Robert George, a political philosopher at Princeton and chief intellectual guru of the Catholic right, laid out the case for banning all civil recognition of gay relationships in the federal Constitution last Friday. It’s such a tenuous case – and requires unbounded paranoia with respect to courts and a disingenuous attempt to argue that the Full Faith and Credit Clause applies to civil marriages (it never has). But he does offer a challenge:
No advocate [for equal marriage rights] has been able to identify a principled moral basis for the requirements of fidelity and exclusivity in marriage as they wish to redefine the institution.
First off, we do not wish to ‘redefine’ the institution. We simply want it to stop discriminating against a small minority of citizens. Currently, civil marriage exists. I don’t want to abolish it. But if it exists, it cannot arbitrarily exclude some citizens, while including others. On the second point, civil marriage licenses currently require no promises from the couple that they be faithful or exclusive. Some heterosexuals, as we well know, do not maintain complete fidelity in their civil marriages. In fact, fifty percent or more break their marriage vows by divorcing and often re-marrying others. Has George heard of Ronald Reagan? Or Bob Barr? Or Newt Gingrich? Or Bill Clinton? If he wants to make adultery or re-marriage illegal, he can propose an amendment on precisely those lines. He certainly believes that re-marriage is a grave moral sin; and adultery (unlike homosexuality) is even prohibited in the Ten Commandments. In other words, George’s standards for civil marriage may be admirable; but they are not enforced; and they are not abided by. They remain the ideal; and gay advocates do not intend to redefine that ideal. But neither should they be held to any higher standards than straight couples.
FIDELITY IN FRIENDSHIP: But George also makes what seems to me to be a point typical of some on the Catholic right. He thinks of sex as the crux of marriage. Senator Santorum even candidly declared that, in his view, marriage had nothing to do with love. And sex is certainly important. But any married couple will tell you that, after a few years, sex is not the sine qua non of the institution. What endures is shared commitment, sacrifice, daily devotion, familiarity, love, friendship. This experience between two people is, to my mind, the central feature of married life and it makes no distinction between straights and gays. I recommend David Hume’s sane little essay on marriage which, of course, doesn’t endorse same-sex marriage, but does argue against polygamy and divorce on grounds not related to sex or what George calls, in the most recent Ratzingerism, “sexual complementarity.” Hume sees that the essence of a good marriage is not breeding or even the romantic love that can blind while it overwhelms us – but a unique and profound friendship that is indeed to the exclusion of all others:
Love is a restless and impatient passion, full of caprices and variations: arising in a moment from a feature, from an air, from nothing, and suddenly extinguishing after the same manner. Such a passion requires liberty above all things; and therefore ELOISA had reason, when, in order to preserve this passion, she refused to marry her beloved ABELARD.
“How oft, when prest to marriage, have I said,
Curse on all laws but those which love has made:
Love, free as air, at sight of human ties,
Spreads his light wings, and in a moment flies.”But friendship is a calm and sedate affection, conducted by reason and cemented by habit; springing from long acquaintance and mutual obligations; without jealousies or fears, and without those feverish fits of heat and cold, which cause such an agreeable torment in the amorous passion. So sober an affection, therefore, as friendship, rather thrives under constraint, and never rises to such a height, as when any strong interest or necessity binds two persons together, and gives them some common object of pursuit. We need not, therefore, be afraid of drawing the marriage-knot, which chiefly subsists by friendship, the closest possible. The amity between the persons, where it is solid and sincere, will rather gain by it: And where it is wavering and uncertain, this is the best expedient for fixing it.
I couldn’t agree more. Fidelity and exclusivity are the outward signs of an inward bond. As long as the Catholic right keeps marshalling arguments obsessed by sex – George even wants to put the word “sexual” into the Constitution for the first time – they will fail to gain a real audience outside the world of celibates or Santori. In time the sexual expression of love in a long and rewarding marriage is a minor, not major, theme. Friendship, husbanding, the sharing of common duties and responsibilities – these are the civilizing human activities that marriage brings. Nothing suggests that they are the exclusive preserve of heterosexuals. So why should marriage be?
THE NIHILIST LEFT: A British liberal criticizes her own side in their assault on Tony Blair:
Bremner says his programme is a contribution to this Big Conversation. Historians should examine it as an encapsulation of the dinner party conversations of a metropolitan bien-pensant left. Blair is awful, the government is a failure, nothing works, everything’s worse, time for a change, we’re bored. Why the vehemence? The Iraq war and all its foreign policy disasters are reasons to censure Blair. But this nihilism set in long before the war.
Toynbee is one of the most irritatingly self-righteous pontificators in Britain. She’s wrong about the war. But every now and again, even she stumbles onto the truth.
The Dish 