David Blankenhorn thinks the gay marriage debate has reached a dead end. He wants it to go in a new direction. Thus “A Call for a New Conversation on Marriage,” a manifesto of sorts from the Institute for American Values.
Blankenhorn wants to form a coalition of the willing to renew the culture of marriage in America. I’m sympathetic, having written in the “The Future of Marriage” (January 2013) that we need to challenge the proponents of gay marriage to support the marriage part of the agenda and not just the gay part.
But I’m skeptical about the Call.
First there’s the pejorative way it describes the “current conversation” as a “at a dead end.” And the current question? It’s “Should gays marry?” So the Call is pretty clear: people like me should stop contributing to the “dead end conversation,” which means stop rejecting the notion that gays should marry. How, exactly, is that a “new conversation”? On the contrary, that’s the gay rights side of the old conversation.
Second, there’s the way in which the Call describes the “new conversation.” It’s not about, say, changing divorce laws, or introducing a pro-marriage curriculum into public education. Nor is it about criticizing high profile celebrities who flaunt marriage norms and have children out of wedlock. That would be an “agenda,” not a “conversation.”
But what’s worse, the leading topic of this “new conversation” is “Who among us, gay or straight, wants to strengthen marriage?” That’s pretty empty, because it all depends on what it means to “strengthen marriage.”
As I argued in “The Future of Marriage,” we should be willing to join forces with anyone who will do what it takes to rebuild the culture of marriage. Coalitions to achieve specific goals don’t need to agree about everything, and there’s no reason why Jonathan Rauch, a board member of the Institute for American Values and signer of the Call, can’t join with me to roll back no-fault divorce–or impose a divorce tax, as I’ve suggested in the past.
What does it mean to use the “who among us” rhetoric, without any specific proposals? What does it mean when that’s married (sorry) to a rhetoric that describes one way of strengthening marriage–the defense of traditional marriage–as taking us to a “dead end”?
As I’ve written elsewhere, gay marriage is a luxury good for the rich, paid for by the poor. Not everybody in the “new conversation” has to agree with my claim, but any serious discussion of marriage has to reckon with the antinomian symbolism of gay marriage. To rule it out as taking us to a “dead end” because it’s inconsistent with the new politically correct orthodoxy means that the “new conversation” is a limited one.
There are some defenders of marriage that are so bitter about liberalism’s insouciance about the basic building block of society that they won’t in fact join forces with anyone who supports gay marriage, even to change divorce laws for the better, or to launch an advertising campaign championing the benefits of marriage. I hope I’m not among them, but they exist.
But the plain fact of the matter is that it’s been the progressive left that has been absent from the pro-marriage cause. (To call gay marriage activism “pro-marriage” isn’t serious: it’s a gay rights project, not a pro-marriage one.) I wish David the best of luck in bringing them into his new conversation, but I’m not optimistic. The antinomian symbolism of gay marriage is accepted and affirmed, because our progressive politics is focused on personal liberation. Marriage doesn’t fit well into that politics, because it binds and limits.
January 31st, 2013 | 10:58 am
R. R. Reno writes:
Exactly. Just yesterday I read the following in Josef Pieper’s “The Four Cardinal Virtues”
David Blankenhorn hasn’t abandoned redefining marriage; he has simply engaged in a new tactic.
January 31st, 2013 | 11:17 am
I too am skeptical about the “Call” but not for the same reasons. Hasn’t the Institute for American Values been encouraging this same “conversation” for twenty years? I don’t see that the marriage question became “hijacked” by same-sex marriage until the mid-2000s. Why was so little headway made before then?
Here is where I agree with Rusty. Marriage is eroding in the United States both for economic and for cultural reasons. The “Call” is happy to engage the former, which is all well and good. But it seems wholly uninterested in engaging the latter. In fact, any success which the “Call” meets is premised upon ignoring the cultural dimensions of the erosion of marriage.
Perhaps marriage is eroding because more and more Americans no longer want to be legally committed to their sexual partners?
January 31st, 2013 | 11:24 am
Maybe a new conversation about marriage should require people like you to actually back up your claims instead of just reasserting them.
“So the Call is pretty clear: people like me should stop contributing to the “dead end conversation,” which means stop rejecting the notion that gays should marry. How, exactly, is that a “new conversation.””
It isn’t. It’s just ending the old conversation.
January 31st, 2013 | 12:03 pm
“Perhaps marriage is eroding because more and more Americans no longer want to be legally committed to their sexual partners?”
Exactly. There are certainly economic aspects to the decline of marriage and other cultural factors – but at the end of the day it is sexual license (in all its forms) that is the biggest factor in eroding marriage culture – the idea that “old” or “traditional” or “orthodox” norms regarding the connection between fidelity, sexual restraint, procreation and family formation – are a shackle that contemporary society no longer wants or needs – that is the issue.
How exactly is a conversation that doesn’t address this supposed to do anyone any lasting good?
January 31st, 2013 | 12:49 pm
I definitely exhort opponents of same-sex marriage to pursue democratic means to stop the practice. But if opponents don’t actually have the wherewithal to stop the practice, then what?
As you compile your list of luxury goods that people pursue at the expense of the poor, please leave room for “doctrinal purity.”
January 31st, 2013 | 1:07 pm
@Boo What, exactly, would constitute a backing up of this sort of claim? The claims have been backed up (for instance, here: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1722155 – this essay is now also a book by the same name, available on Amazon), and will continue to be backed up, if the conversation continues. Starting a “new” conversation only conceeds that the old one has been lost – but it is far from clear that this is the case.
January 31st, 2013 | 1:35 pm
I agree with the editor’s analysis of “the call.” Even so, will someone please explain the following?
“Gay marriage is a luxury good for the rich, paid for by the poor.”
I’m not sure if this statement is true. If true, in what sense are the poor paying for this good? Perhaps Reno is simply lumping together all forms of sexual libertinism? Maybe I simply haven’t read Charles Murray….
January 31st, 2013 | 2:11 pm
I’d regard that last sentence about “it binds and limits” as the key observation here. This problem is about whether we are going to have boundaries and limits at all, not about what kind we ought to have.
January 31st, 2013 | 2:58 pm
Last I checked, progressives were amenable to all manner of binds and limits: limits on people’s freedom to discriminate against protected classes, limits on guns, limits on smoking, higher taxes that limit people’s after-tax income.
Yes, progressives also want to limit people’s ability to discriminate against homosexuals. This may involve granting homosexuals the same right to pursue sex as heterosexuals. Whether you score this issue as limiting (people’s discretion to discriminate) or liberating (people’s ability to pursue sex) I’ll leave to you.
But Reno is right: marriage is about binds and limits. And the fact that progressives are promoting same-sex marriage suggestion that they aren’t opposed to binds and limits. After all, homosexuals don’t need marriage to have sex. (I have this on good authority.)
The people Reno is complaining about are called libertarians.
January 31st, 2013 | 3:38 pm
That’s a reference to Reno’s thesis set forth here.
This thesis has attracted a lot of attention in comments, and people are calling on Reno to expound on it. I understand Reno to argue that social/religious norms serve practical purposes that are not well understood. Even when breeching those norms may produce benefits for some individuals, the loss of the norm may produce harm for society at large – and poor people may be least able to cope with these harms. Thus we have “market failure”: Some individuals will pursue their self-interest, even at the expense of eroding the social norm, but no individuals are charged with the task of maintaining the social norm for the benefit of society at large.
Perhaps the best example of this thesis is society’s relaxed attitudes about out-of-wedlock births. Which is worse: 1) A society that cruelly stigmatizes unwed mothers and “bastards,” or 2) a society that doesn’t – and ends up with 25-33% of its kids growing up in unstable homes? The unwed mother, the child, and the people who encounter them may all find it to their advantage to reduce tensions surrounding this breech of social norms. No one has the specific task of discouraging this breech of social norms. And over time, the social norm erodes.
Society’s changing attitudes regarding same-sex marriage doesn’t fit the model quite as well, but I give it my best shot here.
And I also call on Reno (or others) to restart the discussion of Reno’s hypothesis (Hey, that’s kind of catchy: “Reno’s Hypothesis”!) but,…
January 31st, 2013 | 4:28 pm
The question is if our bindings and limitations are of a transcendent variety or not. The examples you cite are of a faddish, temporal variety, where the kinds of limits Reno is ascribing to marriage are of the transcendent variety. I agree, that a particular sort of libertarian is the target here, but in our culture’s general rejection of transcendence, there’s no fundamental opposition between progressivism and libertarianism-they just diverge on what particular limits they want to focus on rejecting.
January 31st, 2013 | 5:35 pm
nobody.really notes that “progressives” are amenable to “all manner of binds and limits”. True enough. I think the point Reno is trying to make is that progressives oppose “binds and limits” in the arena of sexuality. This combination of lots of binds and limits everywhere *except* sexuality is what James Poulos called some years ago the “Pink Police State“.
February 1st, 2013 | 12:28 am
Darel- Progressives support laws against child molestation. Progressives support laws against marital rape (many conservatives do not). Progressives support laws against public sex. Progressives support laws against incest. Your claim is simply not true.
February 1st, 2013 | 2:12 am
The Reno thesis as described sounds highly speculative, whereas the benefits denied to same-sex couples who wish to marry are pretty concrete. That’s why Blankenhorn wants to start a new conversation about the benefits of marriage for all (as in, “everyone you know”). Because more and more people, who will no longer accept as satisfactory “It’s wrong– tradition and authority say so,” tune out abstract, speculative arguments (antinomian symbolism?) in the face of the real, readily understood and reasonable-sounding wishes and desires of their friends, family, neighbors and colleagues. Once almost everyone outside the NFL Players Union who might in the past have remained in the closet is out of the closet, the existing conversation ends.
February 1st, 2013 | 2:20 am
Well, I haven’t seen any polling data on that one….
But libertarians apparently don’t have any qualms. After the last libertarian debate I attended, I challenged the speaker on this point. I said that the speaker apparently would have no objections to people having sex right in the middle of the public square.
“No, that’s a complete distortion of my views,” he replied. “I’m adamantely opposed to public squares….”
February 1st, 2013 | 10:35 am
nobody.really- progressives and libertarians are two different groups
February 4th, 2013 | 2:18 am
No argument in favor of the SSM idea is an argument in favor of the marriage idea. SSMers attack the marriage idea and demand that marriage come to mean less and less. The goal is make marriage as meaningless as SSM.
Blankenhorn understands that much. But he put that aside for two odd reasons. First, after trying to just 3 years he felt a failure because he did not persuade the pro-SSM elites that they were wrong about marriage. Yeh, just 3 years and the SSM advocates proved themselves to be (gasp!) unpersuaded by the pro-marriage arguments. Second, he asserted that more important than marriage is the claimed “equal dignity of homosexual love”. That claim was merely asserted and has not been backed-up by Blankenhorn with the sound moral argument that supposedly had convinced him of this moral assumption.
Apparently he thinks marriage supporters are more readily coaxed to abandon their principles and to abandon marriage. And, apparently, he has abandoned sound argumentation because the SSM side has shown that you can get your way by mere assertion and obstinancy.
Unreasoning obstinancy is bigotry. Blankenhorn came up against it with the pro-SSM elites. Now he exhibits it as the linchpin for acceptance of SSM and hoodwinking marriage supporters to do likewise.
February 4th, 2013 | 1:26 pm
“SSMers attack the marriage idea and demand that marriage come to mean less and less. The goal is make marriage as meaningless as SSM.”
No, we just attack the idea that the government ought to legally enforce your opinions on “the marriage idea.”
“Second, he asserted that more important than marriage is the claimed “equal dignity of homosexual love”. That claim was merely asserted and has not been backed-up by Blankenhorn with the sound moral argument that supposedly had convinced him of this moral assumption.”
Kind of like your claim of the unequal dignity of homosexual love.
“Unreasoning obstinancy is bigotry.”
So when my niece complains about her bedtime she is being a bigot?
February 8th, 2013 | 12:49 am
Boo,
My opinion is that the marriage idea merits preferential status. Your opinion is that the SSM idea merits preferential status.
This is conflict of ideas, not mere opinons, however.
Boo, your quip regarding the dignity of homosexual love is not an answer to the challenge to provide the sound moral argumentation to back-up the assertion made by Blankenhorn.
Instead it is another assertion: there is no sound moral argumentation either way.
That stands as your concession that the moralism expressed by Blankenhorn lacks what I said it lacks.
Your quip is merely a childish “you too!” assertion. But even at that it depends on another moral assumption on your part: what is this “dignity of homosexual love” about which you speak? Perhaps break it down such that it is not mere opinion on your part.
Boo, your naive question regarding your niece is no distraction from the pro-gay bigotry in your own rhetoric and argumentation. David Nichol helped in this regard when he cited the dictionary definition of bigotry — at the center of which is unreasoning obstinancy. Apparently his fellow SSM advocates agreed with the definition. You, of course, are free to disagree with them and to propose your own gaycentric definition. Or one that encircles your niece’s complaint.
February 8th, 2013 | 12:51 am
I’d add to clarify: Instead it is another assertion, on your part Boo, that there is no sound moral argumentation either way.
Whether or not your assertion is correct depends on what you bring to back it up.
February 8th, 2013 | 7:23 am
Chairm- My opinion is that the principle of equal treatment merits “preferential status,” if that is what you want to call it. It is, after all, what this country was theoretically founded on even though it’s taken a very long time and a lot of shed blood to get us closer and closer to actually living it out. And I have provided sound moral argumentation on more than one occasion, you have simply chosen to ignore it. The original basis for discrimination against gay people was that gay people were seen as an evil threatening “other,” based mostly on the fact that the only time the average person ever saw gay people was when some were in the news being hauled off to jail, and on religious dogma. Now that we have generations that have been able to get to know gay people in their personal lives, they realize that we are not the monstrous demons we have been painted as, and are in fact just people like any other. That is sound moral argumentation whether you want to admit it or not. That is, from what I understand, what got Blankenhorn to change his mind; he got to know his “enemy.”
As for the diginity of homosexual love, the easiest way to explain it to someone like you might be for you to picture the diginity of heterosexual love, and flip the gender of one of the partners. Pretty simple.
And unreasoning obsinancy is not the dictionary definition of bigotry. I looked it up, and you’ve left one rather crucial element out.
February 8th, 2013 | 4:19 pm
Okay, Boo, let’s see your definition of bigotry.
February 8th, 2013 | 4:42 pm
Boo, please provide the link to where you have “provided sound moral argumentation” for the moral assertion made by David Blankenhorn.
Probably most people know others who have engaged in premarital and extramarital sexual behaviors that were based on feelings of love, affection, romance, sexual attraction. Does that familiarity make the behaviors and that love morally sound? Nope. Likewise, most people know others who have engaged in adulterous behavior and adulterous love. Familiarity does not make that morally sound. What familiarity might do is make some of us morally numb or conflicted or even indifferent.
You have asserted a moral equivalence but no moral argumentation to back it up. This is just another form of arguing from familiarity. Hey, you say, familiarity with heterosexual love makes you familiar with homosexual love and, Presto!, you have moral argumentation that is sound.
Nope. It is mere assertion. It does not rise to the level of moral argumentation, much less sound moral argumentation. This does not depend on my admitting one way or another. It has to do with the content of your comment which lacks what you claimed to have already expressed repeatedly.
Look, if your premise is that all love is morally sound, then, state that clearly. If not, then, delimit your meaning.
Note that the equivalence asserted is that heterosexual love is the moral equivalent of homosexual love; that the dignity of heterosexual love is the moral equivalent of the dignity of homosexual love. What is this dignity’s content? What is this love — it must be a type that is different from all the other types of love with which you might claim a moral equivalence, or else why would you make the comparison vis-a-vis the homo-hetero dichotomy?
February 9th, 2013 | 12:34 pm
Chairm- extramarital affairs involve betrayal of trust. Do you seriously need me to explain to you why that is immoral? Premarital affairs are seen by many as immoral, but are simply not the government’s business to regulate.
Regarding Blankenhorn, I believe in my earlier post I may have mixed him up with Louis Marelli, another anti-equality activist who saw the light. Regardless, if you want to know what goes on in Blankenhorn’s head, you’d need to ask Blankenhorn.
“You have asserted a moral equivalence but no moral argumentation to back it up. This is just another form of arguing from familiarity. Hey, you say, familiarity with heterosexual love makes you familiar with homosexual love and, Presto!, you have moral argumentation that is sound.”
No, that was in answer to your question about diginity, not sound moral argumentation. The realization that what one has been led to believe about gay people is lies, that gay people are people like any other, and that there is no sound moral argumentation for denying marriage rights to them, is sound moral argumentation. The fact that you personally do not agree with it does not make it stop being so.
If you truly believe there is sound moral argumentation against equal rights for gay people, what is it? None of you ever say.
February 9th, 2013 | 4:16 pm
Readers might also note that Boo’s and Blankenhorn’s false moral equivalence, even if taken as true for the sake of discussion, does not demonstrate that the proposed moral equivalence would extend to the bodily union of husband and wife.
There is a huge chasm between the asserted pro-gay moralism and sound moral argumentation. And another huge chasm between that asserted moralism and the marriage idea.
The SSM campaign has proceeded by leaping with false assumptions about sexual morality. Also, given the lack of sound argumentation, the campaign has proceeded with a false pretense of moral neutrality; for when pressed, the SSM advocates assert moral approbation is the key to their demand for the imposition of SSM idea (the revisionist view with a gay emphasis) in place of the marriage idea (the conjugal view with no emphasis on identity politics).
February 12th, 2013 | 6:50 am
Boo,
The query is not about government. It is about the asserted moralism. You asserted what Blankenhorn has asserted: the equal dignity of homosexual love.
It is notable that you agree that this does entail an asserted moral equivalence of sexual behaviors.
The point I made about extramarital sexual behavior (of which adultery is a subset) was that noting increased familiarity with people who engage in that behavior is not a moral argument. You agree, it seems to me.
I am familiar with gay people and, as I said, most of us are familiar with people who have engaged in extramarital sexual behaviors. They are our brothers and sisters, of course, which is all the more to concern for sexual morality … rather than indifference.
Now you shifted to a claim that sexual behavior is immoral where there is betrayal of trust. I think you meant that betrayal of trust is immoral — whether or not it involves sexual behavior. I’d agree but your comment would be a dodge of the query. Perhaps you meant something else.
Is all sexual behavior moral where there is no trust for someone to betray (anonymous, or flings, or groups, open nonmonogamous arrangements, and so forth)? Or where all involved consent and do not consider it a betrayal? I would say, no and no. What say you? Is the lack of betrayal decisive in favor morality either way?
Look, soundly arguing a moral proposition is not easy and certainly not as easy as mere moralistic assertion. The query is about the proposed equivalence. It does not get resolved by skipping past it to SSM demands. That would just be more assertion rather than sound argumentation.
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