Editorial
CONTENTS Volume CXVIII, Number 20 Correspondence 674 Editorial 675 An honest cop: Patrick Lacefield 677 Sins of the fathers: John Garvey 679 A case for gay marriage: Brent Hartinger...
...On August 26, the National Police declared that they had "broken the case" and apprehended Escobar's killer...
...But Escobar couldn't...
...Hartinger argues that legalizing marriage for homosexuals will result in a greater 22 November 1991:675 good for a greater number of people, homosexual and heterosexual...
...In the legal arena, Supreme Court rulings on Mormon polygamy decided, we think correctly, that: "To permit this [polygamy] would be to make the professed doctrines of religious belief superior to the law of the land, and in effect to permit every citizen to become a law unto himself...
...We think more is at stake: the meaning of marriage...
...However odd and disorienting the notion of homosexual marriage may be, it is important to understand the arguments advanced in its favor (we thank Brent Hartinger for making the case so cogently, pp...
...The argument holds afortiori where the claim of discrimination rests on philosophical or ideological premises...
...Moreover, if our legal system were to adopt such a subjective criterion, it would risk not merely tolerating but encouraging a variety of voluntary and legal arrangements between consenting adults--prostitution, surrogate motherhood, "'Get yourself some new writers...
...The police detained a man on minor charges and gave him time to memorize a confession to Escobar's murder...
...social recognition of their unions would promote traditional values...
...The ethos of marital heterosexuality imposes upon us a sense of participation in a moral project that transcends our own immediate needs and wants...
...Then they videotaped it with two police officers posing as news reporters...
...But it is not discrimination for our laws and mores to maintain a definition of marriage as being a union of one man and one woman...
...The authorities did not take samples from Mack's fingernails--standard procedure in deaths involving a struggle--nor did they dust the area for fingerprints...
...But in Guatemala, where torture is an everyday tool of interrogation, it is inconceivable...
...But let us not as a consequence simply plead neutrality about the value of procreative sexuality...
...But that need not be if the argument is focused on maintaining an understanding of marriage that honors its true social purposes and its foundational role in our political and cultural system...
...Portland, Me...
...Commonweal, []SSN 0010-3330] A Review of Public Affairs, Religion, Literature, and the Arts, is published biweekly, except monlh]y Christmas, New Year's and July and August, by Commonweal Foundation, 15 Dutch St., New York, N.Y...
...What happened, as Rony Ochaeta, director of the Human Rights Office of the Archdiocese of Guatemala City, told me recently, is something else...
...We only acquire the confidence to make room for these various differences if our fundamental precepts are secure...
...Let us respect and protect homosexuality as a personal value or choice...
...That would be hard to believe in a similar situation in the U.S...
...If the experience of the last twenty-five years has taught us anything, it is that human institutions are not infinitely malleable: the fragility of marriage, the permeability of families, and the incidence of haphazard arrangements for the care and rearing of children are there for all to contemplate...
...I have signed my death warrant," Escobar told friends as he desperately sought help from human rights groups to leave the country...
...Hartinger's moral analogy with laws forbidding interracial marriage also falters...
...But Escobar was a good c o , - a n d a thorough one...
...In Washington, D.C., two homosexuals are suing the city for denying them a marriage license...
...In his "confession," the man says that he and Escobar robbed a bank three years before and that Escobar cheated him of $5,000 from the take...
...684-85, and Jean Bethke Elshtain pp...
...Heterosexual marriage turns us back to the regenerative body and confronts us with the mystery of the other and the joys of human creation in a way same-sex marriage cannot...
...One witness concluded that the men were from "alla arriba"--"up there"-----colloquial for Guatemala's feared G-2 Intelligence...
...Display advertising correspondence should be sent to Ruth E. Taylor, 11 Graffam Rd., So...
...Telephone: (212) 732-0800...
...To redefine the meaning of marriage in order to accommodate a homosexual understanding of it seems both to distort the meaning of homosexuality and, almost certainly, to undermine our ability as a moral community to make and maintain distinctions critical to the meaning of family life...
...Marriage is not denied to homosexuals to suppress or oppress them, but because marriage, by its very nature, hallows society's interest in protecting the connection between sexuality and procreation, what Jean Elshtain in her response calls the social goods of the regenerative family...
...In addition, Escobar had sexually abused the man's wife, who had subsequently developed ovarian cancer...
...Some jurisdictions now recognize domestic partnership arrangements for couples, heterosexual or homosexual, living together without benefit of marriage, this to prevent denial of legal protections married persons enjoy by their status...
...On the tape, the supposed killer is cool, calm, and hasn't a mark on him...
...If anything, he contends, homosexual couples are remarkably conventional...
...For the Catholic archdiocese, however, the case is anything but closed...
...To accept some form of moral or teleological equivalence between homosexual and heterosexual acts is to radically alter the centrality of sexual morality in our most basic understanding of the human project...
...Under pressure, Escobar's partner endorsed the "sanitized" version...
...This past year the Presbyterian and Episcopal churches debated the morality of homosexuality, and struggled over accepting active homosexuals in the ministry...
...Society can accommodate alternative visions of family life and childrearing, but it risks moral enervation if it displaces the biological family as its normative value, if it attempts to measure the meaning of all sexual relations by one overrationalized standard...
...681-83...
...The man was getting a shoe shine in the plaza outside National Police Headquarters when he saw Escobar emerge from the building...
...Political philosopher Michael Sandel warns that"a politics that's empty of larger meanings--moral, spiritual meanings, or for that matter, that's empty of any sense of a shared project--is not a democracy that can sustain itself...
...They did test her blood for alcohol content...
...An authority on Guatemala's estimated 1 million internal refugeesqisplaced by the country's three-decade-long civil war--she had been stabbed sixteen times as she left the offices of a progressive think tank on September 11...
...By giving each of us a compelling stake in the future, marriage takes the paradoxical energies of sexuality and harnesses them to the greater social good of providing for subsequent generations...
...That was it," Escobar's boss National Police Chief Colonel Mario Enrique Paiz told me...
...Can such values be admitted to the public debate...
...We believe, however, that it is vital to argue that heterosexual marriage holds and should hold a privileged place in civil society (see Dennis O'Brien, pp...
...Homosexual life has a place in that moral community, a place that has been strengthened by the end to efforts at suppressing it in private life and by antidiscrimination laws in employment, housing, and public services...
...However diverse the bonds expressed by couples or witnessed by communities throughout the world, the union of a woman and a man has been constitutive of marriage's very definition...
...It is only in our kind of society with its liberal premises and its indispensable regard for individual autonomy that the question of homosexual marriage would be so earnestly pressed in the political arena as well as in some church bodies...
...COMMONWEAL The future of marriage arriage is a given of human society...
...New York, N.Y...
...Such a neutral moral measure suggests, falsely, that the human activity of procreation is bereft of any unique meaning...
...the selling of body parts for transplantation, for example...
...It has documented that Escobar's self-confessed "killer" didn't arrive in the capital until August 23--two weeks 22 November 1991...
...Just vengeance...
...It is perhaps easier for Catholics with an incarnational and sacramental understanding of marriage to see why this is so...
...Granting absolute sovereignty to individual choice in such matters inevitably poses a threat to basic human dignity...
...No politics...
...Aren't we only encouraging prejudice as well as promiscuity by denying homosexuals the right to marry...
...It may seem that privileging heterosexual marriage is a covert argument in favor of heterosexuality that implies disrespect for homosexuals as persons or shows a callous disregard for their dilemma in securing a place in our social and political life...
...In our technological age, countless "improvements" threaten the link between the inviolability of the body and the dignity of the human person...
...But on August 9, he was gunned down in broad daylight, fifty meters outside National Police Headquarters...
...Escobar and his partner were assigned to write the report endorsing those conclusions...
...Staff: Harriette Balsky, Carmen Alava, Pamela Quatse Advertising Manager: Ruth E. Taylor Publisher: Edward S. Skillin Commonweal welcomes letters on subjects treated in its pages...
...such laws were indeed unjust, but they were enacted to help keep blacks in a state of submission and inferiority, not to protect marriage as an institution...
...The tape was aired on Guatemalan television on August 26-27 by order of the Interior Ministry and the National Police...
...Finally, it is right, as Jean Elshtain observes, to "privilege" some sexual relationships over others...
...His investigation uncovered witnesses who testified to continued surveillance of Mack by heavily-armed men dressed in civilian clothes...
...Thus even with the fundamental fight of religious liberty weighed in the balance, the Court ruled against polygamous marriages...
...In an age when, from abortion to euthanasia, technology puts greater and greater power over life into our own hands, the ties that bind each of us to the larger human and moral community must be strengthened rather than attenuated...
...Therefore, he concludes, since the state has no compelling interest in prohibiting same-sex marriages, it is punitive and discriminating to deny people equal rights on the basis of sexual orientation...
...Tipped off far in advance, he is believed to have fled to Los Angeles...
...Not everything that can be done should be done...
...That we now may need to specify heterosexual marriage to distinguish it from the challenge raised by the notion of homosexual marriage will be evidence, for some, of our moral decline...
...On July 4, 1991, the name of the presumed assassin was leaked to the press and the government reluctantly issued a warrant for Alvarez's arrest--nine months after his name was first broached...
...When Escobar's report was publicly issued on November 20, Alvarez's name was nowhere to be found in it, key testimony had been excluded, and no conclusions were drawn as to motive or perpetrators...
...It was a case of vengeance...
...Their conclusion: The killing was simply a common crime, perhaps a crime of passion...
...The papers quoted witnesses as seeing four men in a pickup truck with polarized windows racing from the scene...
...Advocates may counter that the real moral purpose of marriage resides in a"loving, committed relationship...
...Justifying such a prohibition on a political level is more difficult, particularly if one wants also to uphold the values of equality and pluralism...
...Beteta Alvarez, an ex-soldier, had ties to G-2...
...685-86...
...for others, an indicator of moral maturity...
...The case is closed...
...That regard increasingly confronts the body politic with the question of what limits a pluralistic democracy can impose on individual actions that are not violent or selfevidently destructive...
...He happened to be carrying a gun a friend had lent him, and, in a fit of rage, he killed Escobar...
...CONTENTS Volume CXVIII, Number 20 Correspondence 674 Editorial 675 An honest cop: Patrick Lacefield 677 Sins of the fathers: John Garvey 679 A case for gay marriage: Brent Hartinger 681 Against gay marriage--I: Dennis O' Brien 684 Against gay marriage--II: Jean Bethke Elshtain 685 Stage: Gerald Weales 687 Screen: Richard Alleva 692 Art: Lee Siegel 694 BOOKS Broken Vessels: David Too/an 696 Pericles of Athens and the Birth of Democracy: Francis Flaherty 697 Religious booknotes: Lawrence S. Cunningham 699 STAFF Editor: Margaret O'Brien Steinfels Managing Editor: Patrick Jordan Associate Editor: Paul Baumann Production Editor: Jacqueline Dowdell Senior Writer: Robert G. Hoyt Movies: Richard Alleva Stage: Gerald Weales Poetry: Rosemary Deen Columnists: John Garvey, J. Bryan Hehir, Abigail McCarthy, David R. Carlin, Jr...
...POSTMASTER: Send address changes to Commonweal, 15 Dutch St...
...The answer 676: Commonweal is that we cannot hope to sustain a public life without them...
...Hasn't the time come, Brent Hartinger and other proponents argue, for religious and civil society to bestow on homosexual couples the status and protections of legal marriage...
...REPORT FROM GUATEMALA AN HONEST COP POLITICAL MURDER DIES HARD ~ , ~ , ~ etective Jose Merida Escobar was a member of the Guatemala National Police until he was D murdered outside police headquarters on August ~ w " A J 9. In September 1990 he and his partner had been assigned to investigate the murder of Myma Mack, a prominent Guatemalan anthropologist and human rights advocate...
...10038...
...A gay rights bill was approved by a solid majority of California legislators, though vetoed, unexpectedly, by the governor...
...The most profound decisions about justice are not made by individuals as such, but by individuals thinking within and on behalf of institutions," Mary Douglas has written...
...Such a"liberation" can only further erode our most intimate and deeply felt ties to the future and the sacrifices that requires of us...
...But with that standard, it is unclear how prohibitions against polygamous marriages, child marriages, group marriages, or other freely chosen unions could be justified...
...10038...
...Letters should not exceed 250 words and are subject to editing for clarity and spacing limitations...
...In truth, if we do not safeguard the unconditional demands of family life as a "school for virtue," we risk rationalizing away every human duty and loyalty, including the duty to understand those different from ourselves...
...After all, "society has a vested interest in stable, committed relationships...
...Human nature is not simply an arbitrarily willed reality...
...Sexual conduct is often at the forefront of such debates and attitudes toward homosexuality are foremost among our changing mores...
...04106 (207) 799-~387, classified advertising correspondence to 15 Dutch St...
...In his report, filed September 29, Escobar fingered Noel de Jesus Beteta Alvarez as the killer and concluded that Mack's murder was a systematic operation involving numerous personnel, cars and motorcycles, and automatic weapons...
...Pluralism, in other words, can defeat itself by so relativizing all values that the value of pluralism itself cannot be defended...
...Exercising care for the community, acting in the name of a shared future, is perhaps a more fundamental way of enabling the individual than blessing every individual preference with judicial or legislative approval...
...The story, however, does not end there...
...The pluralism that liberalism rightly celebrates cannot rest on such a leveling to individual choice, but must depend on an ordering of values that will preserve a sense of comity and a moral community in whose vitality all citizens have a serious stake, even though not everyone will necessarily consent to its every purpose...
Vol. 118 • November 1991 • No. 20
