How We Piss Each Other Off

I don't think I've ever read anything by Robert Morrison before. But today my favorite sites were full of links to heartwarming remembrances of fathers, and one of them led me to this article of Mr. Morrison's. Much of it shares the way that his father managed to embody some of the best attributes of a father, managing to be both a role model and a friend. Here's a good sample:

My dad was a carpenter and he left the house every morning before dawn. The good part of that is that he would often return in the late afternoon. I can remember as a little boy of nine or ten wrestling with “Pop” on the TV room floor when he came home. He was still sweaty and often had sawdust in his hair and on his clothes.

Nice, comforting stuff on a day that we're meant to think of our dads, to honor their virtues, to do something for them. But then, after recalling a moment when his father stood up for him, Morrison concludes:

We kids grew up feeling safe, protected in our tender years. One of George Washington’s great contemporaries, Edmund Burke, wrote of something called “the cheap defense of nations.” Fathers in the home were surely a part of that cheap defense. Without fathers in the home, there won’t be enough money in the U.S. treasury or all the treasuries in the world to guard the young against bullying.

New York State, my home state, is on the verge of abolishing fathers in the home. They say they are only “re-defining” marriage. They’re not. They are ending it. And with the end of marriage, will come the dissolution of the state. Gone will be the cheap defense of nations. And no one will know what it means “to sleep with my fathers.”

Is there any logical connection between the sentiment at the beginning of the first paragraph and where Morrison ends up? (Go read the article if you think I'm leaving something out. I'm not.) Now, I know what he's getting at: New York is trying to pass a law recognizing same-sex marriage--a fact which is never actually mentioned in the article--and many conservatives feel this will lead to a sustained assault on traditional marriage and the values that underpin it. But how in the heck does this article effectively make the case that this is so?

Morrison paints a moving, emotional portrait of his strong, reliable father, and then asserts out of nowhere that such men will be driven out of existence if gay marriage becomes a legal reality. Really? So Morrison's carpenter father, in a world where people of the same sex can legally wed, would have become and effeminate, uncaring, unreliable disgrace to fatherhood?

I've written previously that I think the state has no business licensing romantic relationships between individuals. If marriage isn't in some fundamental way about procreation, and thus bringing up the next generation of citizens, then marriage should be removed from the legal system and defined by the religious institutions that marry people. But I get the counter-argument of Morrison and those who think like him: traditional, procreative marriage is a cornerstone of civilization, and pulling it out could cause profound social disruption and decay. But even in that grim scenario, men like Morrison's father should still be able to act out the role God and nature have defined for them.

But aside from disagreeing with Morrison's point, I believe writing of the type I linked to causes a further breakdown of the already disastrous debate between left and right in this country. If a gay-marriage advocate reads that article, there is no chance they'll find it thought provoking or convincing. Instead, it will piss them off every which way, and some of them will probably write pieces stating that everyone against gay marriage is a secret theocrat who wants to force Christian beliefs on everyone. And that, in turn, will lead to more angry arguments from the other side.

The gay marriage debate is not one where people seem inclined to compromise. But a little temperance when speaking and writing, especially from traditional-marriage supporters who are supposed to be the defenders of a more refined, civilized point of view, would be a step in the right direction.

Greed, Sex and Public Morality

Republicans, according to stereotype, are overly concerned with what other people do with their bodies, while Democrats are overly concerned with what other people do with their money. So it was interesting, and unexpected, to read an article encouraging a renewed aversion to greed in the latest issue of First Things magazine, which decidedly falls on the conservative side of the spectrum. It forced me to reconsider some basic assumptions I have made about wealth, capitalism, and morality.

The author of the piece, Edward Skidelsky, argues that our elites have lost the traditional, still-popular view that there is something wrong with being greedy, that it is an essentially disordered, wicked activity. This notion, which your average modern economist might dismiss as juvenile, has a rich heritage. As Skidelsky puts it:

Explanation of this point requires a brief excursus into Aquinas’ theory of acts and ends. An act, for Aquinas, has two ends: one “proximate,” which is what makes it the kind of act it is, the other “ultimate,” which is what the agent aims at in acting. If either end is bad, the act as a whole is bad. A good ultimate end cannot redeem a bad proximate end; thieving to help the poor is still thieving.

He goes on to say that most thinkers in western history, up until the Enlightenment, took it as a given that trying to accumulate more money or things than you needed is wrong, no matter if it leads to good things happening. But one of the views of the Enlightenment was the economic view of man, the belief that our wealth-building activities enhance human progress as a whole. Skidelsky notes:

This transformation of attitudes to wealth creation cleared the ground for the new science of political economy. Having been demoralized, so to speak, economic acts became open to analysis and assessment in terms of their effects, intended or otherwise. They could enter into a calculus. It now made sense to ask, for instance, whether it might not be more beneficial in the long run to let corn prices fluctuate freely, even in a famine, than to regulate them—a question that could not have been decently posed when the duty to feed the poor was regarded as absolute. Without this prior demoralization of economic activity, [Adam] Smith’s enterprise would have been unthinkable. Aquinas, for instance, would have regarded it as akin to an earnest discussion of the benefits of cutting up a hospital patient and distributing his organs among others.

Now, I have accepted uncritically that the best way to improve the well-being of all is to allow individuals to pursue their own self-interest. And I don't see how you can renounce that principle without setting some group (whether the command-and-control planners of the Soviet Union or the divine-rights kings of old Europe or some body of clerics) as the arbiters of what is allowed and what is forbidden. But do we need to promote the idea of material success as a complete good? is there room for guilt about greed in a capitalistic society?

I struggled with these thoughts for a little while, but then was absorbed in another First Things article, I began another, this time "Religion, Reason and Same-Sex Marriage" by Matthew J Franck. In this piece, Franck expands on an earlier article where he argued that anti-gay marriage arguments are not based solely on irrational bias and have a place in the public debate. I have outlined my position on gay marriage on the blog in the past: namely, that we have gone so far away from the traditional sense of marriage already, and it makes so little sense for the state to license romantic companionship, that we ought to eliminate civil marriage entirely. Franck, as you might imagine, takes a different view:

Yet another danger may await us in the event that traditional views of sexual morality are overthrown and same-sex marriage is established. We see a sign of it in the driving of Catholic Charities out of adoption services in Massachusetts. The freedom to participate fully in civic life, to offer oneself to others in civil society, conscientiously on one’s own terms as a religious person professing one’s beliefs, may be jeopardized by this new dispensation.

Franck, along with many other observers, thinks the adoption of gay marriage and the host of cultural assumptions that go along with it will push Christians out of public life. This may be possible in the long term, though it is unlikely to happen any time soon in a majority-Christian nation.

So, to recap: we have two articles. One is about the ubiquity of greed in our society and of the need to curtail it, and one is a reaction to the legal advance of gay marriage. What do they have in common? In my view, both authors commit the fallacy of equating laws and government action with public morality as a whole. Look at this quote from Skidelsky:

Democratic states use economic incentives all the time to encourage motives and ways of life considered to be civilized. They limit hours of work, restrict or forbid Sunday trading, regulate where and how advertisers may operate. In a utilitarian political culture, such legislation is usually justified on grounds of economic efficiency or “health and safety,” but its unacknowledged motive is ethical. These states wish to erect safeguards against the powerful human tendency to rapacity.

If we acknowledged the legitimacy of such motives, we might think of many further ways in which the power of the state could be harnessed to discourage avarice. Of course, such proposals will encounter the objection of “paternalism,” but there is nothing inherently paternalistic about a citizen body collectively deciding to encourage certain forms of life and discourage others.

It's true that society's laws are an important benchmark of what is acceptable and what isn't, but they are far from the only ones. The culture of a society can be an equally powerful force in shaping behavior, and yet both Skidelsky and Franck are primarily concerned with whether the law advances or challenges their beliefs about the well-ordered life.

It is probably easier to change the laws to reflect the kind of society you want than to change the culture, but I would argue that a truly Christian response to the problems of materialistic greed and sexual amorality are to build up a virtuous alternative in Christian communities, prove the superiority of that way of life and then share it with others. This may be a libertarian point of view that borders on the naive, but the law that supports our beliefs on Monday may change to oppose them by Friday. (This is, in fact, what is happening with marriage laws.) If we can encourage a truly neutral state in matters of morality and culture (which I admit is a high challenge itself) than Christians should be confident that living out their beliefs will show others a better way. Public morality should be built (and renewed) from the ground up by moral individuals, not imposed from the top down by the state.

Why Civil Marriage Ought to End

The debate about who should be allowed to marry is, first and foremost, a debate around what the word 'marriage' actually means. Is it a descriptor of the loving union of two people? Or is it an institution upon which families (and specifically the optimal raising of children) is based? A series of court decisions have cast doubt on whether marriage is really about procreation: one of the foremost arguments against the procreative view of marriage is that if the point of marriage was to beget children, then we wouldn't let old people or the infertile marry at all. Therefore, the logic goes, the institution must be about two people loving each other and having an exclusive sexual relationship, and therefore it is discriminatory not to let gay couples participate in marriage.

Princeton professor Robert George attempts to bolster the procreative argument in a recent paper. His argument is that, even though some heterosexual couples can't have children, they are oriented towards that goal through the nature of the act. He makes the analogy to a baseball team: all baseball teams are structured to win baseball games, but some win and others lose. Yet the losers are still baseball teams, and in a similar way non-procreative heterosexual couples are still oriented towards procreation.

Over at Slate.com, Kenji Yoshino responds:

I suspect it will be cold comfort to many infertile opposite-sex couples to hear that while their marriage is still "real," it is a "losing" marriage as opposed to a "winning" one. Ideally, most of them view their marriages as something more than honorable defeats and would despise the contention that they had not fulfilled the central purpose of the institution. Moreover, the article says nothing of straight people who choose not to procreate. It is unclear why they would have "true marriages," as they are not even trying to win.

This argument tells you everything you need to know about the pro-gay marriage side of the debate. The first half of the paragraph hints at the skepticism, made more explicit elsewhere in the piece, that marriage has to do with anything other than the shared love and sexual intimacy of two people. (I'll just say, in passing, that the notion marriage is only about love strikes me as historically, anthropologically and psychologically clueless.) But the second half of the paragraph gets at why, despite my much greater sympathy for Robert George's point of view, I believe Yoshino ultimately has the better of the argument. You cannot argue that marriage is about an orientation towards procreation when a large number of married heterosexuals explicitly reject that belief, not by accident of biology, but by choice. And, what's more important, there are no legal or social repercussions when a married couple chooses not to have children.

However, while Yoshino is right that George's procreative argument does not create a sufficient case for preserving marriage as a heterosexual-only institution, he is wrong that his counter argument makes an effective case for gay marriage. Consider this sentence: "Closely examined, the common-procreation argument denigrates not only same-sex couples but several kinds of married opposite-sex couples." He is speaking about the State, our government, smiling upon certain types of loving relationships and 'denigrating' others. Does our government have any interest, at all, in licensing personal, loving relationships? Especially if no-fault divorce means they can be dissolved any time, or for any reason? Of course not. Gay marriage advocates are arguing for inclusion in an institution that, from a civil point of view, is completely hollowed out. If they were intellectually honest, they'd be arguing for an end to marriage as a legal concept, and its replacement with a system of contracts: we could have a basic civil union that covers things like joint tax filing and hospital visits, and a child-rearing contract that expresses the intention of two people to commit to raising a child (whether conceived by the couple or adopted) to adulthood.

To go back to the question of how you define marriage, it isn't an "either, or" issue, but rather a, "both, and" issue. Marriage is both about love, and procreation, and raising children correctly, and (at least for religious folks) making a commitment to God and Church about how you intend to conduct the rest of your life in partnership with your spouse. But that is very explicitly a religious vision of marriage. In our society, I would argue, the only consistent, valuable definitions of marriage are religious ones.

Our society is deeply influenced by its Christian heritage. However, once that faith ceases to be vital in the public square, that influence is not sustained, which means basic assumptions about our society enshrined in law, like marriage, come under scrutiny. I believe marriage as a civil institution was fundamentally hollowed by no-fault divorce, which strips a sense of duty and commitment out of marriage. That shift in the law was largely embraced by the public, including practicing Christians, who get divorced with basically the same frequency as the public at large. If we wish to have a religiously informed vision of marriage enshrined in civil law, Christians must prove through their actions the superiority of that vision. Until then, the best (and most fair) thing to do is to end civil marriage and return it to the religious sphere where it finds its truest expression.