Douglas Kmiec, on the meaning of the California decision:
It is often asked, as Marty's helpful post does, how the acknowledgment of same-sex marriage harms marriage between a man and a woman. The inability to give a simple, secular answer to this explains the California victory in favor of same-sex marriage more than the reasoning of the opinion. That doesn't mean there is not an answer. There is a religious answer, and it is anchored in the creation story recorded in the book of Genesis.The religious answer has a secular side, but it is less articulable. Traditional marriage has been accepted without argument for so long that the words custom and history substitute for analysis. When a more searching inquiry is made, it is often related to the genuine belief that the institution of marriage and associated natural procreation should be (and has been for millenniums) interrelated and very much worth preserving. The story of the declining populations and cultures of Western Europe is debated but troubling. No one wishes the same for the United States, though it is hard to deny that marriages are occurring later and with less frequency (with a con-commitant rise in cohabitation and its various adverse instabilities and risks for children). A smaller youthful population with a sizable graying demographic has many negative economic and social consequences manifest in everything from what does or does not get accomplished in schools to the coming bankruptcy of the Social Security system to much else that depends on the constant influx of new people, responsibly prepared to take up for the work of citizenship and community.
I think the most common, and superficially common-sensical, questions that comes up in discussions of this issue is, "How does Jill and Jane's marriage hurt Jack and Diane's?" The idea is that unless you can demonstrate that a gay marriage directly harms traditional marriage, there is no rational objection to gay marriage.
But this is a shallow way to look at it. We all share the same moral ecology. You may as well ask why it should have mattered to the people of Amherst, Mass., if some rich white people in Charleston, SC, owned slaves. Don't believe in slavery? Don't buy one. Similarly, why should it matter to the people of Manhattan if the people of Topeka wish to forbid a woman there to have an abortion? Or, conversely, why do the people of Topeka care if women in New York City choose to abort their unborn children? Don't believe in abortion? Don't have one.
Some issues are so morally consequential as to affect the moral ecology of an entire society. Along those lines, do the polygamous marriages at the FLDS compound in west Texas hurt your own marriage? It would be impossible to establish a direct correlation there, but I doubt most people would be willing to relax the state's ban on polygamy (the matter of underage brides is a separate question). Why don't we allow polygamous (plural) marriage? Would it keep people who wanted to live in monogamous marriages, gay or straight, from doing so? Of course it wouldn't. So why not polygamy? Let's hear the secular rationale for banning plural marriage. Please take care to explain why it's okay for the law to forbid consenting adults who want to live in plural marriages from doing so, but we have a constitutional imperative to allow same-sex couples to do this.
The fact is, we don't allow polygamy primarily because it deeply violates our tradition. To be sure, there are deeper reasons why we don't, having to do with the kind of social order that polygamous marriage would bring about, but if you ask most people to explain why we don't allow the practice, they'll not be able to go much beyond, "Because it's wrong." Most people don't even have to think about it. Which is precisely where we were as a society on gay marriage until practically the day before yesterday.
We expect the state to come down hard on polygamists because we recognize, if only intuitively, that maintaining the moral ecology of our culture requires saying, "Thou shalt not" to polygamy, and enforcing that precept with the power of the law. The polygamist's community's plural marriages affect everybody else's marriages by implicitly delegitimating the normative model. The plural marriages of west Texas don't affect the integrity of your marriage, but if they were to be tolerated, and then mainstreamed in time, it would undermine the moral basis for monogamous marriage. What's so special about a two-person marriage when any polymorphous arrangement involving consenting adults receives the same legal and social sanction? In time, society becomes indifferent to traditional marriage, and that will have social consequences.
Look at the divorce revolution. There were some good things to come out of it, of course. Men and women aren't trapped anymore in miserable, even abusive, marriages. But nobody can deny that the loosening of the marriage bonds in law and social custom have made it more difficult for couples to hold form stable marriages. The divorce rate today proves that. Marriage as a social institution is not as strong as it was. People may conclude that the trade-off was worth it. But there has been a trade off, and there's no point in denying it.
It is astonishing, though, how quickly gay marriage went from being something as unthinkable by most people as legalized polygamy is today, to being considered a constitutional right by high courts, and accepted by roughly half the populace. I was thinking today that there's a parallel between what happened to the Catholic Church, especially in Europe, in the 20th century -- how it went from being apparently strong and vital to facing all kinds of crises in the blink of an eye. As those familiar with the arguments know, there is a tendency among the right to blame the Second Vatican Council, but the truth is if the Church were as strong as she seemed, things wouldn't have fallen apart so rapidly.
So it is with the institution of marriage. Gay marriage is and is not a sudden shift in the meaning of marriage. It started with the Reformation. The reason I think gay marriage cannot be stopped, only delayed, is because it is only the latest manifestation of deep social trends in the West going back centuries. These currents run so deep in our civilization they carry us all along without many of us being aware of how far from shore we're receding.
If you haven't bought it yet, now's a good time to order Carle C. Zimmerman's "Family and Civilization," reprinted not long ago by ISI. I blogged back in February on this 1940s classic by the top Harvard sociologist, and that lengthy post bears revisiting for a basic orientation on Zimmerman's ideas. The book argues that there are three main family types, and that the type of family that dominates a given civilization determines the fate of that civilization. History says Zimmerman, shows that the ideal type of family, with regard to individual and material flourishing, is the "domestic" family: mother, father and extended relations. The "trustee" family -- a more ancient type, found in clannish societies -- crushes the individual under the weight of the family's authority. The "atomistic" family, in which family bonds are very loose (and which dominates our society today), leaves individuals without the social capital that comes from the bonds of the domestic family. The histories of Greece and Rome, he argues, show that civilization cannot survive the atomistic families as the social norm.
In an interesting parallel with Richard Weaver's contention that the West sowed the seeds for its own destruction in the 13th century with the victory of nominalism over Thomism, Zimmerman says the process of the family's decay began at the same time, for the same reason. More:
It had a firm beginning with the rise of nationalism and the Protestant conception that the family bond was holy but not a sacrament. It led through the philosophical conception of the eighteenth century that the family was a union based upon private contract with only incidental, but necessary, civil implications. The nineteenth and early-twentieth-century schools of family sociology, with their consistently negative attitudes toward the binding and displeasing aspects of the family unit, were but the wholesale development of centuries of previous thought which in a smaller way had the same attitude toward familism.Thus modern thinking about the family, other than the scholasticism of the Christian [Catholic] church, has been largely a product of the Reformation and has attributed to the family all those elements of nominalism and contractualism so prevalent in institutional thinking since that period. Just as John Locke, J.J. Rousseau, Thomas Paine, and a number of the Founding Fathers of our own nation could hold that the social compact -- government -- if it became unsatisfactory to the body of the people could be abolished for a new form, so the developing school of family negationists could hold that unsatisfactory family types had been, are being, and will continue to be abolished.
In the book, Zimmerman traces the development of the idea of the family in the West across the centuries, showing how it went from a concept based firmly in a sacramental marriage, down through the ages until it became seen primarily as a contract entered into by consenting individuals. The strength of the family system is based chiefly on the strength of the marital bond. We now are living in a period of the weakest type of marital bond, and therefore the weakest kind of family.
What does this have to do with gay marriage? Redefining marriage to include same-sex partners within its definition radically changes the institution, reinforcing the idea that it has no transcendental meaning, but can be changed at will. But as Zimmerman's work strongly implies, we shouldn't be the least surprised by gay marriage. It is the natural result of historical processes most of us accept without question. Ideas have consequences.
That is more or less a secular case against gay marriage -- or at least the basis for one. But it won't do a bit of good. This is why I don't see any hope of stopping gay marriage. It did not come out of nowhere, but emerged as the working-out of the logic of our civilization and its exaltation of individualism. That there is no simple answer for "How does gay marriage hurt my marriage?, and indeed the idea that such a question can be sincerely posed, shows how far down the road of individualism, atomism and decline we've gone. Zimmerman, on denial and the future of the domestic family:
There is little left now within the family or the moral code to hold this family together. Mankind has consumed not only the crop, but the seed for the next planting as well. Whatever may be our Pollyanna inclination, this fact cannot be avoided. Under any assumptions, the implications will be far-reaching for the future not only of the family but of our civilization as well. The question is no longer a moral one; it is social. It is no longer familistic it is cultural. The very continuation of our culture seems to be inextricably associated with this nihilism in family behavior. This process of atomization is hastened by the Pollyanna stories and pseudohistories given by the family sociologists. They believe that the family is getting better and better all the time.
Read toward the end of my post from February to get an idea where all this is likely headed.
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William, you have trashed the rules of conduct for this site with your abusive comment to Rev. Spitz. (That does not mean I agree with him.)
Mr. Dreher, thanks for your long and challenging post. Of course you're correct that in this age indvidualism and atomism, too many people can only conceive of opposition to gay marriage as irrational.
But you write that opposition to gay marriage is morally analogous in its reasoning to opposition to slavery, to abortion, and (for pro-choicers) to legal barriers to abortion. But in each of these supposed analogues someone is harmed, or is at least considered harmed (I'm pro-life): slaves, fetuses, pregnant women. The obvious rebuttal to "it you don't like abortion, don't have one" is that passive acceptance of evil is not a moral option.
You write in regards to polygamy that most people don't even have to think about it but recognize intuitively that it's wrong. I would say instead that most people instinctively feel it's wrong because it's not what they're used to; give them years to think about it -- just as many have been thinking about gay marriage for years -- and they'd either oppose it on grounds that it perpetrates sexist oppression or, rejecting that argument, would come to the conclusion that their opposition had been based in bigotry.
You write that toleration of polygamy would, over time, deligitimize the idea that monogamy is normative, and I agree. Men and women who now marry monogamously might in such a society marry polygamously. But heterosexual men and women won't marry homosexually even if gay marriage is someday seen as a normative equivalent to heterosexual marriage. This leaves bisexuals. Do we heterosexuals, for the sake of bisexuals, deny a third group, gays, the benefits of an institution we ourselves enjoy? That seems wrong for several obvious reasons I won't go into.
You write that "redefining marriage to include same-sex partners within its definition radically changes the institution, reinforcing the idea that it has no transcendental meaning, but can be changed at will." But to people who see homosexual behavior as either morally equal to heterosexuality, period, or morally equal in people who experience no heterosexual desires and thus can't form true heterosexual unions, does that redefinition rule out transcendental meaning (by which I assume you mean the existence of a universal as in "universals") or does it redefine marriage in light of a deeper and wider understanding of that universal? Isn't the latter just the opposite of the nihilsm Zimmerman thinks he sees?
I guess your ideas also work with the Orthodox Church. I mean, eventually we'll be seeing gay marriages and gay rights (?) like I read about in Finland (http://jn1034.blogspot.com/2008/11/history-now-finnish-orthodox-church.html). But the upside is that it may help open us to "hidden" problems with gays in the Churches and we won't have to read about "scandals" (http://jn1034.blogspot.com/2008/11/vestments-as-sword-ministry-as-shield.html) Sorry I lifted those links but I can't understand that we have websites that talk truth yet are benign (I mean they don't hurt me directly). Lord have mercy on the world!
The opposition to gay marriage is not just religious but its how we see ourselves in the past. People are afraid of the future. If gay marriage exists we will see two guys or two girls parlaying their physical attraction for each other in front of our eyes, at the mall, in the street, macking by the liquor store. I think people don't really want to see it, however if the government says its OK to be gay & married, how do I explain this to my child. Though I am a religious man, I fail at being a true Christian becuase I believe a woman has a choice to have her baby or not. Its a matter of life or death not about love. However, no one can tell me my religious upbringing is antiquidated or not relavent. Gay and Lesbian people have an agenda and its not about love, it's about money and power.
In response to the previous post by "Your Name": You wrote "Gay and Lesbian people have an agenda, and its not about love, it's about money and power." Perhaps you can expand on that because I don't see it. I'm a 51 year old physician who has never had any trouble with the law. My parents were hard-working responsible blue collar people, and I worked hard to honor that and build on it. Once a doctor, I did a number of medical missions to the third world. I see 20 patients a day and try to do my best for them. All along the way (from an early age), I have had social struggles, religious struggles, self-esteem struggles, family struggles, professional struggles, and relationship struggles, not because I'm gay, but because of the derision, fear, and marginalization I've suffered from those who have been indoctrinated into the common position that I am a pariah. I am still battered by this every day, seeing people's anger and apprehension toward anything that suggests I am human.
You write "we will see two guys or two girls parlaying their physical attraction for each other in front of our eyes, at the mall, in the street, macking by the liquor store." Don't you see this from opposite sex couples? What is the problem? Perhaps you see the opposite sex couples expressing love and romance, while you see the same-sex couples expressing lust and sin. If you are doing that, you are creating the problem for yourself. I suggest you look at same-sex couples the same way you look at the opposite-sex couples and that will solve your problem. What's more, I can tell you that you would be correct. Same-sex couples, just like opposite-sex couples, experience attraction, love, lust, confusion, disappointment, romance, hope, nurturing, and commitment. You seeing them differently is understandable given the family/church/society you have lived in up to now. But the choice to see them differently is still your choice. In my path to living with myself I, too, had to go through shedding my learned disdain. It's easier than you think.
You also write, "if the government says its OK to be gay & married, how do I explain this to my child." First of all, you tell the child that the law is written in a way that people of any religion can live in America. Then you tell her that your religion teaches that homosexual activity is wrong. What is so hard about that? But I have another suggestion. Why don't you tell her that some people fall in love with people who are the same sex, and they want to be happy, too. Passing on your suspicious disdain not only conditions her to have ill-will toward others, but it may destroy her, if she is gay.
Oh, and I wanted to say that after the struggles I mentioned above going on for so many years, I met someone 4 years ago. We now live together, visit each other's family together, work on the house together, do volunteer work together, support each other when we have a hard day at work, sit down and talk about finances, problems, holidays, and the future together, and sleep more peacefully because we have our "other half" to say 'goodnight' to. Is that so ugly? When I read your line, "Gay and Lesbian people have an agenda and its not about love, it's about money and power" it sickened me.
I'm a 51 year old physician, YourName. I have a giving, fulfilling honest job that pays well. I have wonderful neighbors, a peaceful neighborhood, family close by - which includes children (nieces and nephews) who are delightful, and whose futures I discuss with their parents. I aso have a loving, mutually-respectful, mutually- supportive, and mutually-beneficial relationship (marriage, if you will). I don't need money, I don't need power. And I don't need you to shed your indoctrinated fear, anger, confusion, and mean suspicion of me, but I think it would work well for both of us. A little (non-patronizing) good-will will go a long way. Try it.
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