Against gay marriage-II

...The same mistake occurs when someone argues from a natural urge for hetero/homosexuality to the moral obligation to carry forward the urge...

...If all there is to homosexuality (or heterosexuality) is natural determinism, we could remove it from the human spiritual agenda...

...Make no mistake about it: much of the move to imagery of the entitled self and the aspirations to which it gives rise are specifically, deeply, and troublingly antinatal--hostile to the regenerative female body and to the symbolism of social regeneration to which this body is necessarily linked and has, historically, given rise...

...What technology "can do," and the law permits, we seem ready to embrace...

...Her most recent book is Power Trips and Other Journeys...

...After all, one knows one's own sex's response better than the heterosexual response...

...686: Commonweal...

...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...

...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...

...The prevalence of fantasy in sex certainly suggests heavy human seasoning of an essential appetite...

...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...

...But not all things are possible in either variation...

...As Oscar Wilde said about masturbation: "cleaner, more efficient, and you meet a better class of people...

...The Jew, engendered a Jew, attests his belief by continuing to procreate the Jewish people...

...Social Darwinists argued that because humans are naturally aggressive, war was morally desirable...

...am no fan at all of the "natural law" arguments about procreative sexuality as presented in Humanae vitae...

...Playboy and Puritanism both assume the triviality of bodies...

...There are within our society, as I already noted, those who believe this society can and should stay equally open to all alternative arrangements, treating "life-styles" as so many identical peas in a pod...

...Those excluded by, or who exclude themselves from, the familial intergenerational ideal, should not be denied social space for their own practices...

...This complex symbolism incorporates visions and reflections on who is inside and who is outside...

...Ethically responsible challenges to our terms of exclusion and inclusion push toward a loosening but not a wholesale negation in our normative endorsement of intergenerational family life...

...JEAN BETHKE ELSHTAIN Jean Bethke Elshtain is Centennial Professor of Political Science at Vanderbilt University...

...But marriage is not, and never has been, primarily about two people--it is and always has been about the possibility of generativity...

...Although in any given instance, a marriage might not have led to the raising of a family, whether through choice or often unhappy recognition of, and final reconciliation to, the infertility of one or another spouse, the symbolism of marriage-family as social regenesis is fused in our centuries-old experience with marriage ritual, regulation, and persistence...

...These brief reflections are needed to frame my equally brief comments on the legality, or not, of homosexual marriage...

...Kierkegaard regarded marriage as spirit's proper synthesis of recollection and hope...

...I have long favored domestic partnership possibilities--ways to regularize and stabilize commitments and relationships...

...The point of criticism and contention runs: in defending the family as framed within a horizon of intergenerationality, one privileges a restrictive ideal of sexual and intimate relations...

...There are distinct spiritual problems with homosexual "marriage" in the Jewish and Christian traditions...

...Heterosexual marriage is a deep story developed from the urtext of genital biology...

...One could conclude that the homosexual story line was valuable-perhaps more valuable than the heterosexual...

...sex is as different as travel abroad can be from staying at home...

...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...

...Don't get me wrong: not every female body must be a regenerative body...

...At stake here is not mandating and coercing the lives of individuals but pondering the fate of a society that, more and more, repudiates generativity as an animating image in favor of aspiration without limit of the contractual and "wanting" self...

...This imagery is fluid but not, I will argue, entirely up for grabs...

...Our ethics rushes to catch up with the rampant rush of our forged and incited desires...

...This denrandingness, this transformation of human procreation into a technical operation, promotes a project Oliver O'Donovan calls "scientific self-transcendence...

...SeveraI paragraphs in this piece are drawn from her essay, "The Family and Civic Life," which appears in Power Trips and Other Journeys as well as in Rebuilding the Nest...

...The Christian claim for an embodied God moves in the same spiritual territory...

...Ours is a culture whose reigning ethic is surely individualism and freedom...

...That is a symbolism that courts nihilism and privatism (however publicly it may be trumpeted) because it repudiates intergenerational, familial, and communal contexts and believes history and tradition are useful only to be trashed...

...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...

...What difference could there possibly be in homosexual relations...

...One symbol and reality of the latter is the search for intrusive intervention in human reproducing coming from those able to command the resources of genetic engineers and medical reproduction experts, also, therefore, those who have more clout over what gets lifted up as our culture's dominant sense of itself...

...they are for playful/sinful distraction only...

...It seems eminently plausible that bedding with an other (strange...

...To be sure, families in modernity coexist with those who live another way, whether heterosexual and homosexual unions that are by choice or by definition childless...

...But perhaps we have reached the breaking point...

...These arguments assume that one can read the moral law off the book of nature...

...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...

...Normative heterosexual marriage recollects parents in the act of parenting and literally embodies hope in the bringing forth of children...

...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...

...It takes one to know one...

...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...

...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...

...Well, perhaps homosexual relations are better sex...

...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...

...No social order has ever existed that did not endorse certain activities and practices as preferable to others...

...To resolve the untidiness of our public and private relations by either reaffirming unambiguously a set of unitary, authoritative norms or eliminating all such norms as arbitrary is to jeopardize the social goods that democratic and familial authority, paradoxical in relation to one another, promise--to men and women as parents and citizens and to their children...

...And it is possible that if what were at stake were, say, seeking out and identifying those creations of self that enhance an aesthetic construction of life and sensibility, the romantic bohemian or rebel would get higher marks than the Smith family of Remont, Nebraska...

...Homosexuals may, of course, recall parents and be hopeful for the future but they do not, of course, embody a family history...

...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 masturbation, say, and putting free speech as a fundamental fight of free citizens in peril...

...communalists who diminish individual parental authority in favor of the preeminence of the group...

...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...

...I don't think the body politic has to be nude and sexually voracious--getting, consuming, demanding pleasure...

...I do not imply that family size scales one up in blessedness...

...Without getting into deep theological water, it is certainly the case that heterosexual marriage normally carries with it the meaning of recollection and hope...

...Procreative "marriage" seems to me to be a special and irreplaceable central symbol of the tradition...

...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...

...Catholics seem more stuck with incarnation--and somewhere along that line would be a Catholic answer to the question posed...

...9 ut the recognition and acceptance of plural posD sibilities does not mean each alternative is equal 'i to every other with reference to specific social D goods...

...and so on...

...I would like to believe that sex is a human artifact for all that it has a biological base...

...Nevertheless, we should be cautions about going too far in the direction of a wholly untrammeled pluralism lest we become so vapid that we are no longer capable of distinguishing between the moral weightiness of, say, polishing one's Porsche and sitting up all night with an ill child...

...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...

...Our culture panders to what social critic John O'Neill calls the "libidinal body," the body that titillates and ravishes and is best embodied as young, thin, antimatemal, calculating, and disconnected...

...For without some continuity in our imagery and concern, we confront a deepening nihilism...

...on what is cherished and what is despised...

...But for all that nature gives no dogmas, nature presents an ur-text for human meaning...

...The intergenerational family, as symbolism of social regenesis, as tough and compelling reality, as defining moral norm, remains central and critical in nurturing recognitions of human frailty, mortality, and finitude and in inculcating moral limits and constraints...

...on what counts as order and disorder...

...Human eating habits are not just feeding behavior...

...The technologizing of bimh is antiregenerative, linked as it is to a refusal to accept any natural limits...

...One finds more and more the demand that babies can and must be made whenever the want is there...