The plucky Spanish and Poles stick to their guns and help derail a new constitution for the EU. Good news for the U.S. But the process isn’t over. Old Europe will try to put it back together again. Instant analysis: the 25 state EU is unmanageable. It either has to become a far more integrated political and economic unit or it will fracture. Given the fact that even France and Germany cannot abide by the fiscal rules they themselves insisted upon only a few years ago, the chances of a real unraveling are not as low as they once were. Here’s hoping.
HOMOSEXUALITY AND CIVILIZATION: Nice Ed Rothstein review of Louis Crompton’s excellent new book, “Homosexuality and Civilization.” Crompton is not a pomo polemicist, so you don’t have to wade through yet another man’s attempt to understand Michel Foucault to read some actual history. Crompton’s critical insight is the same as John Boswell’s: Foucault’s notion that homosexuality only really emerged as such in the late nineteenth century is either semantics or idiocy. Same-sex love – yes love – has been around since the dawn of time. Pauline Christianity (not Jesus) is mainly responsible for treating it as the equivalent of murder. Reading through Crompton’s book this week, I was reminded of a passage from Montaigne (which is corroborated elsewhere) of gay marriages in Renaissance Italy. It would be flattering to believe that a few neocon homos (ahem) were the first to come up with this idea in the late 1980s, but it’s untrue. Here’s what was going on in the late 16th century:
On my return from Saint Peter’s I met a man who informed me humorously of two things: that the Portuguese made their obeisance to the Pope in Passion week; and then, that on this same day the station was at San Giovanni Porta Latina, in which church a few years before certain Portuguese had entered into a strange brotherhood. They married one another, male to male, at Mass, with the same ceremonies with which we perform our marriage services, the same marriage gospel service, and then went to bed and lived together. The Roman wits said that because in the other conjunction, of male with female, this circumstance alone makes it legitimate, it had seemed to these sharp folk that this other action would become equally legitimate if they authorized it with ceremonies and mysteries of the Church. Eight or nine Portuguese of this fine sect were burned.
These were the first martyrs that we know of to the movement for same-sex marriage – in the 1570s. Of course, they were regarded as absurd and wicked. But notice how Montaigne – whose love for another man is celebrated in his extraordinay essay, ‘De L’Amitie,” – describes the sect of gay husbands as “fine.” If you want to read more about the long, subterranean history of gay marriage, check out my anthology on the subject, which has a long, and detailed historical section.
The Dish 