Proposition 8 and the Meaning of Marriage
I believe in equal justice under the law for same-sex couples. But more is being demanded. We are told that we must call same-sex unions “marriage” and that not to do so is discriminatory injustice.
Since California law already secures for same-sex couples all legal rights enjoyed by married couples, the desire to redefine marriage must arise from the longing for people with a same-sex orientation to feel socially indistinguishable from people with an opposite-sex orientation. Not equality but identity is desired for same-sex couples by those who oppose Proposition 8. This desire is understandable, and in some ways I sympathize. Who would want any relative or friend to be deprived of something so profoundly meaningful as marriage? Nonetheless, given our natures, it is an impossible and ultimately an undesirable goal.
The goal is impossible because sex and sexual orientation matter. They do not justify injustice, but neither are they irrelevant when it comes to marriage. Sexuality is so rooted in us that the differences between same-sex and opposite-sex orientation, like the differences between male and female, cannot be willed into insignificance without violence to our inner lives. We might want to re-order our society to eliminate all reproductive, legal, social, emotional, and psychic differences between the sexes and between sexual orientations. But to pretend that we can actually do so is to sacrifice truth to wishful thinking. We may fear and hate, or accept and celebrate, the powerful mystery of such differences, but short of remaking humanity in the manner of Huxley’s Brave New World, we cannot eliminate it.
The goal is undesirable because marriage is not merely the name for a set of variable historical phenomena. Marriage as defined by the wisdom of civilized traditions is an ideal, an image of the best, most perfect way that human beings may live in the physical body in the world. It is an image of the uniting of all parts of the self by uniting the self in a relationship with another who is both similar and opposite. My teacher used to say that all creation comes by the union of opposites. She meant not only the union of the opposite sexes in reproduction, but of opposite qualities (light/dark, tension/relaxation, movement/stasis, etc.) in works of art, opposite experiences (comedy/tragedy, day/night, puzzlement/enlightenment, etc.) in the mental life, opposite characteristics (daring/careful, rational/passionate, tender/strong, etc.) in human relationships.
Marriage is the archetypal union of opposites: of yin and yang, of heart and mind, of body and soul, of past and future, of temporality and permanence, of the personal and the social, of all that we mean by femininity and masculinity (however mixed in particular selves), of sexual desire and satisfaction, of physical need and help, in the union of two who love one another as individuals physically, emotionally, and rationally, and as potentially fruitful representatives of the past and future of any community. It is the greatest example of the principle of sublimation, in the pre-Freudian sense of the word, of the raising up of all that is lower and including it in the higher. It is an incarnation of the sacramental principle of life, according to which it is man’s function to embrace the here-and-now moment and to hallow it.
Homosexuality as a fact of the psyche is a human variation to be acknowledged and accepted and, as an aspect of the individuals we love, embraced. But only heterosexuality makes possible the realization of the potential in marriage.
To many, the above image of marriage will seem like old-fashioned balderdash. That is precisely the problem. The truth of this image of marriage is opaque to those whose imaginations rule out the sacramental in life as purely imaginary. In order to make marriage available to same-sex relationships, they redefine it as a property agreement or a merely personal choice, reducing it from a universal ideal to a social tool of the desiring self.
Yet even such secularists believe in the sacred without knowing they do. They believe in the sacredness of equality and of emotion. Raised to believe in the unlimited reach of human reason and in the unquestioned validity of natural feelings, they cannot see why marriage cannot apply to same-sex couples, since it is nothing but a practical social construct built either on the ownership of property (as reason says) or on the personal desire for love and companionship (as the feelings say). Under these assumptions, the position is perfectly understandable, as is the belief that any opposition to it could only arise from injustice (bad reason) or bigotry (bad feelings).
But if equality and good feelings are sacred, then so are truth and humility. If it is wrong to persecute minorities, then it is wrong to pretend a lie. C.S. Lewis has written (in The Abolition of Man [Touchstone, 1996]), “For the wise men of old the cardinal problem had been how to conform the soul to reality, and the solution had been knowledge, self-discipline, and virtue. For magic and applied science [and, we may add, the effort to redefine marriage, along with many another modern movement] the problem is how to subdue reality to the wishes of men” (p. 83). (The abolition of slavery and of Jim Crow laws was an example of the former, an attempt to conform man’s behavior to virtue. The effort to redefine marriage is an example of the latter, the attempt to subdue reality to man’s wishes. Hence the commonly repeated analogy of same-sex couples to victims of racial prejudice is a false one. The actual legal rights of same-sex couples having been secured, the “right” to “marriage” is a chimera.)
Conversely, if reality is to be subdued to the wishes of men, why should the subduers care so much about the word once they have claimed the thing? If marriage is not sacred but is only a name for however people happen to behave erotically at any given moment in history, then why should the right to the word be so fervently demanded for same-sex couples? Where has all the diversity training gone? To foster diversity truly would be to acknowledge that same-sex relationships are something different from marriage and to embrace that difference without prejudice. But here the diversity-mongers balk. Why do they care so much about the word “marriage” that any distinction between same-sex and opposite-sex relationships becomes intolerable to them?
The answer is that those who support same-sex “marriage” want it both ways: They want marriage to mean something profound, universal, redemptive, and sublime so that participation in it by same-sex couples might be hallowed. At the same time they argue that there is nothing sacred about marriage so that participation in it by same-sex couples might be totally accepted. They want to reap the benefits of marriage in society by denaturing them in the mind, to eat that cake and have it too.
Of course it cannot be done, and so arises the impulse to redefine out of existence what cannot be enjoyed. What marches as passion for equality—emotionally genuine, perhaps, but intellectually spurious—begins in envy. Instead of articulating an ideal form of union in which same-sex couples could sublimate their distinct kind of relationship, the impulse abroad is to destroy an ideal to which only opposite-sex couples can aspire. It is sour grapes raised to the level of social revolution. As Aesop might say, it is easy (or rather imperative) to despise what you cannot have.
To be sure, if the sacred ideal of marriage is abandoned by our society, it will not be only—or even mainly—because of the movement to call same-sex couples “married.” Fiercer enemies of marriage have long been at work.
The invention of the contraceptive pill and the conversion of marriage from a combined spiritual, social, and personal institution into nothing more than a “relationship of two people who love each other” have fundamentally reconstructed the mental landscape in which marriage takes place.
The consequences are perfectly familiar. The acceptability of pre- and extra-marital sex has increased. The divorce rate has increased. The numbers of unwed mothers and irresponsible fathers have increased. The rate of reproduction among the beneficiaries of “higher education” (whose institutions have threatened population explosion and preached careerism while denigrating marriage) has declined. The young are systematically misled about the negative consequences of divorcing “sexual activity” from expectations for marriage. The pretense that gender is irrelevant to home, workplace, and church has constituted a de facto war against the differences between the sexes out of which the meaning of marriage arises. Extreme feminists characterize marriage as institutionalized rape.
All of these trends arise from the intellectual falsification of actual human experience, the reduction of the profound mysteries of sex, love, reproduction, nature, and society to matters of equality and power only. The sacred ideal of marriage is thus under siege from many directions.
Finally, we are told—as if it were a rational argument—that we must accept same-sex “marriage” because it will soon be universally approved and all who resist the change are headed for the dustbin of history. Perhaps. But the inevitability of a change does not make the change necessarily a good one. History provides plenty of examples of changes that, to put it mildly, have not meant progress.
My argument is not that the concept of marriage will not change but that, if it does, a true ideal will be sacrificed for a false idea. Future generations may grow up imagining that there is no difference between same-sex and opposite-sex couples. So far as society is concerned, they will be right, but only because marriage will have become a thing of the past.
Since California law already secures for same-sex couples all legal rights enjoyed by married couples, the desire to redefine marriage must arise from the longing for people with a same-sex orientation to feel socially indistinguishable from people with an opposite-sex orientation. Not equality but identity is desired for same-sex couples by those who oppose Proposition 8. This desire is understandable, and in some ways I sympathize. Who would want any relative or friend to be deprived of something so profoundly meaningful as marriage? Nonetheless, given our natures, it is an impossible and ultimately an undesirable goal.
The goal is impossible because sex and sexual orientation matter. They do not justify injustice, but neither are they irrelevant when it comes to marriage. Sexuality is so rooted in us that the differences between same-sex and opposite-sex orientation, like the differences between male and female, cannot be willed into insignificance without violence to our inner lives. We might want to re-order our society to eliminate all reproductive, legal, social, emotional, and psychic differences between the sexes and between sexual orientations. But to pretend that we can actually do so is to sacrifice truth to wishful thinking. We may fear and hate, or accept and celebrate, the powerful mystery of such differences, but short of remaking humanity in the manner of Huxley’s Brave New World, we cannot eliminate it.
The goal is undesirable because marriage is not merely the name for a set of variable historical phenomena. Marriage as defined by the wisdom of civilized traditions is an ideal, an image of the best, most perfect way that human beings may live in the physical body in the world. It is an image of the uniting of all parts of the self by uniting the self in a relationship with another who is both similar and opposite. My teacher used to say that all creation comes by the union of opposites. She meant not only the union of the opposite sexes in reproduction, but of opposite qualities (light/dark, tension/relaxation, movement/stasis, etc.) in works of art, opposite experiences (comedy/tragedy, day/night, puzzlement/enlightenment, etc.) in the mental life, opposite characteristics (daring/careful, rational/passionate, tender/strong, etc.) in human relationships.
Marriage is the archetypal union of opposites: of yin and yang, of heart and mind, of body and soul, of past and future, of temporality and permanence, of the personal and the social, of all that we mean by femininity and masculinity (however mixed in particular selves), of sexual desire and satisfaction, of physical need and help, in the union of two who love one another as individuals physically, emotionally, and rationally, and as potentially fruitful representatives of the past and future of any community. It is the greatest example of the principle of sublimation, in the pre-Freudian sense of the word, of the raising up of all that is lower and including it in the higher. It is an incarnation of the sacramental principle of life, according to which it is man’s function to embrace the here-and-now moment and to hallow it.
Homosexuality as a fact of the psyche is a human variation to be acknowledged and accepted and, as an aspect of the individuals we love, embraced. But only heterosexuality makes possible the realization of the potential in marriage.
To many, the above image of marriage will seem like old-fashioned balderdash. That is precisely the problem. The truth of this image of marriage is opaque to those whose imaginations rule out the sacramental in life as purely imaginary. In order to make marriage available to same-sex relationships, they redefine it as a property agreement or a merely personal choice, reducing it from a universal ideal to a social tool of the desiring self.
Yet even such secularists believe in the sacred without knowing they do. They believe in the sacredness of equality and of emotion. Raised to believe in the unlimited reach of human reason and in the unquestioned validity of natural feelings, they cannot see why marriage cannot apply to same-sex couples, since it is nothing but a practical social construct built either on the ownership of property (as reason says) or on the personal desire for love and companionship (as the feelings say). Under these assumptions, the position is perfectly understandable, as is the belief that any opposition to it could only arise from injustice (bad reason) or bigotry (bad feelings).
But if equality and good feelings are sacred, then so are truth and humility. If it is wrong to persecute minorities, then it is wrong to pretend a lie. C.S. Lewis has written (in The Abolition of Man [Touchstone, 1996]), “For the wise men of old the cardinal problem had been how to conform the soul to reality, and the solution had been knowledge, self-discipline, and virtue. For magic and applied science [and, we may add, the effort to redefine marriage, along with many another modern movement] the problem is how to subdue reality to the wishes of men” (p. 83). (The abolition of slavery and of Jim Crow laws was an example of the former, an attempt to conform man’s behavior to virtue. The effort to redefine marriage is an example of the latter, the attempt to subdue reality to man’s wishes. Hence the commonly repeated analogy of same-sex couples to victims of racial prejudice is a false one. The actual legal rights of same-sex couples having been secured, the “right” to “marriage” is a chimera.)
Conversely, if reality is to be subdued to the wishes of men, why should the subduers care so much about the word once they have claimed the thing? If marriage is not sacred but is only a name for however people happen to behave erotically at any given moment in history, then why should the right to the word be so fervently demanded for same-sex couples? Where has all the diversity training gone? To foster diversity truly would be to acknowledge that same-sex relationships are something different from marriage and to embrace that difference without prejudice. But here the diversity-mongers balk. Why do they care so much about the word “marriage” that any distinction between same-sex and opposite-sex relationships becomes intolerable to them?
The answer is that those who support same-sex “marriage” want it both ways: They want marriage to mean something profound, universal, redemptive, and sublime so that participation in it by same-sex couples might be hallowed. At the same time they argue that there is nothing sacred about marriage so that participation in it by same-sex couples might be totally accepted. They want to reap the benefits of marriage in society by denaturing them in the mind, to eat that cake and have it too.
Of course it cannot be done, and so arises the impulse to redefine out of existence what cannot be enjoyed. What marches as passion for equality—emotionally genuine, perhaps, but intellectually spurious—begins in envy. Instead of articulating an ideal form of union in which same-sex couples could sublimate their distinct kind of relationship, the impulse abroad is to destroy an ideal to which only opposite-sex couples can aspire. It is sour grapes raised to the level of social revolution. As Aesop might say, it is easy (or rather imperative) to despise what you cannot have.
To be sure, if the sacred ideal of marriage is abandoned by our society, it will not be only—or even mainly—because of the movement to call same-sex couples “married.” Fiercer enemies of marriage have long been at work.
The invention of the contraceptive pill and the conversion of marriage from a combined spiritual, social, and personal institution into nothing more than a “relationship of two people who love each other” have fundamentally reconstructed the mental landscape in which marriage takes place.
The consequences are perfectly familiar. The acceptability of pre- and extra-marital sex has increased. The divorce rate has increased. The numbers of unwed mothers and irresponsible fathers have increased. The rate of reproduction among the beneficiaries of “higher education” (whose institutions have threatened population explosion and preached careerism while denigrating marriage) has declined. The young are systematically misled about the negative consequences of divorcing “sexual activity” from expectations for marriage. The pretense that gender is irrelevant to home, workplace, and church has constituted a de facto war against the differences between the sexes out of which the meaning of marriage arises. Extreme feminists characterize marriage as institutionalized rape.
All of these trends arise from the intellectual falsification of actual human experience, the reduction of the profound mysteries of sex, love, reproduction, nature, and society to matters of equality and power only. The sacred ideal of marriage is thus under siege from many directions.
Finally, we are told—as if it were a rational argument—that we must accept same-sex “marriage” because it will soon be universally approved and all who resist the change are headed for the dustbin of history. Perhaps. But the inevitability of a change does not make the change necessarily a good one. History provides plenty of examples of changes that, to put it mildly, have not meant progress.
My argument is not that the concept of marriage will not change but that, if it does, a true ideal will be sacrificed for a false idea. Future generations may grow up imagining that there is no difference between same-sex and opposite-sex couples. So far as society is concerned, they will be right, but only because marriage will have become a thing of the past.
posted by G.Rap | 10:45 PM
8 Comments:
I think that denying a group of people the right to "identity" is really the same as denying equality. Isn't this comparable to the ruling that "separate but equal" wasn't really equal?
As for comparing this as a civil rights issue: I may be wrong...but I feel like you still haven't said anything other than quoting notable authors or saying, basically, "Well this is different...It's a very old tradition." Can you please explain to me in any other way why it is not a civil liberties issue?
It's printed in Government textbooks in college as under "civil liberties"- is this because most academics are liberals?
My last question: why do you keep talking about the "sublime, profound, universal, and redemptive" marriage? Marriage is what it is- God endowed us as human beings to love each other, and we naturally came to engage in matrimony.
But I've always been told by Christians that God gave HUMANS the ability to love, to feel this profound feeling. We thus engage in marriage not because it is something "sublime, profound, universal, and redemptive"- we engage in it because God created us to find meaning in our lives through love and matrimony. Do you agree?
It seems this is the REASON why marriage has become so universal and profound. If we didn't find love and profound meaning in marriage, than clearly it wouldn't be such a universal concept.
So do gays and lesbians not feel the same love or something? Or are they endangering in some way the universal idea of marriage?
It seems, unless you disagree with my previous point- that proposition 8 supporters are mainly a little xenophobic- in fact, not nearly as xenophobic as the amount of fear and hate in racial segregation.
My liberal friends say all republicans are just xenophobic- and I just don't buy what my parents say when they say "gays endanger the institution" of marriage. That seems awfully xenophobic-sounding to me. What do you think?
-a confused student
I will do my best to unconfuse you one point at a time.
"I think that denying a group of people the right to 'identity' is really the same as denying equality. Isn't this comparable to the ruling that 'separate but equal' wasn't really equal?"
There is no such thing as your phrase “a right to ‘identity’” implies, nor is it anything someone could grant or withhold. By “identity” I meant not the aspects of one’s self-concept (as in “identity politics”), but the concept of two different things being really the same thing (“identical”). You would not say that an elm tree has the right to be identical to an oak tree. The two are simply different things. Both are trees; in that respect they are identical. But their qualities are not identical. You would not say that a painter has the right to be identical to a composer of music. They are both artists, but they use different media. How is this a matter of rights? A same-sex relation and an opposite-sex relation may be a relation of love. In that they are identical. But an opposite-sex relation can be other things that a same-sex relation cannot be. This is not a matter of rights. It is simply a fact of reality. You may want the “right” to pretend that it is not so, but does the government have anything to do with granting or withholding such a “right”?
Again, the separate-but-equal analogy to racial segregation is a false one. The functions of drinking fountains or busses or education do not depend on race or skin color; some of the functions of marriage do depend upon heterosexuality.
"As for comparing this as a civil rights issue: I may be wrong...but I feel like you still haven't said anything other than quoting notable authors or saying, basically, 'Well this is different...It's a very old tradition.' Can you please explain to me in any other way why it is not a civil liberties issue?"
I think you have not read carefully what I wrote. It is not a civil liberties issue because no civil rights or infringements are involved. Redefining the common meanings of words is not a civil rights issue. The California Supreme Court decided that the California Constitution implied a right to marry to same-sex couples. The people of the state voted to alter the Constitution to clarify that for the purposes of California law only opposite-sex couples could do what is called “marrying.” This does absolutely nothing to infringe any rights of same-sex couples to be together, to love, to inherit from, or to visit one another as married couples can. It only means that by the word “marriage” California law means the recognized union of opposite-sex couples. The people, that is, have chosen for their legal system to retain the traditional meaning of that word, and I am arguing that there are perfectly reasonable and non-prejudicial justifications for their doing so.
"It's printed in Government textbooks in college as under 'civil liberties'- is this because most academics are liberals?"
I don’t know what it is that you are saying is printed in “Government textbooks.” If you mean the textbooks make the use of the word “marriage” a civil liberties issue, you’ll have to provide a quotation before I can have anything to say about what they print.
"My last question: why do you keep talking about the 'sublime, profound, universal, and redemptive' marriage? Marriage is what it is- God endowed us as human beings to love each other, and we naturally came to engage in matrimony."
Your statement is a good example of my point that we are arguing under utterly different assumptions. I talk about the “sublime, profound, universal, and redemptive” nature of marriage because I believe marriage is, potentially, much more than just a natural joining together of two human beings who love each other. It is that, but it is not only that. I tried to say what more it is, and all I can do is to ask you to reread those paragraphs slowly and carefully, weighing each concept.
"But I've always been told by Christians that God gave HUMANS the ability to love, to feel this profound feeling. We thus engage in marriage not because it is something 'sublime, profound, universal, and redemptive'- we engage in it because God created us to find meaning in our lives through love and matrimony. Do you agree?"
I agree that God gave humans the ability to love, which is more than a feeling, however profound. And yes, we engage in marriage because God created us to find meaning in our lives through love and matrimony. But matrimony is more than just an external recognition of mutual feelings of love. As I said, it is ideally that but it is not only that. It is also ideally a social institution, a recognition by both individuals and the community of a particular kind of relation involving not only feelings of love but also mutual help, mutual fidelity, mutual lifelong commitment, whatever happens in the feelings, and a sharing of the principle that a stable relation of husband and wife is the best context for the engendering and rearing of children, who embody the inheritance of the community’s past and the hope for the community’s future. In addition, it is the union of opposites in a sacramental relation which ties two human beings—their bodies, feelings, sexuality, needs, thoughts, hopes, ideas, spirits, and many other aspects of their lives—to one another, to the community, to the past, to the future, and to God.
"It seems this is the REASON why marriage has become so universal and profound. If we didn't find love and profound meaning in marriage, than clearly it wouldn't be such a universal concept."
Again, marriage is a universal concept not because we find love in it only but because part of the meaning in it is that it unites that love to a larger universe of significance that includes the very existence of masculine and feminine principles, the sexual reproduction of the human race, and the union of opposites that God has built into the nature of things.
"So do gays and lesbians not feel the same love or something? Or are they endangering in some way the universal idea of marriage?"
Of course they feel the same emotions of love. And they in themselves are not endangering the universal idea of marriage. Society’s belief in that universal ideal is endangered only when anyone—gay, lesbian, or straight—pretends that emotional and sexual love is all there is to marriage. The danger lies in the assertion that marriage is nothing but personal emotions and legal rights, that there are no differences between homosexual and heterosexual relationships because marital relationships are nothing but love plus rights. Marriage is more than love plus rights.
"It seems, unless you disagree with my previous point- that proposition 8 supporters are mainly a little xenophobic- in fact, not nearly as xenophobic as the amount of fear and hate in racial segregation."
Supporters of Proposition 8 come in all stripes, so your generalization is inaccurate. And there is plenty of prejudice to go around on all sides. Anti-religious prejudice has been at least as evident in the recent campaign as anti-homosexual prejudice, if not more so. I would argue against you equally vehemently if you had written expressing anti-homosexual prejudice or anti-religious prejudice. But those are not the issues I am addressing here. I am addressing the meaning of marriage.
"My liberal friends say all republicans are just xenophobic- and I just don't buy what my parents say when they say 'gays endanger the institution' of marriage. That seems awfully xenophobic-sounding to me. What do you think?"
I agree in opposing your parents’ position that “gays endanger the institution of marriage” just because they are gay. I equally oppose the idea that “all Republicans are just xenophobic.” As usual, distinctions have to be made, and that involves harder work than adopting these sweeping prejudices.
Once again, I am calling for acceptance of diversity among the usual preachers of diversity. I am asking for the true acknowledgment of a difference that cannot be wished or pretended or voted away, the difference between the concept of a loving personal relationship and the concept of marriage. The former, available to any two loving human beings whatever their gender, may be as lasting and as loving as marriage and as legally protected. Nonetheless, it is not the same as marriage, which by definition and long tradition and religious belief and practical wisdom and the nature of human reproduction can be aspired to only by heterosexual couples.
To say as much is not prejudice or injustice or xenophobia or homophobia or any other unsavory thing. It is simply a fact of reality. That fact cannot be changed. What can be changed is society’s general belief in the ideal of marriage. But, to repeat, my argument is not that such a change cannot happen but that if it does, more will be lost than gained.
Mark has left a new comment on your post "Proposition 8 and the Meaning of Marriage":
Well said . . . I wholeheartedly agree. I agree with your argument and I can also assert experientially that marriage is a taste of something sublime, something Other. I am married to the woman of my dreams. Before we were married she was still the girl of my dreams, though I can say with certainty that our marriage is very different than our courtship. The sublime quality of our relationship was fundamentally introduced when we were married and not before. To be sure, we were “in love” before we were married, but after we were married we were actually conscious of our marriage being larger than ourselves and in being caught up in that larger reality. The marriage itself touches something of a beautiful reality of which we have become partakers. It is powerful and mysterious. The apostle Paul calls marriage, “a profound mystery” in his letter to the Ephesians. I concur.
I fear, however, that your argument and my experience will fall on deaf ears because people don’t believe in truth anymore. When objective truth and reality do not exist, things like beauty and the sublime can’t really exist either. Beauty can’t exist apart from truth because when truth doesn’t exist then reality doesn’t exist and when reality doesn’t exist sublime reality cannot exist. In the absence of real sublime reality, people must convert the sublime into the mundane or even the perverse to maintain coherence within. Lewis’s waterfall (in The Abolition of Man) turns into little more than a composite of particular molecules.
In the absence of belief in truth, people, who naturally live by belief in something, choose to believe, “in the unlimited reach of human reason and in the unquestioned validity of natural feelings”. Rather than looking to believe in that which corresponds to reality they look to themselves and find that truth is what you make of it or more properly that truth is whatever my feelings define it to be. This belief is untenable and dangerous.
It is untenable because it holds that the only sovereign truth that exists is the truth that there is no truth while at the same time reserving the right to define truth as I see it, which is false and undermines itself. It is dangerous because it elevates the feelings of a particular person, group, or culture to the place of truth even in the absence of substantive argument. Hence prop 8 opponents feel justified in their quest for identity via the redefinition of marriage because they want identity, not because they have a valid argument for redefinition that corresponds to reality. Many also feel very comfortable analogizing their quest of redefinition of marriage to the noble quest of racial equality, I fear, because they see all arguments as a means to an end not because there is any real analogy between the two. This means to an end philosophy is never far behind those that have eradicated objective truth.
Posted by Mark to Raplog at 5:28 PM
Dr. Rap,
Your argument is compelling, and I agree with you in regards to the tenets of marriage.
In regards to your argument, my question to you is what is your opinion on homosexual couples adopting children? The question refers to couples with authorized civil unions.
Anon. raises a good question. What children need most is virtuous and loving parents who will rear them in a virtuous and loving atmosphere, and it would be best for those parents to be a woman/mother and man/father married to one another. Clearly in the case of particular children who have no hope of such a home it would be better to be adopted by a stable and loving homosexual couple or a loving single parent of either gender than to be left to the orphanages or city streets of the world. Yet while there will always be some heterosexual couples who make far worse parents than some homosexual couples, speaking in general, I agree with Richard Kirk that the best option is to have a married father and mother if possible. (The effort of homosexual couples or individuals to have children by far-fetched means—natural insemination by a friend or stranger, mechanical insemination with the sperm of a friend or stranger, surrogate motherhood, or what not—is another matter and is generally a form of sentimental, however heart-felt, self-indulgence, there being so many needy orphans already in existence. Such would-be fathers and mothers are usually more concerned with their own needs than with those of the hypothetical children and so offer a poor risk for responsible parenthood.)
I want to respond to this passage:
"The invention of the contraceptive pill and the conversion of marriage from a combined spiritual, social, and personal institution into nothing more than a “relationship of two people who love each other” have fundamentally reconstructed the mental landscape in which marriage takes place.
The consequences are perfectly familiar. The acceptability of pre- and extra-marital sex has increased. The divorce rate has increased. The numbers of unwed mothers and irresponsible fathers have increased. The rate of reproduction among the beneficiaries of “higher education” (whose institutions have threatened population explosion and preached careerism while denigrating marriage) has declined. The young are systematically misled about the negative consequences of divorcing “sexual activity” from expectations for marriage. The pretense that gender is irrelevant to home, workplace, and church has constituted a de facto war against the differences between the sexes out of which the meaning of marriage arises. Extreme feminists characterize marriage as institutionalized rape."
Assuming your statistics are true (which I do believe them to be) I think you are finding causation where it does not exist. Lets look at the fact that the percentage of kids born to people of higher education is falling. Well, higher education correlates to a higher income level and thus the use of contraceptives. The reason people without higher education have a higher percentage of our children is precisely because they do not have access to education about family planning and the use of contraceptives.
Furthermore, has it ocurred to you that the divorce rate has increased because, with divorce being more socially acceptable, people find that they do not have to stay in an unhealthy or abusive relationship? I read alot about the sacred instituion of marriage, which seems to assume that a married couple, by virtue of participating in a sacred relationship, is somehow happy. I personally believe is a happy marriage is sacred, regardless of the genders involved. I would rather have two gay mean who love each other raise a child, for example, than have that child grow up with parents in a dysfunctional yet sacred marriage.
My point was to assert not a simplistic causation but a set of influences. There is no doubt some correlation between “higher education” and “family planning,” but when the reasons for not having children and the kinds of contraception used become antithetical to marriage, and even to life, one may legitimately ask how “high” that “higher education” really goes. A college education may well correlate with more contraception; it does not necessarily correlate with wisdom.
Of course divorce must be an option in cases of truly abusive relationships. But far too often in our time the cause of divorce is the elusiveness of a perfect happiness falsely conceived and is blamed on the spouse or the marriage rather than on precisely that anguish of mortality that marriage was instituted to help alleviate. No reasonable person claims that the sacrament of marriage ensures happiness. What it can provide is a vehicle of meaning, of which happiness is a hoped for by-product.
Notice that Myers uses the phrase “unhealthy” as a parallel to “abusive” and a synonym for “dysfunctional.” As the sacredness of a marriage does not ensure happiness, so it is no guarantee of the relationship’s health or functionality. But as a value it trumps—or ought to trump—all three, and as a practice it offers a more trustworthy path than divorce toward healing, proper functioning, and joy.
Our society, by contrast, of which Myers seems to be a representative voice, believes that the cure for unhappiness, dysfunction, and lack of marital health is to find a different spouse. That may work in some cases. In many others the pain is merely revealed to be portable from one relationship to another.
There is more to marriage than finding the right spouse. There is also the building of a mutually right relationship with the spouse once found. And because we are spiritual as well as physical, emotional, and intellectual beings, that rightness generally requires more than the pursuit of individual happiness in non-abusive, sexually compatible, non-dysfunctionality.
Anon has left a new comment:
"(The effort of homosexual couples or individuals to have children by far-fetched means—natural insemination by a friend or stranger, mechanical insemination with the sperm of a friend or stranger, surrogate motherhood, or what not—is another matter and is generally a form of sentimental, however heart-felt, self-indulgence, there being so many needy orphans already in existence. Such would-be fathers and mothers are usually more concerned with their own needs than with those of the hypothetical children and so offer a poor risk for responsible parenthood.)"
It's anon again, and I have a question in regards to the quote above...
Would the same apply to infertile straight couples? Are they self-indulgent too?
Is there not a human need to reproduce? Then is not all reproduction self indulgence by your standard? Essentially what is the difference between supposed 'non-selfindulgent' straight reproduction and selfindulgent gay reproduction?
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G. Rap replies:
I believe the same would indeed apply to infertile heterosexual couples. That is, I would distinguish between the legitimate use of the techniques of medical science to help a married couple conceive their own child and the far-fetched means I mentioned.
Just as marriage transfigures our individual needs for companionship and sexual intercourse into a sacramental relationship, so it transfigures our natural urge to reproduce into the great responsibility of the fostering of a family. The fact that in order to have something like a married couple’s family a homosexual couple must employ a third party in something very unlike marital sexual intercourse suggests that motives may need to be examined. My suspicion is that the demand for acceptance from society for the extreme measures I mentioned, whether in a homosexual or a heterosexual context, disguises a lack of acceptance of self, and hence of reality.
(P.S. To Anon: I am touched and honored by your more personal questions and would like to respond to them, but I don’t think this is the appropriate place. I invite you to contact me directly, or through a comment here that will not be published, with a way to reach you, anonymously if you prefer. In the meantime I will say this: The awareness of paradox and the struggle to make sense of it is of the essence of human life; I welcome you into that often painful but potentially redemptive conversation; and your Huxley quotation is only half true. The particular paradoxes you mention I would like to take up with you privately. Perhaps out of that conversation will come a future posting here, but first I must better understand the terms of your crisis. I hope to hear from you.)
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