Tony Jones and Rod Dreher discuss SSM

Tony suggests beginning by asking how it was that we came to the positions we did on same-sex marriage. I'll start by saying what my position is: that marriage is only between one man and one woman, exclusively, and should be recognized only as such by the state. I believe that the state should make some provision for same-sex couples in the law (some form of civil union), but that traditional marriage should be privileged.

I have never believed otherwise, but that's only because same-sex marriage (henceforth: SSM) was only a fringe enthusiasm until the last 10 years or so. But I was not always conservative on same-sex relations. I was completely laissez-faire from high school throughout college, and didn't think about it much at all until I converted to Catholicism at the age of 26. I accepted the Church's teaching as true, period, the end. But before I became a Catholic, I had come to accept the wisdom of the Church's teaching on the right use of the gift of sexuality, in large part because I had been for so long an abuser of that gift. I couldn't figure out why, if there was nothing more to sex than having fun, why did I feel so crappy afterward? In 1987, in the summer before my junior year of college, I broke up with a girl I was seeing in New Orleans and went to the Superdome to see Pope John Paul II. I don't know why. I intuited that there was something disordered in the way I was living, and that the old man knew something true that I didn't know. I wanted to be near him.

I have since high school had gay friends. My oldest friend from childhood is gay (and a chaste Catholic). Gay friends in college, gay roommates after college. It just wasn't a big deal to me -- and, in terms of socializing, still isn't. I don't get the "yuck" factor many people on my side of this argument have.

When I started out as a serious adult Christian -- which for me meant my life as a Roman Catholic -- I accepted, as I said, all the Church's teachings as true. For an orthodox Catholic, that doesn't mean that you don't think about them, and investigate them, and struggle with them. It means that you accept that these teachings have been promulgated authoritatively, and that they bind your conscience. That meant, of course, that I had to be chaste until marriage -- and if I never married, then I would be chaste all my life. This was difficult, especially for a man my age, living in Washington, DC, surrounded mostly by people who didn't share my ethic (to put it mildly).

But if what the Catholic Church teaches is true, then it was all true; I couldn't pick and choose what I wanted to believe. I was faithful to all of it, and if ever I wasn't faithful, in thought, word or deed, I went to confession and repented.

I got to know in Washington a remarkable man: David Morrison, who became a leader in Courage, the national support group for homosexually-oriented Catholics who choose to be chaste. David taught me a lot about why the Church teaches what it does -- I mean, the deep wisdom of Catholic teaching not only about homosexuality, but about sexuality itself. As I began to explore my own faith, and to think more deeply into why the Church, and Scripture, require chastity (which is not sexlessness, but rather using the gift of sexuality rightly, in right order), it began to make sense to me.

This could get complicated, this tale, and there's really no point in it. Let me just say that at first, I obeyed and believed the Church's teaching about sexuality (which is Holy Scripture's teaching) without really understanding it, and then I came to understand it. I should make it perfectly clear that I do not believe that one has to understand an authoritative teaching in order to obey it, and to recognize it for what it is: a moral truth that is binding on your conscience. Yet I knew from my own experience of living chastely, and from the struggles of David and my dear friend from childhood, with whom I was in close touch, that it is an at times unbearable thing to master the passions -- especially in this culture.

I had no guarantee that God would ever bring someone into my life for me to marry -- but I had that hope. My gay Catholic friends who wanted to be faithful to the truth had to labor without that hope. It's easy for straights who have been married for a while, and who have enjoyed the consolations, physical and emotional, of an intimate married relationship, to forget how hard it is for single Christians -- especially gay ones -- to carry the cross of chastity. Nevertheless, we have no choice but to do so.

And let me say too that I believed then, and believe now, that there is a such thing as objective moral truth. I recognize that we live in a secular pluralist society, which puts limits on how we practice politics. But I do not believe that what's true is true for me. Just so you know that's where I'm coming from.

Anyway, as time went on, I began to read more deeply into history and sociology, and to come to certain conclusions about why it's vitally important to protect the institution of traditional marriage. No gays have done remotely as much to tear down the sacredness of marriage as have heterosexual vanguards of the sexual revolution. We have to do what we can, I came to believe, to restore traditional marriage and family life, as a way to keep our society and culture from falling to pieces. If we grant gay marriage, that would be to codify a view of marriage that separates it entirely from its natural purpose, and which completely redefines the institution in ways that people can scarcely comprehend. (I'll get into this more deeply as Tony and I continue our dialogue). And more recently, I became aware of how granting same-sex marriage rights infringes substantively on religious liberty, which is to me one of the most precious things about this country.

I became more alarmed when I saw ordinary people who don't have any particular animosity towards gays condemned as "bigots" because they do not recognize gay marriage -- and found it very, very easy to see the day when Christians, Jews, Muslims and believers in traditional faiths that hold to Scriptural and traditional teaching about homosexuality would be sanctioned in law and custom for believing what our religions and the witness of history teaches us is true and right.

Moreover, I am temperamentally inclined to be conservative, and suspicious of innovation. We should not throw out time-tested institutions without having a very, very good reason. To radically redefine marriage as is proposed now is madness. Nobody is asking why marriage evolved as it did, and why it has worked so well. But then again, that's our culture: we believe that liberating the individual and his desires from the fetters of tradition, religious or otherwise, is the point of our politics. We call that progress. I call that madness, and the way to barbarism. So when I oppose gay marriage, I'm most fundamentally opposing a way of looking at reality that assumes it's entirely plastic, and the only meaning it has is that which humans give to it. If we accept that fundamental way of thinking about the world and our place in it, then we are lost, truly lost.

But I'll talk more about that later in this blogalogue. For now, the point is this: I believe in traditional Christianity. I believe in traditional wisdom. I believe that we, in our modern times, have dangerously, dangerously separated ourselves from the source of truth and wisdom, and are in mortal danger as a civilization. I really do believe that. This is a philosphical and metaphysical issue for me more than anything else. Emotionally, I'd just as soon say, "Let everybody marry, it's nothing to me." I want my gay friends to be happy. But truth is not determined by emotion, as I see it, and certainly I find it epistemologically arrogant to assume that an early 21st-century white American bourgeois male can stand in judgment of Scripture and the Church, and the long, long experience of humankind on marriage. And so I don't, and won't, and resist those who do, aware all the time that I am fighting a battle I expect to lose.

Anyway, there you have it. If you're still reading, I recommend to you this short essay by Ross Douthat in The American Conservative, which pretty much captures my stance as a cultural pessimist, and which will color all my commentary in this blogalogue. I couldn't find a separate link for it, so here it is in full. Back to you, Tony:

Ross Douthat

The most welcome rhetorical ploy of the last decade was the decision by liberals tired of being tagged with the dreaded l-word to re-label themselves as "progressives." Liberalism and conservatism have always been ill-matched antonyms, since the former refers to a set of political philosophies--Lockean liberalism, Rawlsian liberalism, and so forth--whereas the latter is something more nebulous, an orientation toward the world rather than a programmatic approach to it. The term "progressive," with its implied utopianism, is a more precise antonym for "conservative," and fans of linguistic precision should join subscribers to The American Prospect in applauding its revival.

Still, if one accepts that when people say liberal they usually mean progressive, then the liberal/conservative binary is still a useful way of looking at politics in the West and increasingly worldwide. It's true that neither term is exact enough to enable an observer to discern the definitive "conservative" or "liberal" line on every policy issue and cultural controversy. But even so, if you call someone a conservative or a liberal, anyone willing to accept a touch of ambiguity in their definitions ought to understand what you mean.

Liberals are Baconists: they believe in Francis Bacon's dictum that the ends of politics are "the conquest of nature for the relief of man's estate." A conservative, meanwhile, is anyone who either says no to Baconism, or who says yes, but only up to a point--and so conservatism embraces anyone who has jumped off liberalism's fast-moving train at any point over the last five centuries. If you're a monarchist who thinks that liberalism went wrong with John Locke and the Glorious Revolution, step on up. If you're a West Coast Straussian who thinks it went wrong with Woodrow Wilson, then welcome aboard. And if you're a neocon who loved the New Deal but found the Great Society and George McGovern to be a bridge too far, there's a place for you as well.

But here's the rub, and the reason for a great deal of recent conservative confusion: the Right actually won a victory in the latter half of the 20th century, after centuries of defeat, and turned modernity away from a particularly pernicious path. This unexpected triumph has meant that many people who became accustomed to calling themselves "conservatives" when the conquest of nature seemed to require socialism or Communism are back on board the Baconian train, racing happily down a different track into the brave new future. These are the people who insist that conservatism ought to mean "freedom from government interference" and nothing more--the Grover Norquists of the world, for instance, or the Arnold Schwarzeneggers. In fact, they are ex-conservatives, because they are no longer sufficiently uncomfortable with the trajectory of modernity to be counted among its critics. They were unwilling to give up freedom for the sake of progress, but they're happy to give up virtue.

The picture is further complicated by the fact that because conservatism only really exists to say "no" to whatever liberalism asks for next, it fights nearly all its battles on its enemy's terrain and rarely comes close to articulating a coherent set of values of its own. Liberalism has science and progress to pursue--and ultimately immortality, the real goal but also the one that rarely dares to speak its name--whereas conservatives have ... well, a host of goals, most of them in tension with one another. Neoconservatives want to return us to the New Deal era; Claremont Instituters want to revive the spirit of the Founding; Jacksonians want to rescue American nationalism from the one-worlders and post-patriots; agrarians and Crunchy Cons pine for a lost Jeffersonian or Chestertonian arcadia. Some conservatives think that liberalism-the-political-philosophy can be saved from liberalism-the-Baconian-project and that modernity can be rescued from its utopian temptation; others join Alasdair MacIntyre in thinking that the hour is far too late for that, and we should withdraw into our homes and monasteries and prepare to guard the permanent things through a long Dark Age.

Liberals, on the other hand, dream the same dream and envision the same destination, even if they disagree on exactly how to get there. It's the dream of Thomas Friedman as well as Karl Marx, as old as Babel and as young as the South Korean cloners. It whispered to us in Eden, and it whispers to us now: ye shall be as gods. And no conservative dream, in the 400 years from Francis Bacon until now, has proven strong enough to stand in its way.

Ross Douthat is an associate editor of The Atlantic Monthly.