Calling Things By Their Right Names
The placard in the photo of a recent rally favoring gay marriage asks, bluntly, "Family. Isn't It About Love?"
Well, hmm. You might indeed incline to such a view. Then, again, you might wish to broaden the perspective, in keeping with normative modes for understanding the foundational human structure we call family.
You'd want to begin with the acknowledgement that where norms exist, there's generally a reason for them: the sounder the reason, the more tenacious and enduring the norm, the more deeply lodged in heart and soul and mind. You need more than a placard to uproot such norms. You need compelling reasons.
The voters of California, Florida and Arizona on Nov. 4 saw no such reasons. They enacted formal bans on so-called gay marriage. Thus, the scattered if occasionally sizable protests of a few days ago. The protesters don't like the old marriage norms—one man, one woman. They want new norms, insisting on love as the only thing that matters.
End of debate. We want—so give it to us. Now. Very post-1950s American, don't you agree?
The protesters use the language of civil rights. To quote the chant at a rally last weekend in Washington, D.C.: "Gay, straight, black, white; marriage is a civil right."
No, it's not—not in the sense that desire equals lawful claim, binding on the whole community. To make such a claim is to argue for the dissolving of whatever underlies our life together, and for its replacement with any flickering want or wish.
One reason society guards traditional marriage with a certain jealous care is that marriage orders and regularizes the basic condition of life, namely, the male-female relationship. Society sets boundaries around marriage, establishes rules and rights, lets the parties know what they may expect, and what is expected of them in turn.
A second reason: Family is future. A mother, meaning a woman, and a father, meaning a man, bring life into the world. There's no other way to do it. Even in Dr. Frankenstein's experiments, a human body was the starting point.
The language of the gay marriage protesters is deliberately subversive. All they want, supposedly, is a crack in the legal door wide enough to admit partners of the same sex. That would be "marriage"? Not at all. It would be something wholly new in human experience, with consequences beyond imagining. You might as well call a lamppost a bottle of chardonnay as call the union of two gay people a marriage, howsoever kindly the two parties involved, howsoever generous and public-spirited. It's not about them; it's about us all.
Words like "honor" and "truth"—yes, and "marriage"—aren't just combinations of vowels and consonants. They have lives of their own. They point to how a thing is, not in opinion merely, but in reality. The joy of renaming a thing, of course, is that of reinventing it, substituting a wholly new "reality."
A non-normative marriage, once allowed, undermines the normative kind just by inference. If the norm no longer is the lifelong union of a man and a woman, we may count on the imaginative faculties of those most concerned to come up with new understandings. I don't think the proponents of gay marriage have in mind the extension of the matter to polygamy, but when you think it over, why not? It's what some people want. Shouldn't they have what they want? To deny a 21st century American his wishes (unless he's some Christian rightist or other) would be cruel and hateful.
It's some century all right: great in various particulars, awful in others, such as those touching on the care and conservation of the great truths that once joined all men and women, mind linking with mind, generation with generation. The other side of it is, Californians, when challenged on the point, knew what to do, and so did Floridians and Arizonans. As the Unsinkable Molly Brown would have it, we ain't down yet.
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“Family. Isn’t It About Love?” The statement, in 5 words certainly hints at some truth. But, what is familial about 2 men, sharing one domicile, and sodomizing mostly each other? “Family. Isn’t It [also] About Progeny?”, something that 2 men are metaphysically, permanently incapable of. Love may also be one of the most abstract words in the English language, which means any truth in that statement takes a real, honest conscience to ferret out.
Watch the courts now and see if they don't end up over turning the will of the people (you know, the sainted voters) once again.
Isn't it about love?
The parlor pink crowd are always asking such pointless questions, it makes them seem more rational than when they bellow, "When do we want it? Now!"
@2 dwright, that process is already underway. There are plenty of agitating lawyers on the Left Coast (with German names) willing to undermine democracy.
Voting is meaningless in the United States today. Here in New York City we voted twice to impose term limits on the office of mayor. But the imperious multimillionaire who is our current dictator has overturned those two plebiscites, and will run again, in complete defiance of the public will.
There are two blatant lies to which everyone in America must now pay public lip-service. The first is "All men are created equal." The second is "Democracy rests upon the consent of the governed."
On this fetid issue, I think we are approaching the only solution to the problem: physical force. Remove the sodomites and their sympathizers in the courts and the media to some inhospitable location on the planet and leave them to their filthy desires; otherwise, insanity and tyranny will reign.
No, the institution of marriage is not about love. It is about propagation of a society to the next generation, and channeling the energies and drives of men into unselfish pursuits, such as being a father and provider, rather than into selfish pursuits, such as promiscuity, violence, etc. Monogamy provides security and continuity to children as well as to wives and husbands. Men and women who marry honor and show public respect to the institution that channels male and female energies in the manner that preserves our civilization, even if they are unable to bear children. Men who engage in sham marriages to other men, relationships which are almost never monogamous, in order to gain certain legal benefits, do not honor and respect the institution and its goal of focusing men and women on the perpetuation of the race.
Love between husband and wife helps marriage accomplish its goal. Many societies in the past had marriage without romantic love. Even if we do not wish to have arranged marriages as those societies did, we can hardly say that love is the goal of marriage.
Because, in the post-World War I era, modern "dating" replaced traditional courtship, and the post-WWII era brought further sexual revolution, most conservatives do not realize that they have an anit-traditionalist, anti-Christian view of marriage and male-female relationships. As a result, they buy into some of the same statements that the gays make, e.g. "Marriage is all about love." Then, when gays claim to be in love and want to be married, they can only engage in various inconsistent special pleadings as they dispute the point.
No, marriage is not about love. Love is a key component of marriage in our Western culture. But it is not the goal. You can have one love after another with no institution of marriage at all.
#6 - Well said, Mr. Coleman.
In all traditional cultures, marriage is NOT about love, but about social cohesion, lineage perpetuation, family alliances, and honor. That it is why it was completely acceptable in such cultures for marriages to be arranged by the parents, even before the two pledged parties reached puberty.
Love? The ancients thought of love as a kind of madness -- something beautiful and touching many respects, but something that frequently drove you to insane and self-destructive acts. It was hardly the basis on which to make rational decisions.
Love understood as affection and mutal understanding (rather than mere sexual impulse) is something that can naturally develop in a marriage as two people live together over the years, have children, and attain a closeness of long-standing intimacy, botth physical and psychological.
"Love? The ancients thought of love as a kind of madness — something beautiful and touching many respects, but something that frequently drove you to insane and self-destructive acts. It was hardly the basis on which to make rational decisions."
Not only the ancients thought this. Think Tristan and Isolde, Romeo and Juliet, and the numerous chivalric romances of the Middle Ages. On the more cynical side, certainly Don Quixote is presented as insane due to his notions of romantic love.
There will be no solution to this problem until the separation of marriage and state is brought back!
Yes, let's call things by their right name. They're not "gay." They're Sodomites.
@11 Bruce
Humpty Dumpty said words can mean anything, But that aside I prefer sexual deviants in polite society, and perverts (preverts for those of you who voted Obama), or the godd old fashioned English word "bugger" in ore casual surroundings.
By the way they get get really ticked off if you tell them they can become "normal."
I always tell people that acceptance of homosexuality is basically a western phenomenon. It is also rampant among Muslims because of the distance that women are forced to keep. But has anyone ever noticed that in old India it was never an issue but a non-issuse--there was no need to defend it or notice it or say anything against it--it was a complete non-issue. And however they might try, pseudo scholars have never been able to find texts in its support or against it in the old HIndu and Buddhist texts--you have men in close association as monks but no mention of homosexuality. Why was it a non-issue? Because it is something cultural. It might have existed but it was of no importance to warrant notice or encouragement. Which is how it should be. The present is of course different because of the Western influence....
I always tell people that acceptance of homosexuality is basically a western phenomenon. It is also rampant among Muslims because of the distance that women are forced to keep. But has anyone ever noticed that in old India it was never an issue but a non-issuse–there was no need to defend it or notice it or say anything against it–it was a complete non-issue. And however they might try, pseudo scholars have never been able to find texts in its support or against it in the old HIndu and Buddhist texts–you have men in close association as monks but no mention of homosexuality. Why was it a non-issue? Because it is something cultural. It might have existed but it was of no importance to warrant notice or encouragement. Which is how it should be. The present is of course different because of the Western influence….
Josh Cooney @ 9
Yes, that is true. But in the medieval period, perhaps as a result of the Provencal celebration of amorous doings, and the subsequent growth of the "courtly love" tradition, Western ideas about love slowly extricated themselves from the older ancient notions that love was a kind of disease. Instead we got the more romantic notion that love is an ennobling experience that elevates men and women to a higher plane of awareness.
Cupid/Eros was a very dangerous god to the ancients -- sort of like some obnoxious little brat running around with an Uzi submachine gun. His mother Venus/Aphrodite, while also capable of troublemaking, wasn't as dangerous, since all she did was fire up one's sexual desire. Cupid/Eros created the bad situation where your desires were focused on one person, to the exclusion of other potential partners.
Now I say nothing against love, whether purely sexual or romantically tinged. But unfortunately, when the notion of love between the sexes loses its aspect of madness and disease, and becomes solely something wonderful and positive, then you set the stage for our current misunderstandings about marriage. Gays can scream "We love each other and it's wonderful and elevating!" And if you accept that premise about love, there's not much you can say in response.