Write on the “gay marriage” issue . . . and you get lots of unpleasant email. I don’t blame most of the writers. They deeply disagree with me and are angry. I have, after all, asserted that something important to them is wrong.
It is good we live in a free country where “venting” is possible.
However, two posts about what I have written seemed like good chances to clarify my own views. They are the two most thoughtful responses I have received to date that are also “public domain.” (I don’t use private email without permission.) Both the responses I will use were posted in public spaces. I will leave both unedited to avoid any bias in my “cutting.”
Here is the first:
It’s a very poorly written article by a poor, and limited, thinker. Here’s just a few selections of nonsense:
As a side issue, I think it important to remember that my original piece was a blog post.
(This first comment is not so much a response to my critic as it is a good chance to clarify something for readers in this still young medium of communication: blogging.)
Articles, when that means long blog posts, are not edited or written in the same manner as journal articles.
I do write more traditional articles and one can go to my favorite journal, Touchstone to see some examples.
In a blog post, there are two limitations folks should keep in mind. First, the post is informal. It will only be lightly edited before posting. It will also point to arguments, but not always fully flesh them out. This is due to the limitations (at present) of the computer screen. Most readers do not like lengthy posts . . . in fact we push that patience pretty hard at Scriptorium.
These limits must be kept in mind when reading blogs that are very active . . . where the writer posts daily. They are more like a peek into an intellectual diary than anything else.
There are important limitations to what daily posters can do and these should be recognized. To give one example, most blog posts don’t have footnotes!
Because gay marriage is an important topic, and since my post is being treated as a more serious sort of article, I have decided a few peeks into my thinking would be helpful to readers.
This is also a chance to say what I think many of us must be reminded of all the time: when one goes to a site like Hewitt or Daily Kos (to pick two well run blogs I read every day), one should not demand their entire background thinking or a complete argument in every post. I think most good blogs do give that (in a lightly edited manner) over time. One has to read a blog in context to get a full picture of what a writer is trying to really say.
This also means that it be unfair to attack this critic for not footnoting or making long arguments in a comment box! We must also be generous in terms of the tone of the comment. The tone of comments (in this new medium) is very informal and hard hitting.
People who cannot take that aren’t going to like the new media! Readers must decide for themselves when the line is crossed from funny and informal to useless personal attacks.
Returning to my critic, who quotes me saying:
Marriage is a Jewish and Christian institution as it exists in much of the world.
The critic replies:
First of all, so what? And second, what about a marriage between Muslims, Hindus or a Shinto marriage? What a stupid ethnocentrically myopic bigot.
I worried that I would be misunderstood this way and almost added a paragraph to clarify. However, I thought the phrase “in much of the world” would help out. I do not (of course) mean to imply no other cultures have institutions similar to what we describe with the English word “marriage.”
They also have special institutions for the socially vital coming together of a man and a woman. This unique bond is different from any other in that it brings the two halves of our species into a life long relationship. This relationship will be rich . . . because any time two very different things are brought together there is a richness absent when two sames are together.
In fact, it is of more than passing importance and interest to note that almost every vital civilization has had something like what the Anglosphere traditionally meant by “marriage” and almost none had something like what parts of the Anglosphere (like Canada) now mean by it.
I assume there will be (eventually) pressure to change other cultures (not part of the Judeo-Christian sphere of influence) to broaden their marriages to include different relationships. My friends from nations in non-Christian parts of the Middle East, China, and Korea (to name three areas) do report some pressure . . . though mostly they marvel at what they call the Western disease of sexual confusion. Mostly, these well educated people think Western nations have gone mad!
When we come and lecture them on sexuality, they look at the state of our families and culture and say, “No thank you.”
My comments were limited to the English word “marriage” (I assume Chinese people do not use the English word marriage!) and to the idea behind it. Both the word and the idea were shaped (dominantly) by Jewish, Christian, and Roman thinking. With the spread of English and of the culture of the Anglosphere globally, the word, the thinking about the word, and the folk ways of civilizing the man-woman relationships have actually permeated many non-Western cultures (as I saw in Mongolia). However, my comments were intentionally restricted to our own situation where the English word and concept “marriage” is being changed.
My comments are most applicable to the Anglosphere or to any non-English speaking peoples who also were deeply influenced by the Jewish, Christian, and Roman ideas that formed the thinking that is captured in our English word “marriage.”
Of course, all this is tedious . . . which is why I cut it from the original blog post. I think, however, it makes a good point. Every culture has not dealt with “man-woman” relationships in the same way, but almost all (all?) the great and lasting civilizations have developed their own ways of giving special status to this uniquely important and challenging relationship.
In any case, I tried to restrict my comments with “much of the world” and I would be sorry to be misunderstood!
My critic quotes me again saying:
Whatever friendship or love is between people of the same gender, the dynamics are different when it happens between a man and a woman.
And says:
This, of course, is hopelessly unsubstantiated. What dynamics precisely? Anyone want to help out Mr. Reynolds?
Are there fundamental differences between men and women? This is a hot topic, but thinking that there are is perfectly respectable and one need not be a traditional Christian to believe it. See (to give one example) this interesting discussion.
Important caveat: my argument does not depend on roles, or what men and women should do culturally, only in their fundamental difference. If such differences exist at a basic biological and psychological level, as seems to be true based on my understanding of the scientific evidence, then the coming together of a man and woman brings two very different things together. A man will never (in that sense) totally get what it means to be a woman. Of course, some argue that there are no fundamental differences or that the differences are very slight (so as not to matter at all in relationships). If that is true (and I am not persuaded by it), then this argument against gay marriage would fail.
My critic quotes me again:
Whatever “gay marriage” is, it is not marriage between a man and a woman.
And replies:
The man’s a genius. I wonder how long it took him to figure that out.
The problem is that advocates of “gay marriage” don’t seem to understand this fact! If men and women are NOT interchangeable, then they have taken one thing (marriage) and turned it into something else. That “something else” might be moral or immoral, but it is not marriage.
It is useful for society and for language to have specific words to describe different things. It is also useful for society to protect and help some institutions and not others. Whatever “gay marriage” will be, it will not (I predict) be of much use in continuing the species or in peacefully fusing these two fundamentally different sexes (man and woman) into which humanity is divided.
If you think such a bringing together of two different things is dynamic, then it is sad to weaken support for it by diluting societal props for it.
My critic quotes me:
Now that religious Jews and Christians have lost the word, they will have to start over with a new word to describe what men and women are doing.
And says:
Language evolves over time and the meaning of words gets altered as the culture changes. That’s life and there’s nothing scary about it, Mr. Paranoid.
Right.
I am not afraid of the change, but I am sad whenever we lose a good word without having one to replace the unique idea behind it. Clarity suffers. It also cuts us off even more from writers who have come before. . .
I am sad we lost the word “gay” to describe a certain emotion. It is now useless to use it . . . it means sexuality to a listener. Whatever the ethics of homosexual activity, it would have been nice not to turn yet another word into slang for sex.
That happen often, but I am not sure it is positive evolution.
If we want to extend benefits to gay sex partners (as we do to heterosexual sex partners), then we should recognize the fundamental difference and call it something else. I see small social reasons to do so . . . we don’t support every human relationship that is good (friendship for example) with state support, but there are good arguments to be made for doing so.
It is rather that in calling it “marriage” we have changed the word, replaced it with nothing else, and are pretending that it is the same thing.
Where I am worried is that (given the small numbers of homosexuals and the small numbers now getting married), that we will have changed an important social institution to civil order without thinking through the implications. Will marriage survive? Probably as it is very robust, but any institution is not immune to changes.
My bigger fear is that those of us who think homosexuality is immoral (at least a large plurality of Americans) will soon be unable to live their lives as they wish. If we had a small, limited government (God grant it!) that would leave traditionalists alone (in their churches, families, and business lives), then I would not worry much at all.
I am confident of our ability to compete in an even field. If the state begins to force local schools (for example), to teach only one position on this ethical question, then that does worry me. Ethics is not a matter of science (what “is”), but of what “should be.”
My critic continues by quoting me:
This coming together is naturally fecund, biologically, spiritually, and culturally, in ways the coming together of two “sames” can never be.
And replies:
Of course he presents no specifics. Too bad. That could have been pretty funny. Many heterosexual coules are not biologically fecund (I think he just looked up this word recently). They could EASILY be spiritually fecund (just not his choice of spirituality). And they most certainly ARE culturally fecund because they are raising children to be less bigoted than the likes of Mr. Reynolds.
This is a bit confusing, but I think the critic means that gay couples could easily be spiritually fecund and culturally fecund.
No gay couples (without introducing the other sex into their relationship) are biologically fecund.
Whatever they do produce culturally and spiritually, it will not be the result of the two fundamental others (sexes) coming together. I think that two different things coming together (like two cultures meeting) are uniquely productive. Whenever we meet someone who disagrees with us (like in this blog post!), it produces more thought.
I am all for it!
What this means, however, is that IF men and women are fundamentally different that the fecundity of heterosexual couples will be privileged in an important way . . . in addition to being privileged biologically.
My critic quotes me again:
Leaving aside any questions of morality, traditional marriage is not “two people loving each other in a committed relationship.”
And says:
Flat wrong. It already IS in some parts of the world, like Canada for example. Too bad his brain can’t see outside his narrow, bigoted, little view of the world which seems to end at the US border.
I don’t understand this comment. I was describing traditional marriage. A brief read of Canadian history demonstrates that what Canadians are now doing is not what Canada believed traditionally about marriage.
Whatever “gay marriage” is, it is not what the founders of British Canada had in mind. I fear that too often we develop a chronological snobbery, that cannot see outside our own little limited time in history.
Canadians are, of course, engaged in an experiment in changing what they used to believe marriage was. In one hundred years or so, the results will be in. Here is hoping that it goes well for them, since cultures don’t get “save game” features and if it does not work, they might find it difficult to go back.
The critic quotes me:
It is a man and woman, two distinct and deeply “other” beings, coming together.
And says:
What an empty, meaningless, statement. What on earth does “deeply ‘other’ beings” mean, and why is ‘other’ in quotation marks?
It means men and women are different at the deepest level: spiritually, psychologically, intellectually, and biologically. Even though we are all human, these differences are beautiful and should be celebrated. When (as is usually the case), the two different beings come together in love, we have called it marriage and surrounded it with romance and beauty. I believe that God Himself sanctified this coming together of two different types of human beings . . . but even if I did not, even if I did not want that relationship, I would see its power and its difference from any other type of human love relationship.
I pity anyone who cannot see that!
As for quotes . . . as a Platonist, I have a bad habit of putting caps and quotes on anything I think important! Bad habit . . .
My critic continues:
Why was our institution hi-jacked?
The answer is the lack of intellectual fecundity of the left.
And says:
What utter gibberish. I’d love him to try to substantiate the claim that “the left” lacks fecundity. That would be great fun to witness.
I should clarify and say that I meant the extremist, modern, secular left. I am, of course, a man of the left (in say 1789!) by historical standards. This is an important clarification. Having just finished a visit to Saint Petersburg, I am on the whole confident in saying that nobody should be impressed with the cultural heritage of secularism or the beauty that the extreme, modern, secular left produced in places like Russia, North Korea, or is producing in much of modern Western Europe.
Of course, these groups have only been dominant for a short time in Western Europe with much less power. We shall see how they do in places like Western Europe and Canada. It is important to realize that even in very secular places like Sweden, they have yet to fully jettison Christian ideas and institutions (they are still pretty Christian under the veneer of secularism) and so it will be several decades more before we see how they do.
There are also traditional Jews and Christians in places like Canada that make the whole situation very complex.
I do not, however, anticipate a great cultural Renaissance from a secularized Canada. I do anticipate more Human Rights Commissions.
Pardon my lack of joy.
My critic quotes me and says:
The left is able to ape or appropriate traditional culture, but not create it.
Em…human rights legislation?
I don’t know what he means, but if he means this then I hope we take a pass on this improvement.
If he means improvements like (in the Anglosphere) the abolition of slavery, the I am happy to point out the role played by Christians in stamping slavery out. That is too long of a discussion for this place.
Remember: I am a liberal (in the old sense of the term) and so are most modern conservatives! Sadly, that fine old word was also changed and so conversation is more confusing.
My critic quotes me and concludes:
Meanwhile, we shall simply find a new word for what men and women do who commit to finding God in the sacrament of marriage
Go for it, you big baby.
We will keep living as reason and experience demands!
Just leave us alone and let us raise our families in peace, if you win this present fight.
Use federalism to allow folks in places like Utah to have different moral ideas (to give one example) than California if the national consensus really has broken down.
Allow local majorities to determine what their schools teach.
We shall see which becomes culturally more successful over the long term.
I am actually so confident of the result, that I suspect the other side will not allow the free competition of two competing models side by side and will try to use the power of the judiciary and the state to enforce their views of morality. I hope not.
One note: The public posting by my helpful critic can be found here. I am appreciative of the thoughtful person who provided the original link. Further note: mail on this blog does not go to me directly, so I apologize if I miss emails responding to posts.