Religious believers and non-believers — whether or not they know in which camp they reside — will have irreconcilably different approaches to a given issue. For the example in point: to a non-believer, a religious organization such as the Roman Catholic Church, just like any organization of any type, is its members and what it does. If the people and/or the actions are seen as corrupt, then the organization is defined by corruption. Believers, on the other hand, add a layer of import such that the visible practicalities of the organization are not the whole story. That could be good or bad — depending on what the believer actually believes in — but there's another dimension of consideration required when assessing corruption.
Within the field of Christian belief, with its roots in the New Testament, scriptural incidents can help to frame that assessment, and if we take the twelve disciples' portrayal in the Gospels as an indication, then the manifold flaws in the history of the Church are neither inexplicable nor invalidating. As if to provide a crystallization of this point, both Matthew and Mark note the same action of those who were with Jesus at his arrest: with the violence escalating, with the initial seizure that would begin the Passion, Jesus declared that it all must happen so that scripture would be fulfilled, and the disciples "left him and fled."
If nothing else, the religion that God sent this troupe of doubters and deniers to establish is clearly not one requiring perfection among entrants. The Church in which Simon Peter — arguably the most conspicuous doubter and denier of the lot — is held to be the prototypical pope ought not be expected to be the perfect representative of Christ on Earth, inasmuch as even membership in its hierarchy is not synonymous with sainthood. Rather, it is a body through which all of humanity — sinners that we are — can find our way to God in spite of our failures. The crucial question is: "Simon, son of John, do you love me?" Not: "Peter can you be perfect?" Will you try... not will you succeed.
So to those who see a pattern encompassing, for example, both acquiescence to the fad of castrati and the horrid handling of sexual abuse cases in recent decades, I say that they are correct. The human beings who make up the institutional Church are susceptible to the evils of their times, and the lamentable reality is that those human beings will often fail or fall short in attempting to further explicit ends especially in the direction of cultural gravity. Castrating boys was an excommunicable offense, after all, and employment of the men who'd been subjected to the procedure was hardly unique to the Church. Castrati were so popular that composers sometimes felt compelled to write them into operas for their own sake. More to the point, as inclined as we may be, in the conceits of our less candidly brutal era, to set ourselves above our ancestors, the impulse remains familiar:
Elevated to the position of stars throughout the 18th Century, castrati raised the art of singing beyond human limits. History has recorded the names of a number of famous castrati, who have become legendary in Europe, for example: Caffarelli, Farinelli, Porporino, Senesino and Bernacchi. They attained a level of popularity similar to that of the rock stars of our time. 18th Century groupies went so far as to wear medallions bearing the portraits of their favorite castrati, a fashion not dissimilar to the pins and T shirts fans of rock stars wear today.
How many girls in the modern age have been starved, surgically manipulated, and all but tortured for the excuse of beauty? How many boys have been pushed to exhaustion and misery on the slim hope of athletic success? How many children have been ridden to nervous breakdowns by the constant push to succeed academically — ever younger and covering ever more ground?
I do not intend to deny the organizational Church's errors (evils) or to absolve it of the need for recompense. Indeed, dealing with the Scandal has become a matter of intra-Catholic dispute, and there is much that I would advise be done differently. But in a culture that abuses children relentlessly — almost as a matter of principle — in ways with superficially noble objectives and in ways that cannot be cast otherwise than as licentious, travesties among clerics and in the hierarchy too easily provide the illusion of a redemptive proxy.
Rewriting history to unravel the Church from the developing Western Culture with which it was intimately entwined for so many centuries does not allow us to discard the darkness with the former and keep the blessings with the latter. We cannot expiate our sins by sacrificing those charged with tending the Shepherd's sheep. Believers and non-believers alike do well to recall that hypocrisy isn't among the cardinal sins; consistency makes no virtue of vice, and seeing the sins of others does not diminish our responsibility for those that we share, much less absolve us of our own.
"After that day," Huck started up again, "we switched around the liquors so much that John stopped lookin' at the labels an' only just drank whatever it was he got his hands on without complainin', so that game got tiresome. Both me an' Nathaniel figured we'd got to come up with some sort a' topper 'cause the Summer was endin', but we neither of us could think of a plan.
"Must 'a' been a week or two later that I hears this meowin' outside my window in the middle a' the night. It was Nathaniel, an' he whispers up at me that he's got to show me somethin'. I shimmied down the porch roof, an' we took off real quiet into the woods. We passed over this field that we're walkin' across now, an' a little higher up on that mountain, where it's a sight more woody, we came to a cave which I didn't believe you could find if you didn't know where you was lookin'. Inside, the cave was mainly one big room like a wigwam with a bit of a slice taken out of the top, an' you could see a sliver a' the moon overhead. It was awful hot out, but it was cool in the cave.
"We spent the rest a' that night comin' up with a plan, but I needn't tell you what 'cause I knowed it would change consider'ble once we got a-goin'. Just that we was goin' to scare the wits outta John an have a grand ol' time a-doin' it.
"The first thing we set out to set up was to make the cave a proper place for me to stay an' make like I was a murd'rous bandit. Nathaniel wanted to be the one to hide out in the cave, but he figured John'd miss him before long an' catch on. I told Nathaniel that one've us would have to go to town an' get me some canned food 'cause there warn't enough in the pantry to take any without John missin' 'em.
"'Ain't none of us goin' to need to go shoppin',' he says, an' I asked him why. 'Huck, you ever hear of a criminal on the run goin' off whenever he felt like it to get some prime vittles fer his self?'
"'No,' I says, 'but I thought I was jest a bandit, I warn't awares that I'd been runnin' from people.'
"'Well, a'course yer on the run! Why else would you be out in the woods where there ain't nothin' or nobody to rob from?'
"'I reckon you got a point there, but what'm I supposed to eat?'
"He told me that I could catch all the squirrels or raccoons I wanted if we made some traps for'm, an' I suggested that I could jest get the fishin' pole from out the closet an' catch me some trout in the lake.
"'That won't do,' he told me. 'If you want a fish, you got to sharpen up a long stick on a rock an' stab 'im through like an injun.'
"'Why don't I jest set out a line then, if I can't use the pole?'
"'Well, darn it, that'd be too simple, now wouldn't it? No, the best convicts all learns how to stand real still an' pierce the fish when it swims by.'
"I said I'd give 'er a try, but I reckoned I'd use my pocketknife to shave the stick.
"'Where would a runaway bandit get a knife from?' he asked.
"'You said I was murd'rous, right?'
"'Yes, what's that got to do with it?'
"'Well what did I kill the people with that I'm runnin' for?'
"'I reckon you used a gun. Warn't no pocket knife, that's fer sure!'
"'What would I wanna go catchin' squirrels an' stabbin' fish fer if I got a gun? Why wouldn't I jest shoot a deer or somesuch thing?'
"'I suppose you stashed the gun in the river when you knew they was after you.'
"'What would I do that fer?'
"'So they wouldn't have no evidence against you when yer caught?'
"'But if they ain't got no evidence, why'm I runnin'? It'll jest make me look more s'spicious.'
"Nathaniel looked like he was startin' to get a-boil in his blood. 'It don't matter nohow,' he says, 'because we ain't got a gun fer real even if you was dumb enough to keep the fake'n!'
"'So I'll jest pertend I killed 'em with a knife an' held onto it when I ran.'
"By now Nathaniel was sick of arguin', so he said alright an' suit myself. The next thing we figured was how I was goin' to cook the food once I'd caught it, an' Nathaniel, he said the only way t'do was to only cook at night an' to use alot a' green wood so it'd give off a good 'mount of smoke.
"'Now I can see that wait'n 'til dark would keep me from gettin' caught so easy,' I said, 'but why would I want more smoke than I got to have?'
"'Dern Huck,' he says, 'ain't you never read a book in yer life? Crim'nals always get caught 'cause somebody sees the smoke from their fires.'
"'Well, if I'm lookin' to get caught, I reckon it'd happen quicker if I cook durin' the day.'
"'How you talk! Yer not tryin' to get caught! Yer jest tryin' to make it possible to get caught.'
"I told 'im that I could see tryin' to do one thing or the other, but I warn't sure why I would want to try to do one thing bad enough that th'other would happen.
"'Then how'd you s'pose anybody would come fer you to take'm hostage?'
"'What I want a hostage for if I can avoid havin' one?'
"'But you got to get a hostage so there's somebody to help you when you break yer leg?'
"'Shoot, Nathaniel, I ain't gonna break my leg!'
"'You have to break yer leg! Or at least yer arm. One a' the bandits always gets hurt an' has to be looked after by a hostage so't the others can get away.'
"'But there ain't no other bandits but me!'
"'That's why it's got to be you that gets hurt.'
"'Well if I'm gonna have to get hurt fer the sake a scarin' John, I'd rather jest make like I was pushed outta the tower an' have done with it.'
"Nathaniel considered it for a second and then said that there warn't reason enough fer me to fall from the tower unless it was while John was tryin' to get away. I said that John was a smart enough man to know not to run up to a tower when there was plenty a ways to 'scape from the house an' not drop more'n a couple feet. He asked if I thought I could break an arm fallin' a couple feet, an' I said that I reckoned I could if I wanted to, but that I didn't want to so I wouldn't.
"'Fine,' he says. 'Then jest cook at night so's you don't get caught, an' use alot a green wood so's I can point it out to John so's he'll know there's somebody up here.'
"I told him that he could 'a' just said that to begin with an' saved us all the trouble of arguin'. He grumbled somethin' 'bout me not knowin' nothin', an' we went back to the house to get some shut-eye."
"The followin' day, Nathaniel an' me went around lookin' for things that I might need, which warn't much since I was supposed to be a fugitive and all. In one room we found an old straw hat. Nathaniel said I'd have to start wearin' it all the time so't would be a mysterious omin that I could leave in the woods when I disappeared, an' I told him that it was a heck of an idea. In another room we found a women's white robe with a hood that I thought I'd filtch an' hold on to 'cause we might come up with a use later on, an' Nathaniel said I was startin' to get the feel fer this kinda work. Next to the robe was an old worn Winter jacket that Nathaniel said I'd best take, too.
"'Now what need do I got for a heavy coat like that'n in the middle a' the Summer?'
"'You don't reckon a runaway killer this far in the mountains can count on gettin' caught b'fore it gets cold out do you?'
"I told him that I warn't goin' to wait around that long to get found out, an' if Nathaniel didn't get John to discover me before a week had gone by, then I reckoned I'd make sure they both knowed there was somebody in the woods. He said that I didn't have to wait 'til Winter, only wear the coat to the cave next time I went 'cause a crim'nal wouldn't want to have to carry such a thing when he was on the run, an' leave it in a corner so the police knowed I had been there some time. That didn't seem too much to ask, though I knowed I'd be sweatin' like a pig by the time I climbed all the way up that mountain, jest so long as the police he was talkin' about warn't no more real than the gun or the people I'd killed with it.
"We borrowed a box a' matches from the mantle on the fireplace in the dinin' room, filled a couple a' John's empty bottles with well water, an' took everythin' to the cave after lunch. As I 'spected, I was a-drippin' all over sweat by the time we got there, an' I thought I'd take a sip a' the water. B'fore I could unscrew the cap, Nathaniel up an' tells me I can't do what I was a-plannin' to do. When I asked why not, he just told me that I'd miss it if I ran out while I was hidin'. I didn't bother pointin' out that I could go back to the house an' get more whenever I pleased 'cause he'd 'a' just told me that a fugitive bandit would be too afeared of gettin' caught, so I just waited 'til we got back to have my drink.
"John was tolerable drunk when we got to the house, an' somehow managin' to read some book or other that seemed to 'a' got him on edge. He went on an' on talkin' 'bout the state a' the gov'ment an' how he wouldn't be s'prised if they was hidin' out an' waitin' to cetch him.
"'What'd the gov'ment want with you fer, John?' Nathaniel asked him. John told us that he'd said some things t'upset 'em in his time. Well, me an' Nathaniel jest let him go on, sometimes leadin' him back to it when he started to wander to somethin' else, so by the time we was eatin' dinner, he was jumpin' every time a body threw a stone or piece of metal to the floor behind him.
"'Wassat?' he'd shout an' start spinnin' 'round lookin' fer the gov'ment. After a while I couldn't help but laugh a little an' tell 'im that the gov'ment was too sneaky to jest up an' tap his shoulder. I reckon that was the wrong word to use 'cause then he got going on how they was always list'nin' to what everybody was sayin' all the time an' had saterlites hoverin' over our house an' watchin' us when we was out in the yard.
"It was gettin' close to twilight, an' Nathaniel gave me a signal that maybe I should make a break for it now.
"'I think I'll go'n take a walk to work off my supper,' I said by way of excusin' myself.
"'Watch out,' said John. 'If you see any men in suits, get right back here just's quick as you can.'
"I told 'im that I reckoned if I came 'cross a man in a suit this far in the woods, an' lookin' like I was lookin' after bein' here so long, then he'd be the one runnin' the other way. Not hearin' me, John told me to holler if I had any trouble. I didn't 'spect I'd have any, but I considered hollerin' anyway.
"Well I climbed all the way to the top a' the mountain that the cave's on an' fell asleep watchin' the sun go down. When I woke up, the moon was overhead, an' the stars was all twinklin'. I heared the wind rustlin' through the trees like it was mournin', an' there was an owl in the distance purrin' out 'bout somebody that had died. I couldn't say fer sure it warn't part a' my dream, but it felt like the wind was tryin' to whisper somethin'."
D. shivered; the shadows were long across the ground.
"Then I thought it was the voice a' spirits a' people that'd been dead a long time, an' maybe they was gossipin' to me 'bout each other. I shook off the fear an' stood up. The straw hat was still on my head. I shinned down the mountain 'cause it seemed Nathaniel might a' brought John out to look fer me by now an' be expectin' to find the hat knocked off me in a struggle.
"When I got to the lake by the gazebo, I ran right into Nathaniel. He looked at me somethin' fierce when he saw what I was still wearin'. 'What're you doin'? We been lookin' fer that hat all over!' he whispered.
"Just then, we heared John askin' Nathaniel who he was talkin' to. 'Jest myself,' he says, snatchin' the hat an' pushin' me into the bushes, 'I found that hat that Huck's always wearin'.'
"'I ain't never seen Huck in a hat b'fore.' John was still drunk, an' prob'ly a little tired to boot.
"'He found one yesterday, an' I guess it just seemed so perfect on 'im that I thought he'd always had it,' Nathaniel came back right quick, an' blame it if he didn't sound like he was gettin' all choked up. B'fore he went over to where John was most likely startin' to doze off 'gainst a tree er somethin', Nathaniel took a big bite outta the brim a' the hat an spit the straw on the ground.
"I peaked through the bushes I was hidin' in an' saw Nathaniel handin' the hat over to John, sayin', 'The rip wasn't there before, though.'
"John just looked at it with a blank face an' then says, 'I reckon it was the gov'ment got'im. The cannibals!'"
Well, it's turned out to be another seventy-hour workweek, and that's not including blogging. It's helped, though, to get up early, rather than attempt vainly to stay up late, to do my from-home editing. It hasn't helped that the carpentry wipes me out.
It is nonetheless perhaps the best job that I've ever had, snow and icy mud notwithstanding. There's something about such work that just makes one feel, well, human. Manly, too, but mostly human. It is clearly and unambiguously doing. Building. Shaping the materials that God has given us.
Yes, of course an argument could be made that all work does this — whether in the office or in the lab. But particularly in the office, it takes some pondering among abstracts to see the materials and feel the doing; a sense of fleeting constructs tends to assert itself. I find myself wondering, while shin-high in snow and sawdust — and happy about it! — what our society's degree of leisure has cost us.
In this context, I think Jonah Goldberg cuts his topic short when he wonders what ideological changes technology might bring:
We have a tendency to assume that existing ideological categories are permanent. History is the study of the repeated debunking of such assumptions. The saddle, the stirrup, the moat, the locomotive, the telephone, the atomic bomb, the car, the computer, the birth-control pill: All of these caused tectonic changes in ideological arrangements, and all of them, save the last, were primarily innovations in transportation, communication, or war. The new earthquakes to come from biotechnology — "cures" for homosexuality, unimaginable longevity, real "happy pills" — could level all of the landmarks of our ideological landscape, even redefining the first ideology, conservatism.
The redefinition that we risk goes much deeper than ideology. Marching along like lemmings to the Sea of Uncontrollable Knowledge, with science rather than instinct leading us to a redefinition of humanity itself.
I promised to respond to two critics, so I'll just point out two things about a comment from Michael to my "Matters of Consistency" post. Michael writes:
So any line of argumentation that comes down on the side of SSM is following a preference to a predetermined conclusions but any line of argumentation that comes down against SSM is following reason? I don't understand how you can't see the prejudice in that sentiment.
I'm tempted to acknowledge that I do see the prejudice: the prejudice of the right against the wrong. But that would require a stronger stand than I take. For now, it's enough to note that I did not use Michael's language of absolutes (e.g., "any").
This whole thing began with Jack Balkin's list of options from which the American judiciary could choose in order to reach the goal of same-sex marriage. Although there are degrees to which the demand is held as uncompromising, balancing between the end and the means is the problem at the heart of SSM advocacy. In order for same-sex marriage to be a right that the Supreme Court can recognize, it must be argued as if nothing new is being granted. As even Balkin admits, there is the "completely honest" approach, and there's the "misfit" argument. Seeing all as legitimate indicates that the conclusion is predetermined.
Michael then offers an explanation that we've all seen before, because it's essentially the anti-miscegenation case:
Suppose the state, in an attempt to protect marriage, realized that marriages were significantly more stable if people married within their profession, and thus the state found a compelling interest to ban inter-professional marriages. Everyone is treated equally; they can marry anybody they want from their own profession. There is no physical discrimination because men, women, blacks, whites are all treated the same. The "cannot" here is universal. But what about the "want"? Let's say you want to marry a nurse but cannot because you are a writer. And she, likewise, cannot marry you. You can either choose to marry someone else, someone you want to marry significantly less, or you can change your relgion. There's no discrimination because every profession is treated the same and the government is not telling you cannot get married because you are a writer, only that you can only marry another writer.
Interested readers can find all sorts of discussion about why this sort of example isn't relevant to the same-sex marriage issue. (Search for "miscegenation.") Of particular note is that Michael applies the SSM advocate's marital objective — stability — to the example, not marital objectives to which I subscribe (mainly procreation and raising children). More to the point, he ignores a central statement from my "Whatever Works" post: Unlike anti-miscegenation laws, unlike Michael's hypothetical, with SSM, homosexuals and heterosexuals have exactly the same range of options.
The same-sex marriage discussion has gotten heated, 'round here, and since that's neither my intention nor my desire, I'm going to respond carefully to the latest remarks from two people and then step back from this round. My current schedule doesn't allow me the liberty to continue swinging at irresolvable differences.
First, a response to Gabriel Rosenberg's latest offering:
[Katz] seems to feel I was too focused on the word "consistency" and thus I missed his other points. I thought I had responded to his main point that prohibiting same-sex marriage cannot be both sex discrimination and sexual orientation discrimination.
To be honest, the consistency angle was one that I didn't intend to be central to my "Whatever Works" post. However, in my rush to get to work, I thought I'd made it sufficiently secondary. Perhaps I did not. Be that as it may, part of my thinking when emphasizing SSM proponents' concentration on that angle for my subsequent post grew from the following in Rosenberg's initial response:
In his post Katz explains why he disagrees with one of the theories Balkin presented, but never why any two of them are mutually incompatible.
My hurried a.m. deficiencies as a rhetorician notwithstanding, it seems to me that one would think the thing I actually explained to be the main point. But I'll take the blame for the misunderstanding. However, I won't take the blame for Rosenberg's reaction to my reaction to it:
This is a rather juvenile and disgusting attack. He accuses same-sex marriage proponents of being inconsistent, of doing "whatever works" to achieve its goals, of not standing on any principles, in short of being intellectually dishonest. When I deny those serious accusations I'm told that my powerful reaction might be a sign of insecurity about whether I'm consistent.
Only the first two of my alleged accusations are accurate. I never said that supporters of same-sex marriage don't stand on any principles, nor (in turn) that they are intellectually dishonest (although anybody can be, of course). Indeed, I later said that consistency is only one consideration; furthermore, my "juvenile and disgusting attack" would be nonsensical if I, too, joined the SSM supporters at hand in believing that "the notion of consistency is particularly powerful." Therefore, it doesn't follow that my accusations expanded as Rosenberg has done. (N.B. If one argument for or against something is correct, than consistency with other arguments is moot.)
Here we come to an intriguing point: my second post was not entirely about Mr. Rosenberg, and my first post had nothing directly to do with him. If you go back and read his response to the first, perhaps you'll see, as I do, that the the full brunt of the comments that now so offend him hardly apply to him. His approach to SSM is not identical to Balkin's, differentiated in part by the quality of being more consistent and more logically, as opposed to legalistically, founded. And as I said, the second post was not only in response to him (this is something else that I might have been well advised to make clearer, although I thought the plural language would be adequate.) Yet, Rosenberg goes on to express insult as if everything that I had written in both posts was directly aimed at him:
The initial accusations were insulting. The inference that since I was insulted the accusations are probably true is just stupid.
Yes, that inference would have been stupid if (1) the accusations had been made against him, (2) my response had been directed entirely at him, and (3) my parenthetical quip had actually suggested that my accusations were "probably true." None of those requirements to prove my stupidity are met. But if I won't cede stupidity, I will admit that I should have further explained something about which Rosenberg writes, "I honestly have no idea what Katz is talking about here." In his first post, Rosenberg had written:
Suppose you know a person is attracted to women or in a sexual relationship with a woman. You cannot possibly decide whether to classify that person as homosexual or heterosexual unless you also know whether the person is male or female. All sexual orientation discrimination concerns deviation from one's traditional gender roles.
I said that this posits "a scenario in which discrimination is desirable" because in order for Rosenberg to explain why "all sexual orientation discrimination is inherently a matter of sex discrimination," he must imagine a situation in which we want to "classify a person as homosexual." Since he agrees with me that "if one cannot classify the person, one cannot discriminate against him or her on the basis of that classification," he appears to be positing a circumstance in which the ability to classify — i.e., discriminate — is important.
This point does not indicate that I agree with Rosenberg's overall suggestion. I don't know how else to say it, so I'll just repeat myself: one can define orientation without reference to a particular person's sex. Suppose you want to know whether Pat qualifies for a benefit (or a restriction, for that matter) based on sexual orientation. You need to know neither Pat's gender nor that of the people to whom Pat is attracted — only that Pat is homosexual. If you want more detail — whether Pat is a lesbian or a gay man — obviously Pat's sex becomes relevant.
In the case at hand, whether a homosexual is male or female makes no difference with respect to his or her ability to enter into marriage with a person of the same sex. The IRS, for example, doesn't need to know which one of Pat and Nick is the man, just that they are of opposite sex. To say the least, a strange permutation of sex discrimination is necessary in order for the term to cover a state of affairs in which it doesn't matter whether the individual object of alleged discrimination is a man or a woman.
Pace Rosenberg, it is not true that "if a policy discriminates on the basis of orientation it must discriminate on the basis of sex." And as I've already described, going in the other direction, if a policy discriminates on the basis of sex, it does not discriminate on the basis of orientation. This is why I'm not sure how to further the cause of mutual understanding when Rosenberg writes, in response to my statement that the argument "proceeds" from sex distinctions to orientation distinctions, not the other way around:
It matters not whether the discrimination was itself the goal of the policy, which seems very unlikely, or whether there was some other goal with discrimination being used to achieve that goal, which is far more likely to be the case. Either way one discriminates. Katz is making the incorrect assumption that a policy of discrimination necessarily means the authors or advocates of that policy are bigots.
Of course, there's a bit of loose terminology on all sides about whether we're talking licit "discrimination" or "invidious discrimination." And perhaps I could have been clearer that by "goal," I meant to indicate the discrimination as an intended effect, not a side effect. Still, in the totality of the points that I have made thus far in this exchange, the assumption of bigotry is all that's left — not specifically attributing motives on Gabriel Rosenberg's part, or anybody else's, but as a matter of what must be assumed in order to find sex discrimination within orientation discrimination rather than to start with the stated requirements based on gender and investigate the effects. (I apologize for not, myself, pulling together the totality, but I'm running out of available time.)
As for the last two paragraphs of Rosenberg's post, the areas of misunderstanding, on both sides, are too thick and the temper too heated for unraveling to be sufficiently effective to justify the time. It's as if we're looking at two different discussions, in part because I've apparently left too much unexplained, and in part because Rosenberg seems to think himself the main object of my "attack," rather than the broader position to which he contributes.
It's a frustrating feeling: I think if I'd used some other word than "consistent," perhaps those who've reacted to my "Whatever Works" post might have addressed the points other than the word. Perhaps the notion of consistency is particularly powerful among supporters of same-sex marriage, or something. (Whether their reaction is an indication of insecurity, I leave to readers to decide; I'm not sure either way.)
Look, if the opposite-sex definition of marriage discriminates on the basis of sex, then there is no discrimination on the basis of orientation. Neither homosexuals nor heterosexuals can marry people of the same sex. The tenuous bridge between the two points from Yale Prof. Jack Balkin that I addressed is evident in his phrasing of the sex discrimination case:
It violates sex equality to tell a man he cannot marry another man when a woman could do so. It violates sex equality to tell a woman she cannot marry another woman when a man could do so.
Perhaps the distinction can be best phrased thus: the sex discrimination case is a matter of "can"; the orientation discrimination case is a matter of "want." If we apply the "can" of sex discrimination to orientation discrimination, we find that there is no legal discrimination. The "cannot" is universal. Gabriel Rosenberg attempts a legal bridge:
Although the prohibition facially discriminates on the basis of sex and does not do so on the basis of sexual orientation, one could argue that while facially neutral it has a disparate impact on the homosexual population. That is one could claim that while both heterosexuals and homosexuals must marry a spouse of the opposite sex, homosexuals have greater difficulty finding such a spouse who will marry them.
It may be the case that a legal regime that has made it a dramatic matter of law to peer into the hearts of men can trace back to discrimination from the outcome of a particular policy. Taking up that argument would require entry into another area of likely disagreement, however. Suffice, for now, to say that I reject disparate impact claims, at least when there isn't other information than the outcome to indicate invidious discrimination, and that I'm skeptical that homosexuals wishing to enter into opposite-sex marriages would have any greater difficulty finding spouses than do heterosexuals. The debate's irrelevant, in this instance, because Rosenberg doesn't even want to "consider whether homosexuals could find opposite sex spouses if they wanted to do so, when [he] believe[s] they should not have to do so."
Consequently, Rosenberg takes another tack that, oddly, winds up requiring him to posit a scenario in which discrimination is desirable so that the two forms of discrimination can be made one and the same in a forced overlap:
The reason there is no inconsistency, though, is more basic. The fact is all sexual orientation discrimination is inherently a matter of sex discrimination because one cannot define sexual orientation without reference to one's sex. Suppose you know a person is attracted to women or in a sexual relationship with a woman. You cannot possibly decide whether to classify that person as homosexual or heterosexual unless you also know whether the person is male or female. [Emphasis his.]
The obvious response to the first part of this quotation is that one can define orientation without reference to a particular person's sex: heterosexuals are attracted to people of the opposite sex, and homosexuals are attracted to people of the same sex. Although I can't come up with a circumstance in which one would know the gender of a person's significant other but not of the person him- or herself, I will venture to suggest that if one cannot classify the person, one cannot discriminate against him or her on the basis of that classification. The only way to discriminate is to know that the person is homosexual — meaning attracted to a person of the opposite sex, whichever that might be.
At best, what Rosenberg has proven is that a policy beginning with the goal of discriminating on the basis of orientation must discriminate on the basis of sex, as well. That is not the direction in which this argument proceeds, however — unless we follow the path of those uncharitable enough to assume bigotry before the first round of debate has even begun.
Once again, and with all due respect to Rosenberg et alia, the objective appears to be to fit argumentation to a predetermined conclusion. That's fine, as far as it goes; consistency is only one consideration in ideology, after all. But it strikes me as odd that people engaged in that approach would be surprised and offended that others find their arguments to lack the aggregate import that would exist were they following reason rather than preference to their conclusions.
Although my time is limited, I've been trying to help out Rocco DiPippo while he's on a well-deserved vacation and guest blog on Antiprotester Journal. (Our fellow Rhode Islander KelliPundit is also helping out.)
Although I'm managing to develop a schedule that will accommodate the carpentry and the editing and the blogging and the reading and everything else, I'm still not steady on my feet yet. We've been putting in long hours on the house that I'm helping to build, and last week, I had a number of extracurricular events to attend.
But I am enjoying the work. Something about physical labor, working with wood, making something, all while a glance from a fabulous water view, is spiritually salutary. Add in my elation at simply having sufficient employment to support my family, and even while I fight my eyelids in order to edit, I realize how much I have for which to be thankful.
The only thing that could make my day more fulfilling would be more time (and energy) so that I could maintain a healthy bulk of posts on the blogs and continue to make progress with the professional writing. Eventually, the seventy-hour weeks will dip to sixty, and my body will no longer need the exorbitant recovery time. In the meantime... onward.
The Timshel Music Song You Should Know this week is "Life in Pictures" by Dan Lipton.
"Life in Pictures" Dan Lipton, Pop/Rock
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I find myself curious about Providence Journal editorial boarder M.J. Anderson. I know from some brief reviews of her brand-new book, Portable Prairie: Confessions of an Unsettled Midwesterner, that she's the daughter of South Dakotan journalists and went to Princeton in the '70s. I know from elsewhere that she began as a reporter for the Providence Journal in 1981. But the things that I'd like to know are of a more personal nature.
I don't wonder such things out of voyeurism or twisted lechery. Rather, it has seemed to me, as I've grown older, that much of the sexual revolution is built on personal lies — distortions, at least — and I wonder what might linger behind Anderson's recent celebration of Alfred Kinsey. One can imagine, for example, the feeling of titillation mixed with pride at superior knowledge that a Midwestern Ivy Leaguer must have felt in an academia in the thrall of revolution. Closer to the Velvet Underground than to "Okie from Muskogee." Considering her shared hope, with Kinsey, "that we might throw off a crippling sense of sin, and understand how profoundly we are not just moral beings but physical ones," one wonders what crippling sins Anderson has thrown off, and what were the effects. After all, we're talking Kinsey, here — a man "appalled at how little [literature on human sexuality] was based on empirical evidence."
As a man born around the time that Anderson walked the halls of my (then-future) home state's most highly acclaimed school, I grew up and learned about sex entirely within the culture that was the legacy of Kinsey and the sexual revolution. In high school, as a college dropout, and then as a frat boy, I've witnessed the escalating perversion that can result when the assumption is that everybody is, and should be, living "normal" sex lives (which is to say, without limits). Ironically, I found it a great relief to discover that it simply wasn't true that everybody was living more promiscuously and managing to be better adjusted than I was.
I've learned that, of my '60s-nostalgic elders, many evince a self-inflicted ache at having lived fairly mundane lives; although contemporaneous with a supposed mass liberation of the libido, they have no experience outside of the dreaded traditional structure. Either they are bitter at being cheated, or they take on faith that one could live more wildly than they and achieve the same degree of contentment (think Al Gore, with his stable nuclear family and his radical views on what family should mean for others). Either way, they have no personal basis to advise Kinseyism.
Others of my elders appear, having been hurt by their lifestyles, to be striving to further justify them, rather than correct them. The deceptive hope is that the deviancy in their own lives — whether divorce or infidelity or homosexuality — can simply be defined as "normal," thereby washing away the sting. And still others are simply perverts. Kinsey, from what I've read, was one of these last.
I realize that Anderson's is an opinion piece, but certain sentences beg for journalistic exploration. Among Kinsey's latter-day supporters, one often hears the blurring admission that he was a "flawed man," but perhaps a word or two could have been spent explaining this:
Around the same time, owing to difficulties he and his wife encountered when first married, he began studying the literature on human sexuality. ...He and his wife were both openly intimate with other partners (men included, in Kinsey's case). Their example led to some irreparable wounds among his associates, whom he encouraged to experiment.
To understand the humorous turn of those last two sentences, one must have read a 2003 piece by Janice Shaw Crouse:
In his personal life, Albert Kinsey was promiscuously bisexual, sado-masochistic, and a decadent voyeur who enjoyed filming his wife having sex with his staff.
Encouraged to experiment, indeed! Returning to Anderson for more serious matters, consider the disclaiming passive voice with which she begins the following:
Although his methodology was later faulted, he induced millions to consider that the range of "normal" behavior was much broader than they had assumed, and included homosexuality.
Faulted for what, pray tell? Well, we can turn to Janice Shaw Crouse for enlightenment:
He used over 300 children, including babies, in his studies of female orgasm. Some critics legitimately accuse Kinsey of child molestation. The American Board of Pediatrics argues that his data are not the norm; that he used unnatural stimulation and, even then, did not prove his point. Using pedophiles, he charted the length and frequency of infants' and children's supposed "orgasms." ...In terms of subjects, Kinsey used volunteers — a practice that scholars decry because of the selection bias it introduces. Many psychologists say that exhibitionists and unconventional sexual experimenters are the most likely respondents, thus distorting the results of the studies. A quarter to nearly half of Kinsey's subjects were prisoners, hardly reflective of the general population. Plus, over 1,400 of his subjects were sex offenders. Kinsey's samples were skewed in other ways as well: His subjects were overwhelmingly single when less than a third of the population was single during the 1950s, and they were also predominantly college educated.
Perhaps the most offensive aspect of Kinsey's supposedly "scientific" method was his definitions. He classified prostitutes and cohabiting females as "married" women, and then claimed that 26 percent of married women committed adultery.
Such are the subjects whom Anderson applauds for having redefined "the range of 'normal' behavior." She writes that "post–sexual revolution, it is almost impossible to imagine the relief Kinsey's reports must have inspired," and the wry reader might think to agree that many a pedophile, prisoner, and prostitute must have been much relieved to be blended with the prudent suburban housewife.
So, I can't help but wonder what induces the likes of M.J. Anderson to raise up Alfred Kinsey. Is it a deliberately blind adulation of a cultural icon — a better-informed version of the ignorance from which Che Guevera benefits? Is defense of Kinsey really just the outward manifestation of defense of the waning side of the culture war? Or is there something more personal, psychological, behind the spin? To be sure, Anderson is far from the only person to whom this applies, but the habit of defining the cultural norm without offering empirical evidence in the form of personal experience can be, as Kinsey might have agreed, appalling.
In this respect, a more balanced study of Kinsey himself might benefit our body of knowledge, if only we could push beyond the reflex that leads us to blame "a repressive society" when even a flawed, faulted, adulterous, sado-masochistic scientist becomes depressed.
Dust in the Light reader Chairm Ohn has posted three very handsome charts illustrating Dutch marriage and legitimacy trends on what looks to be a toe dipped in the blogosphere. I don't have the time or immediate context to dig for deeper analysis than what Chairm offers, but I certainly wanted to note the effort both for your edification and so that I'll find it easy to locate the charts when they would come in handy in the future.
In response to my disagreement, Ramesh Ponnuru has elaborated on his suggestion that, if "it really is the case that 'matters of character' are 'matters that should precede governmental authority,' as Coleman concludes, then I think his separationist conclusion [about marriage and state] certainly follows." Inasmuch as Ponnuru's point is that pure libertarianism doesn't allow "much of a defense of marriage laws," I suppose I've no choice but to agree. One might as well attempt to dispute that socialism doesn't allow much of a defense of inheritance laws. But as with socialism, libertarianism is a flawed, weak, ultimately dangerous approach to government when implemented as a political philosophy rather than a general principle for assigning preference.
The question, as I addressed it, is whether the degree of libertarianism that can claim the broad appeal that Ponnuru appears to be assuming requires government's lack of authority over "matters of personal character" to translate into a separation of marriage and state. On a more theoretical level, the question can be taken to be whether that degree of libertarianism is justifiable (or sane).
I may very well be missing a step in his thinking, but it seems to me that Ponnuru is conflating concepts that are actually distinct. If we reject "the idea that the promotion of morality is a legitimate aim of the government," does that mean we "can't count in cultural effects that occur through subtle influences on people's behavior and beliefs"? I don't believe so. What's more, I don't think many people do, and I don't think this represents a emotion-driven inconsistency on our part.
The idea that Americans generally reject is that it is a legitimate aim of the government to promote morality per se. It is difficult to imagine what the proof might look like, but arguendo, if it could be proven that every act of fornication brought our civilization closer to doom and ruination, then few would be the purists to declare the SCOTUSian right to privacy inviolable.
This is why we spend so much time arguing over whether same-sex marriage will have deleterious effects. Many supporters of same-sex marriage may see it as such a basic right that damage to society is irrelevant, but even they surely understand that their cause is dead if they ever reach the point of having to argue as much. Ponnuru refers to the principle that "everyone has the liberty to swing his fist until it hits someone else's nose," and I will concede that this understanding of government's purview is broadly held. That does not mean, however, that "subtle influences on people's behavior and beliefs" are outside of the state's authority. Rather, it means that the "cultural effects" must be persuasively arguable as wounds.
Unless Ponnuru's conclusion, as follows, is intended to illustrate the shortcomings of libertarianism, then it falls to a subtle, but decisive, distinction intellectually and as a matter of what America's citizens actually believe:
If you don't see a legitimate role for government in promoting morality at all... then you would support same-sex marriage only as a move toward a contractarian policy. Ultimately, I think, you would have to say that marriage is none of the government's business.
In the paragraph previous to this one, Ponnuru suggests that "liberty and social welfare" are truly what "marriage laws promote." Taking that as true, it doesn't matter that those ends are accomplished "precisely by encouraging moral behavior." The question is whether those ends are accomplished "precisely by encouraging moral behavior."
The latest Notes & Commentary essay by Maureen Mullarkey is "Heavy Machinery and Gnomic Vignettes," reviewing John Walker at Knoedler & Co and Saul Steinberg at PaceWildenstein.
"I reckon I was the first to come along after Nathaniel invited John to the house," Huck began. "Back then it seemed John found his way into some town or other an' got himself a jug a' somethin' to help thicken him up when he needed it, which was most a' the time. He'd been storin' the empty bottles in his room so long that there warn't nowheres left in there to put any more. By the time I got here, he'd got in the habit of usin'm as decoration where there warn't no books on the shelves.
"Things was quiet for a while, and time went quick on account of there bein' so many books to read and me an' Nathaniel havin' such prime talks all the time. He had an amazin' head fer jest a boy! We'd talk all the time, an' when we warn't a-talkin', I was a-readin'. Finally one day, Nathaniel was playin' at the piano when I walked up to him an' told him my name. He said it suited me just fine, and we set about rummagin' through all the rooms to find me an outfit. What we found was the same as what I'm a-wearin' now, only a sight older an' more authenticated, an' when I had got it all on, Nathaniel laughed an' whistled. 'I do b'lieve we done found a match,' he said, an' I was awful glad to know who I was, 'cause now we could get on in a suitable way.
"'Round this time, John's bottles had got so they filled all the empty spots on the shelves, an' he started puttin'm on the railin' outside his room. Well, Nathaniel saw this an' was tolerable mad. 'I'll never b'grudge a man his whiskey,' he said, 'but purty soon we'll be throwin' out the drinkers to keep what's been drunk outta.' An' I could see that this gave him an idea."
"Hold it," interrupted D. "John told me that he was homeless before he came here and that he doesn't get paid for watching the house."
"Yes'm, that's true enough, from what I've heard."
"Then how could he possibly afford to fill the bookshelves with bottles, let alone his room?"
"Well, that's a question I've yet t'have answered fer me, so I'll be darned if I c'n give'n to you; but I 'magine Nathaniel'd been givin' him some comp'nsation on top a' providin' all his food an' housin'. Now where he got it from, I daren't even guess."
"Why didn't Nathaniel just cut John off if the drinking was becoming a problem?"
"Well darn, woman! What good would that do but creatin' an ornery an' sober ol' man to deal with? Nobody minded the drinkin'. Truth be told, we would sometimes take a peck at the stock, an' stoppin' the flow would 'a' been like dryin' out a toilet to keep a chile from playin' in it!"
D. had to mull that one over a little, and Huck let her. They had reached the tree line at the other end of the field when he started up again.
"While John was off restockin', or wherever, me and Nathaniel borrowed a dozen'r so bottles from his room, 'cause we knowed he wouldn't miss them from that mess. The col'rd ones, that was about six of'm, an' two of the clear ones that had vodka labels, we filled with water from the bathroom, and we took the rest of the clear ones down to the stream to fill'm with muddy water that didn't look much like the dark rum that John drinks but would pass from a distance if ya shook it first. We tucked all the water bottles away up in the south tower an' waited for John to git back.
"He was already a-whoopin' an' a-hollerin' drunk by the time he walked in the door, an' it warn't long before he was snorin' away in that big ol' chair a' his. Gatherin' up all his new jugs, 'bout seven all told, we lugged 'em up to the tower and started workin' our way to rip-roarin'. After one a' the bottles was tapped, we was makin' such a racket that John sort of waked up a little, but not enough for what we wanted, so Nathaniel whoops to him an' shouts down:
"'Hey there John! What's a fella gotta do to getcha outta that there chair?'
"John didn't pay no never mind to that, except to sort of mumble a yell and slip back to nappin' a bit. So Nathaniel whoops again and yells:
"'What if I told you that if you didn't come help us out with these here drinks, I don't reckon we'll be able to finish'm before earlier than six in the mornin', just the two of us?'
"This got John a-rollin' enough to get 'im outta the chair, an' he screams that we best not finish them all without him and he warn't of the mood to drink no more.
"'Well then,' says Nathaniel, 'I reckon we'll have to find ourselves some other way to unload this here burden.' An' he takes a big swig outta'n bottle a' rum an' drops his hand enough so John couldn't see that he was switchin' it fer a bottle a' nothin' but dirty water. Nathaniel, he takes an' holds the water up so's John gets a good enough look to think it was the rum and chucks it right off into the trees. I ain't never heard the woods so quiet as when waitin' fer that bottle to fall, an' when it did, it was the most God awful and beautiful crash a body ever heard.
"Now John's purty well stirred, with this look on his face like bloody murder, an' he comes a-rushin' up the stairs, an' I barely had the time to throw myself over the hatch so he couldn't lift it. I've always been a sight heavier than John could hoist. So there we are, Nathaniel a-laughin' like to raise the dead, John a-swearin' cusses that I knowed he made most of 'em up an' tryin' to get through, an' me just bouncin' up an' down on the hatch and a-gigglin' away like a Sunday School girl at a circus clown. Eventu'lly, John gets tired an' we heared him goin' down the stairs; next we knowed, there he was on the other tower a rantin' an' ravin' an' carryin' on like the house was on fire. When he'd got a hold a' his self, Nathaniel takes up a bottle a' clear water, takes a sip an' makes like it's the worst moonshine he ever tasted and then throws that bottle far off into the trees.
"John couldn't take no more a' this, so he climbs all shaky like down th'other tower an' starts crossin' the peak a' the roof with his arms out fer balance. Well, I was mighty impressed, 'cause he made it 'bout halfway without fallin', an' when he did fall, he didn't stop swearin', not for one second. No sirree, he just kept on a-yellin' at the top a' his voice an' tryin' to stand. He got to his feet an' started swingin' his arms, an' I don't think I ever seen a man so sober or scared as when he discovered that he was a-goin' to topple anyway. He rolled over backwards once'r twice, an' slid the rest a' the way 'til his feet was danglin' over the edge of the roof an' he was grabbin' at the shingles to save his neck, all the time slidin' just a little more.
"I reckon me an' Nathaniel sobered up then just about as fast as John did, an' we shinned it down into Nathaniel's room. And there in the window was two hairy legs all bare an' naked an' white as a ghost, just a-swingin' an' trying to get back up to safety. His robe was all bunched up by his waist, an' I see'd that he was wearin' a brand new pair a' boxer shorts with little paisley designs all over 'em. We throwed open the window and grabbed those kickin' legs an' told John to just let go so we could get 'im in. After a minute of arguin', he just let go his faith an' slipped over the edge an' into the room.
"Well, me an' Nathaniel felt a world a' sorry for what we'd done an' fixed John up with a rum 'n' coke. He went on fer a while 'bout us tryin' to kill such an' old an' kindly gentl'man who'd never been nothin' but good to us, an' we just kept on apologizin' until he wore himself out an' we all went to bed."
Huck and D. had come to the edge of a small lake (or big pond), and Huck skimmed a rock across its surface. The sun had dipped out of sight behind a mountain to the left, turning the water a pale and silent kind of black. Except for the faint buzzing of mosquitoes and the more vehement tweeting of the birds, the air was still. About twenty feet to the right of where they stood, D. saw a haphazardly built gazebo beginning to bend in on one side with the weight of a drastically tilted roof. The pair walked past the structure, keeping to the water's edge, and Huck skimmed another stone. Jim dove in and swam to the spot where it had sunk, paddling about and looking for it before giving up and swimming back to shore.
"Me an' Nathaniel agreed to be nice to John for the time bein', an' there warn't nothin' we didn't do to help him out an' make him feel all at home an' 'mongst friends again," Huck continued. "He started hidin' all his bottles but the one he'd be drinkin' at the time, so a' course we couldn't help but try to find 'em all out. One of'm he put in the piano, which warn't too hard to 'cipher out on account of it rattlin' so every time you hit the lower keys. There was a couple behind the bathtub upstairs and a cartload under a loose board in the front hall. 'Bout the hardest one to find was away behind some books by a man named James Fenimore Cooper. I found that one detective fashion, 'cause I figured nobody'd ever take them books down off'n the shelves t'actuly read 'em. It got to where we knowed where just about ev'ry bottle was.
"Nathaniel an' me was out explorin' one afternoon when he turns to me an says, 'Well, Huck, I reckon that it ain't no use havin' all this infermation an' not usin' it.' I told him I reckoned he was right, so he goes on, 'and I don't think it would hurt the ol' man all that much if we was to fool with 'im jest a little.' I told him I reckoned he was jest about on the mark again.
"The first thing we did next time John was a-snorin' in his chair, which warn't too long away, was to switch all the liquors around. We got an ol' crystal pitcher with a real slim spout from the kitchen an' went an' put vodka from the bathroom in the Kahlua bottle from the front hall an' filled the vodka bottle with water, an' swapped the whiskey in the piano with the Southern Comfort behind that Muleravisher book or whatever it's called. Next all we did was wait.
"The afternoon after, we climbed up into the willow, which was all thick with leaves, an' watched John take his sweet-tooth over to the bookshelf. He looked around like he was bein' sneaky and took down the bottle a' what he thought was SoCo. He sort a' smiled to himself an' went off into the ballroom. We dropped down from the tree just in time to hear his loud 'yeck' when he discovered that his Southern Comfort was beginnin' to taste awful sim'lar to Jack Daniel's. We strolled in to where he was an' Nathaniel says:
"'What's all the gaggin' fer John?'
"'Well, this here bottle's supposed to be full of Southern Comfort, but I'll be damned if it ain't J.D.,' John snarls back, an' in a voice that showed that he suspicioned what we was up to.
"'Give it here,' says Nathaniel, an' he takes a big pull, 'tastes like SoCo to me. Here, Huck, you give it a try.'
"I took the bottle an' says that I hope'ts the Comfort, 'cause Jack Daniels makes me powerful sick from just a sniff. So I takes the bottle an' smells the top with one eye all squinted so's it looks like I'm really makin' sure, an' then I gulped down a good amount a' the whiskey an' says, 'Well, I ain't a-pukin', so's I guess it's just what it says on the bottle.'
"'Gimme that,' says John, not believin' us more'n a bit. He took a sip an' gave us a look like either we was foolin' with him or he was goin' crazy. He ordered us out to the courtyard an' to close our eyes. We did what we was told, an' I heared him gettin' the Jack Daniel's bottle that was full a' Southern Comfort out from where it was hid in the piano. 'Now you two are gonna drink this'n here with yer eyes shet an' tell me what yer tastin'. And don't say nothin' 'til you've both had yer go.'
"First Nathaniel took a drink an' then smacks his lips real loud. Next John shoves the bottle against my chest and says it's my turn. Well, I hardly had the bottle to my lips an' I starts gaggin' an' makin' like I'm gonna throw up. I was bent over on my knees an' spittin' on the ground when Nathaniel says, 'I reckon Huck agrees with me that that there is Jack Daniel's.'
"John took a swig an' swore up 'n' down that what he was a-tastin' was Southern Comfort. Nathaniel chimes in with, 'Well, I see what's goin' on here.'
"'Really? An' what's that?'
"'You've been mixin' an' matchin' these diff'rent liquors so much yer heads gone an' switched 'em all around.' So John says we'll see about that, an' marches up to the bathroom. I guess he didn't want to let on where his big stash was, 'case we hadn't found it yet. Well first he takes a drink a' the gin that was there, points to the label an' says, 'Now that says gin, it smells like gin, it tastes like gin, an' I'll swear by God that it ain't nothin' else!'
"We didn't say nothin' diff'rent, so he takes up the vodka bottle an' just about finishes the whole thing in two gulps. 'Try it,' he d'mands without sayin' nothin' else. Nathaniel drinks it an' makes a more squintin' an' wrinkled face any twelve year old fiddlin' around in his pap's liquor cabinet ever made.
"'That's some powerful stuff!' he says when he's all done makin' like he's gaspin'.
"So John says, 'Look me in the eye an' tell me that warn't water you just took a drink of.'
"'Damn, John, would I be all a-fluster like this if I was drinkin' jest water?' an' I see'd that he was indeed all a-fluster, with his eyes a-tearin' an' ev'rything.
"John reckoned not if he was tellin' the truth, an' when I tasted the water I told purty much the same tale, but not with so much style. We was all gettin' a little thick from all the tastin', an' John twice as much on account a' his startin' to believe that it was vodka that he had drunk so much of. So now he takes us down the stairs so's he can prove he's not insane an' all the bottles under the floor is what they say they is.
"First he goes through a few tastes a' rum before he believes his tongue on that one. Then he had a pull a' tequila that we hadn't even seen hidin' down there an' says that he reckons if it wasn't tequila he was tastin' then he'd have to be an imigr'nt. At last he comes to the Kahlua, which, if you never had it, is sweet as molasses compared to vodka, an' takes the biggest gulp yet. Believe you me that there vodka didn't so much as touch his guts before he was down on one knee doin' all he can to keep it down. Meanwhile, Nathaniel's dumpin' the vodka in a plant that used to be by the door there, before it died a short while later, so when John righted himself an' asked fer the bottle, there wouldn't be nothin' but air.
"'Dagnabit,' he says, still kinda droolin', 'that warn't like no Kahlua I ever had. No way, no how! That was vodka or I'll eat myself a hairball!'
"'Well, John, I'd love to prove you right, but you done drank all there was to drink. That Kahlua's some heavy stuff, you must be feelin' a might bloated right about now.'
"Snatchin' away the bottle, John sees that there ain't nothin' left but a lingerin' smell a' the Kahlua that used to be there before me and Nathaniel drank it all, an' let's out this moan, 'Awwohh, boys, I reckon I'm a gonner now.'
"Nathaniel grabs him 'round the waist and leads him to his chair. 'You better rest for a while,' he advises, an' John sort of groans his agreement. The way the man went on you'd a thought he had drank a whole case a' caster oil. 'Ventually he's off an' snorin' again like always."
Huck stopped talking for a moment.
"So what's the Nonesuch Inn?" asked D., who was looking over the treetops to where the towers of the house protruded from the mist of bare branches. They had been climbing the rocky side of the first hill to the north of the house that was higher than the one upon which it stood.
"I'm a-gettin' to it," Huck told her, "but while I do, I think we best head back. My stomach's tellin' me that it's gettin' on to dinner time."
Stopping a moment to look at the view of the little lake, D. followed Huck down the rocks the way they had come. They walked in silence, listening to the late afternoon stillness in the air. Jim broke D. from the state of country enchantment that had started to come over her by poking her in the bottom with a stick that he wanted her to throw. Once she realized that it was going to be more work than it was worth to wrestle over a stick that Jim wouldn't even chase after it was thrown, D. picked a fresh one from between the blades of brown grass and threw it. Jim dropped his stick and ran off after a new one altogether. D. was surprised at how quickly the day seemed to be passing.
The Redwood Review fiction piece of the week is "from At First You See It," by A. Valentine Smith.
It occurs to me to mention, over here, that Anchor Rising has added a contributor: no less a personage than NRO Contributing Editor and professor of national-security affairs at the Naval War College in Newport, Mackubin Owens. His first post is on unintended consequences of clear air legislation.
The Redwood Review nonfiction piece of the week is "Hogmaney (New Year's Eve)," by Christine L. Mullen.
In conversation at the Republican event that I mentioned over on Anchor Rising, differences of opinion arose with respect to prioritizing "libertarian" issues and "social" issues. To be honest, I think I'm too exhausted to take up that or any matter but so lucidly. Still, to get some thoughts down, I'll let my fingers type some compounding points, letting my eyes check in from time to time from behind heavy eyelids.
The bottom line is that all issues, even those that rouse libertarians, are moral, "social" issues. We may all want lower taxes, for example, but there must be moral reasoning to justify cutting them. Moreover, tax cuts are not an obvious good if separated from an invocation of some form of ideology, and there are two options for considering efforts to amass wealth: a larger purpose or greed.
Particularly in Rhode Island, folks are willing to give their charity by proxy. High taxes hurt a given family somewhat, but families can feel, whether justified or not, that they "gave" to others in dire need. They support a system in which the government does what people are, ostensibly, not willing to do to help each other. In the ineluctable cycle of such things, these people gain the mindset that they are investing in protection of themselves. That isn't true, at least not for most families, but it is the feeling that they buy with their tax dollars.
Mixed up with the moral vanity of supporting giveaways, money and the purchased trappings of modern life can be means to an end, or ends unto themselves. One gets the sense that, for some people, consent to high taxes is a palliative for guilt over greed. As if the Mercedes is forgiven because the taxes help to fund welfare.
In a sense, those trappings are buy-offs embedded in the hidden forces of an unhealthy worldview seeking validation — an anti-individualist, anti-religious, anti-family, misanthropic worldview. Unfortunately for those willing to be bribed, the cost rises over time, changing form; high taxes become time lost for the sake of work becomes a separation from family becomes a family spread out across the country because taxes are too high in one area, stifling opportunity, and accustoming parents, children, and siblings to hardly seeing each other anyway.
With these generalities, I'm not drawing a sufficiently solid line that it ought to be followed as an argument to promote tax cuts, or any other cause. However, it circles an important bit of strategy: the social issues that strain family life overlap any political issues that affect citizens directly or indirectly (e.g., taxes and economic policy). It isn't enough to tell people that they can keep more of their money. It isn't enough to say that children will be able to stay within an easy drive if the economy improves through the government's making some hard decisions. As the culture sinks generations-deep into its corrosive mire, we must increasingly convince people that the traditional family is important in the first place.
Libertarian reason unmoored from social conservative principles ultimately has no basis articulable in terms of pure reason. Principles will inhere, whatever the case, and for society to continue to function, we cannot allow those principles to be negative by default, as attacking libertarian issues alone would ensure.
The Redwood Review poem of the week is "Lighthouse Keeper," by Ingrid Mathews.
Although many proponents of same-sex marriage seem to believe that opponents' reasoning is merely cover for bigotry, the arguments against are internally consistent. Not so the other side. Even just the thesis of a post by Yale professor Jack Balkin illustrates the point: "Viewing [five legal theories] together one can see the choices that courts will have to make in upholding the rights of same-sex couples." Openly, here, it is assumed that the courts ought to take the goal of "upholding the rights of same-sex couples," not applying the law, as is the duty of their branch. Also openly, the emphasis is on methods to reach that goal, not a unified argument for why it can or should be reached.
The additional commentary that Balkin provides for each point is important to read, but consider a trimmed points one and two:
1) Sex equality. It violates sex equality to tell a man he cannot marry another man when a woman could do so. It violates sex equality to tell a woman she cannot marry another woman when a man could do so. The ban on same-sex marriage makes an illegal distinction on the basis of the sex of the parties. ...2) Sexual orientation discrimination. The ban on same-sex marriage discriminates against gays and lesbians in their choice of spouses.
Balkin states that the second option has the advantage of being "completely honest about what the problem is": identical treatment of a group. The difficulty that this presents, intellectually, is that homosexuals aren't discriminated against as a group. If the objective of marriage is to bridge the gap between sides in the single most fundamental human division — men and women — thereby joining potentially procreative couples, then homosexuals have exactly the same range of choices as heterosexuals. (It's worth noting that that wasn't the case with anti-miscegenation laws, which discriminated even in the range of options.)
Balkin says that one disadvantage of option two is that a court implementing it would have to add orientation to the list of suspect classifications, but that isn't enough; the court must also define marriage as something other than a pairing of men and women. To do so, it would have to make marriage "about" amorphous concepts like love, commitment, and care. This is where, pace Balkin, the decision would create "obvious problems for state prohibition of incestuous and polygamous marriages." Essentially, Balkin is counting on the judiciary, having created a right to same-sex marriage based on reasoning outside of the law itself, to discard much of that reasoning in order to adhere strictly to the letter of the law when further questions arise.
Option one is different mainly in that it approaches the issue as a matter of individual rights and is targeted more closely to the central question of any such ruling: what is marriage? As Balkin admits, the "disadvantage of the argument is that it uses sex equality doctrine to uphold what most people would say is really discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation." Essentially, to grant homosexuals the right to marry according to their orientation, such a ruling would label marriage as an inherently — definitionally — sexist institution.
What's worrying about this approach is that it avoids the group emphasis, perhaps as a means of avoiding the obvious rejoinder that men and women are equally free to marry people of the opposite sex. It suggests a particular man/woman who wishes to marry a particular man/woman and cannot, even though a particular woman/man could. In doing so, it also ultimately redefines marriage as a prerequisite, adding the view of marriage not as a broad social institution, but as a matter to be defined from the point of view of the individual. Again, only mere law stands between such a ruling and further expansion of marriage.
Of course, when the goal is to find a right, the consistency and the consequences are of secondary concern... if that.
The Timshel Music Song You Should Know this week is "Once Upon a Time" by Joe Parillo and Christine Harrington.
"Once Upon a Time" Joe Parillo and Christine Harrington, Jazz/Classical
Stream (HiFi)
from Sand Box
Readers will already know my likely comment on this:
New York is one of a few states without some form of one-step no-fault divorce, partly the result of years of opposition from some women's rights groups, the Catholic Church, legislators, and others who believe that easier divorces and quick settlements might harm one spouse--often women--who have historically earned less money or have not worked outside the home.Yet Judge Kaye, who leads the Court of Appeals and oversees New York's judiciary, argued in her speech that a "fair" compromise should be possible to dissolve marriages that are obviously over, protect the rights of both spouses, and aid victims of domestic violence who may find themselves trapped if their spouses evade fault or refuse to grant a divorce. She also called for appointing more judges to the heavily burdened Family Court system.
We must keep in mind that news context is often not accurate context, and cynicism may not be appropriate with Kaye, but modern government requires one to ask: Isn't it the legislature's job to craft compromises?
This was going to be a busy week anyway, so throwing forty hours of carpentry work into the mix has drained my days (and nights, for that matter). However, judging from the amount that I managed to post while teaching — with all of the out-of-school planning and grading and reading and so on — posts ought to be more frequent once I've got a schedule down.
In the meantime, I'll do my best to keep things 'round here interesting.
What does it mean to say that marriage "should precede governmental authority"? From opponents of same-sex marriage, it usually means that the government should adhere to the definition of marriage that filtered to it over the ages. In John Coleman's hands, writing in Reason, it's closer to an argument for same-sex marriage on the sly:
As we approach the anniversary of Valentine's own rebellion and denial, shouldn't the nation that pioneered a popular government of the people, by the people, and for the people" be the one that finally stands to assert the pre-governmental primacy of matrimonial privacy?It is time to privatize marriage. If the institution is really so sacred, it should lie beyond the withering hands of politicians and policy makers in Washington D.C. There should be no federal or state license that grants validity to love. There should be no state-run office that peers into our bedrooms and honeymoon suites. If the church thinks divorce and homosexuality are problematic, it should initiate the real dialogue to address these problems in-house rather than relying on state-sponsored coercion to affirm doctrinal beliefs. And if tax-codes and guardianships need some classification for couples, let's revise civil union standards to reflect those needs.
I wonder by what calculus tax-codes could need "classification for couples." More importantly, I can't help but notice that Coleman doesn't make a distinction that's very popular among people advocating positions similar to his: that between civil marriage and religious marriage. Granted, he alludes to the different roles of church and state, but separating the two types of marriages, I don't see — as Ramesh Ponnuru does — how Coleman's "separationist conclusion certainly follows" from his premise that "matters of personal character [should] precede governmental authority."
Consider his telling of a St. Valentine's story:
Around 270 A.D.—according to one tradition, at least—St. Valentine, a Roman cleric, was imprisoned for his opposition to Emperor Claudius' decree that young men (his potential crop of soldiers) could no longer marry. Valentine performed their ceremonies anyway and was thrown in jail for his obstinacy.
The truth of the matter is that nobody stops anybody from calling any ceremony a "marriage" and calling themselves "married"; it's already out of the hands of the state. In his time, St. Valentine's ceremonies also granted such "validity to love," but Claudius (i.e., the government) apparently felt compelled to recognize the marriages, otherwise there would have been no crime. They were, in essence, civil marriages.
For his part, Coleman wishes to outdo Claudius and forbid all civil marriages and insist on not recognizing any religious marriages. One could point to the difference that priests would remain free to perform marriage ceremonies outside of government acknowledgment, but that's already the case.
Coleman may lump all religion under "the church," but the reality is that some churches do perform same-sex marriage ceremonies; some have very little concern for previous divorces. However, when particular religious marriages follow the pattern of valid civil marriages — two people of opposite sex who are not currently married or closely related — the government merely saves couples the trouble of marrying twice, so to speak.
The question then becomes which relationships to recognize for non-religious reasons, and here is where same-sex marriage opponents apply the "marriage precedes governmental authority" rule. The right to marry and the definition of marriage are not the government's to change. While civil marriage may be a government creation, it is rooted in the lessons of marriage throughout history, and the government should therefore move very slowly, and with social consensus, before issuing a Claudius-like decree abolishing the institution as it has been known.
It should also steer clear of semantic games, such as Coleman's, recasting civil marriages as civil unions so as to neatly discard all considerations — intuited more than understood — that make traditional marriage doctrine more a matter of reason than of faith.
While we battle back and forth about the sanctity of evolution in the public school science curriculum, a reminder of the broader field in which we work is in order:
According to benchmarks for middle school education, the top objective for the district's math teachers is to teach "respect for human differences." The objective is for students to "live out the system-wide core value of 'respect for human differences' by demonstrating anti-racist/anti-bias behaviors."Priority No. 2 is where the basics come in, which is "problem solving and representation — students will build new mathematical knowledge as they use a variety of techniques to investigate and represent solutions to problems."
No, I'm not arguing that the establishment of political correctness as a central goal of education means that the door has been opened to ideology. No, I'm not taking this extreme example as representative. Still, our schools are not hard-line institutions of knowledge collection, and I don't believe that they ought to be.
It's also interesting to note that mathematicians and the ACLU aren't mounting a campaign to beat back this infringement of ideology — the armies of Unreason — on the cold truth of math. Shouldn't the courts be called in to straighten out these liberal fundamentalists?
The latest Notes & Commentary essay by Maureen Mullarkey is "Paradise Regained," reviewing Hannelore Baron at Senior & Shopmaker, Stephen Talasnik at Marlborough Chelsea, and Susan Shatter at Lyons Wier Gallery.
I apologize for the lack of posts, this evening. For various reasons, I didn't get home until later than I'd expected, and I made it to my computer only to find tons of comment/ping spam. That wasn't a problem, per se, but it appears that there were so many that my email program stopped saving messages, only subject lines. So, I then had to poke around looking for a means of salvaging the messages and, when that proved impossible, to email a few folks requesting that they resend their messages.
If you emailed me and didn't receive such a note, please resend your email. And as a general note, if you ever come across spam among the comments, please let me know.
Wrote Herman Melville to Nathaniel Hawthorne on June 29, 1851, in the final months of Moby-Dick's production:
Since you have been here, I have been building some shanties of houses (connected with the old one) and likewise some shanties of chapters and essays. I have been plowing and sowing and raising and painting and printing and praying, -- and now begin to come out upon a less bustling time, and to enjoy the calm prospect of things from a fair piazza at the north of the old farm house here.
Much has changed, these past one hundred and fifty years, and few moderns who share Melville's vocation will have any experience with such things as plowing and building shanties. (Far too many have little experience with praying.) Those among us who are conservative of temperament inevitably wonder what has been lost. What disconnection from raw reality does the man suffer who is multiple steps removed from tangible life, whose every good is constructed by others? What human sympathy drains from a person who has transcended the hardships that the past century has unevenly worn away?
We who make a craft of thinking can string together ideas, and if we write, we fashion them with words. But this painstaking labor raises mere ephemera, and often in desperate throes we cry for the recognition that makes our efforts real. Strange, then, that so many who build only shanties of thought consider themselves above those who construct such things as only a fool would deny.
Today I begin work as a full-time carpenter, and I expect the benefits to my soul to be worth well beyond their weight in the lumber that I will cut and hammer. Being somewhat green, I'll be the least in every way that matters throughout the workday. With that perspective, perhaps my evening labor will be worth more than the vanity of its author. And when I slip into bed, my children's house heated and the next day's meals awaiting in cupboards and on refrigerator shelves, with the sense of prayers answered because heard, the prospect of things will be calm in the only ways that truly matter, now or one hundred and fifty years from now.
"Hello, King John!" shouted Huck amiably when he and D. had reached the mosaic window on the front stairs and could see John struggling to keep Jim from jumping on him.
"Huck, you get this mongrel away from me before I give him a swift kick!"
"Aw, he ain't doin' nothin' but sayin' hello and how-de-do, yer majesty," Huck responded, but whistled Jim away for safety's sake.
Brushing paw marks from the front of his white robe, John scolded Huck, "You know that I don't like to be called that."
"Sorry, sir. I'll stop, promise. Been visitin' the Nonesuch Inn much lately, old man?"
"Don't you old man me neither, Huck! I'm barely ten years your senior."
"Ah, more senior'n I'll be in thirty, I reckon, and were I a hundred, I reckon I'd be the junior still! But why don't we let bygones be bygones, John? S'been nearly since you was my age that we been disagreeable t'each other, ain't it?"
Relaxing a bit and subtly, very subtly, smiling, John said, "Huck, you do this every time you arrive. You know that before you leave you'll have done yet another horrible and inconsiderate atrocity to me, so why do you bother apologizing before you've even done it?"
"Aw, shucks, John, you know that what I want is fer everybody on this here raft to be satisfied and feel right and kind towards each other!" said Huck, winking at D.
"Yes, I'm sure that's exactly what you're after," John retorted, but he let it lie at that, then, changing the subject, "I see you've rousted the rabbit from her hole."
"Naw, it was Jim. He's always been a sight more person'ble than me. What would you want to go scarin' this girl into stayin' hidden for two days fer anyway?"
"It wasn't anything I did. I've been nothing but helpful to her. It was the doing of the other new arrival, Alex. Wasn't it, young lady?"
D. mumbled that she supposed that he was telling the truth.
"I did attempt in earnest to retrieve your keys," John avowed. "In fact," he continued, "I've managed, not to find your clothes, but at least some comfortable looking slippers that might be fit for you to use for the time being." He raised a finger for them to stay put, disappeared into the courtyard, and returned with a pair of hard-soled slippers that did, indeed, look comfortable. "It's a petty conciliation, I know, but I searched them out to show that I do not condone what has happened since your arrival."
D. put them on; they fit perfectly. "Perhaps I have been a bit too rash in suspecting you," she acquiesced.
An awkward silence was broken when Huck clapped his hands and said, "Welp, I'm glad we've got that settled. The lady 'n' me were on our way for a stroll to wear out the new shoes, d'ye like to come, yer emminence? Or would you rather stay here and partake of the provisions I put in the pantry for you?"
John's eyebrows raised, apparently catching the exact meaning of "provisions." "I've been walking all morning. I suppose I'll have something to eat and then relax with a good book."
"Oh, yer welcome to the food, too, but I suspect you've a bout a' thirst," Huck said, laughing. "Just don't stuff yerself so full that yer too cross-eyed to read." John shot a mildly nasty look at Huck, who only laughed and slapped him on the back. Then to D., "Le's go an' leave the king to his refreshment."
She didn't object, in large part because she hoped their walk might bring them to Huck's car, and neither did Jim the dog, so out they went. As soon as the door closed behind them, John marched hastily toward the kitchen.
On the porch, Huck whispered to D. that he thought John would be feeling considerably more mellow by the time they got back.
D. wanted to check on her car, but Huck convinced her that without the keys there was no reason to frustrate herself further, so they walked north rather than south. Between blithe bouts of hopping around them, Jim would charge far off into the woods until Huck whistled for his return. The dog came back each time with a different stick, letting his two companions take turns at trying to wrest each from him and running off after a new one when they succeeded.
The foliage pressed in thickly around them.
"You must get lost out here quite a bit," D. remarked.
"There's paths if you know where to look." Huck indicated the direction they were heading, and D. saw that the bushes leaned just slightly outward. She supposed that traffic on this particular highway was light, and a fractional regret presented itself for ratification when she considered that the off-road scars left by her car would be a long time healing. But toward her defense, she recalled that the road off of which she had driven a mile-and-a-half from where her car now lingered inanimate had been on a new map that she had bought the week before and was already losing ground to the forest at its borders and gushing sprouts of green at uneven intervals across the asphalt.
"Huck?"
"Yes'm?" he responded as he threw yet another stick out of sight between the trees. Jim watched it fly then bounded briskly in the opposite direction.
"You said you parked your car quite a distance from the house right?"
"Yes'm."
"Then you must not have been able to bring all that many provisions with you."
Chuckling, as if he thought that she was trying to catch him in a contradiction, "There's a wheelbarrow I leave near the spot when I go."
"But still..."
"I left most of the stuff that'll keep in my truck. I reckon I'll go back and get the rest in time."
"Oh," she said, somewhat dejectedly, then, "Would you like some help?"
"Naw, it's my part to do. House rules."
"Oh great, more rules."
"You'll catch on."
"To be honest, I don't think I'm going to be making that a priority."
"Do what you like, but there's a bundle a' int'resting characters to be met here."
"I'll bet."
They walked on. D. would have asked about some of these "int'resting characters," but she figured that Huck would only tell her that she would see when she would see, or something along those lines. Jim took after a squirrel sniffing around beneath a nearby tree. It ran around in a confused circle and leapt up the trunk, halting in alertness fifteen feet above the barking dog, who began running around the tree and stopping every few revolutions to make sure the squirrel knew that he was still there. Whistling, Huck threw a stick away from the scene. Jim disappeared in the stick's general direction, his tongue lolling out the side of his mouth, and returned with a rock that was one size too big for him. Huck laughed and told Jim to drop the stone. Doing as he was told, the dog fell into a meandering amble a pace ahead of the people, looking back and waiting whenever the distance grew to a dozen yards or so. A bird called out above them. Another responded with a countermelody a few trees over. D. looked at Huck.
"So what's this Nonesuch Inn."
Huck smiled fondly to a memory, "Oh that goes back to the beginnin' of my knowin' of John and Nathaniel." He snickered.
"A funny story?"
"If you know how to look at it."
"Well, I'm of a mind to hear a good story if you're of a mind to tell one."
Huck smiled kindly, old age obviously loitering behind his pensive posture as he glanced out over the field to which they had come. The grass was wild and dead, but still high, and the wind blew across it in waves of life. Huck smiled again, this time with a bit more enthusiasm; the old age, if it had not been an illusion, skittered away or was sucked into the boyishly glinting hazel of his eyes.
If this doesn't furrow your brow, well, it should:
"It was an unintended consequence of McCain-Feingold. Instead of going to the parties, rich people are putting money into these 527s in the dark of night," Lott told the Sun Herald in Biloxi, Miss.In other words, some of those rich people might be trying to throw out incumbents.
McCain is even more blatant about the incumbent-protection angle. As The Washington Times reported last week, "McCain said lawmakers should support the bill out of self-interest, because it would prevent a rich activist from trying to defeat an incumbent by directing money into a political race through a 527 organization."
"That should alarm every federally elected member of Congress," McCain said.
Indeed, it certainly does.
Subsequent to these catches, Ryan Sager raises an important point: grouping citizens under a "shadowy and devious" number — 527 — doesn't remove their guaranteed right to free speech. Now that all three branches of government have abandoned the Constitution in this respect, there's little incentive among our legislative rulers to correct their error.
Although Sager doesn't make this point, his closing hopes that a future Supreme Court will revisit the issue hint at a broader concern about that branch. In recent decades, SCOTUS has been better known for finding new rights in the Constitution. With its rubber stamping of "campaign finance reform," the court has effectively ignored a right.
The time may not be far off that American citizens have to reclaim their own government. Let's hope that it can be accomplished from within the system.
Increasingly, it seems that a "yes" or "no" answer to the question of same-sex marriage ultimately relates to a series of "yeses" or "nos," leading to irreconcilable versions of reality. Consider this paragraph from an interesting post in which Greg Wallace ponders fatherhood:
I hope I've been able to make it clear that both the mother's and father's love are essential for any child to have a complete sense of being loved. Without this sense of "well-being" from mother, and the benevolent provision, protection and boundaries from father, the erotic drive that naturally emerges in adolescents is raw and untamed. When this happens, erotic love becomes unmanageable and literally enslaving, rather than a Gift that adds to the beauty of a committed monogamous relationship. That's why pornography was so powerful in my life as a teenager and young adult, and why my homosexuality seemed to be little more than a never ending dead end street.
In a thread elsewhere, on which I'll likely comment before tonight is through, I noticed the insistence that same-sex attraction is just the way homosexuals are. The object was to claim, for homosexuality, the precedent established for race: it's immutable and natural, and any social structure that is exclusionary on its basis is ipso facto discriminatory in an unacceptable way.
I don't intend a definitive proclamation with this, but note how well that point of view dovetails with the usually corresponding understanding of what children need for parents. If genes are destiny (perhaps in conjunction with extremely early environmental factors), then who one's parents are doesn't matter except in a controllable social sense — mitigable after the fact. In the contrary view, if the subconscious and overt behavior of parents contributes to fundamental qualities in their children, then traditional family structure carries subtle qualities that are important to preserve.
In the first case, only large aspects of the parent-child relationship are important: love, support, trust, and so on. One parent could do it, although two would be better, and there's no reason that three, four, or five "parents" mightn't be even better. But in the second case, nigh intangible aspects of the parent-child relationship are just as important: interactions between males and females, binary and complementary qualities of the parents, and so on.
To put it bluntly, if a parent can cause homosexuality, then one can, as Greg hopes to, "identify the father [or mother] wounds" and "release them" as part of a "healing process." Treating homosexual relationships as equivalent to heterosexual marriage, if it does not break the link between parenting and marriage, will normalize circumstances that affect child development profoundly.
The limited research on the topic appears to confirm this point; homosexuality is more frequent among those raised by homosexuals. Supporters of same-sex marriage always offer some form of qualifier, when they declare "no difference," to the effect that children raised by same-sex parents don't differ from other children in a way that really matters. But this statement is made after the assumption that sexual orientation doesn't matter.
Whatever one's level of "tolerance," the question ultimately becomes whether homosexuality is so inconsequential that individuals and society ought to be completely indifferent about it. In that respect, it really is a choice. And again, the answer must be "yes" or "no."
A few days ago, reader Nosy emailed me the following in response to my posts on sex ed. (here and here):
Here is something to ponder. There is no one teaching "safer gangbanging". That is, no one even for a minute suggests that children and teenagers should be taught "Don't get into a gang, but if you do, here's some suggestions that might keep you from becoming a drug addict or getting killed..."No, what is taught is something else: "Do not join a gang. Do not socialize with people you know to be in a gang. Do not go to places where gang members are known to hang out. If you are in a gang, get out now, we will help you leave."
Isn't that "Gang Abstinence"? Shouldn't we be more realistic, and accept the fact that some teenagers will experiment with gangs, and teach them how to have a safer gang experience, rather than just teach this simpleminded "Don't do it" stuff? Aren't we just setting our kids up for failure, when they are tempted to join a gang and don't know how to be a gangbanger safely?
Well, a post by John Hawkins doesn't quite prove the new maxim that contemporary society undermines the possibility of satire, but it comes close:
The story of young Devin Brown should be a cautionary tale about what happens when you fall in the wrong crowd, but is instead being used as a way to attack the police. Brown, a 13 year-old "eighth-grader at a magnet school for gifted youth," started hanging out with gang bangers,"Friends and neighbors said the teen had recently begun skipping school and spending time with gang members after his father's death last year. They insisted, however, that he wasn't in a gang."It's a bad crowd he was starting to hang with but he wasn't a gang member yet _ and I say yet," said Kevin Mitchell, a gang prevention specialist who knew Brown and himself a former gang member.
... Instead of carping about the police, who's asking what this kid's parent was doing while he was hanging out with gang members? Why aren't we hearing calls for the police to crack down on the gangs?
Here are the details:
According to police, Garcia and his partner were on routine patrol near Gage and Grand avenues when they saw the driver of the maroon Toyota Camry run a red light. The officers followed the car onto the Harbor Freeway and then tried to pull the driver over.A three-minute chase ended when the driver lost control of the Toyota and drove onto the sidewalk. The officers then parked their patrol car behind the Toyota.
A 14-year-old passenger fled, but was later apprehended. When Devin, who was driving, allegedly backed into the officers' car, Garcia opened fire.
One can hear the thought in the air: if only he'd been taught how to conduct safe grand theft auto. Truly, I'm not making light of this heartbreaking incident, but whether the misguided reaction to tragedy is to blame the police or to offer but-if-you-do guidance to other children, the result will be more loss, not less.
The Redwood Review fiction piece of the week is "Dragons," by Gary Bolstridge.
I had forgotten the anecdote that Jay Nordlinger reprints today, and since it ought not be forgotten, I rereprint it here (I don't think Mr. N will mind):
... I enrolled in the Near Eastern Studies Department at the University of Michigan, where I took several courses, including the Arabic language. The department was dominated by extremists. The graduate assistants, certainly, were Arabs to the "left" of the PLO, meaning, they took Arafat and Co. to be sell-outs, untrue to the cause. There was no discussion of the legitimacy of Israel: It wasn't discussable; Israel was illegitimate, and every worthy person knew it.One day, we trooped into an auditorium to see a documentary on the conflict. I can't remember the name of the documentary or of the documentary-maker, but I can see her, and she was on hand to introduce her film and to take questions. The film featured mainly radical Palestinians talking about dismembering Israel.
During the Q&A, a middle-aged white woman — a little fat — raised her hand and asked the following question: "These were such extreme voices. You've made a wonderful film, but couldn't you have found some softer, more moderate voices?"
In the row in which I was sitting were several Arab students — older ones, graduate students — and one of them, in front of everybody, stood up and said words I will never forget. I won't forget the words, or his face, or his relatively quiet, determined tone. He said: "I will kill you." (This was directed at the woman who had asked the question.) His buddies got him to sit down.
But that's not the important part — what he said is not the important part. The important part is, no one said a word. No one reacted. We all sort of coughed, and looked away, nervously. We all pretended that what had just occurred had not, in fact, occurred — or that it was normal, acceptable. We simply ignored it.
The emphasis is his.
Yes, yes, I know it all comes down to the individual's faith; it always has, and it always will. But as I've poked around the Internet today, my mind began to organize, and before I've reached any conclusions, I thought I'd throw a question out there into cyberspace:
What are the priorities among the issues that we face in these insane modern times?
The liberal grip on the mainstream media is proving difficult to maintain when that hand is needed to swat at an upstart New Media. The universities are finding their practices under increasing scrutiny and professors' credibility up for questioning. Mel Gibson's independent film has (we can hope) begun a similar reckoning in Hollywood, but much of the art world remains unperturbed.
As the Democrats diminish in power, the radical fringe continues to assert its influence. Republicans are dealing with their own internal struggles, between such factions as social conservatives and libertarians. Meanwhile, the judiciary continues to expand the power created by its quick 'n' easy method of Constitutional amendment. And on top of it all, forces continue to push for a world government.
We've got the same-sex marriage debate, yes, and the larger sexual revolution trending to redefine the essence of the human family and human relationships. But then, we've got scientists running full-tilt toward technologies that will redefine humanity itself. Then there are scientists seeking immortality in a test tube. Abortion is on t