“Jesus talked of hating your neighbor as tantamount to hating God, and yet some Christians hate their neighbors by policy and are busy hunting biblical justifications for doing so. Are they not perverts in the fullest and fairest sense of that term?

“If it can be argued that homosexual marriage is not reproductive and is therefore unnatural and should be forbidden on that account, must we not argue that childless marriages are unnatural and should be annulled?” he asked.

“One may find the sexual practices of homosexuals to be unattractive or displeasing and therefore unnatural, but anything that can be done in that line by homosexuals can be done and is done by heterosexuals. Do we need a legal remedy for this? Would conservative Christians like a small government bureau to inspect, approve and certify their sexual behavior? Would they like a colorful tattoo verifying government approval on the rumps of lawfully copulating parties? We have the technology, after all, to monitor everybody’s sexual behavior, but so far as I can see so eager an interest in other people’s private intimacy is either prurient or totalitarian or both.”

“The oddest of the strategies to condemn and isolate homosexuals is to propose that homosexual marriage is opposed to and a threat to heterosexual marriage, as if the marriage market is about to be cornered and monopolized by homosexuals. If this is not industrial capitalist paranoia, it at least follows the pattern of industrial capitalist competitiveness. We must destroy the competition. If somebody else wants what you’ve got, from money to marriage, you must not hesitate to use the government–small of course–to keep them from getting it.”

“Heterosexual marriage does not need defending. It only needs to be…

On another note: I happen to agree wholeheartedly with Wendell’s point about “the division of sexual energy”… and I don’t think my own approach to that whole discussion is quasi-Catholic at all. That’s another topic for another time, though.

Great, thought provoking article – thanks Jake!

That’s called “personal growth” and “maturity.”

I admire Berry’s literary writing (my sum total of reading his work is a few of the Port William novels/stories) – but his rant was just that – a rant – pretty much devoid of reasoning, nuance and charity. Just sad.

Naturally, the questions are related, but in none of your quoted passages does Berry directly address marriage as a legal agreement sanctioned by the government. (He says much about “community,” but that is not the same as government sanction.) Berry has always had something of a libertarian streak, and while it does not dominate his political rhetoric, it is often present as a silent premise. Berry’s recent statements on marriage did not surprise me.

I’m not saying I agree with Berry on those points, but all of them fit with an interpretation that Berry hasn’t changed his mind about marriage per se (he says in the interview, “Marriage doesn’t need to be defended; it needs to be practiced”) but that he is growing more outspoken about the conflict between the ends and means of Christians in advocating for traditional marriage and his sense that they have compromised their ends by their means (state violence and conflictual politics).