Glenden BrownReframing the Debate about Marriage
When it comes to matters affecting glbt people, Andrew Sullivan is usually right.
Today’s tour de force on marriage is dead on. Sullivan argues that opposition to legal same sex marriage is part and parcel of fundamentalism’s long standing, ongoing war against modernity. At the core of religious conservatism is a yearning to turn back the clock - to a time when:
. . . civil marriage brought with it a whole bundle of collectively-shared, unchallenged, teleological, and largely Judeo-Christian, attributes. Civil marriage once reflected a great deal of cultural and religious assumptions: that women’s role was in the household, deferring to men; that marriage was about procreation, which could not be contracepted; that marriage was always and everywhere for life; that marriage was a central way of celebrating the primacy of male heterosexuality
By establishing male heterosexuality, marriage was intended to both reflect and reinforce cultural and religious norms:
women were deferent, non-heterosexuals rendered invisible and unmentionable, and thus the vexing questions of sexual identity and orientation banished to the catch-all category of sin and otherness, rather than universal human nature.
In this understanding, getting married signals that one has accepted those values and ways of understanding the world. The last few decades have witnessed the demise not of those values (many people still hold them) but of the consensus about them and their place of primacy in our culture. Economic and social forces have undone the agreement. Sullivan writes:
And watching fundamentalist Christianity and Benedict-style Catholicism react to the last couple of decades has only cofirmed for me what I suspected in my early adulthood: that their solutions to the modern problem are not solutions at all. They are wild lunges at something they hate almost as much as they misunderstand.
Sullivan is framing the debate about marriage as a contest between modernity and the past, between modernity and religious conservatism. Modernity is by its very nature ambiguous and uncertain. Modernity accepts that uncertainty is the rule rather than the exception and, perhaps most unnervingly, that the how things were is not how things have to or should be. The entire culture war in the US can be seen as a struggle between people who believe we can make things like they used to be and people who have said, “We don’t want things like they used to be.”
If conservatism is to recover as a force in the modern world, the theocons and Christianists have to understand that their concept of a unified polis with a telos guiding all of us to a theologically-understood social good is a non-starter. Modernity has smashed it into a million little pieces. Women will never return in their consciousness to the child-bearing subservience of the not-so-distant past. Gay people will never again internalize a sense of their own “objective disorder” to acquiesce to a civil regime where they are willingly second-class citizens. Straight men and women are never again going to avoid divorce to the degree our parents did. Nor are they going to have kids because contraception is illicit. The only way to force all these genies back into the bottle would require the kind of oppressive police state Rod would not want to live under.
Carl Sagan, in a lecture later published in his book The Varieties of Scientific Experience, talked about the idea of change. In the past, tradition was non-trivial, inherited wisdom a matter of survival, and not accepting that wisdom of the past was disastrous; accepting what you were taught was an absolute necessity, one humans developped a knack for. In times of rapid change, however, the inability to abandon old ideas and adopt new ones becomes a liability - the need to adapt to changing realities requires the ability to discard old ideas and create new ones, to rethink not only how we solve problems but how we identify them. We human creatures have rarely if every known a time of such rapid change as the last 100 years - revolutions in transportation, communication, medicine (all the sciences, in fact), and warfare have rendered our old ways of knowing and understanding the world almost obsolete.
For religious (and cultural conservatives) these rapid changes prompt their desire to hold to the old ways - it makes perfect sense. In times of change, what worked in the past is comforting, sure. It runs into problems because, simply, the solutions of the past only work with decreasing effectiveness and increasing tension. Addressing Rod Dreher, Sullivan says:
He is free as a person of faith to regard my civil marriage as substantively void and his as substantively meaningful; he is simply required as a member of this disenchanted polis to accept my civil marriage as legally valid. That’s all. Is that so hard? [snip]
I have nothing against the voluntary and peaceful activities of any religious group, and regard these organizations as some of the greatest strengths of America. The idea that gay people somehow want to persecute these churches, that we’re out to get you, and hurt you and punish you is preposterous. The notion that there are rampaging mobs of gay people beating up on Christians is also unhinged. To take one flash-point between a radical Dominionist group deliberately trying to rub salt in the wounds of Castro Street bar patrons after closing hours - in which no one was hurt - as the harbinger of some kind of mass gay pogrom against Christians is daffy. . .
[Snip]Dreams of total pre-modern coherence - whether in the malign fantasies of the Taliban or the benign aspirations of theocons longing for the 1950s in the 21st century - are dreams undone by freedom. We live in a new world, and we can and should create meaning where we can, in civil society, in private, through free expression and self-empowerment. But we cannot enforce that old meaning on others by law. And we certainly cannot do so arbitrarily, to the sole detriment of only one group in society - homosexuals. . . .
My advice to the theocons: by picking solely on homosexuals to force back the sexual and spiritual freedom of modernity, you look awful, you are losing the next generation and you are buttressing cruelty and pain. In your heart of hearts, you don’t want to do that.
Sullivan’s frame, however, is more than simply the battle between traditionalists and modernists or between two competing groups with incompatible agendas. Sullivan is arguing for a pragmatic and practical compromise - the same compromise that the Catholic church has made on divorce. The separateness of the civil and religious, the pragmatic understanding that what is deemed legal is not always the same as what is deemed moral and the state cannot meaningful enforce morality through legality. The pragmatist accepts that the church as an institution and individuals are free to reject as substantive the marriages of gays and lesbians but that blocking their legality is the path to irrelevance for conservatism as a whole.
Gay marriage is dividing conservatives from the rest of America in which 3/4 of Americans support Civil Unions. 40% (or so) of Americans support same sex marriage, a number which grows each year. Sullivan is advising conservatives - be truly conservative, pragmatic. If you lose on this issue - and you have already lost Americans under 40 - you doom yourself and conservatism to generations of irrelevancy. Don’t throw the conservative baby out with the same sex marriage bathwater.
November 20th, 2008 at 5:37 pm
Glen:
Nice! You just smashed Brother Mero’s argument (unconvincing that it is) into a million pieces. Perhaps this is social entropy at work.
November 20th, 2008 at 5:59 pm
I really do believe the Mormon church and probably others will eventually come to this conclusion themselves. It’s a matter of survival for them, as your post says, the younger generations already are rejecting the old ideas and fears.
November 20th, 2008 at 6:33 pm
Once upon a time everyone knew that kings were the way to run a country, and conservatives complained about how this “democracy” thing was against the will of god.
Once upon a time slavery was supported by the bible and the will of the lord.
Once upon a time a woman’s place was in the home because that was the way god intended it.
One day in the future we will look back at those who spoke against gay marriage in the same way we today look at monarchists, racists and sexists.
The question is, do you want your decedents to look back at you the way we look at the Klan, or the Abolitionists? The women’s rights movement, or jerks with the “shut up and iron my shirt” sign?
Just sayin’.
November 20th, 2008 at 9:09 pm
JFarmer - I thought Sullivan made a pretty convincing case myself.
November 20th, 2008 at 10:29 pm
What argument of mine got smashed?
Sullivan is a verbose drama queen who is throwing another tantrum over the central reason he is a lapsed Catholic…you guys are just the less-articulate Mormon (or non-Mormon/Mormon-hating) version.
Sullivan assumes “modernity” in itself is good. Really? But what would we expect from the “cult of change” now rampant in America. Conservatives embrace constructive change…”moderns,” ironically enough, don’t…they only accept change for change’s sake. Any questioning change or judgment over the value of change is anathema. Why? Because they believe in nothing lasting…no “truth.”
Your non-intellectuality is glaring…you see opinion as fact…self-righteousness as a moral statement…and Sullivan as an expert on conservatives. Wow!
November 20th, 2008 at 10:47 pm
Paul:
Did you really just call someone a “verbose drama queen”?
Haha. Now that is hilarious!
November 20th, 2008 at 11:12 pm
Well, okay…at least I got the queen right.
November 20th, 2008 at 11:44 pm
Paul, I have to agree with you on Sullivan (though I enjoy his writing apparently more so than you). His understanding of conservative thinking says to me that when he was a conservative, he was simply a confused liberal “in the closet.” But I do think he has an ability to sum up the current manifestation of conservative thought (which I would argue has been hijacked by the religious right into something a far cry from my father’s conservative ideals) in a casual and usually accurate manor.
On the subject of change, there was an interesting exchange last week on The Daily Show between Jon Stewart and Bill O’Reilly. O’Reilly, in a defense of the notion that the country is “center-right” at it’s core began a sentence (paraphrasing): In America we respect traditions, and conservatives defend those traditions. Stewart interrupted, saying “Yes, and the tradition in America, so far, has been a progression of freedoms.” I think Stewart (yes, a comedian!) encapsulated something not given the importance it deserves with that quip. In the discussion of equality, nobody mentions the importance of liberty in a content, productive, and lasting community. Historically, it is the heart of longevity.
November 21st, 2008 at 7:19 am
jasonthe, as Paul has already pointed out to me when i made much the same claim, that is all wrong. America is not founded on freedom, I am just too dumb to know it. Sadly my years of study in political philosophy have all come to naught and I have the most basic concepts wrong.
…..I suppose i should turn in my degree.
November 21st, 2008 at 7:32 am
Paul - You are truly an expert at the art of argument by insult. It is however, nothing more than an attempt at distraction, a desire to twist discussion into insults and defenses against those insults. It’s a way of avoiding the issues, of refusing to address them. You may not like Sullivan’s points, you may disagree with them, but dismissing them as a tantrum won’t make them go away.
November 21st, 2008 at 8:06 am
Glendon, Paul is also a master of obfuscation as evidenced in his wordy comment on another thread here.
For example he says: “Hitler and Stalin and Mao began their reigns of terror by dismantling civil society…so there was no buffer between the individual and the state…SO the state became the arbiter of values, morality, mores.” While ironically what he himself proposes in opposing same-sex marriage is to be the arbiter of values, morality, mores.
Further, he says: “Conservatives, real ones, don’t believe that those documents [Declaration of Independence and the Consitituion with its Bill of Rights] are permission slips to do whatever you want to do… ” Implying, I suppose, that Liberals think there should be what? No laws at all? Ridiculous statement.
In order to reach his salient points, you have to weed out all such tripe. This is why I laughed when I read his opinion of Andrew Sullivan. Must be true what they say, takes one to know one.
November 21st, 2008 at 9:09 am
Shane, you wrote…that I said…
“America is not founded on freedom…. ” I said the opposite. I said America IS founded upon freedom, just NOT abstract individualism. And, sadly, yes, maybe you should ask for your money back on that degree.
Glen, I addressed Sullivan’s point about modernity…that I also called his thinking a “tantrum” hardly disqualifies my opinion from his opinion.
And, Becky, with all due repsect, keep up. Historically, and for very good purposes that go to our lasting freedoms as a nation, civil society has been most often the arbiter of our values, morals, and mores. When it hasn’t been, the state has filled the void and then all sorts of horribles have occured. Individualism has NEVER been the arbiter of values, morals, and mores for a society…except maybe in Sodom.
And my point about the existence of laws is only to challenge you guys to explain the limitations of “individual freedom,” as you all would argue. So far, like the good little ideologues you all are, I have heard you all to say that laws exist to liberate individuals from the shackles of myths and ignorance that come from religious people like me. Do you all have any other examples of why we have laws, especially limitations on just letting any two consenting adults marry?
November 21st, 2008 at 9:20 am
Gee, Paul, you forgot to tell me to put down the Kool-Aid. Shane has responded with a new top post. I suggest we all read it and move our further comments there.
November 21st, 2008 at 11:45 am
Sullivan neither accepts nor rejects the idea that modernity is good in itself - he accepts that it simply is and is not likely to be undone. Sullivan’s argument about the genie coming out of the bottle is nothing more than a call for conservatives to accept that the clock cannot and will not be turned back - that the premodern consensus cannot be recreated and fighting to recreate it serves only to alienate people from conservatism. Describing Sullivan’s argument as a tantrum is many things but it is not taking it seriously - nor does it grapple with the argument he’s making.
November 21st, 2008 at 1:25 pm
Sounds like Obama’s “Change” really meant changing back to the Clinton administration. Not only is he filling his cabinet with a bunch of Clinton retreads including Hillary “I voted for the war in Iraq” Clinton as Secretary of State, but now he has said he will have to “delay” abolishing the “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy of gays in the military.
Obama to delay repeal of ‘don’t ask don’t tell’…
Makes you wonder what other campaign promises he is going to “delay”. It is looking more like Obama is becoming just a toady for the Clinton’s. He will be in the White House but the Clinton’s may be the ones calling all the shots.
November 21st, 2008 at 1:56 pm
Hey Ken, I think you’re on the wrong thread–this one’s a different topic. Or else you’ve gone completely off your rocker and are spouting random anti-Obama rhetoric just everywhere. I’ll be glad to chat with you elsewhere about how much I loved the Clinton years, how well my family did finacially, how fondly I remember having an actual intelligent person in the oval office, and how I’d love to see some of that same wonderful brilliance again. Then I’ll listen patiently while you rant about his sexcapades and that the good times were all due to Reagan and Bush before him, and our present bad times are all his fault. Oh, maybe I covered it all already and we don’t need to chat.