by John
With apologies for failing to engage seriously with most of what she (or James) has had to say about the topic, let me say that I disagree with the upshot - though not necessarily the substance - of what Helen says above about tradition and same-sex marriage.
As a card-carrying anti-liberal and occasional member of the Christianist conspiracy, I agree with Helen that granting the privilege of legal marital status to same-sex couples marks a change in what "marriage" means, and that this is not the sort of thing that should be undertaken lightly. And (again, I presume, like Helen) I find the usual arguments given in favor of such a change - marriage is a right (no, it isn't); traditional gender roles are oppressive, anyway (no, they needn't be); it's not the state's business to legislate morality (yes, it is); and so on - to be pretty deeply unpersuasive. If you have, as I think just about everyone does in at least some ways, an even somewhat robustly normative vision of the place of (both sacred and profane) authority in political community, then the question of who should be recognized as married to whom is not one that can reasonably be settled on grounds as flimsy as these.
But for all that, I still think that religious and other traditionally-minded conservatives' opposition to same-sex marriage is misguided. I think this, though, for reasons having more to do with the consequences of such opposition, and of the political arrangements that are its outcome, than with the principles that are used to ground it. Allow me, then.
Suppose that there are no good a priori or otherwise universalistic arguments against a certain sort of legal arrangement - one that grants legal marital status only to differently-sexed couples, say - and several such arguments in favor of it. If this is true, as I think it is in the case at issue, then it follows that, all other things being equal, the legal arrangement in question is one that it is good to have in place. But it is crucial to recognize that other things are never equal: there are plenty of cases - the war on drugs being the most famous of them - in which a governmental policy or political arrangement is justified in the abstract but, when the rubber meets the road in a particular situation, its upshot is more bad than good. And it is my contention that such is the case, in present-day America, with the refusal to recognize same-sex couples as proper candidates for civic marriage.
What are the realities that make this so? They stem, I think, from the fact that in a society like ours, where the common understanding of marriage has been thoroughly contractualized and that of sexuality profaned, any political measures that treat some sorts of monogamously sexual relationships between consenting adults in different terms than they treat others are going to be perceived by a considerable portion of the population as - in e.g. the terms of the challenge that Helen was responding to - bigoted, and therefore will give rise to huge amounts of (both real and felt) hostility and resentment that make for the kind of societal division and unrest that should be avoided when possible. Much as some of the more "in-your-face" tactics of agitators for homosexual privileges have ultimately set back their cause by making other segments of society feel threatened in ways that they frankly are not, religious and traditional conservatives who persist in their refusal to recognize the civic legitimacy of same-sex marriage in this particular culture and at this particular time cannot but give rise to the (only sometimes accurate) perception that they are a group which does not only hate the sin, but despises the sinner as well. Even if - and I think this is quite a big "if" - this arrangement also has the outcome of contributing to the preservation of the traditional institution of marriage and/or discouraging immoral sexual conduct, the negative effects of the social discord it breeds seems to me easily to outweigh such benefits.
Put slightly differently and perhaps a bit more strongly, the point is that our public understandings of marriage, gender, sexuality, and the family already have changed in many of the ways Helen is worrying about (though the complementarity of gender has not gone away), and the proper conservative response to this should be to find a way to incorporate the growing public acceptance of homosexuality and same-sex unions within a set of cultural and political arrangements that recognize, and indeed "defend", the particular goods of procreative marriage and traditional sexual mores. (Exactly what this would come to is a question for another day; suffice it to say that the rights of religious traditions to discriminate on the basis of sexual conduct should remain firmly intact.) That the state has an inescapable role to play in helping to form the moral attitudes of the citizenry and encourage certain ways of living at the expense of others seems undeniable; it cannot, however, do this effectively if it is perceived by crucial segments of the population as an alienating and unsympathetic force for repression. There are kinder, gentler ways to shape private opinion than preserving a bit of the legal code whose underlying rationale is frankly a thing of the past, and the hostilities that such laws engender should themselves be reason enough to aim for a middle way.
(Cross-posted at Upturned Earth.)
These sorts of arguments always seem abstracted from the average citizen and over-sensitive towards academic, legal, and media opinionmakers.
It's a counsel of surrender before the first battle is even finished. Why must people pretend there is an obligation to recognize the "civic legitimacy" of same-sex marriage when in fact it has only been approved in two states, and imposed both times by the courts over popular resistance?
Even the arguments about respecting cultural change don't bother to prove whether the novel support for same-sex marriage is particularly deep. The gallup poll you cite still shows 41% support (37% in another part of the page) for *anti-sodomy laws*. I doubt those expressing pro-gay attitudes are united in similar strength.
Finally, these warnings about overreach are hardly ever delivered to the left. I have seen few liberals publicly lament that the California Supreme Court brought this issue to the fore in an election year. Gay rights activists didn't worry whether driving Catholics out of the adoption business in Massachusetts would provoke a backlash, and the activists' few conservative friends sure seemed pretty quiet about it.
If there is, say, a purge of justices of the peace and low-level judges for refusing to officiate at same-sex ceremonies, will your sentiments voiced here justify such a raw grab for power?
Posted by: Kevin J Jones | June 18, 2008 at 09:49 PM