Frederica Mathewes-Green, an estimable person, has just finished an apophatic if not oxymoronic 3-part series on why she’s not “speaking out” on same-sex marriage (part 1, part 2, part 3):
1, I haven’t spoken out against gay marriage because I don’t see it damaging marriage any more than straight people have already done.
2, my spiritual tradition has found by experience, over millennia, that sex apart from hetero marriage damages one’s spiritual health. (Actually, a lot of world religions have observed the same.) This is just one part of a much larger process of spiritual therapy, and I don’t expect it to make sense to those outside the faith. It’s certainly not the thing I’d first want to talk about with nonbelievers. Jesus comes first. So, as far as this issue goes, I just want to live and let live.
(Part 3)
Although we’ve never met, and rarely corresponded, she and I are of the same generation and “go back a long way” to when neither of us was yet Orthodox and both were ardently pro-life, she as President, I believe, of Feminists for Life, I as, probably, legal counsel to Indiana Right to Life (her position was notably more prominent than mine). I certainly respect her right to pick her fights, and I don’t expect to see her, like David Dunn, going over to the dark side.
But while I agree with almost all her factual points, I fear she worked some inadvertent mischief by so conspicuously “not speaking out.” She’d have done less damage (and maybe caught less flak) if she had not spoken out by simply not speaking out rather than by, in effect, chronicling the reasons why those of us who do speak out are missing the beam in straight eyes while seeking the speck in gay eyes.
I don’t think I’ve ever shot off my mouth about same-sex marriage destroying my marriage or destroying marriage in general. I’m with Frederica on that.
I don’t think that God’s going to rain down fire and brimstone on us like Sodom and Gomorrah (though I do think that muddled thought and transgressive behavior – economic, sexual and other – produce their own bad consequence).
I come at “the marriage issue” from an oddly lonely position, which I should (and do) consider as a warning that I may be a crank. It’s especially odd that most of my fellow lawyers are either amnesiac, or revolutionaries, or too timid to speak about stuff we learned in law school.
But if I really thought I was a crank, I could shut up or maybe change my opinions. So of course I think my position is correct. And here it is:
Yes, we straight folks have put marriage in a world of hurt. Contraception, cohabitation, no-fault divorce and marrying-or-not-depending-on-the-tax-and-social-security-consequences have variously damaged the Christian conception of marriage and obscured the procreative and familial state interest in the institution of the confusingly identical name.
Yes, I said “procreative … state interest.” There was a procreative interest of the state in marriage. Want proof? Marriage could be annulled if the putatively married couple never engaged in “the marital act,” (cover the children’s eyes now) the one and only bit of bedroom acrobatics that actually can make a baby (wink! wink!). Doing that act was called “consummating the marriage.”
Q.E.-freakin’-D. What more proof do you want?!
Yes, that means that straight couples who get married in their fertile years intending never to have children are deserving of The F Word: Freeloaders.
Marriage is where the marital act should occur and babies should get made. Married husband-wife families is where children ideally should be raised. And if the rest of the world disagrees, then why the hell should the state be involved in putting a sort of Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval on warm’n’fuzzy feelings between folks? If there’s no public interest at stake, keep the public and the public fisc out of it.
If two people cannot do the marital act that’s fundamental to the state’s procreative interest, they can’t really be married. Sorry. Enjoy each other’s company, but don’t look to the rest of us for more than benign neglect.
Of course, I think there is and should be a procreative and familial state interest in marriage, but suffice for now that it drives my small government impulse crazy to hear people say, in effect, that marriage is (nothing more than) making promises your most specialest bestest friend and that the government must give you a license to do that and perks for having done it. The bad effects from that kind of muddled thought is a yet more statist polity.
Note that my point is not addressed by either of Frederica’s two summary points. As I say, it’s a lonely position.
Now let me give Frederica her due. She doesn’t entirely miss my point, though she puts it in a way that I think is too easily missed:
The uniqueness that hetero marriage embodies—literally, embodies—will inevitably emerge in time. What’s the most primitive aspect of human life? Survival, first; secondly, reproduction. Male-and-female constitutes an archetypal truth, and no other formulation of marriage can convey it. The resemblance between “gay marriage” and hetero marriage can never be more than skin deep (literally). The primitive truth about male-and-female will always emerge, in the long, slow circles of time.
But before reality re-emerges from the current delusion, there’s hard times coming for many people who boast of the name “Christian,” especially those in Churches that have no sense of marriage as sacrament, no limitation on non-members using the facilities for nuptials, and so forth. Unless they cave in, which most of them will as they have on every other issue and cultural trend in my lifetime.
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“The remarks made in this essay do not represent scholarly research. They are intended as topical stimulations for conversation among intelligent and informed people.” (Gerhart Niemeyer)
Tipsy Teetotaler ن 