Against gay marriage-I
O'Brien, Dennis
AGAINST GAY MARRIAGEml WHAT HETEROSEXUALITY MEANS y firmest conviction on this debate is that it will end with no conviction. To reach some common view would require an agreement on the meaning...
...Since Hollywood is usually the avant-garde of the culture, it may be that marriage of any kind is a charming anachronism...
...But perhaps we have reached the breaking point...
...But for all that nature gives no dogmas, nature presents an ur-text for human meaning...
...A religious position on homosexual marriage would go beyond the merely legal and the larger political values...
...on what counts as order and disorder...
...on what is cherished and what is despised...
...Should Kurt and Goldie break up this side of marriage, there are "palimony" settlements and similar suits have been brought for homosexual partnerships...
...Would homosexual marriage harmonize with our underlying values...
...DENNIS O'BRIEN Dennis O'Brien, a frequent Commonweal contributor, is the president of the University of Rochesten AGAINST GAY MARRIAGEmll ACCEPTING LIMITS E very society embraces an image of a body politic...
...am no fan at all of the "natural law" arguments about procreative sexuality as presented in Humanae vitae...
...It seems eminently plausible that bedding with an other (strange...
...Great and good things have come from this stress on freedom and from the insistence that there are things that cannot and must not be done for me and to me in the name of some overarching collective...
...Well, perhaps homosexual relations are better sex...
...In a world of ever-more transgressive enthusiasms, the individual--the self--is more, not less, in thrall to whatever may be the reigning ethos...
...Franz Rosenzweig states a deep truth when he attempts to explicate Jewish "faith": "the belief of the Jew is not the content of a testimony, but rather the product of reproduction...
...684: Commonweal Is the meaning of marriage (as religious sacrament) consonant with the meaning of homosexuality...
...It seems a short step from palimony to matrimony...
...It takes one to know one...
...The Athenian polis, while it practiced a form of sanctioned homosexuality, did not amalgamate that practice to marriage...
...I am interested in the basic values of the American polis...
...There are distinct spiritual problems with homosexual "marriage" in the Jewish and Christian traditions...
...After all, one knows one's own sex's response better than the heterosexual response...
...Surrounding heterosexual arrangements with political blessing and legal structures could be judged to have special social utility on that ground alone...
...I have no doubt that there are deep and abiding homosexual commitments...
...The most famous are "the Mormon cases" which ruled on the legitimacy of polygamy (as a religiously protected right...
...The sexiness of homosexuality may or may not be the case, but I believe that reflection on hetero/ homosexual embodiments would reveal quite different erotic story lines...
...If we were only accidentally related to our bodies (angels in disguise, ghosts in a machine), then how these mechanisms got sexual kicks might not fundamentally invade our sense of person and human value...
...Playboy and Puritanism both assume the triviality of bodies...
...Without getting into deep theological water, it is certainly the case that heterosexual marriage normally carries with it the meaning of recollection and hope...
...Social Darwinists argued that because humans are naturally aggressive, war was morally desirable...
...To the extent that superficial accounts of homosexuality treat it as a direct expression of a biologically determined appetite, they displace it from the web of cultural development that would assay the worth of homosexual life patterns...
...I do not mean what the newspapers think of as "political": who has the clout to carry the day...
...For all that, marriage did not thus become "immoral...
...If homosexual marriage were to be seriously advanced, similar large concepts should be brought into play...
...Heterosexual marriage is a deep story developed from the urtext of genital biology...
...Are there potential problems for the polis if homosexual marriage becomes a legally sanctioned institution...
...The very day that Commonweal asked me to comment on the subject, I happened to read a personality squib in the local paper about the movie actors Kurt Russell and Goldie Hawn...
...The prevalence of fantasy in sex certainly suggests heavy human seasoning of an essential appetite...
...I am not overwhelmed by the sociology of the Court's opinion, but the justices were correct in attempting to connect marriage customs with the deeper values of the society...
...The latter meaning may be even less recoverable than the former...
...I thought about this sort of thing a lot when I listened to the stories of the "Mothers of the Disappeared" in Argentina and to their invocation of the language of "human rights" as a fundamental immunity--the right not to be tortured and "disappeared...
...What consenting adults do, and so forth - - but the state is not obliged to bless every bedroom...
...Polygamy leads to the patriarchal principle...which, when applied to large communities, fetters the people in stationary despotism, while that principle cannot long exist in connection with monogamy" Reynolds v. United States 98 US 145 (1879...
...There are some obvious social concerns...
...To reach some common view would require an agreement on the meaning of marriage--no easy subject...
...Heterosexual arrangements remain the mainstay for creating the next generation--which is not an incidental issue for any continuing social body...
...I do not imply that family size scales one up in blessedness...
...Giving heterosexual marriage a positive place in the legal structure does not, however, imply that homosexual relations need suffer from negative legal stricture...
...But not all things are possible in either variation...
...If legal rights are an issue, they can, of course, be settled by (non-marriage) civil contracts...
...I would like to believe that sex is a human artifact for all that it has a biological base...
...It is, therefore, unsurprising that anything that comes before us in the name of"rights" and "freedom" enjoys aprimafacie power, something akin to political grace...
...sex is as different as travel abroad can be from staying at home...
...What would formal marriage add...
...Ours is a culture whose reigning ethic is surely individualism and freedom...
...This complex symbolism incorporates visions and reflections on who is inside and who is outside...
...Perhaps truly loving couples should be as "indifferent" to marriage as our Hollywood pair...
...Legal marriages do help in divorce proceedings because there is a known system for dissolution and disposition of claims...
...America is a debating society of opposing philosophies and life styles...
...What difference could there possibly be in homosexual relations...
...I am not certain I can answer that question, but it is worth pointing out that "nonnormal" marriages have previously received constitutional scrutiny...
...When Madonna proclaims, in all sincerity, that mock masturbation before tens of thousands is "freedom of expression" on a par, presumably, with the right to petition, assemble, and protest, something seems a bit out of whack--distorted, quirky, notquite-right...
...Genuine commitment does not need the sanctions of judge or priest...
...The Christian claim for an embodied God moves in the same spiritual territory...
...In fact, it shows a weakening of ardor to rest fidelity on formality...
...Homosexuals may, of course, recall parents and be hopeful for the future but they do not, of course, embody a family history...
...finally, we would have to find a tone of "sexual wisdom" for the discussion--we are usually too passionate about our passions for wise dispassion...
...The same mistake occurs when someone argues from a natural urge for hetero/homosexuality to the moral obligation to carry forward the urge...
...One could conclude that the homosexual story line was valuable-perhaps more valuable than the heterosexual...
...What does our society express about itself and the human condition through its sanctioned institutions...
...American democracy rests on a powerful set of assumptions about human nature and society which legitimate the character of its institutions...
...The Supreme Court struck down polygamous marriage in part on democratic grounds...
...For without some continuity in our imagery and concern, we confront a deepening nihilism...
...I assume that the reluctance to enter marriage is that it destroys the honesty and commitment of "true love...
...As Oscar Wilde said about masturbation: "cleaner, more efficient, and you meet a better class of people...
...This imagery is fluid but not, I will argue, entirely up for grabs...
...The Jew, engendered a Jew, attests his belief by continuing to procreate the Jewish people...
...Normative heterosexual marriage recollects parents in the act of parenting and literally embodies hope in the bringing forth of children...
...they are for playful/sinful distraction only...
...That there have been homosexual palimony cases would suggest that the law already brings homosexual partners into some sort of "coupled" network of legal restriction...
...If the sole meaning of "marriage" is legal, then marriage of any sex may become a matter of "indifference...
...Human eating habits are not just feeding behavior...
...Catholics seem more stuck with incarnation--and somewhere along that line would be a Catholic answer to the question posed...
...In so far as these Judaic faiths are not finally enacted in the realm of attitudes, they seem destined to give a special place to embodiment...
...Kierkegaard regarded marriage as spirit's proper synthesis of recollection and hope...
...Assuming that sex has a human meaning, it seems plausible that homosexual life patterns differ from heterosexual if for no other reason than that male bodies and female bodies are different...
...Arguments are settled, if necessary or at all, by clout not cultural commitment...
...I don't believe there is a slippery slope from queasiness at, if not repudiation of, public sexual acts for profit, orchestrated [. 22 November 1991:685...
...They now have a four-year-old son and they would consider marriage if their current arrangement proved difficult to the youngster...
...One might believe that the Americanpolis avoids deep value issues...
...Underneath all the heated argument about artificial contraception, abortion, population control, family planning and the lot, the traditional Jewish mitzvah for procreation expresses human solidarity with a Creator God...
...It seems that they are "together" after previous unhappy marriages...
...If there is an issue regarding homosexual marriage, it must rest on some deeper political or "religious" concerns...
...Procreative "marriage" seems to me to be a special and irreplaceable central symbol of the tradition...
...These arguments assume that one can read the moral law off the book of nature...
...On the other hand, it is doubtful that any polis can exist at all without a cultural sense, however suppressed...
...The church has thought traditionally that a religiously celibate life choice was more exalted than marriage...
...believe that homosexuality should not be discussed as a straightforward moral issue...
...If all there is to homosexuality (or heterosexuality) is natural determinism, we could remove it from the human spiritual agenda...
...an agreement on whether homosexuality has a meaning--or is it just a natural fact...
...moral issues generally deal with specific acts but the concern here is a life choice...
Vol. 118 • November 1991 • No. 20
