“Why did you get married?” said Scrooge.
“Because I fell in love.”
“Because you fell in love!” growled Scrooge . . .
— Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol
Most of what is wrong with Mr. Girgis’s reply to my article discloses itself when we consider a man who has testicular azoospermia, knows it, falls in love with a woman, and tells her that to a certainty they cannot have children. If these two want to marry, Girgis would marry them. His reason is that the sex they will have is oriented to procreation. But it is not. They will never have children, and their knowing this will make it impossible for them to see their union as procreatively oriented. Thus falls apart Girgis’s explanation of why they should follow the norms he and I care about: The reality of their relationship precisely does not call for life-sharing in order to foster children they know they will not have.
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Why do they want to marry? Is it not because they are in love, have committed to spending their lives together, and want the law to protect their commitment when it comes to such things as property and health care? And are a same-sex couple not also able to make this commitment and deserve such protection?
Both the same-sex couple and the man with testicular azoospermia and his wife have reason to follow marital norms, which I presented and Girgis has ignored. Where there exist children to protect, I want our law to enforce the norms, by making it harder to divorce and by making unwed parents jointly responsible for their children’s welfare. I did not mention it, but I also advocate using the tax code to encourage people who are married and can do so to procreate, and who have procreated but not married to do so. All of this would underscore the serious implications of procreative-type sex (which means: sex that might lead to procreation — not, as Girgis has it, sex like this), and would do so more directly, hence more clearly, than marriage law of the kind traditionalists favor.
Girgis also has ignored this proposal, an omission that reduces his discussion of the sociology of parenting to irrelevance, though it does set him up to falsely claim that I present a brief in Partilla and Riddell’s defense. His implausible view of sex, according to which it is only about the getting of pleasure if not had like this, and his belief that wanting to spend your life with someone can mean nothing other than wanting to spend every waking second with that person, are not true to human experience. And he really is the dualist, because he is making judgments of value based on generalizations about bodies rather than generalizations about being a person — that is, existing in the first person with one’s body and mind united.
To answer Girgis’s several objections, I make the following “oracular pronouncements.”
I. Persons 1. You have a certain point of view; you perceive the world and act upon it from a perspective that is different from mine or anyone else’s.
2. You cannot escape this perspective. You cannot see the world through my eyes or through no one’s eyes, but must see it through your own, and hear it through your ears, and act upon it with your limbs, and so on.
3. What would it even mean to think that your mind inhabits your body as a “vehicle” or “extrinsic instrument”? This makes sense only if you can form some idea of your mind’s not inhabiting your body, of the two existing separate like snapped-apart Lego pieces — and that is just how you cannot think of yourself.
4. Don’t say, “Existing as just a mind would be like dreaming.” When you dream you still have a body.
5. Your mind is not just thoughts, feelings, perceptions, and so on, but their continuity and unification as a point of view. It is your perspective without being any particular part of your perspective.
6. That you have this perspective through your body, that you look out through your eyes and perceive and act upon the world through your brain, is the unity of your mind and your body.
7. You cannot show your thoughts, feelings, perceptions, will, and so on to others, and you cannot show them to yourself; they are not things that can be shown. All the same you have them. And you have them.
8. What can be shown is the world as you perceive and think about and act upon it, and this includes your body and others’, the sounds you and they make as speech, the marks you and they make as writing, and so on, as well as the posited causal history leading up to all this.
9. Through things that can be shown you recognize other minds.
10. Recognize, for it is not an inference. You do not think, “There is a body like mine, moving much as mine does, etc., and so there is also a mind like mine.” At once, you see the body as coming with a mind and a unique perspective that cannot be shown — much as at once you see the configuration of ink on the page as writing.
11. You form some idea of what a person is thinking, feeling, and so on through things that can be shown — his testimony, his actions, his circumstances. You see someone shiver in the snow and understand that he is cold. I call this the “empathetic extension” of your point of view, because it is possible only inasmuch as you can form some idea of yourself shivering in the snow and giving public signs of it similar to his. But again, it is not an inference. And again, there is not this thing being cold to observe and categorize as if sorting Lego pieces by color. Yet any one of us could certainly be cold and show it.
I got three paragraphs into the article before stopping. What a waste of effort. As usual, the liberals find one really sad example to get your attention and make it apply to everyone. You could have made your argument better by saying two 65 year old folks get married.
Gay marriage is wrong on so many levels but mostly for the children. Gay unions... ok, gay marriage no. Take this from a child of a gay man who failed his son in more ways than one. Life is about children and when you make a decision to have a child your life is no longer about you, it is about your child. As a person without children you will never see this nor understand it. If you are a parent with children and you don't see this then you are selfish and shame on you.
This is charming and mostly about love, but not about marriage. You don't understand marriage at all.
Let's give marriage back to the church. The state has made a hash of it. Let people make contractual relationships though the state, just as you say. (Or not) That is not marriage, but you can have it, whatever it will be, to cover the state's legal definitions of relationships.
Marriage as a covenant goes beyond love and all of this stuff you write about. It is simple. But you have a point and people are complex. In a system governed by rules and regulations of all sorts I can see that some contractual relationship between people to meet legalities of all sorts might be necessary. Why do you have to call that marriage? Marriage is a word with a traditional meaning. What you want is something altogether new. Let the church have the marriage covenant and let the state have some other name to cover the variety of contractual relationships you propose.
This comment may seem insubstantive, but I mean it constructively: the author needs to learn to make succinct arguments. They will be much more persuasive, if only for the reason that writing concisely forces one to closely consider the core points of one's argument, and the best way to clearly express them. This reply -- is it the second or third? -- goes on endlessly, and his good points are lost in the muddle.
The author makes a fundamental and fatal mistake. He confuses personal reasons for marriage with societal/legal reasons for marriage.
It doesn't matter if a single couple do not view their marriage directed towards procreative action. (And I disagree with the author that the couple in his first example could not view their marriage as such.) What matters is whether or not society at large views it as such. Girgis and others have given us many good reasons to suppose that society will view it that way. Here are just a few: (1) even when a couple does not view their marriage as directed towards procreation and the rearing of children, they might still have children and rear them, (2) the biological reality is that their acts are directed towards that goal even if there are (currently) problems in the machinery, (3) people outside the marriage will not know that the couple have problems bearing children, etc...
So: Jason Lee Steorts proposes a radical change to the legal of marriage, introducing a two-tiered system to recognize relationships that have NEVER been given the sanction of marriage, all because the traditional view of marriage is LITERALLY DEHUMANIZING: oblivious to the reality of perspective and "nothing less than a failure to think of persons as persons."
And he defends his view as conservative because he says it would solve problems "without aiming at m*ssive social transformation."
He's either deluding himself or lying to his readers.
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It is no denial of the fact of perspective to conclude that perspective isn't the only thing that matters.
Regardless of how other relationships feel to those involved, the union of man and woman is unique, complimentary in ways that are not true for other configurations. The union CAN result in child-bearing and child-rearing, and that's the primary reason for the state to provide a unique sanction for the union, but the complementary nature between a man and a woman simply doesn't end there.
Steorts' argument is a superficially clever solution to the dilemma of those who support the radical redefinition of marriage but not its logical consequences -- how, exactly, can we extend the definition to THIS group but no others? -- but, in writing 7,000 words to respond to Girgis, he barely touches upon the most obvious weaknesses of his proposed solution, that "rogues’ gallery" of polyamory, polygamy, and incest.
Polygamy is obviously excluded from his definition of a "maximal experiential union," but he never makes clear why we should affirm that specific kind of union and not, say, a "signicant" experiential union where those involved commit to a lifelong relationship of shared resources but do so without the commitment to monogamous exclusivity.
And, on incest, he originally wrote that maximal unions should be "relationships of peers whose bodies/minds are complementary rather than overlapping," which is an odd thing to say in defense of marriage between two men. Here, he writes, "Incest is not a gift of the self, but the alteration of something that was not yours to give in the first place, namely your relation to this person."
Isn't ANY marriage an alternation of one's relation to another? You used to be classmates, or coworkers, or whatever, and now you're also spouses? Steorts is grasping.
I frankly don't care that he's making a fool of himself, it's the supposed conservative flagshap that he's bringing down with him.
Hard cases make bad law. The fact that Steorts has to continually grasp for awkward exceptional cases such as "a man who has testicular azoospermia" shows that he's already acknowledging the applicablity of Girgis's arguments to the great majority of marriages.
Yes, some male-female relationships are doomed to be sterile and childless. But all such homosexual relationships can be so categorized.
I have an unusually high tolerance for this kind of thing, but Steorts goes too far. Are these jottings and musings supposed to amount to a coherent reply to Girgis? Does the editor of NR think so?
I hope Girgis has the time and energy to deal with Steorts’s tedious pensees, whether one by one or in a couple of fell blows. I will say this:
Same-sex marriage would normalize the abnormal and justify the immoral. Girgis doesn’t deal with those points, because he is presenting the secular case for preserving marriage (and either accepting the APA’s revised views of homos*xuality or leaving them to one side).
And there is indeed an excellent secular case for preserving marriage to be made, in addition to the moral and psychological cases. Girgis’s mistake is to overemphasize society’s interest in ensuring the presence of a *biological* father and mother for each child. While that would be ideal, married infertile people may still one day choose to adopt, at which time they will have already created a household ready with a committed father and mother for the child – committed to each other by means of their romantic union, and also committed to remaining together for the sake of the child. Children are the reason behind and the justification for the government’s interest in marriage, and Steorts’s wish instead that society were invested in what he likes will never change that fact, even if he gets his way, because true marriage will be destroyed in the process.
All that to make homos*xuals feel better about themselves.
I have no patience for Steorts' tedious exercise in casuistry and sophistry. Perhaps he is trying to bore us into distraction so we won't notice the inevitable legalization of gay marriage under our nose. At its root, Steorts' argument insists that the institution of marriage has nothing to do with procreation. That is a hard sell when all of human history tends to refute such a bizarre claim. In addition, Steorts seems to suggest that marriage should be held hostage to the emotional and subjective will of its participants and he cannot imagine why society might have an existential interest in promoting marriage as the exclusive province between a man and a woman. That he doesn't realize this after committing so much verbiage to the subject is a strong indication that he is beyond the reach of reason. I cannot imagine why NRO has prolonged this exercise in masochism by letting him natter away again, but let's hope it is at an end.
You note, rightly, that "Same-s*x marriage would normalize the abnormal and justify the immoral."
It seems clear that that's a goal Steorts has in view, as he approvingly quotes, in VII.2, a "humane thought" that "there are no freaks, no abnormalities, except in the statistical sense."
Bulimics, anorexics, and people who eat inedible material like sofa cushions; people who mutilate themselves, sado-masochists, and all sorts of perversion: these are only statistical abnomralities, rarities that add to the variety of life, and not actual deviancy that ought to be treated, when possible, and that ought not to receive social sanction. We shouldn't grieve the existence of such disorders, "actually it ought to make us happy."
Take this position to its logical conclusion, and you must frown upon Christ's healing miracles, for His daring to give sight to the blind: their blindness wasn't really a malady, it was only our narrow-mindedness that saw it as more than a statistical abnormality.
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Cherub:
"At its root, Steorts' argument insists that the institution of marriage has nothing to do with procreation. That is a hard sell when all of human history tends to refute such a bizarre claim."
Steorts, the managing editor of an ostensibly conservative magazine, disagrees with the weight you give the traditional understanding of marriage: "To defend tradition simply because it is tradition strikes me as 'special pleading,' an abdication of responsibility, and a suicide of the intellect." (II.15)
Not content to demand that traditional values prove their truth and worth to his satisfaction, Steorts moves from the indictment phase to render judgment: "The basic problem with Girgis’s philosophical outlook — and, frankly, the outlook of the entire tradition he represents — is its studied obliviousness to the reality of perspective. It is nothing less than a failure to think of persons as persons." (VI.11)
Persons "as persons" value things, sometimes in ways that are statistical abnomralities. If you don't defer to their disordered desires -- to the value they attribute to certain things, value that is found or given rather than determined, as if that means that act of finding is infallible -- you betray a positively inhuman worldview.
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I will say that the most disconcerting thing about this whole thing is that I don't think Steorts would have been given so much room to argue for the radical redefinition of marriage if others at NR didn't share his basic disdain of the institution's traditional structure.
No less than Jonah Goldberg wrote that he found 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."
The traditional, Judeo-Christian s*xual ethic -- chastity, which means the lifelong commitment to fidelity in marriage OR lifelong celibacy -- is discarded as an OBVIOUS offense to morality and reason: "cruel" and "absurd."
The NR editorial on marriage last year was really strong, and I don't expect every NR writer to agree with it, but it's surprising to see the ease with which Judeo-Christian ethics -- mere ethics, not even theology -- is dismissed contemptuously.
"...when we consider a man who has testicular azoospermia..."
And how would the lowly county clerk who issues the license reasonably determine such a thing? It's enough for the law to make the reasonable assumption that opposite-gender couples make babies and same-gender couples cannot.
I'm glad NR kept this discussion going, giving Steorts enough rope. I followed this because, though my gut knows the answer, I'd like to get my mind around it. Could not get past the first page here, so pedantic it'd put 'em to sleep in the faculty lounge. If this is the best he can do, then there's no need to get my mind around it. My gut says marriage existed before gov't existed, and a gov't that tries to redefine it as something it isn't will fail. When the gay movement emerged, it had an appealing motto- keep the gov't out of our bedroom. Now gay activists demand that City hall bow down before their bedroom. Not so appealing.
C'mon. Nobody could have read and processed this entire thing. It must be longer than all of the previous articles combined.
I was happy to see it on the home page as I've found the back-and-forth intriguing up until now. Both writers have delved a little too far into the esoteric and wordiness (past the point where it stops making me feel dumb and leads me to believe they're trying to hide something), but that is typically just part of the game. This one finally jumps into the depths of gobbledydook.
"Where there exist children to protect, I want our law to enforce the norms, by making it harder to divorce and by making unwed parents jointly responsible for their children’s welfare. I did not mention it, but I also advocate using the tax code to encourage people who are married and can do so to procreate, and who have procreated but not married to do so."
Steorts undermines the entire case, such as it is, for SSM here.
The CA Supreme Court, the MA Court, and Judge Vaughn Walker, among other activist judges, have asserted that marriage has nothing to do with procreation. In fact, they say, it's bigoted to suggest marriage has anything to do with procreation.
How then can anyone turn around and argue that society ought to use "the tax code to encourage people who are married and can do so to procreate, and who have procreated but not married to do so" once our legal system establishes in the law that marriage and procreation are unrelated?
Marriage and the social norms traditionally associated with marriage exist because only male-female couples make babies. It's irrelevant whether every couple ultimately ends up having a baby (something the state cannot know in advance); babies come from a pairing of male and female. Society is under no obligation to pretend this biological reality is irrelevant or bigoted.
Yes, Kate, but the essay, if you can call this installment an essay, argues badly.
There is no ground for legal recognition of the arrangements homosexuals make with each other any more than there is ground for legal recognition of friends or of single men and women who are in love with each other. Homosexuals are not a separate kind of human being, and their relationships cannot be marriage. What they are are single people with no interest in marriage as it exists. They are not the only such people.
And they are free to make whatever contractual arrangements they want to make. There is no societal justification for conferring a special name on their contracts. They are free to construct their wills in whatever way they want to do, buy property jointly, etc., just as other single people can do. As for benefits, any that they ought to have other single people ought to be able to claim as well. The hospital visitation business comes to mind. Finally, they can obviously have ceremonies if they wish to. Just don't require the rest of us to go along with the view that they are special as a result of their s*xual preferences, or that their relationships are marriage or some facsimile thereof.
Good heavens. Eight more web pages of rhetorical casuistry. Occam's razor is a dull blade in your hands, Mr. Steorts.
The fundamental issue here is straightforward: homosexuality is not normal. Pathologies are to be regarded with compassion: studied, treated, and when possible, cured. They are not to be rationalized, normalized, or celebrated.
Societies that institutionalize pathologies are societies that choose to fail.
