Alas, a Blog

Via Leroy Huizenga, the Archbishop of Chicago wrote:

Neither Church nor state invented marriage, and neither can change its nature.

I’ve heard similar comments from many other opponents of same-sex marriage. To some extent, I agree with the Archbishop. If tomorrow morning Congress passed a law redefining the word “marriage’ to mean “delicious circular bread which is boiled then baked,” no one would accept that a bagel is a marriage. The government cannot radically change the meaning of marriage.

So why do millions of Americans accept that same-sex marriages are marriages?

The first time I attended a same-sex wedding was 1986, long before any court or legislature was prepared to recognize same-sex marriage. A woman and a woman got married, and none of us needed a law passed to understand that it was a marriage.

This was around the same time (give or take a few years) that the cartoonist Howard Cruse, in his groundbreaking comic strip “Wendel,” had his main characters Ollie and Wendel share a dream in which they were married, with all their friends and relatives in attendance. (And Smokey the Bear as the officiant). “Wendel” was published at first in a gay newspaper, and later in the nationwide gay magazine “The Advocate”; I doubt that any of Cruse’s thousands of readers had to have the concept of marriage between two men explained. Because it was too obvious to need explanation.

Same-sex marriage was not invented in a courtroom, or a state congress. Lgbt people, and those who love them, knew about same-sex marriage years before the government knew about it. It came into being as a natural outgrowth of people’s lives.

The Archbishop is correct to say that the government can’t change marriage. But that’s not what the marriage equality debate is about. For vast numbers of Americans, marriage has already changed (just as it’s changed many times before).

I’m not going to stop considering my married same-sex friends married, no matter what the law says. Neither will millions of others. The Archbishop and his allies have no power to stop gay marriage.

The only thing opponents of same-sex marriage can do is prevent the government from recognizing all these existing marriages. That hurts a lot. It hurts because it sends a message of rejection to all lgbt people. It also hurts on a practical level — it means same-sex couples and their children will sometimes be poorer, sometimes lack legal protection, sometimes be kept apart by immigration laws, sometimes be kept apart in hospitals.

But no matter how much hurt they cause, it won’t mean, and will never mean, that same-sex marriage is not a reality.

Here’s what the Archbishop doesn’t understand: Neither Church nor state invented gay marriage, and neither can take it away.

I was reading The Bulverism of Same-Sex Marriage Supporters by Leroy Huizenga. It begins well, with a C.S. Lewis quote (can’t beat Lewis for clear prose), but soon descends into an opaque thicket of un-argued metaphysical statements:

Many find it inconceivable that opposition to gay marriage could be rational because they’re operating not only with a faith-reason split but also with a truncated view of reason. They see it rooted not in respect for nature but rather in the desire to conquer nature in service of human will. It’s a view of reason which can say little more than “the right to swing my fist ends when it meets another’s nose,” but until then anything goes so long as done among consenting adults.

The problem with making consent the sole criterion of the Good is that it’s merely a social convention. “Consent” is an idea forged in the wake of the widespread death of metaphysics and it thus lacks any ultimate grounding. It will disappear once a majority of the strong decides it’s no longer useful to their interests.

I’m posting this not to respond to Huizenga (if you’re interested in reading a civil debate about natural law, check out the comments to this post on “Unequally Yoked”), but to comment on the “fist and nose” aphorism. “The right to swing my fist ends where your nose begins” is nowadays seen as a individualistic statement, and I’ve often heard libertarians bring it up to argue for minimal government. But that’s not what it originally meant.

John B Finch was an orator and prohibitionist, who traveled the country arguing for anti-liquor laws. According to the website Quote Investigator, Finch’s speeches are the earliest known version of the “the right to swing my fist” argument, although Finch’s version was not so concise. Here’s a bit of a speech Finch gave in 1882:

I go over there with these gentlemen and swing my arm and exercise the natural right which you have granted; I hit one man on the nose, another under the ear, and as I go down the stairs on my head, I cry out:

“Is not this a free country?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Have not I a right to swing my arm?”

“Yes, but your right to swing your arm leaves off where my right not to have my nose struck begins.”

Here civil government comes in to prevent bloodshed, adjust rights, and settle disputes.

Finch’s point was that individual liberty didn’t include the right to drink liquor (the arm) if drinking liquor caused harm to the larger community (the nose).

Other prohibitionists took up Finch’s argument, and through repetition it became short and polished. By 1887, prohibitionists were saying stuff like this:

The only leading argument urged by the anti-prohibitionists in this campaign for keeping open the bar-rooms, is personal liberty. A great man has said, “your personal liberty to swing your arm ends where my nose begins”. A man’s personal liberty to drink whisky and support barrooms ends where the rights of the family and the community begin.

This argument is, interestingly enough, similar to the argument made today by many people who oppose marriage equality. It wouldn’t be hard to imagine someone today saying that “a gay couple’s personal liberty to get married ends where the rights of the family and the community begin.”

(Of course, the prohibitionists had an understandable, reality-based account of how drinking harmed the family and the community. SSM opponents, in contrast, seemingly have only metaphysics.)

In the end, prohibitionists were wrong both because they undervalued individual liberty, and because they didn’t understand (or perhaps didn’t care about) the harm their laws would cause.

But still. I enjoy thinking about John Finch, dead for 125 years, except for a tiny scrap of his oratory, which still lives on, animated by millions of water-cooler arguments and blog posts. Would Finch be pleased at this tiny bit of immortality? Or irritated that it’s so often used to mean the opposite of what he intended?

It’s about an hour long, but — if you’re interested in the SSM — it’s an entertaining hour. Both Brian and Dan are extremely confident, fluid speakers.

I do think that Dan’s arguments were weaker than they had to be, more than once. In particular, I think Dan failed to chase down the point about slavery and the Bible as well as he could have.

Brian countered Dan’s point by pointing out that slavery as described in the Bible had to be understood in historical context, and that the slavery discussed by Paul was more like “indentured servitude” than like the considerably harsher slavery practiced in the pre-emancipation USA. That’s fair enough, but Dan should have raised the question – if the Bible’s discussion of slavery needs to be understood in historical context, then shouldn’t we also say that the Bible’s discussion of homosexuality needs to be viewed in historical context?

The form of homosexuality practiced by Dan – in which two gay men fall in love and form a lifetime union, becoming a family and raising a child together – would have been at LEAST as unknown in Jesus’ day as the American form of slavery. If we can’t assume that the Bible was giving it’s approval to US-style slavery (because historic context), then how can we assume that the Bible is condemning the current practice of homosexuality?

Another time I felt Dan dropped the ball a little was when he described what he thought marriage was about (around 35 minutes into the video), in which he seemed to deny that marriage is at all about babies and children. I don’t think that’s correct; marriage has multiple benefits for society, and among those benefits is the benefits to children. Marriage equality opponents are wrong when they say or imply that marriage is only and exclusively about children; but it’s also a mistake to say or imply that marriage isn’t at all about children. There’s no need to pick just one thing and say “this and this alone is what marriage is about”; it’s not logically required for a social institution to serve only one purpose, and it’s a fairly trivial observation that marriage does, in fact, serve multiple functions in our society.

On the whole, I think Savage had the better arguments (although of course, I would think that). Brian fell into the problem that marriage equality opponents fall into; he was unable to persuasively articulate how same-sex marriage harms anyone. The harm that he returned to multiple times, with great passion, is that same-sex marriage is harmful because it leads to people like Brian Brown being seen as bigots.

Yet as painful as it may be for Brian Brown to be called a bigot, that pain pales to insignificance compared to how people unable to have their marriages legally recognized suffer. Consider the case of someone permanently separated from her spouse because they were born in different countries, neither of which recognizes same-sex marriage. Could anyone seriously suggest that the suffering Brian Brown goes through when someone calls him a bigot is even one-thousandth as bad?

Brian also brought up the alleged harms of discrimination laws, but if those harms come up regardless of if SSM is legal (Brian used an example from New Jersey, where SSM isn’t legal), then it’s hard to blame those harms on SSM.

Brian also entirely failed to respond to many of Dan’s arguments. For instance, Dan made a very eloquent argument – one I’ve never heard before – for why FRC’s arguments falsely connecting pedophilia and homosexuality actively harm gay teens. Brian didn’t respond to this argument at all, and it’s hard not to suspect that’s because he didn’t have preset talking points that addressed that argument.

Similarly, less than a minute after Dan spent a lot of time explaining why he opposes polygamy, Brian said that SSM advocates did not have any arguments against polygamy. He didn’t refute Dan’s argument; he just pretended that Dan hadn’t made it. This added to the impression that Brian was simply not listening to Dan at all, not even to refute him.

Most deadly, when asked by the moderator, Brian (starting at 55:50) admitted that his views aren’t subject to changing based on evidence – that is, Brian can’t imagine any evidence that would cause him to change his views. He seemed to admit that his views aren’t based in facts, or in social science, or anything but his “fundamental” definition of marriage.

(In contrast, Dan was able to describe evidence that would change his views.)

Anyhow, those are my initial reactions. What are your thoughts?