Reading Ross Douthat in the New York Times lately has been painful. He's one of my favorite conservative opinion-makers; he's a reasonable guy who avoids the crass foul play of your typical right-leaning conservative blogger. For that reason, watching him twist convoluted pretzel-shaped arguments in order to mold the conservative belief-du-jour into something rational and palatable is painful. The latest? His take on gay marriage:
So what are gay marriage's opponents really defending, if not some universal, biologically inevitable institution? It's a particular vision of marriage, rooted in a particular tradition, that establishes a particular sexual ideal.
This ideal holds up the commitment to lifelong fidelity and support by two sexually different human beings - a commitment that involves the mutual surrender, arguably, of their reproductive self-interest - as a uniquely admirable kind of relationship. It holds up the domestic life that can be created only by such unions, in which children grow up in intimate contact with both of their biological parents, as a uniquely admirable approach to child-rearing. And recognizing the difficulty of achieving these goals, it surrounds wedlock with a distinctive set of rituals, sanctions and taboos.
The point of this ideal is not that other relationships have no value, or that only nuclear families can rear children successfully. Rather, it's that lifelong heterosexual monogamy at its best can offer something distinctive and remarkable - a microcosm of civilization, and an organic connection between human generations - that makes it worthy of distinctive recognition and support.
I'm not going to quibble here -- he's essentially saying gays are icky, and forming lifelong sexual relationships around breeding is the way we've always done it -- which is all fine and good, and he's free to feel that way if he wants. No one's forcing him to marry a man and raise an adopted child. But where it gets weird is that Douthat is arguing that the state to enforce his view of marriage, that it must use its authority to prevent gays from starting families.
Why? What danger does gay marriage represent that the state must coerce same-sex couples away from lifelong commitments? What could be so important?
Why, the fate of Western civilization, of course. According to Douthat, monogamous, life-long commitments are directly tied to the fate of "Western civilization." It's not only gay marriage that threatens this "unique and indispensible estate," but "serial monogamy" (not to mention philandering spouses, aged singles, and childless couples, apparently). (But then gay marriage has grown out of Western traditions of tolerance and individualistic expression, has it not? Maybe it's gay marriage that's the inheritor of Western civilization, and its banning the sign of sharp turn towards...oh, I dunno...religious fundamentalism?)
But what the cost of allowing other kinds of relationships exist isn't exactly clear. The danger is...other kinds of relationships will exist!
Here's the question, though: should we use the power and authority of the state to uphold tradition? Do we ban ballpark visitors who don't stand after the top of the seventh? Do we jail those that introduce themselves with their left hands? Should those men that don't pay for dinner at the first date be prevented from dating forevermore?
One of the favorite epithets hurled against liberals for favoring infrastructure improvements that ensure, say, public education or affordable healthcare, is that they are creating a "nanny state." Whatever. It's a fun pejorative to underscore conservatives' self-perceived manliness, but, really, isn't the kind of government that conservatives seem to favor - government that forces certain types of behavior, speech, and thought - isn't that far, far closer to their bugaboo nanny state than anything liberals have ever come up with?
Update: Glenn Greenwald points out a couple major fallacies with Douthat's argument that I thought about, but wasn't smart enough to include in the post.
First, because the law allows an act doesn't mean it will become accepted; nor does using the law to uphold "Principle X" mean Principle X will prevail.
Second, the court case surrounding Proposition 8 "did not decree that there are no legitimate moral, theological or spiritual grounds for viewing heterosexual marriage as superior." That is, you can both approve of the ruling and still think heterosexual marriage is teh awesome.
Greenwald:
They just can't misuse secular law to institutionalize those views or coerce others who don't accept them into having their legal rights restricted based on them. But if they're as right as they claim they are, they shouldn't need to coerce others into acceptance through legal discrimination. Their arguments should prevail on their own. The fact that they believe they will lose the debate without that legal coercion speaks volumes about how confident they actually are in the rightness and persuasiveness of their views. |
