So now openly gay soldiers get to fight and die in neocon-imperialist wars too?
David Brooks saw such ironic progressive victories coming. In his book Bobos in Paradise, he wrote that everything “transgressive” gets “digested by the mainstream bourgeois order, and all the cultural weapons that once were used to undermine middle-class morality . . . are drained of their subversive content.”
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Two decades ago, the gay Left wanted to smash the bourgeois prisons of monogamy, capitalistic enterprise, and patriotic values and bask in the warm sun of bohemian “free love” and avant-garde values. In this, they were simply picking up the torch from the straight Left of the 1960s and 1970s, who had sought to throw off the sexual hang-ups of their parents’ generation along with their gray flannel suits.
As a sexual-lifestyle experiment, they failed pretty miserably, the greatest proof being that the affluent and educated children (and grandchildren) of the baby boomers have re-embraced the bourgeois notion of marriage as an essential part of a successful life. Sadly, it’s the lower-middle class that increasingly sees marriage as an out-of-reach luxury. The irony is that such bourgeois values — monogamy, hard work, etc. — are the best guarantors of success and happiness.
Of course, the lunacy of the bohemian free-love shtick should have been obvious from the get-go. For instance, when Michael Lerner, a member of the anti–Vietnam War “Seattle Seven,” did marry, in 1971, the couple exchanged rings made from the fuselage of a U.S. aircraft downed over Vietnam and cut into a cake inscribed in icing with a Weatherman catchphrase, “Smash Monogamy.”
Today Lerner is a (divorced and remarried) somewhat preposterous, prosperous progressive rabbi who officiates at all kinds of marriages — gay and straight — and, like pretty much the entire Left, loves the idea of open gays becoming cogs in the military-industrial complex.
The gay experiment with open bohemianism was arguably shorter. Of course, AIDS played an obvious and tragic role in focusing attention on the downside of promiscuity. But even so, the sweeping embrace of bourgeois lifestyles by the gay community has been stunning.
Nowhere is this more evident — and perhaps exaggerated — than in popular culture. Watch ABC’s Modern Family. The sitcom is supposed to be “subversive” in part because it features a gay couple with an adopted daughter from Asia. And you can see why both liberal proponents and conservative opponents of gay marriage see it that way. But imagine you hate the institution of marriage and then watch Modern Family’s hardworking bourgeois gay couple through those eyes. What’s being subverted? Traditional marriage, or some bohemian identity-politics fantasy of homosexuality?
By the way, according to a recent study, Modern Family is the No. 1 sitcom among Republicans (and the third show overall behind Glenn Beck and The Amazing Race) but not even in the top 15 among Democrats, who prefer darker shows like Showtime’s Dexter, about a serial killer trying to balance work and family between murders.
Or look at the decision to let gays openly serve in the military through the eyes of a principled hater of all things military. From that perspective, gays have just been co-opted by The Man. Meanwhile, the folks who used Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell as an excuse to keep the military from recruiting on campuses just saw their argument go up in flames.
Personally, I have always felt that gay marriage was an inevitability, for good or ill (most likely both). I do not think that the arguments against gay marriage are all grounded in bigotry, and I find some of the arguments persuasive. But I also find it cruel and absurd to tell gays that living the free-love lifestyle is abominable while at the same time telling them that their committed relationships are illegitimate too.
Many of my conservative friends — who oppose both civil unions and gay marriage and object to rampant promiscuity — often act as if there’s some grand alternative lifestyle for gays. But there isn’t. And given that open homosexuality is simply a fact of life, the rise of the HoBos — the homosexual bourgeoisie — strikes me as good news.
Yesterday I saw a tweet by a gay marriage proponent that read as follows: "I am opposed marriage in general, but I support gay marriage." That's a hell of a rejoinder to everything Jonah wrote above and it still has room for 79 more characters!
The last sentence of Jonah's penultimate paragraph collapses the last 15 years of gay marriage advocacy into a single sentence. Indeed over the course of the last 30 years or so "gay marriage" went from being two words that no one had even heard before in the course of human history to being something that could get you labeled--by a conservative no less--as "abominable" and "absurd" to even oppose.
Up until very, very recently what was self-evident to the point of being confusing to even try and explain is the inarguable point that marriage only came into existence in the first place because men and women procreate. Aside from that fact, the word "marriage" wouldn't exist.
Jonah leaps over this basic point. When we ask “should we include gay couples in this thing called marriage?” we don’t even know what we are asking. We might as well ask “should ‘men’ be included in this thing we call ‘women’?” Sure, we can collectively decide that henceforth all people will be known as “women,” but since we will still be left with two different sexes all we will have done is to render the word “woman” meaningless. Likewise, since it is not possible to include gay couples in the institution of marriage, the real debate we’re having--and we don’t even know it--is whether the government should end or at least redefine on its own terms the natural right of marriage.
The stunning assumption of this whole piece is that marriage is primarily sentimental and self-gratifying. Let me end this already too long comment by quoting Douglas Farrow from his excellent book on the subject:
"[The origins of] close-relationship theory...can be traced back behind the likes of Alfred Kinsey or Margaret Mead to Friedrich Engels...it interests itself in gratification, not renunciation. In short it offers a radically different account of the nature and function of marriage, and so also the politics of marriage."
Anyone interested in a longer ramble of mine can go here.
It does appear that NR is rapidly conceding defeat on the issue of the morality of homosexual behavior; never mind the trashing of traditional American family life. I guess anything goes now. Scoff if you like but in not too many years our societal downward spiral will have reached a point where polygamy will be considered acceptable and decrying such behavior will be considered "hate" speech. No longer will homosexual behavior be something that is tolerated because it is private activity but it will be actually promoted as enforced public policy. Look to England where religious reservations are landing people in jail for speaking their mind.
Perhaps I’m missing Jonah’s point with the Michael Lerner story, but an analogy came to mind that goes like this: Used to be folks on the Left such as John Dewey and Victoria Woodhull eschewed liberalism under the banner of progressivism. But look at the Left today! Why nearly all of them march to the drumbeat of liberalism.
The gargantuan issue Jonah only grazes is this: "Sadly, it’s the lower-middle class that increasingly sees marriage as an out-of-reach luxury."
An entire class of Americans, already light on values, correctly recognizes that it can't commit for economic reasons, but fails to stop copulating and spawning like other creatures of God, and instead digs itself deeper into the economic hole.
It's not that homosexuality is bourgeois these days that bothers me ... it's that they have transcended bourgeois and become a class of their own. They aren't just everyday 'owners of capital' like the rest of us, they also own the mantle of 'most socially enlightened' or '(currently) most persecuted minority' or 'most likely to be hip.'
Elton John and David Furnish father(?) a child via a surrogate mother. The surrogate is in California because it's too difficult to arrange in the UK. The child is named Levon. He's born (delivered) on Christmas Day. Did the New York Times report 'God is dead', too?
Congratulations abound ... but as I asked on Ricochet, what are we congratulating? They have used celebrity, money and technology to bring a child into the world. This would not be an option for your average gay couple.
They aren't the bourgeoisie, they are the entitled aristocracy and above question.
"Modern Family is the No. 1 sitcom among Republicans"? Is that true? It is a great show, but that's surprising, to say the least, if accurate.
I agree with Jonah, homosexual marriage is a cultural (and legal) inevitability. The percentages of young people who favor gay marriage will eventually be too much to overcome.
I was reading a report from the CDC a year or two ago that said homosexual men still account for fully half of all new HIV infections each year. I'm not sure how, after decades of "safe-sex" counseling, that is possible. But, it is. Perhaps marriage, a legitimization of monogamy through legal commitment, will ebb that tide. While I'm hopeful that will be true, I won't be surprised if it isn't.
Rocket bravo! Jonah your sentence to be truthful should not read "Personally I have thought that gay marriage is an inevitability..."
To "Personally I have always thought that destruction of marriage is an inevitability..."
We think because we grew up with certain assumptions and beliefs that we can hold radical social challenges in balance and not them go to far. However our children will grow up in a different world with different assumptions.
The laudable winning over of some people to the "bourgeois" values they once rejected is only because people fought to keep those values alive. You think that it is ok that affluent people have re-embraced marriage and the middle class to poor have rejected it? Would it not have been better to win that generations culture war in the first instance?
You very much underestimate the harm that gay "marriage" will do to marriage it will make the term meaningless and useless. Exactly what we don't need right now.
Would you like this situation to play out in a bar one day...good looking man, "Would you like to get a room."
person being hit on, "Ahh I am married you know..."
good looking man, "I am not sure what you mean by married is it just a friendship thing or what?"
"Elton John and David Furnish father(?) a child via a surrogate mother"
Therein lies my problem with the homosexual mafia - their unrelenting need to procreate, no matter how biologically impossible that may be. I can't think of anything more cruel that to purposefully bring a child into this world with the express intent of denying that child either a mother or father. I feel the same way about single women who succumb to the sound of their own biological clocks and find a father for their child in a test-tube.
It is perhaps, the single greatest expression of selfishness possible today; Sating your own need for procreation at the expense of the person whom you're using to fulfill that very need. It's sick. And, it's worsened by the fact that there are so many children in this world growing up in orphanages and foster homes who would love an opportunity to live with just a little security.
The task of redefining marriage primarily comes down to separating procreation from having any fundamental relationship to the origin or meaning of matrimony. Perhaps Jonah and Scott Wilson are correct. Perhaps the next generation will be downright blasé about this sort of thing, which Maggie Gallagher discusses so brilliantly here.
But the germ of redefining marriage has been around much longer than its current "inevitability." Perhaps the redefinition of marriage isn't quite so inevitable after all. On February 11, 1861, Abraham Lincoln made the following analogy between what was then called the "Free Love" movement with the succession of the southern states (taken from Harry Jaffa's A New Birth of Freedom, p. 255):
"[For the Southern states] the means for the preservation of the Union...is of a very thin and airy character...In their view, the Union, as a family relation, would not be anything like a regular marriage at all, but only a sort of free-love arrangement, to be maintained by what that sect calls passionate attraction."
I am furious at women who have their law firm partnership, their condo, their BMW, and need to acquire that last possession to round out their otherwise perfect lives.
Every child deserves two parents.
Frankly, I'm not so sure that every child needs a hetero dad and a hetero mom, but certainly single parenthood is profoundly suboptimal.
MikeB, you are unconvinced that it's best for a child to be raised by his mother and father, but you are convinced that every child needs 2 caregivers. I'm curious--where did you come up with 2 as the ideal number? Wouldn't 3 be better than 2? And wouldn't 4 be better than 3? You say every child deserves 2. Why 2?
It seems to me that the primary purpose of marriage is to legally tie a man to the woman he procreates with. This is imperfect but it works better than anything else mankind has invented. If you look at marriage as procreation centered, then homosexual marriage makes no sense.
In the modern world, most people view marriage as primarily some sort of personal commitment to limit yourself to having sex with only one other person. Allowing homosexuals to marry fits with this world view.
I am concerned because rampant homosexuality is generally associated with societies in decline.
It is not surprising that, immediately after Congress repealed DADT, the President of the United States and Commander-in-Chief, scholar, world-traveller,avowed Christian, father of two children,fifty years old, would leap upon the stage to confess he is "wrestlingwith the conflictions of his convictions". We have not taken any comfort in the man since, oh, quite some time before his ascendancy to leader of the free world. Nor is it surprising that the second-in-command,confessed Catholic Christian, father, considerably older than fifty, veteran of dozens of years of sober and extended deliberative Senate debate, would also, so soon after passage of DADT repeal, leap upon the stage to admonish "give it up folks; homoexual marriage is a done deal." For we have witnessed the man in action for a good deal longer than the President.
What does cause us some distress, however, is that a pillar of the NRO community apparently is, again hastily right upon the heels of the repeal of DADT, standing athwart and casually remarking "Come on through, just be orderly about it."
@Rocky: All good questions! I am really, really sure that two is better than one -- can we go with that, or do you need more than an assertion?
As for more than two -- it really depends on the relationship. All in all, three co-equals won't work, the way three shareholders in a corporation or three partners in a general partnership don't work. Two always gang up on one. Ask any corporate lawyer. Now two co-equals plus, say, a mother-in-law . . . depending on the dynamic, that could be even better than two. Four and more starts to get really complicated.
Fair analysis?
Let me proceed to take a bit of a detour. (Traditional) marriage is a strange intersection of the ecclesiastical and the civil.* After all, what other package of legal rights can be conferred upon individuals by a member of the cloth? Do any of us think that, if marriage were invented today, religion would have any more to do with it than, say, first communions and bar mitzvahs have upon the legal age to drive, vote and drink?
So for those of us who fondly remember the day we took our vows, had the rice thrown at us, etc., etc., gay marriage sort of eats at all that might be considered warmly traditional. I assert that it hasn't made my memories a bit less warm.
*Contrary to popular belief, you don't need a marriage license to be married. You need two things: (1) you have to be a qualifying person, e.g., not 12 years old, not your spouse's brother, etc., and (2) you need "solemnization," which is a ceremony that can be performed by any priest, rabbi, etc. Now, it is against the law for a religious official to perform a marriage ceremony unless he sees (and signs) a marriage license, but that doesn't make the spouses any less married if the officiant doesn't obey the law. It just makes the officiant a criminal and the spouses legally married.
I have to take yet another crack at this. Jonah writes, "But I also find it cruel and absurd to tell gays that living the free-love lifestyle is abominable while at the same time telling them that their committed relationships are illegitimate too."
Jonah performs a sleight of hand here that I'll call an 'honest sleight' because I bet he doesn't even see it himself. Notice that the only way a conservative can get out of the cruelty that Jonah has accused them of is by redefining marriage to mean an intimate relationship between two people (or however he chooses to redefine marriage; it is only necessary that the new definition not be exclusive to the procreative potential of men and women).
The sleight of hand here is in his presenting a conclusion as a premise. In his book "Nation of B*st*rds" (NRO won't let me quote the title in full!) Douglas Farrow describes the technique as follows:
"Marriage, it is said, is an intimate relationship between adults. Jill and Jane are intimate adults. Therefore Jill and Jane must be allowed to marry or their rights will be violated. And what prevents them from marrying? The common-law definition. Conclusion? We must change the definition. And to what will we change it? Well, to 'a union of two persons' -- that is to an intimate relationship between adults. If the Supreme Court is looking for tautology, there it is! And if this dishonest argumentation, which takes its conclusion as a premise, is not acknowledged as such and rooted out, the integrity of the law will certainly be the next casualty of same-sex 'marriage.'"
@Rocky: Not to be cute, but there's "marriage" as you and I know it, and "marriage" the way gay marriage advocates would have the word redefined.
Just because the second part of that may come to pass doesn't mean what you and I consider "marriage" will change. It's the difference between a legal definition and a traditional one.
In Israel, people who would be hauled off to the gas chambers in a second Holocaust are officially ruled "Not Jewish" all the time.
Rocket nails it: Jonah's rationale for seeing the "pro" side of redefining marriage to include gays is question-begging. So is this:
"Many of my conservative friends — who oppose both civil unions and gay marriage and object to rampant promiscuity — often act as if there’s some grand alternative lifestyle for gays. But there isn’t."
Not sure I agree that celibacy is impossible (some of us manage it at times, whether we want to or not). But even conceding that point, so what? You don't have a normal mating instinct? Tough. You're SOL. Just like the woman who wants to be in a marine infantry unit, or the man who wants to work at Hooters. To ask that society re-define itself to accommodate your condition, consequences to society be damned, is outrageously self-centered. And to claim it as a matter of right is beyond the pale.
Wynguard--well thanks. I'll second Allesnarf as well.
I just wrote a comment to Jonah's Corner posting, but it's so far down the Corner river at this point that I thought I'd cross post here. On the Corner, Jonah expands a bit on his inevitability argument. Here's what I wrote in response (and I added a bit more here):
There's so much to respond to here, but I'll just deal with the inevitability argument. If gay marriage is inevitable, it's inevitability is entirely a function of the worst kind of judicial activism. Newt Gingrich advocated the drug prescription law because he said some kind of massive government entitlement was inevitable. If I picked my policy stands based on whether or not I thought liberals would win in the long run, I'd be somewhere to the left of Nancy Pelosi.
Jonah also makes the argument that beyond the inevitability, gay marriage is actually very conservative. Well, as lawyers say, that's an argument. I recently read an NRO original where a professor from the University of Vermont laid out an argument step by step that communism shared all the tenets of Christianity. I found it more convincing than Jonah's argument that gay marriage is actually classical liberalism.
The last thing all this reminds me of is one of the Nixon books by Monica Crowley. It's hard not to really like Nixon the man when reading these books (I didn't like Nixon the President) but there was one page where Nixon tells Crowley that he's a liberal when it comes to healthcare because his brother had Leukemia.
To some extent, much of what Jonah has written on gay marriage reads like a burning urge to vote 'present.' Over the years most of the best arguments I've read on NRO have come from Jonah because he usually stakes out a tough position with big guns. But to stake out a position by arguing that this is what you've said all along reminds me of yet another politician...oh I'll just stop here.
I detect quite a bit of irony in Jonah's column. The term Bourgeois carries a lot of historical and social baggage. It's connotations are negative. From Roussaeau through Marx and Satre, the term Bourgeosie was one of scorn and derision. Artists of the late 19th and 20th Century declared war on the Bourgeoisie and thier institutions -including marriage. Bohemians, many of them gay looked down on marriage as oppressive, sexist, and a relic of past injustices.
So, at a time when the Bourgeosie are bailing out on marriages (co-habitation is the new norm), gays are rushing into it. I think it was Lezak Kowalowski who wrote many years ago that the problem with Post-Modern Marxism was that the Proletariat became "embourgeosie" -that is, the Proletariat was joining the Bourgeois. And one cannot lead the vanguard of a Marxist revolution without a Proletariat.
Perhaps the same is occuring with the so-called Gay Artistic Left. The Bourgeois can no longer be shocked. And instead of raising the consciousness of the Bourgeosie, the Gays are being absorbed by them.
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