepts like marriage, art, and so on. Calling me a nihilist doesn’t contribute anything to clarifying that issue.”
I’m sorry, but “impeaching the witness” is a legitimate course of inquiry, and the preeminent one, because if there is no objective reality, we only have opinions to rank. But I didn’t label you a nihilist. I stated:
“In your view, there is no objective anything. It leads to some curious results a relentless dedication to curious fusion of nihilism and neophilia.”
Your posts exhibit a consistent character, as do mine. I have a bias to empiricism, and against statism, and I not only don’t object to being so characterized, I consider those biases virtuous.
For you I see a bias to relativism, with a subordinate bias to the burden of proof being placed on the rejection of novelty (neophilia).
That’s why, despite the fact that for millenia it was accepted “res ipsa loquitur” that marriage, despite all other variations, was understood to involve the union of man and woman, you reject that, arguing that this understanding should not stand, because there is no objective reality. Therefore the arrangement must accept and absorb all matter of novel redefinition that might occur. Of course, I think relativism is merely a disingenuous rhetorical tool used by people to assert a new order to displace an old one.
If marriage has no fixed meaning and is infinitely malleable, then the logical answer would to abolish it, rather than deform it.
November 27th, 2012 | 2:40 pm
Boonton,
See the original context as Michael PS presented it. Has DNA testing really replaced “the commitment made by the husband during the celebration of marriage, to raise the couple’s children”?
Science is great, but I’ve never heard of a lab test that could do that!
November 27th, 2012 | 3:05 pm
I’m sorry, but “impeaching the witness” is a legitimate course of inquiry, and the preeminent one, because if there is no objective reality, we only have opinions to rank. . . .
Adam Baum,
Impeaching the witness may be a legitimate tactic in a court of law, but it definitely is not in a philosophical discussion, where it is merely argumentum ad hominem.
If marriage has no fixed meaning and is infinitely malleable, then the logical answer would to abolish it, rather than deform it.
My point is that marriage (like art, justice, loyalty, etc.) has a meaning, but there is no one “objective” definition of any of those. They all describe something real that there can be great areas of agreement on, but if two people disagree about what art is, there is no third person who can settle their argument with an “objective” definition.
I believe we can know a great deal but that we cannot be certain of everything. I believe I can point to Bernini’s Ecstasy of Saint Teresa and say, “That is great art.” You seem to believe that if an “objective” definition of “great art” cannot be arrived at, then “great art” must have no meaning.
If marriage has no fixed meaning and is infinitely malleable, then the logical answer would to abolish it, rather than deform it.
I, of course, did not say the meaning of marriage is “infinitely malleable.” I said it does not have one precise, objective meaning upon which everyone would agree.
I have a bias to empiricism . . .
It is not at all evident.
November 27th, 2012 | 3:19 pm
Joe Sansonese –
I’m rather amazed that you could so misconstrue what I wrote. The disgust was a symptom of the hatred (and such hatred might be in some sense historically comprehensible, but not justifiable), not a cause of it. It was learned. That’s the point!
How else to explain separate drinking fountains and bathrooms?
And there’s wide disagreement on that, too. I mean, Christians actually worship with men and women intermingled! They’re even willing for men to come into contact with a menstruating woman, or a chair she’s sat on! Now that’s outrageous… if you’re an Orthodox Jew.
Again, I’m worried far more about actual demonstrable harm than ‘outrage’.
November 27th, 2012 | 3:39 pm
Michael asked:
- The wife who stays with her husband even though he spends his money maintaining mistresses
- The husband who adds another wife as soon as the last has become worn through childbearing
- The husband who fathers children and supports his wife but pours his affection on the young men he truly desires
- The gay couple who stay sexually faithful to each other until death while raising children they adopted
============
One common thread in all these examples: the protagonists feel they are entitled to pursue whatever dysfunctional and unethical desires that appear in their minds. All of them believe they are not accountable for any of the sexual and psychological dynamics they experience. They all believe in their entitlement to live an unexamined life, to let their most dysfunctional instincts and desires control and dictate their lives.
Thus, in all of them, there is only one course of action – to act out whatever perverse desire they feel without ever questioning where it came from or how they should resolve it so that they can live their lives in the following way:
The husband and wife who build a marriage together and raise their children based on ethics and a wholesome relationship.
November 27th, 2012 | 3:53 pm
See the original context as Michael PS presented it. Has DNA testing really replaced “the commitment made by the husband during the celebration of marriage, to raise the couple’s children”?
Tom Gilson,
One of the things we hear frequently from opponents of same-sex marriage is that every child has the right to be raised by his or her biological parents. However, the “presumption of paternity” Michael PS keeps bringing up pretty much guarantees that a child conceived before marriage or with a man other than the woman’s husband will be brought up by the mother’s husband, not the biological father. I’d venture to say that in general, that’s the way it should be, but there is a conflict between the presumption of paternity and a child’s alleged right to know and be raised by both biological parents.
Also, the presumption of paternity presumes things that can be proven false by DNA testing, but yet for the most part, the law still presumes paternity for the wife’s husband even when it is known to be factually incorrect.
November 27th, 2012 | 4:42 pm
See the original context as Michael PS presented it. Has DNA testing really replaced “the commitment made by the husband during the celebration of marriage, to raise the couple’s children”?
Filiation is not loving fatherhood. Filiation is assigning fatherhood to a man. Filiation is assigned in marriage for several reasons. The most pressing was to avoid courts having to hear numerous cases of husbands claiming their wives were unfaithful and therefore they should not be legally responsible for the children their wives bear. Since most such cases would be little more than bitter ‘he said, she said’ screaming matches filiation makes it very difficult but not impossible to argue it. There are other times in history when it was very important to deem someone a ‘legitimate heir’ for purposes of royal succession….the concern was to be able to fill the role in a clearcut way that would minimize the risk of people contesting the crown, not establish untarnished biological truth.
But it is possible. Even before the age of DNA a husband could challenge filiation in cases where he could present clear proof he is not the actual father (for example, a man who goes away at sea for two years and returns home to a pregnant wife) or where all the parties agreed he was not the father.
Today, though, DNA testing is cheap and easy so you can let any husband challenge filiation. If he asserts he isn’t the father a simple test will prove him right or wrong. But that’s all the law does. Just because the law declares a man is the father of a child, that doesn’t make him ‘celebrate the marriage’ or even ‘raise the children’. That comes from the father himself, or it doesn’t. All the law can do is provide for some very basic functions like assinging inheritance rights, imposing child support if necessary etc.
David
However, the “presumption of paternity” Michael PS keeps bringing up pretty much guarantees that a child conceived before marriage or with a man other than the woman’s husband will be brought up by the mother’s husband, not the biological father.
Indeed, Michael PS’s argument (and he is really the only one who makes it, to be fair) essentially is running totally counter to the biological essentialism many others here are fighting for. Filiation seems like it especially desgined to faciliate biological fraud. Which might make sense for a country like France that had a long history of nobility (even though the Revolution was not quite crown friendly to say the least) where biological heirs and ‘legitimate’ heirs were often only partially overlapping sets.
November 27th, 2012 | 4:45 pm
Heather
One common thread in all these examples: the protagonists feel they are entitled to pursue whatever dysfunctional and unethical desires that appear in their minds. All of them believe they are not accountable for any of the sexual and psychological dynamics they experience. They all believe in their entitlement to live an unexamined life, to let their most dysfunctional instincts and desires control and dictate their lives.
But it’s the uncommon thread that you have to defend here. Of all the examples cited, you are clear in your disapproval of them. You are clear in your position that they are kidding themselves on the damage they are doing to themselves, others, even possibly their souls. Yet all of them are free to be married legally in your book except one. You have to demonstrate why one case, a case which many would think are on a higher moral plane than the other cases presented but that’s a different issue, is so important to treat differently legally.
November 27th, 2012 | 5:15 pm
One common thread in all these examples: the protagonists feel they are entitled to pursue whatever dysfunctional and unethical desires that appear in their minds. All of them believe they are not accountable for any of the sexual and psychological dynamics they experience. They all believe in their entitlement to live an unexamined life, to let their most dysfunctional instincts and desires control and dictate their lives.
Heather,
This doesn’t describe a husband with a mistress, or a husband who has relationships with young men outside his marriage, and it certainly doesn’t describe a faithful gay couple. It describes criminally insane psychopaths.
I don’t see how the way you routinely depict people of whose behavior you disapprove, and particularly gay people, can be described in any other way but contemptuous. Most people lead reasonably good and decent lives most of the time, and even people who do bad things like commit adultery are probably more weak than evil. I have known some pretty amoral and irresponsible people, but I have never known any who “believe[d] in their entitlement to live an unexamined life, to let their most dysfunctional instincts and desires control and dictate their lives.”
November 27th, 2012 | 6:18 pm
Boonton: “You have to demonstrate why one case, a case which many would think are on a higher moral plane than the other cases presented but that’s a different issue, is so important to treat differently legally.”
I already explained in my comment why there are problems with all four examples. There is no lack of demonstration.
If you would like to make an argument against what I wrote, feel free to.
Simply ignoring what I wrote, however, is not an argument.
November 27th, 2012 | 6:24 pm
“One common thread in all these examples: the protagonists feel they are entitled to pursue whatever dysfunctional and unethical desires that appear in their minds. All of them believe they are not accountable for any of the sexual and psychological dynamics they experience. They all believe in their entitlement to live an unexamined life, to let their most dysfunctional instincts and desires control and dictate their lives.”
David Nickol: This doesn’t describe a husband with a mistress, or a husband who has relationships with young men outside his marriage, and it certainly doesn’t describe a faithful gay couple. It describes criminally insane psychopaths.
Wrong – it describes all four examples. Didn’t all four pursue the unethical and dysfunctional dynamics in their minds?
Contrary to your silly contention, it is not only the few “criminally insane psychopaths” of the world who have issues with ethics and pursuing dysfunctional desires.
November 27th, 2012 | 7:05 pm
David: “I don’t see how the way you routinely depict people of whose behavior you disapprove, and particularly gay people, can be described in any other way but contemptuous. ”
We now have a contention that people who are doing harm in the world should do so with a lack of accountability, lack of criticism, lack of disapproval, and with lack of contempt.
I’m not sure how much contempt I feel regarding any person who does harm in any sphere of life, but whatever contempt I may feel merits no criticism.
“Most people lead reasonably good and decent lives most of the time, and even people who do bad things like commit adultery are probably more weak than evil.”
I disagree. How one characterizes “the majority of people” really depends on how much of a conscience one has regarding ethics and how much knowledge one has about the problems in the world.
The more numb one’s conscience is, the less problematic attitudes one is able to acknowledge in oneself or in others. The lower one’s standards of “good,” the more anyone is “good most of the time.” The more insensitive one is to human suffering and the harm that causes it, the less of it one sees in the world. The more one colludes with people doing harm, the more interest one has in portraying them as good. The more one desires lack of accountability for oneself and for others, the more one characterizes those who demand it as unreasonable.
As for your contention that people who commit adultery are more weak than evil, I disagree with the framing used.
I know many adulterers who are not in any way “weak.” Would I characterize the majority of them as “evil?” Not the majority, but some are so perverse in their attitudes and behaviors that even such an extreme label is warranted. The problem with your framing lies in the false dichotomy: “adulterers are either weak or evil. If they are not evil, they must be weak; if they are not weak, they must evil.” That is not my view, nor my argument. I would say most adulterers are neither weak nor evil. They are often strong or privileged and lack character in many ways.
The overwhelming majority of adulterers I know or know of are profoundly unethical and do harm in a very large number of ways, with varying degrees of intensity. Whether they are also “weak,” is that relevant? Let’s consider this example: If because of a “weakness,” a homosexual abuses a child, should he be more pampered in how he is treated? What if he commits murder? Or rape? Or adultery?
Is this your mantra for analyzing the world: “if someone’s “weakness” made them do it, it’s not a big deal?”
I don’t even know what you mean by “weak” but it sounds like buzz word for excusing harm and doing away with accountability.
And how much harm does one need to do in order to merit the label “evil”? I don’t usually employ the word “evil” for people who don’t reach an enormous level of perversity.
This doesn’t make all the people who do harm in terrible ways, but not the most extreme ones, any better than they are. Between being “good” and being “evil” there lies a very complex spectrum. It’s not because someone is not evil that they are any good or much good.
November 27th, 2012 | 9:25 pm
Gilson,
You’re welcome. I appreciate it.
“I didn’t mean some particular marriage between two particular people, but marriage itself”
I would think that the definition of marriage itself exists in order for us to judge whether particular couples are married.
Three of my examples conform to your definition of marriage and have historically been accepted as marriage at one point or another, though, by today’s standards, they are all bad marriages.
The fourth example is not by your definition marriage, but it nonetheless exemplifies a healthy relationship.
The question is why you would require that the state and other institutions not recognize this healthy relationship as marriage.
“You have painted the last one in very bright colors, of course”
The opposite, of course, is true. I painted the last relationship in very plain colors. I know lots of people—straight and gay, churched and unchurched, married and even a few unmarried —who have remained sexually faithful to their partners and raised children. These are common and largely unremarkable behaviors.
You only perceive the colors as bright because you think of most gay unions as unsuccessful. Most gay unions are unsuccessful, but that fact doesn’t mean that all are, that most are fated to be unsuccessful, or that participating in a loving, supportive Christian community can’t improve gay unions.
“The best research we have now suggests that this relationship is not very healthy for the adopted children.”
It has been for the few children I know well. I’m aware of no study that has examined the health of children from intact gay families.
“And (although this was no part of these three authors’ analysis) there is also the immorality of homosexual sex”
I’ve never heard a convincing explanation of what exactly is sinful about homosexual sex. With one conspicuous exception, there is no run-of-the-mill activity either gays or lesbians employ that my wife and I don’t use. How these are sinful, I just don’t know. Adultery and fornication are plainly sinful, but these other activities I don’t get.
November 27th, 2012 | 9:42 pm
Michael,
I considered the last depiction bright simply by comparison to the other scenarios you offered. At least you do agree that most gay unions are unsuccessful (in the sense of being lifelong faithful partnerships, I assume).
The reason I would require the state not to recognize that relationship as marriage is because, healthy or otherwise, it is not marriage. It is a relationship. It is a partnership of two people. There are children there. There is longevity of commitment. Thank you for that depiction of two sisters raising their nephew and niece: it is not a marriage. Now, revert the scenario back again to two men who relate to one another sexually: is there something about two men sharing a sexual relationship that magically turns it into something the state should manage, control, regulate, and endorse? Do you want the state making that the issue on which to regulate relationships???
The explanation for the sinfulness of homosexual sex is found where all such explanations are found: in God’s word. It is (a) sex outside the bounds of marriage, and (b) expressly condemned in Scripture. Either (a) or (b) suffices, by the way; so whether some new or variant reading of the Greek can be brought to bear against (b) is irrelevant.
There are no studies that show the health of children from intact gay families; on this you are correct. In recent research Mark Regnerus tried very hard to find enough intact gay families to assess statistically. He couldn’t do it. His tentative conclusion/suggestion, subject of course to future research, was that such families are rare for some systematic reason related to the gay/lesbian factor. Note that in his research there were considerably more non-intact families in which homosexuality/lesbianism had been part of the picture, and in which children’s outcomes were not positive compared to those in other families. Further, there is considerable research among heterosexual couples showing that the most healthy family structure of all is one in which children are raised by their biological parents. (Being raised in a low-conflict environment is a highly important, related, yet still distinct variable.)
November 27th, 2012 | 9:43 pm
Heather,
“One common thread in all these examples: the protagonists feel they are entitled to pursue whatever dysfunctional and unethical desires that appear in their minds.”
Reread the examples more carefully, and I think you’ll find that you’ve jumped to conclusions about some of them.
In the first, the wife stays with the roving husband. Are you claiming that her desires are dysfunctional and unethical? Haven’t we urged generations of women in such circumstances to stand by their men? What would you encourage this woman to do?
In the third, the man follows age-old advice. He confines his sexual activity to his wife and treats her well. Haven’t we asked gay men to do that for ages? What would you encourage this man to do?
November 27th, 2012 | 9:48 pm
I’ll admit to being lost with respect to David’s and Boonton’s comments at 3:53 and at 4:42. I understand what you’re saying but I can’t see how they have anything to do with the discussion at hand.
Boonton, your definition of filiation may be fully accurate in certain contexts, but that doesn’t decrease the relevance of the husband’s/father’s commitment to the marriage and to raising the child(ren). It seems to me that’s the point that still bears discussing, regardless of whether biological paternity can be tested in the lab.
November 27th, 2012 | 10:19 pm
Gilson,
“I considered the last depiction bright simply by comparison to the other scenarios you offered.”
Fair enough. It was bright in order to make the point that you condemn healthy unions but accept as marriage some unhealthy ones.
“At least you do agree that most gay unions are unsuccessful (in the sense of being lifelong faithful partnerships, I assume)”
You assume correctly, but let’s linger on that point a moment. Unions are seen as successful when they are long-lived and healthy. The long life of a relationship tells us something about its supportiveness. The healthiness tells us that it has been faithful and loving rather than abusive. I’ve seen several gay unions do both.
“Thank you for that depiction of two sisters raising their nephew and niece: it is not a marriage. Now, change the scenario to two unrelated men who relate to one another sexually: is there something about two men sharing a sexual relationship that magically turns it into something the state should manage, control, regulate, and endorse?”
Yes, there is something magic about the sexual relationship of the two men or two women, and that magic is described in Genesis 2, which explains that in sexual unions we seek out the missing part of ourselves, our helpmeet, the one who ends our loneliness. Genesis 2 is quite explicit that this person is the cause of us breaking away from our birth families in order to create a new family. Two sisters can never create a new family; they can only perpetuate the old.
(That was a skillful turn in your argument, by the way, and it was elegantly done. I especially appreciate the fact that you chose to discuss women. Nice touch.) (And there’s no sarcasm here. I really mean it!)
“Do you want the state making that the issue on which to regulate relationships?”
Yes. I’m sure. Why wouldn’t I be?
“It is (a) sex outside the bounds of marriage, and (b) expressly condemned in Scripture.”
But why is it condemned? It makes sense that murder, adultery, fornication, and theft are condemned. But why homosexuality? Surely it can be explained as easily as adultery or fornication.
“His tentative conclusion/suggestion, subject of course to future research, was that such families are rare for some systematic reason related to the gay/lesbian factor.”
The systemic reason is social change. It’s only been recently (the last quarter century) that a couple could be out, be supported by a church or neighborhood community, and raise children. In ten years, a new study will find a larger sample and plenty of evidence. I’m close to two couples who have been together 25 and 30 years and have wonderful college-age children. There are surely more.
“Note that in his research there were considerably more non-intact families in which homosexuality/lesbianism had been part of the picture, and in which children’s outcomes were not positive compared to those in other families”
That jives with my experience. People my age—fifties—were largely from straight families that broke up when someone realized they were gay and left the marriage. Divorce was still less than common and homosexuality quite strange, so there was lots of instability from lots of directions. I see fewer broken families from this source in younger people. Regenerus is capturing a particular historical moment, not eternal, sociological truths.
“Further, there is considerable research among heterosexual couples showing that the most healthy family structure of all is one in which children are raised by their biological parents.”
You’ll find no argument there from either me or my gay friends who have adopted. I’m an adoptive parent myself, and there’s few of us who would argue that our children wouldn’t have been better off in their birth family had their birth family wanted them.
November 27th, 2012 | 10:46 pm
Tom,
Michael PS’s assertion, and he’s made this many times now, is that marriage is simply a civil procedure to assign paternity making it easy for courts to do things like order child support, decide inheritance cases and so on.
That doesn’t have anything to do with a man’s commitment to a marriage or children. It has to do with what a court will do should a man lack such a commitment. It also raises the stakes on marriage. If you marry a woman, be prepared to step into the role of father to the woman’s children. If you don’t trust that the woman will be faithful to you, take heed *before* you get married. Otherwise, while it isn’t impossible, you’re going to have a very hard time getting any court to declare you’re not the father and you’re not responsible.
But I don’t see the relationship and SSM, in fact I don’t see the relationship between this and most marriages. Many marriages do not have children. Most marriages that do have children have no disputes over who is the father. While it’s helpful for society to have a system of rules that make it easy to assign the legal responsibilities of fatherhood, it just isn’t such a big thing that it alone really accounts for civil marriage. Even if you did think this was a huge deal, SSM doesn’t cause any problems with it since SSM couples do not have biological children so having 1-5% of marriages being SSM won’t interfere with paternity disputes in the rest of marriages that may arise.
So there’s that and my general lack of impression that what France adopted as civil marriage law in 1791 enjoys some type of status of infallibility. France had a revolution and wrote a civil code of law. Like any other code, it’s been subject to endless tweaks and refinement ever since. Perhaps SSM doesn’t make sense for France since they have a slightly different style of marriage law (with their PACs which sound like an optional ‘customized marriage’ available to straight and gay couples alike) but the US doesn’t operate on French law and doesn’t have the French system.
November 28th, 2012 | 4:21 am
Booton
Yes, paternity has a legal and social dimension, as well as a biological one and, for that reason, the law does not permit an apparent status to be challenged.
Examples of “apparent status include:
That the individual has always borne the name of those from whom he is said to descend;
That the latter have treated him as their child, and that he has treated them as his father and mother;
That they have, in that capacity, provided for his education, support and settling;
That he is so recognized in society and by the family;
That public authorities consider him as such.
In the same way, a clearly invalid marriage cannot be impeached after the death of one of the parties.
Again, no third party can challenge a man’s acknowledgement of his child, born out of marriage, even if it reduces or eliminates his reserved share of the inheritance. Still less can a third party challenge the presumption of paternity.
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.
November 28th, 2012 | 10:27 am
Michael PS
Again, no third party can challenge a man’s acknowledgement of his child, born out of marriage, even if it reduces or eliminates his reserved share of the inheritance. Still less can a third party challenge the presumption of paternity.
I don’t know about French law but this is just untrue in the US. Even before DNA testing a husband could challenge paternity. It’s even possible for a man who is having an affair with a married woman to argue that he is the father of her child rather than the husband.
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
I think the obsession with filiation has more to do with the property rather than the welfare of the child. In an aristrocratic system, there’s a huge need to deem a person a ‘legititmate heir’ and your doctrine of filiation does that quite nicely. It doesn’t help children much, though. If you’re an illegitimate child you’re out of luck, even if the man who fathered you has millions.
The US never had a domestic system of royality and in its revolution decidedly rejected monarchy. Its paternity laws are much more focused on child welfare. Hence it’s relatively easy for a man to challenge paternity rights when a child is born (before there’s been as much parental bonding) but becomes much more difficult as time goes by.
In terms of SSM you still haven’t explained why this is relevant. France could adopt SSM and still keep its system of unchallengeable paternity.
November 28th, 2012 | 1:51 pm
Booton wrote, “In terms of SSM you still haven’t explained why this is relevant. France could adopt SSM and still keep its system of unchallengeable paternity.”
What you would then have would be two kinds of marriage: those between opposite-sex couples, to which the presumption applies and those between same-sex couples, to whom it does not. That is precisely the position in Belgium and the Netherlands, where the rule applies only to those marriages where there is both a “husband” and a “wife.”
Now, I can easily explain the legal function of the first of these two kinds of marriage; I have only to quote the old commentators on the Code, , Demolombe (1804–1887), Guillouard (1845-1925) and Gaudemet (1908-2001) and, of course, our old friend, Carbonnier. But I am at a loss to explain the legal function of the second kind. What public purpose does it serve?
Even if we call both “marriage,” the most casual observer will realise that we are dealing with two different institutions, not one.
That is why I consider such legislation futile; the supposed equality it is designed to introduce would be spurious.
November 28th, 2012 | 5:57 pm
What you would then have would be two kinds of marriage: those between opposite-sex couples, to which the presumption applies and those between same-sex couples, to whom it does not.
The presumption could apply to both. A male-male couple is never going to get pregnant and bear a child. Hence there’s not going to be any challenge of paternity. If one of them father’s a child with some woman they are not married too, it would be no different legally if a married man fathers a child with a mistress. In the case of a female-female couple, motherhood would be determined by which woman gave birth….which isn’t contraversial. Fatherhood, being a male role, would have to be given to whatever male impregnated her….in otherwords equal to a woman having an affair on her husband.
As for the ‘public purpose’ of such marriage, you’ve identified one particular purpose which is suitable for France’s culture of aristrocratic elitism. Plenty of other countries, such as the US, which had no history of royal families or the need to determine ‘legtimate’ from ‘illegitimate’ heirs to pass on family estates, titles etc. never thought their lack of filiation needs made it pointless to have marriage. Perhaps the ‘public purpose’ you’re looking for is the fact that law accomodates human nature, not the other way around.
November 29th, 2012 | 4:19 am
Booton
I do not think that the focus on filiation in the Civil Code has anything to do with France’s royal or aristocratic legacy.
On the contrary, I believe that Archbishop of Paris, André Vingt-Trois, was right, when he told the Pécresse mission of the National Assembly, “Even though it has not taken the modern form familiar in our civil legislation, there has always been a means of handing things down from generation to generation, which is the very basis of continuity and stability in a society. This transmission between generations is primarily effected by the family. It is the legal framework of family life that structures the transmission of life and shapes the future of society.”
Robert Neuberger, Director of the Centre of the Association for Family Studies [Centre d'étude de la famille association (CEFA)] told the Pécresse mission, “In this country, the model has long been the peasant family, structured around a patriarch and expanding from hearth to hearth.”
The mission endorsed the traditional view of marriage.
I doubt if this is very different from the American experience.
November 29th, 2012 | 11:35 am
I do not think that the focus on filiation in the Civil Code has anything to do with France’s royal or aristocratic legacy.
Really? On a previous debate on this topic I recall you asserted that one of France’s shining accomplishments was having large landed estates that have stayed within families for multiple generations. While actual royal titles, I suppose, more or less came to an end after the Revolution elements of the culture remain.
It’s nice that the legitimate heirs to large landed estates have an easy time of it under French law but that doesn’t explain the legal purpose marriage has for society. AS I pointed out while this is great for ‘legtimate’ heirs, it’s pretty bad for illegitimate ones. And most people do not have ‘large landed estates’ anyway so clearly marriage’s legal purpose should be a bit more broad than this rather specialized ‘need’. And I put ‘need’ in quotation marks because it’s unclear that it’s a good thing. The US does not consider vaste estates of inherited wealth to be in itself a good thing. I believe there’s a Chinese motto about three generations to become rich and two more to become poor again. The idea that the upper class at any given time should be directly descended from previous generations’ upper classes hardly seems like an unquestionable good thing to me.
But even if you feel this is marriage’s only purpose, I still have yet to see how SSM impacts that in any serious way. Given that gays are a minority of the population and will not produce paternity disputes from their marriages, you can still use France’s filiation system even with SSM.
December 2nd, 2012 | 12:40 pm
Boonton,
The legal presumption that the husband will father the children born to he and his wife is a rebutable presumption one case at-a-time. That does not invalidate its sexual basis. It confirms it.
That two-sexed sexual basis is also the sexual basis for consummation (completion and renewal of the marital relationship), annulment (no marriage existed), adultery/divorce (grounds for dissolution and harm), and so forth.
This sexual basis in law reflects societal regard for the core meaning of marriage. It is not American specific nor French specific. The nature of humankind is two-sexed;the nature of human procreation is two-sexed; the nature of human community is two-sexed. The sexual basis for the marital presumption of paternity arises from the nature of humankind itself.
However, that sexual basis is specifically inapplicable to the SSM idea in whatever form you might hope it would take in culture or in law. SSM is not oriented to integration of the sexes; it is not oriented to responsible procreation; it is not even oriented to sexual attraction or gay identity.
The SSM idea means societal disregard for the core meaning of marriage. There is no provision for integration of the sexes but rather segregation of the sexes. There is no provision for the unity of fatherhood and motherhood but, if procreation is even contemplated as central to the SSM idea (which we are assured it is not), it is as extra-marital or extra-SSM. Your own remarks made that clear, anyway. In terms of the marital presumption of paternity, there is nothing to rebut one case at-a-time in the one-sex short scenario — sexualized or not, gay identified or not, licensed or not. Unlike the union of husband and wife, there is no sexual basis for presuming consent to co-equal parental status.
The SSM idea comes with an elaborate emphasis on gay identity this and gay identity that; and on sexual attraction. But neither sexual attraction nor group identity is a trump card for those who are ineligible to marry in two-sexed scenarios. Why treat the same-sex scenario differently? Because it is a different type of relationship in kind rather than in degree. Your own remarks say so.
There is no justification to legally presume that all same-sex scenarios are gay or entail sexual attraction as essentials. That to which consent is given is the key here. In marriage the husband and wife consent to the sexual basis of consent to the marital presumption of paternity, for example. But that is inapplicable to the entire range of arrangements that lack either husband or wife. There is no sexual basis to legally presume consent to co-equal parental status arising from the lack of husband or wife.
There is no gay identity basis for that. There is no same-sex sexual attraction basis for that. The SSM idea does not entail consent to the provision for responsible procreation.
The comprehensivenss of the marital relationship is foreign or extrinsic to the same-sex scenario — regardless of the gay emphasis and the emphasis on sexual attraction that is placed front and center in SSM rhetoric and argumentation. The topic of the marital presumption of paternity demonstrates this. SSM points outside of marriage even if you believe that SSM is a type of marriage. Your remarks illustrated that.
December 2nd, 2012 | 10:42 pm
Chairm
Micheal PS has been arguing for what I think we can call ‘strict filiation’. By that I mean if you’re married to a woman and she has a child, you are the father no matter what. It doesn’t matter if DNA says you’re not, doesn’t matter if you were away at sea for a year, doesn’t matter if there’s a man down the street who swears he is the true father.
This makes sense, if you think about it, for an age of royality and titles. Since the last thing you want in a monarchy is a dispute over who is really the dead King’s true son, you need a surefire system of declaring legitimacy that no one can game, no one can argue with. Strict filiation fits the bill. The King may have as many mistresses as he pleases….so may the Queen for that matter! They aren’t required to have a happy marriage but all its political needs will be meet if she bears a child.
Since neither the US nor France has such a system, there is no need for ‘strict filiation’. Filiation is a useful tool for keeping the courts unclogged with spurious paternity suits by deadbeat husbands who want to skip out on their families by claiming their wives slept around on them. One can see that esp. before the day of DNA, these would be almost impossible cases for courts to handle since they almost always fall apart into ‘she said, he said’ matches that no 3rd party can really judge. But it wasn’t ‘filiation for filiation’s sake’. A man could challenge paternity of his wife’s baby, but he had to do it quickly and had to have real evidence (i.e. away at sea for a year when she conceived)
The SSM idea means societal disregard for the core meaning of marriage. There is no provision for integration of the sexes but rather segregation of the sexes.
I don’t see this at all. By this reasoning the handful of people who choose chastity (say nuns and priests) are somehow thwarting society’s need for procreation and should be declared enemies of the people! That would, of course, be absurd. 3-5% of non-sexual people in society would hardly generate a population collapse. Likewise 3-5% of SSM is hardly going to usher in some type of ‘segregation of the sexes’, not that I’m sure what you even mean by that.
There is no provision for the unity of fatherhood and motherhood but, if procreation is even contemplated as central to the SSM idea (which we are assured it is not), it is as extra-marital or extra-SSM. Your own remarks made that clear, anyway.
Again I believe this is simply a moot point. Outlawing SSM doesn’t prevent SSP (same-sex parenting). If a same-sex couple has a child via something outside the couple (i.e. an affair by one partner, an aggranged surrogate etc.), there is nothing to stop that simply because the state has banned SSM. In fact in such a case the child would be worse off in a state without SSM. At least in a SSM state, the child’s interests could be legitimately considered by courts in the case of a divorce or breakup.
Your above sentence, likewise could be written as….
There is no provision for the unity of fatherhood and motherhood….in a marriage of a 65 yr old woman/an infertile couple/a couple unfit to have children…etc.
There is no justification to legally presume that all same-sex scenarios are gay or entail sexual attraction as essentials. That to which consent is given is the key here. In marriage the husband and wife consent to the sexual basis of consent to the marital presumption of paternity, for example. But that is inapplicable to the entire range of arrangements that lack either husband or wife. There is no sexual basis to legally presume consent to co-equal parental status arising from the lack of husband or wife.
I think you’re confusing consent to marriage with consent to parternity. But it doesn’t work that way, right now if you marry a woman you don’t simply ‘consent’ to be the father of any kid she bears. In fact you can’t. If she has an affair, and conceives a child, the man she slept with can assert his right to be the child’s father and he will win…provided he moves quickly and firmly.
I think I get what you’re trying to say, that integration of the sexes is required for Marriage (note the capital ‘M’ to denote what’s been called here ‘philosophical marriage’ but others may simply call a ‘true marriage’ or ‘real marriage’….as in “Brittany Spears married a friend of hers after a night of drinking in Las Vegas but it wasn’t a real marriage”. Which is fine but a lot of legal marraiges are a far cry from ‘true marriages’. Why should the law, which doesn’t intervene in a lot of other couples foolishly trying to marry, intervene in the case of SSM?
December 4th, 2012 | 9:54 pm
Boonton, people should not be allowed to conceive offspring with someone of the same sex, it is unethical to combine the genes of two people of the same sex and it should be prohibited. All marriages should be allowed to conceive offspring using their own genes, none should be prohibited from using their own genes to conceive offspring together.
Do not equate my right to conceive offspring with my wife using our own genes to a same-sex couple’s right to conceive offspring. One is a right and should be protected, and the other is not a right and should be prohibited
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