Editor’s note: This essay was adapted from remarks delivered on June 30, 2011, at a fundraiser for the Love and Fidelity Network and Grupo Solido, an Argentine project supporting marriage, chastity, and fidelity.
Thank you for asking me to speak this evening in support of the Love and Fidelity Network and Grupo Solido. I so admire the young people who have poured their hearts into this work, which is so important to the future of our two countries, and to the health of truly human culture everywhere. I am, I fear, a poor spokesman for the cause to which we are devoted here. By training and experience I am a political scientist, studying laws and institutions, courts and legislatures, political theories and constitutional frameworks. I am not a family sociologist, or a moral philosopher, or an expert in any of the half dozen other fields that have been represented at the annual intercollegiate conference put on by Love and Fidelity.
But perhaps from the perspective of my discipline I can say a few words about why the work of Grupo Solido and of Love and Fidelity is so important, and why the support and (we might now need to say) the restoration of marriage and family on a sound basis are inextricably bound up with the shape of our politics, and with its ultimate health or sickness.
The intersection of the family and politics is a major theme of Plato’s Republic. In Book V, Socrates introduces his young companions to the most revolutionary idea proposed in the dialogue: That in order to achieve their shared goal of designing (in theory anyway) the perfectly just political order, they must treat men and women as exact equals, denying that there is any meaningful difference between men and women.
With relentless irony, Socrates goes so far as to say that there is no more significant difference between a man and a woman than between a hairy man and a bald man. He calmly proposes that in the training of the city’s defenders, the young men and women should exercise on the same field together, clothed only in the virtue that the city’s educational program gives them. This is grimly comical, and is intended to open our eyes to the absurdity of all uncompromising attempts to mold the rough clay of human nature into some perfect shape according to a single principle.
The comedy turns in a tragic direction when Socrates goes on to prescribe complete political control of reproduction and childrearing. The family as his companions have known it—as we know it—must be destroyed, swept aside in favor of a politically directed breeding program. No man and woman can join in a lifelong union; their sexual couplings are ordered for eugenic purposes. Mother and child are separated at birth, and parents and children are deliberately made strangers to each other, as special nurseries take over the raising of the next generation of devoted citizens.
A second book I want to mention is Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. Huxley’s book presents us with a future world—going Plato one better— in which sexuality is completely severed from reproduction. Children are both conceived and gestated in vitro, have no parents, and are raised by “professionals” in common nurseries. All citizens are assigned to one of several fixed social classes, their roles and functions in society eugenically predetermined.
Unlike Plato’s city, whose eugenic project must rely on procreation accomplished the old-fashioned way, Huxley’s World State has no need to harness sexual desire for its breeding program. But the sexual passion still exists. What then to do with it? The World State’s answer is to liberate it, indeed to require promiscuity. Men and women are expected to have many sexual partners, while undue attachment to one partner above others is severely frowned upon—and the State makes sure to prevent this by various social, psychological, and pharmaceutical measures.
Although Plato’s city looks draconian and severe and Huxley’s World State looks hedonistic and easy, what they have in common is their assault on nature in the name of some abstract notion of justice. Each in its own way is heedless of human embodiment—of the fact that the human person is this body, and that one, and that other one. Both political orders treat their denizens as denatured souls abstracted from their bodies, as creatures whose lives can be rationally planned for them without regard to the longings of their hearts for union with one another, and for families.
In these dystopian societies, everything about human sexuality, the complementarity of men and women, and the generation of offspring is broken to the yoke of the city, and made subservient to a single-minded politics of regimentation and control of human choice. And it all happens because a single political principle is pushed without limit until human nature itself is mowed down in its path.
But what has all this to do with us, and our situation?
Consider the messages that young people get today, from the colleges they attend, the media culture they swim about in, and even from the laws of the land and the words and deeds of high public officials. Here are fifteen such messages:
1. Sexual desire is something that can and should be gratified, not restrained. This gratification is known as “health.”
2. One’s sexual “orientation” or “identity”—even one’s “gender”—is a variable thing. Maybe genetics has something to do with it, maybe it comes down to freedom to choose—maybe a little of both. But wherever you wind up, it’s all good. Until you wind up somewhere else, and that’s good too.
3. Everyone is entitled to marry the person he loves (at this particular moment). Coming soon—marriage to the multiple persons one loves!
4. There is no significant difference between men and women with respect to any sexual matter. “Gender” and “identity” are “social constructs,” which we can accept or reject at will.
5. The differentiation of male and female roles is a species of oppression. (Even if you choose the role? What happened to the freedom to choose your identity? Never mind, don’t ask such questions!)
6. “Hooking up” for casual sexual encounters without commitment is just what young people do if left to their own devices. And it is good so to leave them, as these serial relationships are normal and healthy.
7. “Safe sex”—that is, the use of contraception and disease-preventive measures—and consent are the only moral strictures that universally apply to sexual matters.
8. Virginity past one’s late teen years is, well, freakish.
9. Cohabitation before marriage is downright expected, and is a healthy trial run of a relationship.
10. Marriage is optional and certainly not permanent, nor need it be characterized by sexual exclusivity. “Until a loss of interest do us part.” Why should it be work?
11. Out-of-wedlock childbearing is normal and has no adverse consequences, anyway not for you.
12. Abortion is always available, always will be, and has no adverse consequences, anyway not for you. “It’s a woman’s right to choose.”
13. “A family” is whatever we say one is. Who are you to say different?
14. Where children are wanted and nature does not supply, science can make up the deficit at no moral or social cost (albeit considerable financial expense) by sperm donation, egg donation, surrogacy, in vitro fertilization, etc.
15. Any child can have mommies and/or daddies in any number and combination, by blood, marriage, or adoption. There is no harm in any of these possibilities, for children are blank slates, fully adaptable to all adult choices.
Every one of these fifteen messages is a lie. No lie sustaining the preposterous political orders in Plato and Huxley is worse than any of these, and some are in fact exactly the same—about the sameness of the sexes, the dispensability of marriage, the malleability of children, and so on.
In Plato and Huxley these lies are recognized as such, and made to serve a particular purpose: the quest for perfect justice in Plato or the quest for perfect peace in Huxley. But our society considers these lies to be truths that are indispensable in the quest for perfect freedom. The record of broken communities, broken families, and broken human beings is apparently no deterrent to this quest.
Neither is the mounting evidence that neither freedom nor equality has been advanced, or put on a sounder footing, by the revolution in morals of the last two or three generations. Where is the gain to freedom in the coercive redefinition of marriage to include relationships that cannot properly be called marriages? Where is the gain to freedom when people of sincere religious faith, dissenting from this redefinition of marriage, are coerced to violate their consciences in order to go about their ordinary business in the marketplace, or even to serve their communities in ways they feel called to do? Where is the gain to freedom or equality in the contemporary abortion industry, which violates the very first of our human rights—the right to life—while lying to women about the consequences of “choice” in their own lives? Where is the gain to equality in our class-stratified culture of divorce, high illegitimate-birth rates, fatherless children, and minority poverty and imprisonment rates? Where is the gain to equality in a culture that, in the most elite colleges, encourages the best of our young women to behave like the worst of our young men?
In truth, the debauched notions of “freedom” and “equality,” run rampant in our politics, threaten the survival of authentic freedom and equality, by undermining the family and elevating the state. What Plato’s city and Huxley’s state did directly—sacrificing the individual to the collective—we now run the risk of doing indirectly, by way of a truncated anthropology that categorically misunderstands freedom and equality because it misunderstands nature. And it misunderstands the utter dependence of our free society, and our constitutional order, on the bedrock of the family, rightly understood.
What we are here tonight to celebrate and support are the efforts of some young people to stand against the elite culture’s pressures against chastity, fidelity, and family, and to push back hard against them. They are willing to contradict the falsehoods, in word and deed. They are willing to work to change minds and hearts, laws and policies, curricula and student-service bureaucracies. They are willing to live their faith in the future of the family, and to do so in the open, even at the risk of scorn from their peers and disdain from their teachers. After all my grim talk up until now, I turn to these young people and see hope of redemption. Their numbers are growing, and their determination is strong, but they need our help.
The Love and Fidelity Network, and its affiliate organizations such as the Anscombe Society at Princeton, and now the new Argentine start-up, Grupo Solido, represent courageous counter-revolutions “back to the future” of the family. It is so heartening that they are themselves the brainchildren of young people, young leaders who see, at ground level as it were, what passes for sexual ethics and integrity among too many of their own generation. Their generation was very ill-served by mine, which has left them with quite a mess to clean up. Devoutly should we pray that the next one is better served by theirs. I believe it will be, and I thank you all for being here tonight to support them generously in their work.
Matthew J. Franck is Director of the William E. and Carol G. Simon Center on Religion and the Constitution at the Witherspoon Institute in Princeton, New Jersey.
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Comments:
http://www.isna.org/faq/conditions
You can, however, acknowledge that a given innovation should be discarded in favor of other approaches, even if those approaches are old ones, or that the availability of that innovation should be controlled or limited, either by social pressure or by legal intervention. (Military history offers some good examples of innovations that have been subsequently discouraged and limited, though not eradicated, by responsible governments.) And while most of Franck’s readers are going to read the nuances of American politics onto the argument, the cultural situation that he is addressing is somewhat different from the US.
I do wish people were more nuanced in their treatment of Plato's Republic. Yes, it does envision a state which is approximately totalitarian in the moderns sense. But there are some interesting ways it doesn't fit our normal usage:
1. It's notable that the restrictions cited are mostly imposed on the Guardians. The limits on the ordinary "appetitive" section of society are really not discussed in much depth. It is precisely on the creation of a truly just ruling class, that Plato focuses. This is very different from any other distopia.
2. It needs to be remembered that the entrie exercise is explicitly justified as looking at justice in the state, as a means of discovering justice in the individual. While I don't claim that none of his prescritions were intended as serious, it is the primary point that a just soul will have a balance reflecting that of the Republic.
3. Plato was a philosopher. As C S Lewis said, Plato's thought is always ruthless. What this means here (and elsewhere in his work) is that, when discussing justice, of course we are to discard all which conflicts with justice, or which distracts us from it. Do family affections diminish our ability to be just? Of course, which is why I cannot serve as a juror in a case involving one of my relatives.
It does not follow from this that we must reject or attack Plato, unless we wish to jettison all human feeling. It merely means that we should learn from Plato what he wishes to teach. Intentionally or not, one of the things the Republic shows is that if we subordinate all else to justice, what we will lose is more than the likes of Kant or Rawls imagined.
Huxley's book, of course, is not in any sense advocacy of the society he describes, so it really shouldn't be linked with the Republic. The latter belongs beside Utopia, the fomer beside 1984.
†
"In his 1934 Plato und die Dichter (Plato and the Poets), as well as in several other works, Hans-Georg Gadamer describes the utopic city of the Republic as a heuristic utopia that should not be pursued or even be used as an orientation-point for political development. Rather, its purpose is said to be to show how things would have to be connected, and how one thing would lead to another — often with highly problematic results — if one would opt for certain principles and carry them through rigorously. This interpretation argues that large passages in Plato's writing are ironic, a line of thought initially pursued by Kierkegaard."
http://advogato.org/article/1031.html
Any engineer will tell you that you don't design systems for the ideal conditions, but for the extremes so that they can survive in the real world where the unexpected does happen. This design philosophy is applicable to laws, and when we fail to design for the extremes, we create loopholes. Are you a fan of legal loopholes?
And although it's hard to say with precision, people with intersex conditions (including the ones I mentioned) might be as common as 1 in 100. The point is, such individuals exist in sufficient numbers that they do in fact get married, every year and in every U.S. state.
Now if you want to have a law that is consistent and fair, how would you (Fred or anyone else who cares to answer) categories such people. If SSM is illegal, then which gender can an intersex person marry? both? neither? And do you know how many states currently require genetic proof of gender - that the bride is in fact an XX female and the groom an XY male?
In marriage cases, how should sex be determined?
Woman born male marries girlfriend; attorney general asked to decide which ID legit
Austin Statesman, May 5, 2010
http://www.statesman.com/news/local/in-marriage-cases-how-should-sex-be-determined-673181.html
For whatever reason, I don't find the discovery that people have chromosomal abnormalities, genital deformities, etc. as surprising as you think it is.
You claim that the law must cover every contingency fairly and consistently and without loopholes. Please ask any judge, attorney, or legislator whether what you say about the law is in any way accurate. Think hard about any law or legal regime you can think of.
Lex non curat de minimis.
As to marriage, SSM is not "illegal," but not recognized as legitimate marriage in the vast majority of jurisdictions around the world. In the United States, at least, there is nothing criminal about two women dressing up as man and woman and performing some ceremony and calling it marriage, any more than it's illegal for me to dress up and call myself the Duke of Earl.
Since time immemorial, we have had traditional marriage and a fraction of the population with chromosomal abnormalities related to marriage--and the vast majority of them unaware of these abnormalities and/or uninterested in marriage. Still, somehow we've managed to muddle on without any great crisis to the legitimacy of our institutions.
The website to which you linked makes the following claim that illustrates precisely Professor Franck's point #4:
"Intersex is a socially constructed category that reflects real biological variation. To better explain this, we can liken the sex spectrum to the color spectrum. There’s no question that in nature there are different wavelengths that translate into colors most of us see as red, blue, orange, yellow. But the decision to distinguish, say, between orange and red-orange is made only when we need it—like when we’re asking for a particular paint color. Sometimes social necessity leads us to make color distinctions that otherwise would seem incorrect or irrational, as, for instance, when we call certain people “black” or “white” when they’re not especially black or white as we would otherwise use the terms."
Nonsense. The male-female division is not a social construct, but made by nature. It's not a spectrum but a complementarity upon which the existence of the species depends. It's not "social necessity" but biological necessity. Those whose chromosomes and bodies don't correspond to this order have a disorder--no less a disorder than those human beings who cannot see, hear, or reason.
If you are asserting the complementarity of male and female in anything beyond the obvious physical differences between male and female genitals and the male and female gametes, could you please elaborate? Aside from their physical characteristics, are there any traits that all males have and no females have, or vice versa? If you pluck a male and a female at random from the world population and put them together, will they be complementary?
Another conservative I can start taking less seriously.
The fundamental error that Mr. Franck falls into, though, is a common one. A false, simplified image of modern American society is generated for our adoring horror. He and a few embattled, righteous figures, backs to the wall, sound the clarion call to resist the overwhelming, amoral radicalism that grips the nation and controls virtually the entire educational establishment, government, and media.
Of course, this is wildly exaggerated and one-sided. It's would be bizzare to imagine the local public school system my sons go to, or the public university my wife teaches at here in Kentucky, promoting promiscuity and instant sexual gratification (Franck's #1 and #6), disparaging virginity past the teens as "freakish", (#8), holding that there are no moral imperatives regarding sex beyond contraception and good hygiene (#7), or taking a blase, "no problem" attitude towards out-of-wedlock pregnancies and abortion (#11 and #12). The idea is simply comical.
I've seen both the conservative right and the radical left create these apocalyptic caricatures of our society for many years, and always for the purpose of galvanizing the masses in a struggle against unspeakable, tyrannical evil--an evil that is just centimeters from total conquest of society.
Another case in point, coming from the religious right, was a radio broadcast I heard a few years ago by Chuck Colsen. Now, I admire Mr. Colsen for his prison ministry, but that day he was decrying the corruption of the Girl Scouts of America. He told, in graphic detail, how young girl scouts today are being trained, right in the scout meetings, to install a condom on a man, using an erect male dummy as a training aid. I thought this incredible, so I later relayed the story to a woman I knew who was a high-ranking girl scout leader at the time. She stared at me open-mouthed for a few seconds and then doubled over laughing. When she got control of herself, she explained that the only topic relating to sexuality that they were allowed to treat in meetings was basic feminine hygiene, and that only with the older girls, and only with written parental permission.
It pays to sit back, put whatever propaganda you are hearing in a realistic, broad context, and always do your homework about the details.
Shall we use the example an extremely rare isolated medical condition to dictate then how a whole society orders itself on a question as basic as sexual identity?
It is just like the ridiculous equivocation that pro-abortion advocates use when they talk about the necessity of access to abortion in cases of incest or rape. These cases are 1% or less of all abortions.
I live in California, not Kentucky, and Mr. Franck is right on.
Martha
The thing that makes California so fascinating is that you can find anything there...literally anything! Do you want radical-avant garde-progressive lifestyles? No problem. Take a stroll through the Castro district of San Francisco for a truly extreme model. You can hit the UC Berkely campus, but that is rather tame now compared to my experiences living there in the '60s. Things seem quiet and boring on campuses today compared to my experiences back then.
Do you want to schmooze with dedicated capitalist libertarians? Visit Silicon Valley where I worked in the '80s. Do you want really old-time anti-communist conservatism? Wander over to the Hoover Institute at Stanford. You'll find it.
Are you interested in fiery evangelicalism? Visit my mom's church, the First Assemblies of God in San Diego, a patriotic Navy town. Who knows...Spirit willing, you could receive the gift of tongues like my mom did! For the Catholic side, you could visit Saint Ann's right next to the Stanford campus. That's where I met my wife, a visiting poet at Stanford, and I still have many good friends from the Young Adult Group there, including a couple of NASA scientists.
The point is, thinking about California only reinforces my feeling that the version of American society Mr. Franck presents is a simplistic caricature.
David N.--(1) The "distinct and least common denominator" method of definition simply doesn't provide a meaningful definition as you proceed upwards (or downwards?) from inanimate matter to biological sciences to the study of human beings). Are human beings by nature rational or free? There are tons of exceptions, including myself, at times.
(2) The intersex movement you celebrated attempts to deny the realy biological differences between male and female precisely on the "obvious" level you state.
(3) The merely physical differences you acknowledge to exist, including the fact that all healthy women have functioning wombs and breasts, and no healthy men have them, have enormous implications for the rest of their biology and for society as a whole--far beyond differences in hair or skin color. To cite one example, think of the implications of the fact that males, by evolution, can have an almost unlimited number of offspring BUT be unsure of the identify of those offspring, while females can have a limited number of offspring, but known offspring.
(4) The attempt, on the other hand, to say that the differenec between male and female is just the "shape of their skin" (like color of skin) and any other alleged difference is a social construct is simply not true.
Rick,
1. I agree with your general theory as to our public discourse, and I agree that the word "lie" was used a bit promiscuously.
Still, the something approaching willful deception, or self-deception, is involved in many of the principles set forth above.
2. As to the elites--lurid sexuality has its origins in the Supreme Court who denied the right of communities to protect its citizens against the development of perverse habits by law. The people did not demand the legalization of porn, the elites did. And the elites include the large corporations. Did you see how coca-cola recently successfully pressured a large law firm to violate the rules of legal ethics and fire its client--the House of Representatives?
3. You are correct that you can find pockets of conservativism in America, even California. But the friends of libertinism and androgyny dominate the universities, and the media. They dominate much of corporate America, especially human-resources departments. In some places they dominate nearly everything.
4. Still, I agree we should not exaggerate the deep divisions of our society into a civil war. Those of us who disagree have an enormous amount of freedom--freedom that many, if not most, of our opponents do not grant grudgingly, generally speaking. Though there are many prominent instances of coercion--especially when it comes to the custody and education of children. And it is here where the greater danger of tyranny lies. Already in the law academy our future judges are being taught that homeschooling is oppressive, that teaching traditional morality to any child is abuse, etc.
Your are right that there are conservatives even in CA. We had some as neighbors in San Jose. We liked the many Catholic churches we attended, both those with "liberal" or "traditional" bents. But our kids spent most of their waking hours in school, on campus, and their worlds were as described by Mr. Franck. One child is going to finish out his final year at Santa Cruz and then get out of Dodge. The rest of us have had enough. My daughter did thank the teacher at San Jose State for his objective approach. He told her he was aware of the pervasive bias on campus and made a deliberate effort to avoid it. He was glad she noticed. My daughter suspects he is a conservative in the closet, so to speak.
OK, I will defer to your current experience with raising children in California. My California experience is getting a bit dated, and I have only raised my kids here in Kentucky. Thank you for the update! But it's wise to keep in mind that Kentucky is more representative of the America population in general than California is.
By the way, if I wanted to find traditionalist allies in the fight against redefinition of the family in California, I would cozy up to some of the huge immigrant populations there, like the Hispanics and muslims. When we were at Stanford around '91, the administration decided to allow gay couples to live in married graduate student housing, just like married couples. Everyone wasn't pleased with this, but who do you think in the Stanford community reacted like a wounded tiger and launched a campaign of protests, demonstrations, and petitions against it? It was the Stanford Islamic Students Association. They just didn't want their kids to live next door to gay couples. (Oh yes, and their campaign was entirely nonviolent and conducted legally, if unsuccessfully.)
Actually, it is these immigrant groups that are keeping our national fertility rate at a good, healthy level, so that we may not end up like Japan and Europe (and possibly China) will be, with a huge elderly population and too few young people to support them--a senescent civilization. They still believe in babies.
@David:
"Already in the law academy our future judges are being taught that homeschooling is oppressive..."
I'm unaware of the attitude of law schools to homeschooling, but it is quite popular out here. I recently met a man who is homeschooling his kids because, he said, he didn't want them to be brainwashed in the public schools into acceptance of homosexuality. He must have thought he was in California! I explained to him that my boys are now in high school in the Kentucky public school system, and they have so far gotten no instruction of any kind concerning homosexuality. The schools here simply avoid the topic completely.
One possible downside to homeschooling, though, is whether the kids are adequately socialized. That is, do they get good experience in befriending and adapting to all sorts of other kids in groups? My wife helps take groups of Kentucky university students on summer educational excursions to other countries--Japan, Mexico, etc.--and two times she has had a young person in the group who had trouble fitting in, operating in a group climate, and so forth. One young woman told her, in tears, "I was homeschooled. I don't know how to make friends!" Of course, many of them turn out fine, but we have some questions about the social aspects of it.
In addition, I have mentioned to some of my students in other countries (I teach English online) that some American kids are homeschooled. They draw a complete blank, and I have to explain what it means. They are generally astonished that the government allows such a thing. It is unheard of in their countries. Maybe we aren't so regimented and oppressive as some people would have us believe.
2357 Homosexuality refers to relations between men or between women who experience an exclusive or predominant sexual attraction toward persons of the same sex. It has taken a great variety of forms through the centuries and in different cultures. Its psychological genesis remains largely unexplained. Basing itself on Sacred Scripture, which presents homosexual acts as acts of grave depravity, tradition has always declared that "homosexual acts are intrinsically disordered." They are contrary to the natural law. They close the sexual act to the gift of life. They do not proceed from a genuine affective and sexual complementarity. Under no circumstances can they be approved.
2358 The number of men and women who have deep-seated homosexual tendencies is not negligible. This inclination, which is objectively disordered, constitutes for most of them a trial. They must be accepted with respect, compassion, and sensitivity. Every sign of unjust discrimination in their regard should be avoided. These persons are called to fulfill God's will in their lives and, if they are Christians, to unite to the sacrifice of the Lord's Cross the difficulties they may encounter from their condition.
The Church speaks with serious authority based on both biblical and natural law truth.
†
What I find ironic of all this entry is that the author has chosen to criticize to forms of dystopia imposed by the state on the throats of people, but like most conservatives, he just wants to replace by his own dystopia forced on people beds and relationships, as it was in the “good old days”….