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A moderate, liberal “compromise” on homosexual marriage
Paul Cella, of Cella’s Review, sent me Noah Millman’s blog entry on homosexuality and marriage. While it strives to mark out a new, moderate center on the issue, I don’t see anything new in it. Millman says homosexual relationships need some official recognition and status in society; that solving the problem by instituting single-sex marriage is going too far because it would undermine the sacred and irreplaceable institution of marriage itself; and that society should therefore construct some kind of new legal category for homosexual relationships that would nevertheless be entirely distinct from marriage. The problem, of course, is that whatever you call this new homosexual arrangement, it is still quasi-marriage. Millman himself says it would have most of the substantive content—the rights and duties—that marriage has. So his innovative homosexual institution would inevitably degrade the traditional heterosexual institution, which is the very thing he says he wants most to prevent.
Millman is thus a typical liberal. That is, he wants to maintain the form of marriage, while (whether he realizes it or not) subverting the substance of marriage by creating gay civil unions that would (except for children) be the operational equivalent of marriage. Comments
We are, as a nation, confused on homosexual marriage because we have lost sight as to what hetero marriage is. While not giving an inch in the homosexual marriage battle, conservatives should not just be “aginers” as we so frequently are. We should explicitly put forth an ideal of heterosexual marriage and should not assume anyone still understands it. We should not fear controversy, for marriage itself, properly understood, is controversial. It is the primal group, and the first place that the individual is called upon to sacrifice self for the good of the group. Marriage, accordingly, is the core conservative institution and the radical individualists must attack it as an insult to individualism, trying to reform it as something friendly to individualism. That is the true thrust of homosexual marriage and is somewhat of a counterpart to already existing individualist “till death us do part or it gets to bore me” hetero marriages. We must accordingly re-emphasize marriage as individuals who covenant to create a group greater than themselves. Homosexual marriages are the necessary outcome of a nation with sick heterosexual marriages. Posted by: Gary on June 20, 2003 10:05 AMFine words, Gary. I tried to put forth some thoughts on the ideal of heterosexual marriage is the post Mr. Auster linked to above. Similiarly with this essay: The blog entry in “Cella’s Review” (beginning with the words, “David Brooks has a stimulating essay … “) which Mr. Cella’s comment links to is an exceptionally well-crafted piece, as the following excerpt illustrates (just one of many that could be quoted): “The damage inflicted on individual men, women and children, and on the social fabric of the nation, by the effacement of the traditional ideal of marriage and family is extensive. It hardly needs delineating at this late date. And I think it is safe to say the damage has been borne primarily by women and children. The enterprise undertaken to sever sex from all its viney entanglements with the rest of human life was hardly a surgical thing, though the social science rationalizations built up around it seemed to imply that it was; it was rather a wild and maniacal hacking at part of the roots of our society; the action of madmen, deracinated creatures awash in self-loathing.” Thank you for that wonderful piece. Posted by: Unadorned on June 21, 2003 12:24 AM Thanks for the kind words, Unadorned. Posted by: Paul Cella on June 21, 2003 12:29 AMRegarding Mr. Cella’s passage about the damage done to marriage and so much else besides, let’s stop beating around the bush. The left is organized evil. Wherever it takes over, it creates hatred, division, degradation, ruin. It is to human civilization what the devil is to God, the counter-force, the denying force, the destroyer. And why is it so exceptionally powerful now? Because men, individually and collectively, have turned away from God. Of course men have always turned away from God, so what’s different now? It’s that our entire civilization has turned away from God. Just as an individual person, by turning away from God, allows the devil to take him over, so does an entire society. Posted by: Lawrence Auster on June 21, 2003 1:44 AMImmediately after posting the above comment about the left being evil, I received an e-mail announcing a book called, of all things, The Dark Side of Liberalism. http://www.townhall.com/bookclub/kent.html Posted by: Lawrence Auster on June 21, 2003 1:50 AM“It has been left to the last Christians, or rather to the first Christians fully committed to blaspheming and denying Christianity, to invent a new kind of worship of Sex, which is not even a worship of Life. It has been left to the very latest Modernists to proclaim an erotic religion which at once exalts lust and forbids fertility.” — G. K. Chesterton, 1935 Posted by: Paul Cella on June 23, 2003 4:05 PM |