The first, for Andrew Stuttaford, who cites David Brooks’s column in the New York Times yesterday as a “conservative argument” for gay marriage (scroll down).

There is not a word–not one–in David’s column that so much as attempts to draw distinctions among heterosexual marriage, homosexual marriage, polygamous marriage, or, for that matter, incestuous marriage. If a man wished to marry his sister, what of it? “[W]e are not animals,” David’s column would reply, “whose lives are bounded by our flesh and by our gender. We’re moral creatures with souls, endowed with the ability to make covenants….” David blithely heaves thousands of years of moral understanding over the side, in other words, yet never even begins the difficult work of social and moral analysis that would enable us to grasp why certain unions are ennobling while others remain unacceptable. He asserts high sentiment, but sentiment alone. This is neither “conservative” nor “argument.”

The second, for Mike Potemra, who singles out for praise one passage in David’s column (again, see yesterday’s postings). The passage read in part, “Some conservatives may have latched onto biological determinism (men are savages who need women to tame them) as a convenient way to oppose gay marriage….”

The view that men and women are profoundly different–distinct from one another in the very depths of their beings–is implicit in Genesis, finds support among the most profound minds the world has produced, including Augustine and Aquinas, and was so interwoven into the mores and habits of cultures around the world that until no more than a few decades ago it was everywhere taken for granted, a given aspect of reality. To dismiss this understanding of the sexes as mere “biological determinism” betrays ignorance of one of the great themes of history. And to assert that conservatives have “latched onto” it simply because it now proves “convenient” is–well, my friend David Brooks ought to know better. The legend of “Beauty and the Beast” first appeared in print in the eighteenth-century, and it contains elements of “Cupid and Psyche,” which was committed to writing in the second century. David is of course free to dismiss it. But first he needs to tell us why the legend of a man who was tamed and fulfilled by the love of woman has resonated for at least 19 centuries.