Reading this piece by Rod Dreher is saddening to me. What separates Rod from many others on the right is his passionate sincerity. Even when he goes overboard, it’s all real. He’s not a cynic; and he grapples in ways many others on the social right do not with the fact of modernity, which makes the dream of cultural conservatives just that … a dream. And not of the future, but of the past. Rod longs, as many do, for a return to the days when civil marriage brought with it a whole bundle of collectively-shared, unchallenged, teleological, and largely Judeo-Christian, attributes. Civil marriage once reflected a great deal of cultural and religious assumptions: that women’s role was in the household, deferring to men; that marriage was about procreation, which could not be contracepted; that marriage was always and everywhere for life; that marriage was a central way of celebrating the primacy of male heterosexuality, in which women were deferent, non-heterosexuals rendered invisible and unmentionable, and thus the vexing questions of sexual identity and orientation banished to the catch-all category of sin and otherness, rather than universal human nature. To tell Rod something he already knows: Modernity has ended that dream. Permanently. Rod has read his Alasdair Macintyre. And – despairing (rightly) at the Catholic hierarchy’s inability even to have a reasoned conversation about what is going on and at its own sexual and psychological dysfunction and sin – Rod has joined the Orthodox church, perhaps the deepest as well as oldest of all Christian communities. I respect all that – profoundly. My own wrestling with the conflicts between Thomist teleology and modernity came in my 20s, when Oakeshott and Montaigne threaded the needle and when the fact of my own sexual orientation forced me to a reckoning others can perhaps escape. (The result: "Virtually Normal.") My faith has been more private since and more informed by mystery, reticence and doubt. And watching fundamentalist Christianity and Benedict-style Catholicism react to the last couple of decades has only confirmed for me what I suspected in my early adulthood: that their solutions to the modern problem are not solutions at all. They are wild lunges at something they hate almost as much as they misunderstand. If conservatism is to recover as a force in the modern world, the theocons and Christianists have to understand that their concept of a unified polis with a telos guiding all of us to a theologically-understood social good is a non-starter. Modernity has smashed it into a million little pieces. Women will never return in their consciousness to the child-bearing subservience of the not-so-distant past. Gay people will never again internalize a sense of their own "objective disorder" to acquiesce to a civil regime where they are willingly second-class citizens. Straight men and women are never again going to avoid divorce to the degree our parents did. Nor are they going to have kids because contraception is illicit. The only way to force all these genies back into the bottle would require the kind of oppressive police state Rod would not want to live under.
But how do those who are ready to live in this modern world coexist with those who still believe that it is not only misguided but evil? And, of course, vice-versa? There is only one way.
That way is to agree that our civil order will mean less; that it will be a weaker set of more procedural agreements that try to avoid as much as possible deep statements about human nature. And that has a clear import for our current moment. The reason the marriage debate is so intense is because neither side seems able to accept that the word "marriage" requires a certain looseness of meaning if it is to remain as a universal, civil institution. This is not that new. Catholics, for example, accept the word marriage to describe civil marriages that are second marriages, even though their own faith teaches them that those marriages don’t actually exist as such. But most Catholics are able to set theological beliefs to one side and accept a theological untruth as a civil fact. After all, a core, undebatable Catholic doctrine is that marriage is for life. Divorce is not the end of that marriage in the eyes of God. And yet Catholics can tolerate fellow citizens who are not Catholic calling their non-marriages marriages – because Catholics have already accepted a civil-religious distinction. They can wear both hats in the public square.
Rod believes that accepting my civil marriage as equal to his somehow erases the meaning of his own union. But it doesn’t. He is free as a person of faith to regard my civil marriage as substantively void and his as substantively meaningful; he is simply required as a member of this disenchanted polis to accept my civil marriage as legally valid. That’s all. Is that so hard? We can find a way forward to accommodate both our marriages in a public setting. I’m passionate, as every other defender of marriage equality that I know, in defending the rights of religious groups and churches to marry whosoever they want, according to whatever they believe, and to discriminate as religious groups in private contexts against those in their direct employ who violate those teachings. I defended the right to homophobia of both the Boy Scouts and the St Patrick’s Day parade. Heck, I’m even against hate crime laws.
I have nothing against the voluntary and peaceful activities of any religious group, and regard these organizations as some of the greatest strengths of America. The idea that gay people somehow want to persecute these churches, that we’re out to get you, and hurt you and punish you is preposterous. The notion that there are rampaging mobs of gay people beating up on Christians is also unhinged. To take one flash-point between a radical Dominionist group deliberately trying to rub salt in the wounds of Castro Street bar patrons after closing hours – in which no one was hurt – as the harbinger of some kind of mass gay pogrom against Christians is daffy. To equate a few drunks gays with Bull Connor is deranged and offensive. There are elements on both sides who do not represent the core. That core can coexist with mutual respect in the context of legal and civil equality.
Sorry, Rod, but you and I have to live in the disenchanted world our generation was born into. The dreams of total pre-modern coherence – whether in the malign fantasies of the Taliban or the benign aspirations of theocons longing for the 1950s in the 21st century – are dreams undone by freedom. We live in a new world, and we can and should create meaning where we can, in civil society, in private, through free expression and self-empowerment. But we cannot enforce that old meaning on others by law. And we certainly cannot do so arbitrarily, to the sole detriment of only one group in society – homosexuals. Rod knows that restoring his definition of marriage would require above all restricting the rights and freedoms of heterosexuals in modern society. But he also knows that will never fly. My advice to the theocons: by picking solely on homosexuals to force back the sexual and spiritual freedom of modernity, you look awful, you are losing the next generation and you are buttressing cruelty and pain. In your heart of hearts, you don’t want to do that.
So listen to your heart. Accept civil equality not as a defeat but as an opportunity: to persuade and evangelize for something beyond the civil that still respects the integrity of the civil. That’s what America’s founders intended. It is part of their genius that today’s fundamentalists simply do not understand.
The Dish 