Marriage & The Political Order

Posted by Rebecca Teti in Marriage on Wednesday, July 01, 2009 4:00 PM

President Obama hosted a reception in honor of LGPT pride month Monday.

You should read his remarks—along with those made recently by former Vice President Cheney—on the subject.

They remind me I promised you a series of posts addressing different facets of the same-sex marriage debate.

In part one I argued that marriage defenders aren’t against anyone, they’re pro-marriage. In part two I pointed you to Anthony Esolen’s work.

Let’s talk now about the common good and whether same-sex marriage furthers its cause—apart from any religious argument (which we’ll deal with in a separate post). I’ve addressed the topic briefly in Faith & Family Magazine at least twice (here & here), but by far the best magazine-length piece I’ve ever read on the subject was published at Mercatornet just yesterday by my friend Bob Reilly.

Please read the whole piece, but I’ll highlight a few things to whet your whistle.

What makes the topic of homosexuality so difficult to deal with in the public square is two-fold. As Reilly points out, the homosexual “movement” has enjoyed great success couching its arguments in the language of rights, as if it were only the latest in the chain of genuine human rights movements. No one wants to give even the appearance of being a bigot and everyone wants to be on the side of civil rights, so as long as the debate takes place on that plane, marriage defenders find themselves at an emotional disadvantage.

I would add that our educational system has not taught genuine civics in any systematic way for nearly fifty years. Our kids may learn how a bill becomes a law, but hardly anywhere can they study what law is or what difficulties our Founding Fathers were trying to avoid when they crafted our system (it’s about a lot more than “checks and balances”). It’s somewhat rare, therefore, to find someone who can articulate the purpose of law and the principles of civilized society without making recourse to religious arguments—with the result that many opponents of same-sex marriage have been cowed into thinking they oppose it only on religious grounds, and can’t “impose their religion” on others.

These ideas—that same-sex marriage is a right and only a God not everyone believes in opposes it—rely on a set of false assumptions however, and Reilly does a superb job of illuminating what they are.

1. Privacy. As I’ve written before, most of us practice the good ol’ American virtue of minding our own business, and this is the central attitude homosexual rights activists (and, not incidentally, abortion rights activists) play on in mounting their case: “keep the government out of my bedroom!” “This is my business.” “It’s between me and my God.”

Well… yes, sort of.

However, were it simply a matter of carrying on private acts in private places, none of us would ever know about these things, would we? By asking for legal redress against discrimination and public recognition of their relationships, activists are not asking for privacy, they are asking for these private acts to be publicly embraced and normalized.

Reilly explains this well by taking the case of heterosexual marriage. Marital intimacy is private, but it has many public manifestations: the wedding itself, wedding rings, children, homes, schools:

the whole structure of society, in fact, is built to protect and maintain the conditions for that intimacy and its results. The whole social and political order is supportive of this privacy. It is encouraged and protected by law because it is held to be of benefit to all.

That is what the so-called gay activist is seeking: not privacy at all, but public judgment that his type of relationship is of benefit to all. The public judgment that active homosexuality is not to be encouraged must be repudiated. The goodness of homosexuality must be taught side-by-side with the goodness of marriage.

2. Justice. Unfortunately, as Reilly points out, the ironic result of this demand is destruction of the principle by which we can make any judgment at all about what is and isn’t beneficial. We have to understand something about the underpinnings of law to see why, and here I’ll let Reilly do the talking:

The legal protection of heterosexual relations between a husband and wife involves a public judgment on the nature and purpose of sex. That judgment teaches that the proper exercise of sex is within the marital bond because both the procreative and unitive purposes of sex are best fulfilled within it. The family alone is capable of providing the necessary stability for the profound relationship which sexual union both symbolizes and cements, and for the welfare of the children which issues from it.
The legitimization of homosexual relations changes that judgment and the teaching which emanates from it. What is disguised under the rubric of legal “neutrality” toward an individual’s choice of sexual behavior – “freedom for everyone” – is, in fact, a demotion of marriage from something seen as good in itself and for society, to just one of the available sexual alternatives. In other words, this “neutrality” is not at all neutral; it teaches and promotes an indifference, where once there was an endorsement. Since the endorsement purported to be based upon knowledge of the objective good of marriage, it taught not only that marriage is good, but that we can know what is good.

The “gay agenda” then turns out to be part of the “dictatorship of relativism” then-Cardinal Ratzinger spoke of at the opening of the most recent conclave. Reilly continues:

The implied indifference in a law which is “neutral” to one’s choice of sexual alternatives teaches that we are incapable of knowing in an objective way the goodness or evil of these sexual alternatives, and that therefore their worth can only be determined subjectively by the private individual.
[snip]... far from not embodying any moral view, legal “neutrality” gives public status to and fosters a highly subjective view of life, which, of course, extends to things other than sexual behavior. As Germain Grisez wrote, “One can not long adopt certain specific moral precepts without adopting the entire view from which such precepts rise.”

(For an excellent treatment of how conscience is deformed in this way, see J. Budziszewski’s “The Revenge of Conscience.”)

3. Nature. At this point Reilly takes up the question of order and Nature. That section of his article will repay careful reading, but here I want to respond to a comment on an earlier post, in which someone remarked to the effect that homosexuals have been hurt by the Church’s calling them “objectively disordered.” Perhaps that expression is not well understood, since right after Pope Benedict XVI’s election I had an email exchange with a prominent homosexual blogger who made the same complaint bitterly: “the Pope thinks I am less than human, a life not worthy of being lived.”

In the first place, the Church does not teach that any persons are disordered in their existence. Of course not; every human being is willed by God, loved by Him, “necessary,” as the Pope says. That same-sex attraction is objectively disordered is not a “Catholic” judgment, but a clinical and biological evaluation.

To suggest a parallel, there are people who suffer from a condition known as “pica,” a compulsion to eat things with no nutritive value such as dirt, clay, chalk, ashes or plaster. Their natural appetite for nourishing food has become—for reasons unclear—disordered, directed away from its proper end toward what is poisonous. Recognizing the truth that the appetite has gone awry makes no moral claim about the person at all. It’s the condition that’s disordered, not the person. Similarly, same-sex attraction is objectively disordered with respect to the natural biological drive to reproduce, but stating so does not imply any judgment on the person who suffers that disorder, nor is the disorder in itself sinful.

Reilly makes the point this way. The distinction between the person and the act (love the sinner, hate the sin):

removes any moral onus from a person whose homosexuality, or, say, alcoholism [or pica] is no fault of his own. But a genetic condition of homosexuality or alcoholism does not deprive a person of his free will, so the person is still morally responsible for homosexual acts or drunkenness. Of course, if one has no free will – which is suggested by those who declare sexual restraint or abstinence to be impossible – then any notion of morality becomes absurd.

To return to Reilly’s argument, the basis of our understanding of what is good is drawn from observation of the laws of the universe. Everything—including man himself—is ordered towards a purpose.

In non-human creation this design is manifested through either instinct or physical law. Man, however, possesses free will. He alone can choose the means to his end or choose to frustrate his end altogether. This, of course, is why “moral” laws are applicable only to man. That man can defy moral law in no way lessens the certainty of its operation. In fact, man not so much breaks the moral law as the moral law breaks man, if he transgresses it. In short, when we speak of man’s nature, we mean the ordering of man’s being toward certain ends. It is the fulfillment of those ends which makes man fully human.
Since Socrates, we have called man’s end: the good. The good for man, Aristotle tells us, is happiness. However, happiness is not whatever we say it is, but only that thing which will by our nature truly make us happy…. Aristotle explains that happiness is achieved only through virtuous actions—the repetition of good deeds. Deeds are considered good and bad, natural and unnatural, in relation to the effect they have on man’s progress toward his end. So, it is through Nature that we come to understand the proper use of things.

In order to defend homosexual unions we have to make one of two mistakes. Either we have to deny there is such a thing as human nature and thereby deny that there is any such thing as right, wrong, use or abuse; or we have to re-define nature as anything a person is capable of doing or historically ever has done. If we make the first mistake, we have destroyed the basis of any and all rights and the point is moot. If we make the second mistake, we’re arguing that anything anyone ever did in history is “natural”—and must include horrors such as human sacrifice and ethnic cleansing.

If human acts are not objectively good or evil and only individual desires are real, how can distinctions between desires be made? This is the existential dilemma created by the abandonment of the objectivity of Nature. Since the moral quality of an act cannot be discerned, one is left with a quantitative standard of intensity. How intensely (genuinely) is the desire felt? Adultery, incest, pederasty, masturbation—according to the school of desire, no moral distinction can be made between any of these acts and, say, the act of marital union. This is sexual equality with a vengeance.

If we forbid ourselves to make judgments about the right use of sexuality—and that is the logic of same-sex marriage—we are saying that there is no objective good to be sought, only desires to be enacted. That is not a premise that will confine itself for long to adult sexual acts; it will inevitably spill out into every area of life, undermining respect for life and for law in every sphere. We already accept desire to kill the unborn and the Terri Schiavos among us. What other desires are we prepared to accept?

If we cannot know the good, how will it be possible to work for the common good?

If there are not pre-existing, intelligible ends toward which man is ordered by nature, every individual must invent, in an arbitrary and subjective manner, some ends by which to guide his actions and order his life. The way one lives then becomes a matter of “lifestyle.” The elevation of the word “lifestyle” to its present prominence is an indication of the total loss of any serious meaning in one’s choice of how to live. What used to be man’s most profound ethical concern has been reduced to an element of fashion. The choice of homosexuality or family life becomes equally “valid” in this denatured contest. If the concept of an intelligible common good is denied, so are the moral grounds for social approval or disapproval of personal behavior. With each person a law unto himself, political community becomes impossible.

The impossibility of community in such a system is the reason same-sex marriage is to be resisted. It has nothing to do—to answer another objection—with fear that “gay marriage” will cause anyone to become homosexual or personally undermine your commitment to your spouse.

As I wrote in part one of this series, I consider self-indulgent heterosexuals more to blame for the pass we are in at present than homosexual activists, who in a sense have simply latched on to the example set them by practitioners of contraception and no-fault divorce. It cannot be said strongly enough that the critique of same-sex marriage is not an indictment of people suffering from same-sex attraction, which the Church understands as a cross.

Nor does rejection of same-sex marriage imply rejection of the rights of homosexual persons! Human rights by their nature are universal and homosexual persons are entitled to full exercise of civil rights.

It is the espousal of fictitious and self-contradictory “gay rights” that must be opposed because it elevates homosexuality to, and advances it on, the level of moral principle. This claim threatens the health of the whole community, not because it would mean a wholesale defection to the ranks of the homosexuals, but because the teaching itself is pernicious and will affect and form the attitudes of the body politic in other matters as well.

Which is exactly what our courts do when they create “gay marriage”—create a special privilege for those drawn to a particular sexual act. To give Reilly the last word, speaking of the recent court decision in Iowa, he writes:

Equality before the law does not mean that everyone gets to be “affirmed” in whatever they may choose to do. That is why laws have penalties. It means that the law applies equally to everyone, despite their personal desires. The Court has actually acted against this principle by saying that there should be a special category of marriage for those disposed to the act of sodomy, who, for whatever reason or indisposition, refuse to comply with the laws for marriage passed by the Iowa legislature.
In Iowa, no doubt, there are also laws or regulations that define the qualifications for service in fire departments and police forces. If one cannot meet those qualifications through some physical or other infirmity, is the state then obliged to create a special kind of fire department or police force in which one can serve to meet the requirement of equality before the law?  Of course not. It would defeat the very purpose of fire departments and police forces to have people serve on them who cannot perform the duties of firemen and police officers. They would therefore no longer be real police forces or fire departments. Likewise with marriage, a far more important institution than either the police or fire departments, creating faux marriage for those who cannot or will not perform the duties of real marriage defeats the purpose of the institution. The Iowa Supreme Court should at least have the presence of mind to acknowledge what it is actually doing – denying that there is a real purpose to marriage – and be ready to explain to others, such as polygamists or those in man-boy relationships, why it should not, by judicial fiat, also create a special kind of marriage for them.

Do read his whole article to do these arguments justice. 

In upcoming posts I’ll try to tackle the moral question, the clash of same-sex marriage with women’s rights and religious liberty, and the even thornier topic of how we as Christians ought to relate to practicing homosexuals who are our friends and neighbors.

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