‘Christianists’ for peace
An example of how misleading and unhelpful Andrew Sullivan’s “Christianist” designation is: Andrew’s denouncing as a “Christianist” the Bruderhof pastor Johann Christoph Arnold, because Arnold is opposed to gay marriage and says, “God’s law is supreme.”
For one thing, surely Andrew knows that the refusal to follow, on grounds of religious conscience, laws that one finds unjust is the basis for civil disobedience. Thomas More died because he considered himself “the King’s good servant, but God’s first.” Dietrich Bonhoeffer was also martyred because he insisted on serving God instead of Adolf Hitler. Martin Luther King went to jail multiple times because of his belief that “God’s law is supreme.” Today in Iran, a Christian pastor who converted from Islam is preparing to face execution because he will not recant his faith.
I hope that I have the courage to refuse to follow an unjust law that I profoundly believed contradicted the law of God, no matter what the consequences for me. Andrew professes Christ also; he would be a sorry Christian if he weren’t prepared to do the same.
For another thing, does Andrew realize who Johann Christoph Arnold is? He is a pacifist whose grandfather led the Bruderhof community driven out of Nazi Germany by persecution. His writings are usually about peace-making and forgiveness. He is by no means part of the Religious Right. But because he holds to the Bible’s clear teaching about marriage, Andrew vilifies him as a “Christianist.” If Johann Christoph Arnold earns that designation, then it belongs to everybody who professes Christianity but who disagrees (as most Christians in every time and place, until the last 20 years, have done) with Andrew’s position on marriage equality. In which case, how useful is it as a descriptive term?
It’s not. It’s only a term of abuse for Christians Andrew dislikes. I wish he would withdraw it. To apply it to a man like Johann Christian Arnold, who comes out of the most un-Constantinian Christian tradition there is, of being a “Christianist” is to reveal how bankrupt the concept is.
UPDATE: What Alan Jacobs said. (Thanks Leroy Huizenga.)
I agree that Sullivan’s term “christianism” is hyperbolic and unhelpful, but I am baffled by talk of civil disobedience in this context. In what way does the New York State law in particular violate the liberties of religious people? In what way is anyone forced to do anything because of gay marriage in New York? Given the protections for religious groups in the bill that was actually passed, how has the state legislature violated religious liberties?
Nobody’s talking about civil disobedience here, Jon. My point was that the concept that people have a higher responsibility to obey God’s law rather than man-made law formed the moral basis for civil disobedience in the Christian tradition. If J.C. Arnold is a “Christianist” because he believes that the state has no right to legislate against what he believes is the law of God, then so was Martin Luther King a Christianist because he believed the state’s segregation laws were illegitimate because they violated the law of God (as well as the US Constitution — but King was a Christian pastor who based his activism in the Gospel).
The difference here is that New York same sex mariage law is merely permissive (you may marry someone of the same gender– you don’t have to) whereas segregation laws were prescriptive (you WILL live in a racially segregated way, no
choice about it).
And if permissive laws violate divine law then what are we to say about laws that allow freedom of religion? How is the license afforded to conscience by those laws different from similar license in same sex marriage?
I see your point, but Arnold goes well beyond King. King never argued that any law that falls short of blblical norms is invalid because it violates the will of god. When King talks about laws violating God’s law, at least in the Letter From Birmingham Jail, he only refers to laws that are oppressive. “An unjust law is a code that a numerical or power majority group compels a minority group to obey but does not make binding on itself. This is difference made legal. By the same token, a just law is a code that a majority compels a minority to follow and that it is willing to follow itself. This is sameness made legal.”
There is a big difference between that statement, and saying that the state never has a right to contradict the “law of God” on any matter. King identified a very specific situation under which the law of man can interfere with the Law of God. That is a profoundly liberal (in the old sense) and democratic concept. However, the statement that “the state has no right” to permit civil marriage between same sex couples because it violates the laws of god is a theocratic statement.
This dispute seems hyperbolic. No one is compelling Pastor Arnold to perform homosexual marriages or to approve of them, and he’s apparently not doing more than saying he disapproves of the practice on religious grounds.
I can see conflicts arising in cases such as mandating church-related agencies to accept homosexual couples as adoptive parents, and so forth, but Sullivan seems to be calling the Pastor a “Christianist” just because of his views, not because he’s asking the government to oppress Andrew.
A tempest in a (highly decorated and collectible antique) teapot?
The best definitions fulfill two distinct but equally important criteria:
First, they are as simple as possible. Second, they are worded so they encompass the whole scope of current usage.
Consequently, I submit that “Christianist” is Sullivan-speak for “person I want silenced/eliminated.”
I can’t think of any counter-examples, and it’s very simple, so I guess it’s a good working definition.
Whenever anyone invokes Thomas Moore to defend “civil libertarianism” I want to gag. Thomas Moore was a murderous persecuter of other people’s religious convictions, hounding and killing many Protestants for their religious convictions, and seeing himself as doing the work of God. When the shoe was on the other foot, suddenly he becomes a saintly figure who heroically dies for his convictions. He’s the Che Guevara of the Christian conservative movement.
As for Arnold, I’m sure he’s a great guy if you’re a white, straight Christian. If you’re gay, he’s more than happy to deny you your legal rights because that’s what his conscience tells him is the right thing to do. It just goes to show that acting as one’s conscience tells one to do isn’t necessarily saintly. It can be outright awful, as Thomas Moore’s persecution of Protestants shows us.
I think Andrew’s use of the term “Christianist” is quite appropriate, especially when applied to people who self-identify as Christians, but engage in persecutions of people who don’t fit their conception of what the Christian God wants people to be. And most importantly, who don’t even understand what it actually means to be a Christian in society – unconditional love of others – but instead come up with rationalizations for their own set of bigotries under a religious guise.
Let’s not forget Alan Jacobs’ takedown of Sullivan on the “Christianist” issue: http://theamericanscene.com/2011/08/09/the-cause-of-all-the-trouble
Someone wrote years ago that Andrew hates well. His misanthropic side is exacerbating by the British pugilist debater style, which knows no ideological boundary.
Christianist has apt uses. Andrew uses it too indiscriminately. His credibility rightly suffers from such rhetorical excess. As does any commentator who employs rhetorical excess. Again, a problem that knows no ideological boundary.
Um, Conrad, “civil disobedience” is not the same thing as “civil libertarianism.” Your reasoning about Thomas More in this context is equally skewed. The point is not whether or not More was a good man; the point is he went to his death peacefully, in defiance of a law he believed contradicted the law of God. Andrew’s deploys the abusive term “Christianist” against any Christian who opposes on theological grounds Andrew’s views on gay marriage. It’s an empty term.
An Islamist is a Muslim who believes society should be governed by sharia law, as prescribed by the Qu’ran. There are millions of Islamists, of various sorts. The ruling AK Party in Turkey are soft Islamists; the Hamas government in Gaza are hard Islamists. The point is, there is such a thing as Islamism. There is no such thing as Christianism. It doesn’t exist. It is a scare word designed to smear, with the religious totalitarianism we associate with Islam, any Christian who supports legislation based wholly or in part on his or her Christian faith.
As I said in this post, Arnold comes out of a small branch of Protestant Christianity that is very much for the separation of church and state. They are anti-Constantinian. It is utterly risible to call members of the Bruderhof “Christianists.” Throwing that word around has become a tiresome reflex of Sully, who is better than this nasty habit. One may certainly judge Arnold to be on the wrong side of this issue, but that does not make him a Christianist any more than it makes people who believe that marriage equality for homosexuals is required by Christian moral teaching into Christianists (or homosexualists).
I’m intrigued to know why you think Sullivan is better than this. Labeling those he disagrees with is SOP for him.
Sullivan exhibits the narcissistic world view common to deviates. Anything that fails to make him feel good must be evil. And anything that they feel like doing is automatically natural.
His term is as empty as Islamist. What the blazes is an Islamist? If you take certain passages of the Koran and the hadith literally, then killing Christians is merely being a good Muslim. Now while this view has many historical progenitors, it is by no means universal. So the term Islamist is humbug.
A Christianist in this case would seem to be someone who upholds the mainstream Christian understanding of this issue from the very beginning. Sullivan’s problem is with Christians, not Christianists.
The reference to gay marriage in the context of this post is unhelpful. The particular issue in question is pretty irrelevant.
What is relevant is “God’s law is supreme.”
What does that mean? If Arnold means that he will never personally recognize two men or two women as being married, that he will encourage others to follow his lead, then that’s one thing.
If, on the other hand, Arnold uses his formulation of “God’s law” and seeks to impose it upon everyone else, regardless of their own personal faith (or lack thereof), then I have a serious problem.
The difference between a Christianist and someone like More or the pastor in Iran is that More sought the liberty to practice his own faith and to hold his own beliefs. He did not seek to stop the annulment of the King’s marriage. He did not seek to prevent his marriage to Anne Boleyn. He merely sought the right to his private opinion that what the King did was wrong and the right to refuse his approval of it.
Arnold, by contrast, is not seeking to preserve the private right to his own conscience. As a matter of fact, no-one is even suggesting that that right be infringed. What he is doing is stating his personal opinion about what God’s law is and insisting that his opinion be forced on to everyone else.
That’s what makes him a Chistianist: his lust for power and control over others.
WRT Martin Luther King, He may have been motivated by his religious faith, but the arguments he made in favor of civil rights are secular:
Read the “I have a dream” speech. It’s all about justice and prosperity and the promises of the Constitution and the Emancipation Proclamation. Yes, there are references to “God’s children” and to people of differing faiths living together but King, preacher though he may be, makes secular arguments. He doesn’t say that God has commanded you to grant civil rights. He says that America has promised civil rights and it is only just and proper to deliver them.
Anti-marriage activists have so far been unable to make effective secular arguments against gay marriage. Pro-marriage activists, on the other hand, have been. That’s why public opinion has been shifting. And Arnold’s speech is proof that the anti-marriage side is losing the war: he wouldn’t have to fall back on this appeal to “God’s law” (whatever that may be) otherwise.
Rod,
Do you have any proof to back up your claim that Sullivan defines all Christians who oppose gay marriage on theological grounds as christianist?
Geoff G, if the legal understanding of basics like marriage, contracts, rights etc. don’t flow from the understanding of the majority, from where should they come? Do you think it is possible to create a society without any original understandings or basic values?
Thomas O. Meehan asked:
If the legal understanding of basics like marriage, contracts, rights etc. don’t flow from the understanding of the majority, from where should they come?
Is this not one of the important points of having a Constitution in the first place? Indeed, in many respects, the founders were very worried about the so-called “tyranny of the majority,” not least because of how established religions had treated those who did not subscribe to their beliefs.
Do you think it is possible to create a society without any original understandings or basic values?
No, but I do believe that these basic values need not be theological in nature.
Geoff, the problem is that the push for so-called gay rights is really and truly squeezing religious rights (which unlike some so-called rights hiding in those Gnostic penumbras and emanations are in fact guaranteed by letter in the First Amendment to the Constitution), and sooner or later — it’s happening already, here and abroad — orthodox Christians are going to pay penalties of various sorts for thinking wrongly on these issues. Losing jobs (California), paying fines to “Human Rights Commissions” (New Mexico), being forbidden from fostering or adopting children (England), etc. [Rod, maybe it's time for a meta-post detailing some of the more egregious things that have been happening, or running a repeat from the old Crunchy Con blog to refresh people's memories.]
As far as Rev. Arnold goes, anyone who knows anything about him or the anabaptist peace tradition he represents knows that he has absolutely no “his lust for power and control over others”. It’s risible to suggest such. But his fears about the State interfering with his activities as a Christian minister are well-founded. The State’s been interfering with his tradition since the 16th century, killing many of them at many times, persecuting them in other ways in other times.
I do think the line that the line that it’s “God’s Law” is unfortunate, if one assumes he’s getting it from the Bible and not nature, which too has God as its author, because it gives rise to the misunderstanding you evince. When Christians (and others of goodwill!) make pro-marriage arguments, they generally do so on the basis of reason and nature (See here, here, and here, for starters). And these arguments are solid; if they’re ineffective, it’s because many people nowadays have given up on reason and given themselves over to desire, and so we find ourselves in a situation where consent is the sole criterion of the good. I find many folks simply don’t want to really listen or interact. (When they bother to, <a href="http://www.thepublicdiscourse.com/2010/12/2217"they get refuted fairly easily.) Desire and individual autonomy are pretty thin things to think of as rational, as reasonable. The starting point is the assumption that one can do what one wants, so long as it doesn’t hurt anyone else, and that’s a long way from reading nature rightly. It wrongly assumes our essential selves are desires trapped in bodies, and it assumes an overly individualistic conception of human beings. Things we think we do privately actually affect the entire polis. Every member of the public you see walking around, for instance, is the result of a supposedly private act of intercourse.
If it is then asked, why does it seem to be Christians only who are making such arguments, as if there’s something surreptitious going on in which faith masquerades as reason reading nature rightly, then my answer would be that it’s pretty much Christians (along with some Jews and other folks of good will) who still believe in reason and nature. We’re making arguments about the common, human good, in theory accessible to all, based on reason, and not revelation. Of course, reason and revelation coincide often; is “Thou shalt not kill” a truth of reason or revelation?
Just some thoughts. Thanks for the forum.
Rod,
Yes, I used the wrong phrase. Even so, Moore is a terrible example of a champion of “civil disobediance”, in that when he was in a position of state authority, he used that authority to kill people purely for their religious beliefs. He was not a man of peace, but believer in violent authoritarianism, and is a perfect example of “those who live by the sword die by the sword”. That he was willing to die for his twisted and violent beliefs does not make him a model for our conscience. He’s an excellent example of the kind of “conscience” we should not admire, but realize is riddled through and through with violent authoritarian delusional thinking.
Likewise, Arnold may have some admirable qualities, and he’s certainly not a violent man, but his conscience is not admirable at all in my book, in that, like Moore, it compels him to advocate that the state deny men their legal rights if they don’t conform to his religious convictions. One can certainly say he’s a man of his convictions, but so were many terrible people in history. It’s only a virtue if one’s convictions are virtuous. If not, then not. Otherwise, we must admire Hitler for acting on his conscience and convictions, and going down with them.
I don’t think the term “Christianist” that Andrew uses is that same as “advocate of strict Theocratic government” (even so, there certainly do exist such Christians, though they are a very fringe minority). It’s not the mirror equivalent of “Islamist”. He’s defined it rather well as those who seek to base their politics on an authoritarian version of the Christian religion, and who seek to shape the Christian religion according to their authoritarian politics.
I think the key word here is “authoritarian”. Using the Bible as an authority upon which to base governmental discriminatory policy against gays is, yes, “Christianist”. Using the Bible as inspiration for anti-discriminatory policies (as with MLK) is not “Christianist” because equality is not an authoritarian goal. If it’s not authoritarian, it’s not “Christianist”. The whole point of Andrew’s use of the word is to distinguish authoritarian strains of Christianity from the many other, non-authoritarian traditions within Christendom.
As for Arnold being in favor of the separation of Church and state, good for him, but it seems that he’s violating his own principles then in advocating that the government discriminate against homosexuals because the Bible says we should. In what sense is that separating Church and state?
“One may certainly judge Arnold to be on the wrong side of this issue, but that does not make him a Christianist any more than it makes people who believe that marriage equality for homosexuals is required by Christian moral teaching into Christianists (or homosexualists).”
If one opposes slavery, as Wilberforce did, out of strong Christian belief in the equality of men, that is not “Christianist”, because slavery is an authoritarian system that denies people their rights, and opposing slavery does not require an authoritarian government. Can you not see the difference? Likewise, to be in favor of gay rights out of religious belief is not “authoritarian”, and hence it is not “Christianist”. I know that doesn’t seem fair to you, but that’s because you are trying to find a way to rationalize your own views on the subject as “Christian”, when they are not even that, except in the traditionalist sense, rather than in the sense of someone living by the example and teachings of Jesus. Of course, I suppose this merely brings up the question of whether Jesus was an authoritarian who wanted the state (or even the body of his followers) to enforce his views. The “Christianist” interpretation of Jesus and the Bible is that he was, indeed, an authoritarian leader, and that any true believer must also be an authoritarian follower, and that this means that even the state must be run according to Christian authoritarian principles in a Christian society, even if by democratic means (meaning elections, the results of which are seen to override individual rights).
If Jesus was not an authoritarian leader, then none of the rest follows. Then even those who would be inspired by his life and teachings to create a social and political order that is in accord with Christianity would not create an authoritarian order, and hence, would not be “Christianists”.
Geoff G, our constitution was passed by a majority and reflected a majority understanding of rights to be protected. Sure, they they provided protections for minority rights but in the context of the norms they already considered eternal. I don’t see how one appeals to the constitution for the imposition of rights unrecognized by the drafters themselves. No drafter conceived a right to same sex marriage or for women to serve in the Navy. Indeed, the founders had no trouble with strict anti-sodomy laws.
I understand your point about established religions suppressing dissent but I think a careful reading of the signers own views reveals more a fear of inter-denominational wrangling over establishment than a fear of Christian religion in general. One thing they all agreed on, no to tithing to the Church of England.
I wonder how many societies reached the point of social sophistication wherein they constructed complex laws and constitutions without the influence of pre-existing religious principles and concepts? The only people I’ve heard of who seemed to have no developed religious concepts were the Comanches.
What’s also ‘risible’, Leroy, is to state that those who support gay marriage are led merely by ‘desire’ and not reason and nature, as if those who support it are not willing or capable of accessing these things to reach their conclusions.
Thomas More was a great man. The only reason certain people here hate him is because he didn’t believe that all religions are equal. We all know that liberals hate the idea that one God is better than another. It’s all fluff to them anyway.
Welcome, Rod. Jacobs is gentle, but when he brings out the edge, he’s delicious.
I see a lot of question-begging going on, as if it’s simply self-evident that gay “marriage” is an undeniable right. It hasn’t been self-evident to most people, however, and it’s not rooted in nature or tradition; it’s a creation of a powerful minority wielding the power of the State. And what the State giveth in one generation, it can take in the next.
I also see a lot of confusion regarding reason and revelation. Most folks see these as absolutely separate (and some Christian traditions have gloried in the dichotomy), but for us Christians, they’re complementary, sometimes overlapping, but each has its own role.
Just rereading Benedict’s speech to the German Bundestag, and I’d want to say what the Pope said here:
Unlike other great religions, Christianity has never proposed a revealed body of law to the State and to society, that is to say a juridical order derived from revelation. Instead, it has pointed to nature and reason as the true sources of law – and to the harmony of objective and subjective reason, which naturally presupposes that both spheres are rooted in the creative reason of God. Christian theologians thereby aligned themselves with a philosophical and juridical movement that began to take shape in the second century B.C. In the first half of that century, the social natural law developed by the Stoic philosophers came into contact with leading teachers of Roman Law. Through this encounter, the juridical culture of the West was born, which was and is of key significance for the juridical culture of mankind…
For the development of law and for the development of humanity, it was highly significant that Christian theologians aligned themselves against the religious law associated with polytheism and on the side of philosophy, and that they acknowledged reason and nature in their interrelation as the universally valid source of law…The idea of natural law is today viewed as a specifically Catholic doctrine, not worth bringing into the discussion in a non-Catholic environment, so that one feels almost ashamed even to mention the term. Let me outline briefly how this situation arose.
Fundamentally it is because of the idea that an unbridgeable gulf exists between “is” and “ought”. An “ought” can never follow from an “is”, because the two are situated on completely different planes. The reason for this is that in the meantime, the positivist understanding of nature and reason has come to be almost universally accepted. If nature – in the words of Hans Kelsen – is viewed as “an aggregate of objective data linked together in terms of cause and effect”, then indeed no ethical indication of any kind can be derived from it. A positivist conception of nature as purely functional, in the way that the natural sciences explain it, is incapable of producing any bridge to ethics and law, but once again yields only functional answers. The same also applies to reason, according to the positivist understanding that is widely held to be the only genuinely scientific one. Anything that is not verifiable or falsifiable, according to this understanding, does not belong to the realm of reason strictly understood. Hence ethics and religion must be assigned to the subjective field, and they remain extraneous to the realm of reason in the strict sense of the word. Where positivist reason dominates the field to the exclusion of all else – and that is broadly the case in our public mindset – then the classical sources of knowledge for ethics and law are excluded. This is a dramatic situation which affects everyone, and on which a public debate is necessary. Indeed, an essential goal of this address is to issue an urgent invitation to launch one.
The positivist approach to nature and reason, the positivist world view in general, is a most important dimension of human knowledge and capacity that we may in no way dispense with. But in and of itself it is not a sufficient culture corresponding to the full breadth of the human condition. Where positivist reason considers itself the only sufficient culture and banishes all other cultural realities to the status of subcultures, it diminishes man, indeed it threatens his humanity. [...]
At this point Europe’s cultural heritage ought to come to our assistance. The conviction that there is a Creator God is what gave rise to the idea of human rights, the idea of the equality of all people before the law, the recognition of the inviolability of human dignity in every single person and the awareness of people’s responsibility for their actions. Our cultural memory is shaped by these rational insights. To ignore it or dismiss it as a thing of the past would be to dismember our culture totally and to rob it of its completeness. The culture of Europe arose from the encounter between Jerusalem, Athens and Rome – from the encounter between Israel’s monotheism, the philosophical reason of the Greeks and Roman law. This three-way encounter has shaped the inner identity of Europe. In the awareness of man’s responsibility before God and in the acknowledgment of the inviolable dignity of every single human person, it has established criteria of law: it is these criteria that we are called to defend at this moment in our history.
To the extent that there is such a thing as an “Islamist” there is such as thing as a “Christianist.” ANY religion claiming some sort of universality, particularly any faith claiming to be the only way to salvation, has within it the potential for raising up a faction that finds a divine duty to impose such faith on unbelievers. Islam means “submission to God.” What incorrigibly evil person would refuse submission to the omnipotent Creator of the universe, the wise, beneficient and merciful? Most such factions are equally avid to slay “apostates” among their own faith unwilling to take such a path. Christianity had its centuries pursuing such arrogance. In this century, such a faction has arisen in Islam — and not for the first time, but its been a while. Recent edicts from Iran and from Hamas have nothing on Ambrose for justifying mass slaughter of Jews.
Arnold is a gentle pacifist who comes from roughly the same religious tradition as Jan Hus and some of the early Baptists and Mennonites. On the other hand, he leads a communitarian sect that is only three generations or so old, in which leadership is more or less of a hereditary monarchy. Many people are happy in this arrangement, and they have a right to choose it. The Bruderhof are generous to those who choose to leave the community, even financing their moving expenses, and hold no grudges. But he’s not all gentle hermit.
As Geoff G. put it, if I understand him correctly, Arnold has every right to say that God ordained marriage as between a man and a woman. He has every right to say, that he believes the New York legislature made a mistake. However, if he is saying that the New York legislature had no right or power to pass the law they did, he is wrong, and fortunately, impotent to make anything of that statement. Civil marriage is granted by the state, Holy Matrimony is a rite of the church. Courts have scrupulously recognized that they have no jurisdiction over the latter — read the Massachusetts decision that started the ball rolling.
Yes, there are whining narcissists who moan that they are not truly equal because certain churches can refuse to host a same-sex marriage if they don’t want to. But this has no legal standing. Yes, it would have taken some tenacity to fight that notorious fine imposed by the unelected panel in New Mexico — but I believe it could be done by anyone willing to stand up and fight it. Scattered incidents across the landscape do not amount to a tidal flow throughout an entire legal system, or even culture.
Leroy Huizenga, I’ll be the first to admit that there are those in the gay and lesbian community who are downright hostile to organized religion and Christianity in particular. I get that way sometimes myself in my less lucid moments (one of the reasons I do hang out here is that I think it’s important to be exposed to the arguments and reasoning of people who disagree with me on issues like this).
For reasons similar to the one’s I addressed here, I think it’s worthwhile exploring just why this is so.
We’ve got a pretty long history of problems with society as a whole. In general, over the last century or so, we’ve really been unable to count on protection from any quarter. Not the police, not the law, not religion, not even, in many cases, our own families. This has often left us at the mercy of a lot of undesirable groups (for instance, the Stonewall Inn in Greenwich Village was a mafia operation protected by bribes to the NYPD until the raid). The same also applies to more random acts against us. It’s within my own memory that the police started taking any interest whatsoever in gay bashings.
Because religion has been such a staunch supporter of this old status quo, it’s not at all surprising that religion generally is viewed by a lot of gays and lesbian, particularly older ones, with a very great deal of hostility and skepticism about how Christians live up to their professed values when it comes to us.
So that’s the starting point. We don’t trust you because for as long as we can remember, you’ve been nothing but hostile to us.
So when we look at specific policy discussions, here’s what we see: you object to same-sex marriage, and can bring up a few reasons for that. OK, fine. Is there still room for compromise? Well, you’re against civil unions, even though they’re not marriage. You’re against the repeal of DADT (and you should know that I personally lost my Army career as a result of DADT, a blow that I took particularly hard). You’re against employment and housing discrimination laws, which seems to mean you’re fine with us getting fired or thrown out of our homes for no reason other than who we are. You’re against programs that offer support to youths who are at risk. We start up programs that basically say “Don’t kill yourself” and not one single Republican can bring him or herself to say that suicide is indeed a very bad thing and you shouldn’t do it.
(Note: I realize that this is not how you would frame your arguments on each issue, but this is what it sounds like to us)
So we interpret all of this not as a reasoned debate over substantive policy issues but as part of a longstanding campaign waged against us that began long before you or I were born and that seems rooted in reasons we cannot really understand. Hence the way the homophobia and bigot charges tend to get thrown around. Which also means that we tend to interpret Christianity as an implacable enemy that must be overcome.
What’s more, because this attitude means we take everything you say on the subject with a pillar of salt, so to speak, your concerns about infringements on religious liberty are met with disbelief or at best are inconsequential next to what we’ve had to go through. Now, I’m quite aware that groups that suddenly find themselves in the ascendancy after many long years of persecution can often, out of a sense of paranoia, overreact and become the persecutors themselves. I think we’re a very long way from that in this present situation, but the possibility is another reason I try to keep lines of communication open.
And trying to build those lines of communication is really the only way forward I see that has any chance of building some consensus that accommodates both groups. The alternatives are either that you force us back into the closet and turn back the clock (which seems highly unlikely to happen under current circumstances) or we end up forcing some Christians into a “Benedict Option” and (most) others into acceptance, which seems to be the path we’re on right now.
There are a few people who are interested in bridging that gap. But they receive very little help and support from either side in the battle.
Sorry this has gone on so long. It really is a weakness of mine that I tend to post way too much. But I think it’s important for conservatives to understand what they sound like to the other side and why it is that they sound that way. Doing so will help you and us find ways of finding ways of living together that respect your own integrity (an overwhelmingly important quality to gays and lesbians, btw) as Christians.
Just one last point, and then I need some sleep
As far as Rev. Arnold goes, anyone who knows anything about him or the anabaptist peace tradition he represents knows that he has absolutely no “his lust for power and control over others”. It’s risible to suggest such.
That’s absolutely true. And absolutely irrelevant. You’re typical gay guy, even a well-informed and politically active one, unless he or she has some esoteric interest in Protestant history and/or theology, couldn’t tell an Anabaptist from an anemone. They may be vaguely aware that they’re a Protestant sect, in which case they’ll most likely be lumped in with Baptists, Pentecostals and Evangelicals of all stripes, and thus labeled part of the enemy.
Sect and denomination doesn’t matter. We lump all Christians (Catholic, Protestant, LDS, Mainline or Evangelical) into the same category: Christian. (Note: this tends to drive liberal Christians right up the wall [warning: link has profanity]).
And I’d say that persecutions of Anabaptists in the 16th and 17th centuries are also pretty irrelevant to the discussion as well. Jews were persecuted for centuries, right up to the Holocaust (and even today, crimes against Jews are the greatest source of religious-based hate crimes in the US), but that hasn’t stopped Israel from acting in some pretty questionable ways.
Christians themselves were persecuted in the Roman Empire, but that didn’t stop them from outlawing the practice of other religions just as soon as they acquired power, or destroying pagan temples.
As noted above, a history of persecution often leads not to tolerance but rather to a willingness to persecute others just as soon as the balance of power shifts. All part of the human condition.
Re: the problem is that the push for so-called gay rights is really and truly squeezing religious rights
Hmm. Couldn’t one say the same thing about the push for equal rights for the Jews and other non-Christians? And didn’t the push to legalize Catholicism in England imply that the Church of England would be truly squeezed? The Gordon Rioters certainly thought so.
No, it seems to me that only squeeze in the squeezing out of the “right” of religious bodies to use the state to impose themselves on others who do not freely choose them. And if a church must depend on the state to proclaim itself then I would say that church has left the path of grace and follows the path of mammon.
“we will not allow ourselves to be mandated by (government) laws — God’s law is supreme”
What is the context, and who is ‘we’? Is he saying that Church procedures should not be mandated by the government? No problem there. Is he saying people should mass disobey the laws because they don’t like gay marriage? That is scary and undemocratic, and ‘Christianist’ is indeed a helpful term.
Luis Huizenga said, “as if it’s simply self-evident that gay “marriage” is an undeniable right. It hasn’t been self-evident to most people, however, and it’s not rooted in nature or tradition; it’s a creation of a powerful minority wielding the power of the State.”
I guess I take issue with the idea that homosexual behavior isn’t rooted in nature. Homosexual behavior been observed in over 200 vertebrate species, hasn’t it. These animals aren’t making some conscious decision to violate natural law.
Thus it follows that if humans had understood from the get-go that homosexuality doesn’t violate the natural order, the concept of gay marriage would be rooted in tradition anyway.
Al-Dhariyat, “I guess I take issue with the idea that homosexual behavior isn’t rooted in nature. Homosexual behavior been observed in over 200 vertebrate species, hasn’t it. These animals aren’t making some conscious decision to violate natural law.”
Cogent, very cogent. And let’s not forget that the eating of one’s own young has been found in many vertebrate species as well, as has abandonment of the sick, and submission to the strongest. These are all clearly our patrimony and no one should question there validity.
Geoff G, I salute your comment as an exposition of the mechanics of the homosexual point of view. We don’t address our perceptions as basis of our positions often enough. Well done.
I would not go praising Christoph Arnold. I bought into the ideals for a while. I owned and read his books. I also spent nearly 2 mo at a bruderhof. It’s a scary cult. Arnold will talk peace and then toss someone out on their butt leaving them all but homeless and not allow them to see their children still at the bruderhof. He is freakishly controlling and cuts people off from their family. I found my experience there very disturbing. I’ve never found a group of people more controlled in my life. I’d also not call him a Christian period at this point since last I read he’d basically abandoned belief in the Trinity. At this point I wonder how much of their history and personality cult of Eberhard Arnold was fabricated and elaborated on to form a better story. A pretty cohesive front is what these people are about. I know this rant has nothing to do with what he said on homosexuality. I don’t disagree with him there. But please check your facts on this guy before praising him. They live to tightly control how their history is presented and aggressively harass and sue people who dare to speak out against anything they say or do. They might not use guns but I’d not call them pacifists since they do NOT turn the other cheek. Don’t believe how THEY present themselves. They also cheat the system by doing things like taking WIC because they can claim next to no income for individuals in their communities but meanwhile have private jets.
Thomas,
Al-Dhariyat has answered the objcetion that homosexuality is unnatural. Are you willing concede he has made his case? We can then move on to consider its moral status.
Geoff,:
Left out of your anaylsis, cogent and well-thought-out out though it was, is the fact that there are gay people who are also Christian.
JonF, Al-Dhariyat made the case that what Andrew Sullivan’s behavior is also the behavior in some creatures living in my garden. What he has not show is how normal such behavior is for we humans. The Marquis de Sade made the same argument to justify his own proclivities. So let’s hear it for the enlightenment.
Unlike Bonobos we can encourage or discourage given behaviors. And yes that brings in the issue of morals.
But Meehan, you are moving the goal post. The original objection was that homosexuality was not natural. Evidence was presented that it is. Now you say, well it’s natural, but not moral. Fine, but then why raise the ‘it’s not natural’ argument to begin with?
At some risk of offending almost everybody, I suggest that homosexuality is a natural deviation from a naturally occurring sexuality that evolved among animals primarily to insure reproduction of each species. The organs that meet in homosexual encounters are not designed for such purposes, and are designed primarily for other purposes. The same could be said for a number of common heterosexual practices. Human ingenuity (or spirituality) has come up with many purposes for sexuality that are not evident among other mammals, much less reptiles, amphibians, or icthyians.
Is it moral? While a certain moral consensus is indeed necessary for a community to exist, and humans are not well designed to exist outside of community, consensus primarily is required for matters where we step on each other’s toes, so to speak. The private conduct of two adults of the same sex does not step on my toes, nor does it require me to teach their techniques to my children. And somewhere around there we should draw the line.
No, militant homosexuals are not entitled to have all children taught what a wonderful part of human existence same-sex encounters are. But they are entitled to have all children taught that this happens in every generation, it may happen to them, but that is statistically unlikely, and whoever turns out that way, its for them to deal with it, not for the rest of them to deny the respect any human being is entitled to.
There will always be some tension. For example, heterosexuals, the overwhelming majority, can generally assume that a member of the opposite sex is fair game for a reasonably courteous approach, whereas a person of homosexual inclinations must assume that most of the individuals of their own sex are off limits. So, there will be some social space not shared in common. Well, there is really not much to be done about that. Life isn’t always fair.
As for those who consider homosexual acts to be an offense against God, well, they can believe that. Some who are tempted believe that, and choose to remain celibate as a result. Some who are tempted believe that, but give in to the temptation anyway. Some who are tempted believe that its perfectly OK with God. Since God hasn’t mentioned the subject to me, and I’ve never been tempted, it is really not a matter of significant concern to me at all.
Grendel, Let’s be clear. What would loosely be called Homosexual behavior has been found in lower species. But humans have Homoerotic behavior. That is, when animals mate, they are following Darwinian responses. Homosexuality exists in the animal kingdom only as a darwinian strategy in special circumstances and within the overall scheme of reproduction. For obvious reasons there are no homosexual species.
Humans are the only critters who experience eros and can conceptualize what they do. In humans homosexuality serves no purpose vis a vis reproduction and hence is unnatural. Both as biological organisms and as social beings, it is natural to pair-bond with members of the opposite sex and reproduce. What could be more unnatural for a human being than to forsake our status as reasoning creatures in order to fulfill a disordered impulse.
There’s no question that marriage is a basic human right. There’s also no question that denying gay people their right to marry is denying them a basic human right. The only questions have to do with what justification is used to deny gay people this basic human right. If the justification is based in religion, then that is a clear violation of the separation of church and state. If religious proscriptions against homosexuality are taken as authoritative for the state’s laws, that is ” religious authoritarianism”. It’s easy to recognize such things in other cultures, such as Iranian Islamism. It’s equally easy to see such tendencies in Christianity, though generally with much less severity. (Gays are criminally prosecuted and even executed in some muslim countries, not merely denied marriage rights).
There’s also no question that Thomas More presided over six executions for Protestant heresy during his term as Chancellor, and that he fully approved of burning them at the stake. There are many things to admire about More’s scholarly work, but he was not a man of peace, but an advocate of violent persecution of those whose religion he disagreed with. I have no hate for him, but he’s obviously not a saint, but a murderer of innocent men whose only crime was the advocacy of Protestantism. That he didn’t think all religions are equal is not crime. Murdering people because they advocate a religion he thought was not the equal of his own is, indeed a crime. Do we disagree on that point? Even worse, his advocacy of such violent treatment of Protestants gave intellectual and moral support for the violence of the counter-reformation, which led to far more deaths over the next few centuries. You might think a saintly man of peace would have advocated against such violence, even while peacefully disagreeing with those advocating other religions than his own. But I guess those who advocate for “Utopias” often feel fully justified in murdering those who seem to stand in their way. Again, the comparison to Che Guevara is apt.
Thomas,
There is zero connection between what is “normal” and what is moral. Left-handedness, red hair and perfect pitch are not “normal”. Mother Teresa’s exemplary charity is not normal. Surely our moral concepts should move beyond the day when being eccentric could get one burned as a witch.
And really, can we do better than just follow Jesus’ simple rule: to love God with all one’s heart and love others as we love ourselves. Why heap up burdens beyond that?
JonF I think the crux of our disagreement is in the term normal as in typical. I understand what you are saying and you have a point. We experience urges that are not culturally learned. In that sense it can be argued that they are “normal.” But these urges/proclivities would never be considered normal from the viewpoint of the preservation of our species or in the interest of a well ordered society. So while natural they are not normal.
Now my personal opinion is that we are a creature in evolutionary transition from our former Simian nature to a higher one, and some of our behavioral inheritance is no longer helpful. It’s normal for powerful males to feel a right to sexual access to all the females in their surroundings. But would this be a justification for a legal regime of harems for billionaires? Do impulses found in nature automatically constitute rights?
A Christian perspective would seem to advise against surrender to nature in favor of a life directed by higher values.
As to Christian love, I have had numerous homosexual friends and certainly love them to one degree or another. But we are also social beings and societies must have workable norms. Loving someone does not equal giving them everything they want. At times one must say no for the greater good.
Thomas,
As I tried to explain “normal” things may be good, bad or neutral. There is zero moral content is what is normal. I’m sure we can think of deeply immoral stuff (e..g, telling selfish lies) that is unfrotunately very much normal in human beings, as well as abnormal things that are very, very good.
And not everything we do must have some vast cosmic purpose, or else be labeled wicked. What a tedious way to judge life! No, there are large areas of human life that are neither good nor evil, and have no purpose apart from such purpose as we may assign. And read that sentence again. We are made in the image of God: in small ways we too are creators inasmuch as we can assign meaning to chance and bring beauty out of randomness. Your philosophy seems to deny that, portraying us instead as slaves to external purposes with no space for our own freedom. It is not thus that I understand God’s love.
“I have had numerous homosexual friends and certainly love them to one degree or another. But we are also social beings and societies must have workable norms. Loving someone does not equal giving them everything they want. At times one must say no for the greater good.”
Wow. I guess you see yourself as not just a friend, but a parent as well, an authoritarian arbiter of what is good for them. I hope your numerous homosexual friends appreciate what a good friend/father they have in you as you work to prevent the state from recognizing their relationships… for their own good, and the greater good, of course.
JonF: your second paragraph is beautiful
As for “normal”, we have to recognize that sexual reproduction by its very nature always produces a wide range of characteristics, in every respect. That is its purpose – reproductive diversity. We don’t clone ourselves like some creatures do. We produce a huge diversity of offspring with a wide ranger of phenotypes, including behavioral phenotypes. In that sense, homosexuality is completely normal, just as celibacy. It’s wouldn’t be normal for everyone to be the same – that would indicate something had gone terribly wrong.
So yes, homosexuality is a part of the normal and expected range of human behavior as dictated by our genetics. And as for our modern concept of “rights”, essentially this means that people have the “right” to be themselves, within the limits of harming others of course. We simply cannot operate any longer under the ignorant assumption that God created us all to literally be the same, to live the same way, eat the same foods, like the same people, think the same way, have sex the same way, etc. God created us through biological mechanisms which ensure diversity in every respect. We have to honor that in our society by ensuring that people have the right to live out that diversity peacefully and without harming one another. That is the golden rule in action.
So yes, people do have the right to be homosexuals and to participate in society in every respect, so long as they do no harm to others, like everyone else. And we have to make sure that in living out our own partiuclar human pattern we do no harm to others as well, including homosexuals.
Thomas – I agree that society must have workable norms, but it also must have diversity, and thus tolerance for those living outside the norms. God does not merely create norms, he also creates diversity that extends outside the norms. We must see the divinity in the whole range of life, not merely in the norms, as if only the norms are blessed, and the rest is some abomination. Some see only the social norms as being valuable to society, and those outside the norms are seen as a threat that must be eradicated. But the opposite is the case. Both need each other. The norms need those outside the norm for perspective and creativity, and those outside the norms need the norms for centering and a stable foundation. Gays need the straight norm, and straights need the gay diversity as well. It doesn’t have to be a conflict, it can be a symbiotic relationship.
“There’s no question that marriage is a basic human right. There’s also no question that denying gay people their right to marry is denying them a basic human right.”
There is a question on at least the latter point. I question your statement. There, that negates the assertion “there is no question.” What you are qualified to say is, “In my mind (and inferentially in the mind of others who have agreed publicly with me), there is no question that…” I’m sure you are aware that many others of your fellow citizens also question the assertion — many more virulently than I do.
Human rights are societally designated. In a state of nature “There is no law, there is only my will” said the strongest man not yet murdered by a stronger man. We have, in this country, a strong sense of individual rights and limited government, along with a strong sense of compassion and equality. All good things for any human culture to embrace. But if civilization collapses, there are no rights except those you can defend at gunpoint, without being killed first.
Taking as a given all the rights established over the past 200 years in America, as we struggled to make a constitutional vision real, marriage is a basic human right, and the Supreme Court recognized that in 1967 (Loving v. Virginia).
I deny that “gay people” have been “denied their right to marry,” just as I deny that people in wheel chairs have been “denied their right to equal access” by the existence of stairs. Nobody ever built a staircase to deny people in wheel chairs access to buildings. Stairs were built to PROVIDE people with legs (the norm) with access to buildings, and ability to build higher than one story, build above the ground so wood wouldn’t rot so fast, etc. The Americans with Disabilities Act was in fact a call to DISCRIMINATE IN FAVOR of the minority among our fellow citizens who must cope with disabilities. I have no problem with that. I drove a paratransit bus for five years. I loved many of my passengers. (In no conceivable demographic is everyone noble or wonderful). It is a good thing to build ramps, so that even more of us, even all of us, can have access.
Antimiscegenation laws were written to deny certain men the right to marry certain women, and vice versa. No marriage laws, prior to 1990 or so, were written with the intent, or for the purpose, of “denying gay people the right to marry.” In fact, nobody, including those in homosexual couples, ever really thought about gays marrying until the last forty years or so, barring the joke about a Virginia senator being “Mrs. Buchanan” to a bachelor president.
In fact, every gay individual has every right to marry. They don’t wish to marry. They wish to revise the definition of marriage. They want one more human relationship to be recognized in exactly the same manner that one human relationship, one between a man and a woman, has been recognized for centuries. I’m not particularly opposed to that. I applaud the fact that in New York, the state’s highest court declined to find a constitutional right, and the legislature, the people’s elected representatives, made a decision by statute to add to the existing definition of marriage.
Constitutional rights adhere to each “person,” not to demographic constituencies. Each man, and each woman, is free to enter into the human relationship known as marriage. By its very nature, to marry, a man requires a willing woman, and a woman requires a willing man. That is no more unconstitutional discrimination than the legal principle that a prostitute and her customer cannot be considered to have “conspired,” merely because there are two of them, when the act itself requires two individuals to consummate. (A pimp, on the other hand, can be guilty of conspiracy with almost anyone else). A male partner simply doesn’t bring to a marriage the capacity that a female partner does, and vice versa.
Gay people have not been denied anything. Their constitutional right to privacy has been well established by Lawrence v. Texas, which I applaud. They have no constitutional entitlement to the recognition, approbation, and celebration of the entire community. The community, through legislative action, may choose to extend such recognition. As I said, I don’t much care if that happens. But it is not a constitutional, much less a “human” right.
JonF wrote, “As I tried to explain “normal” things may be good, bad or neutral. There is zero moral content is what is normal.”
OK help me understand this. If there is zero moral content in what is normal, how can you refer to them as being Good, Bad or neutral. Your using moral terms to contradict your self.
Conradg, I am not making a case for persecuting homosexuals. I am making a case for the majority to have the right and an obligation to maintain a legal regime that encourages the their own cultural norms. Marriage and its definition is well established in tradition and law. It is no infringement on homosexuals to deny them a right they never had in the first place.
But your writing about norms brings up an important question. How do we deal with deviance? To my mind the vast majority of deviance is maladaptive and harmful. But as you point out some of it Isn’t. So for the Athenians, odd old men pestering the young men in the Agora is a nuisance, except when the odd old guy is Socrates. There is just no easy answer to this question. But I do know that assuming that all the corrupters are Socrates is playing a losing hand. It’s perplexing.
Re: If there is zero moral content in what is normal, how can you refer to them as being Good, Bad or neutral.
OK, I phrased that badly. What I meant is that you cannot say “This is normal” or “This is unuusual” and have those be synonyms for “This is good” and “This is bad”, respectively.
Re: To my mind the vast majority of deviance is maladaptive and harmful.
When you have that mindset, you are keeping company with those good, “normal” folk who hung Christ on the Cross. What is maladaptive will not last. Stipulating that I am talking of things not destructive or harmful to others, Let 100 flowers bloom. Most will wilt without issue; but a few will yield seed a thousand fold.
And probably the best advice of all: Live your own live and mind your own business. The world is in better hands than yours and mine.
“Nobody’s talking about civil disobedience here”? Rod, you’re the one who said, as your first point of reply to AS, that “the refusal to follow, on grounds of religious conscience, laws that one finds unjust is the basis for civil disobedience.”
And that statement is clearly false as it stands. The refusal *on grounds of religious conscience* is *a*, not *the*, basis for civil disobedience. Civil disobedience is essentially defined as the refusal to follow laws that one finds unjust. It has no necessary connection to religious conscience or belief at all, and your clause limiting it thereto is incorrect.
“The point is, there is such a thing as Islamism. There is no such thing as Christianism.
Sure there is. The FBI tracks the activities of a dozen violent, terrorist organizations in this country that call themselves Christian. Now, you may not accept that self-definition (while you do accept the self-definition of al-Qaeda), but it’s not your place to accept or reject the classification.
As for the rally Sullivan referred to, it was not a rally against same-sex marriage. It was a rally against any and all recognition of same-sex relationships. There’s a world of difference between opposing the use of the word marriage and keeping two people apart as legal strangers. The words of the gentleman in question, “send a message to Washington”, seem to me to be a call to Washington to settle the issue. How would Washington do that? What has been the aim of NOM and the other co-sponsors of the rally? A constitutional amendment to define marriage in the United States according to the traditional, Christian definition and to ban civil unions, domestic partnerships. etc.
How you can insist that a rally in favor of changing the law to reflect (some) Christian teaching is any different from changing the law to reflect (some) Islamic teaching is, well, mystifying.
It’s simple. If Arnold fights within his religion to keep homosexual marriage from being sanctified by his church, he’s not a Christianist.
If he seeks to shape the laws of his pluralistic nation through the lens of his particular religious views, he’s a Christianist.
Sorry that the term hurts your feelings. Imagine how the people who are being prevented from being civilly married feel.
Thomas O. Meehan:
This is simply false. Sex serves a variety of purposes besides reproduction. Just looking at primates, baboons use sex to establish dominance. Bonobos use sex as social lubricant. A primatologist likely would give another half-dozen examples.
And while sex evolved because of reproduction, don’t make the mistake of thinking that is an animal’s purpose, even when that is the result. Most animals don’t have the cognitive ability to anticipate that! Even in those that perhaps do, there is no reason to think that is what drives sex. If we were to anthropomorphize what goes through the mind of a chimpanzee in estrus, I suspect it is much closer to “me so horny,” than “I’d like another baby.” There is no one plotting a Darwinian strategy, not even the animals whose behavior reflects it.
You keep using that word. It doesn’t mean what you think it means.
Also, Jacobs’s article at TAS makes a similar mistake. Of course MLK was personally inspired and fueled by his own Christian faith. But the truth and the rights that he fought for deserved to prevail not because they are grounded in Christianity, or in any other religious faith, but because they are universal human rights, not conceptually tied to any particular religious faith or to religious faith at all. And to see those convictions pass into law in American society in particular requires that they not be essentially grounded in religious tenets held on faith by adherents of a particular religion.
The Christianist fight against homosexuality in general, and gay marriage in particular, may in the future be recognized as the last battle of the Enlightenment; the final extension and incorporation of the principles born of that socio-politico-philosophical movement into actual governance.
Andrew may be careless in his use of the Christianist label from time to time; he’s human and prolific. But he is generally consistent, and applies it to those Christians seeking to impose their religious beliefs on society through governmental action to oppress, deny equal treatment to, or otherwise limit the rights of others.
Neither marriage or monogamy are natural, but rather a product of civilization. As such, the definition of marriage (not just the man/woman definition, but the larger and more complex definition of the entire institution) is the providence of the society that hosts it, and it has changed constantly throughout human history.
Currently in the United States, the culture is shifting to more broad based moral acceptence of homosexuality as whole, and in turn we are pollitically and legislativly shifting the definition of marriage to accomidate these changes to our collective morallity.
And if you think that morallity is immutable, history is full of people who thought this and whose moral structure would be completly alien in the modern world. The common example is contemporarly moral people who owned slaves – which would be considered completly immoral today.
It is unfortunate when people who should know better intentionally misstate the findings of the natural sciences on the role which homosexuality plays in the preservation of species.
If we are to believe the traditional defense of ultra-conservative Catholics that Galileo was punished, not for his heliocentric views but his improper reasoning, then it only compounds the intentional false witness to make such statements.
Christianist is a neologism. As such, the definition, however settled among lexicographers is going to remain fluid for some time. It is no surprise that Dreher dislikes the term, the conflict between his own profound dislike of homosexuality and his striving to be a good Christian is at the root of much of the conflict he has with the term.
There is, of course, an easy answer to all those who insist that granting us homosexuals the right to marry is immoral. We can examine those countries which grant us marriage or partnership rights and in which we enjoy full civil rights. Our examination should index the most grievous of moral failings in those countries against the status quo in the US, where our civil rights are denied us.
Where are the rates of newborn and early childhood death highest?
Where are the divorce rates among heterosexuals highest?
Where are the abortion rates highest?
Where are the rape and murder rates highest?
Where are those practices condemned by the Catholic Church most practiced, ie: Wars of aggression, lack of health insurance, imposition of the death penalty, support for torture.
A truly fair assessment shows that my full civil rights and marriage in Europe has not caused any decline in morals. It could, in fact, be argued that those developed countries which most restrict gay rights are also those most culpable of moral failings.
I am curious how one goes about “breaking the law” when it comes to gay marriage. Does this mean one would, for example, not rent an apartment to a gay couple if they were married. but would if they weren’t? And how is one “civilly disobedient to gay marriage “laws”?
Siarlys,
If you accept that marriage is a basic human right, then the only way you can say that homosexuals are not being denied a basic human right is to say that they are not human. Some on this blog seem to being making that inference by comparing them to garden creatures, but I don’t think you are one of them.
We deny people basic human rights all the time. Those who commit crimes are denied some of their rights. Children are denied many rights. As far as marriage goes, we deny the right of closely related people to get married. I know a woman who lived with her uncle from her late teens in an incestuous relationship until the day he died, and she certainly felt it was unfair that she was denied her right to marry.
So the question isn’t whether gays are being denied the right to marry. As I said, if you accept the first claim, the second can’t help but follow. The question is whether there is a good reason to deny gays the right to marry one another, as we do close relatives. That’s the major issue that was on trial in California recently over Prop 8. The anti-marriage case was embarrassingly empty of sound reasons to deny gays this basic right. It’s not as if the courts felt the same way about incestuous marriages. And likewise, you have not come up with a sound reason to deny them this right either, except to claim that there is no specific right for gays to marry, but somehow there is for straights, which frankly makes no sense. Gays and straights are both human beings, and they have equal rights, and you can’t just deny one type of person their right to marry whomever they wish without very good legal and social reasons for it.
The problem with your formulation that men are free to marry a woman, but not a man, is that this is clear sexual discrimination. A woman is allowed to marry me, but not a man? What other legal contract makes this discriminatory exclusion? Are there any legal contracts that I can only make with a woman, and not a man? Would constitutional law permit such contractual restrictions to be enforced? Why should marriage contracts be exempt from this?
And of course we all know that since gay men are not interested in marrying women, to allow that, but not same-sex marriage, of course denies them the right to choose whom they would marry, just as anti-miscegenation laws have been struck down as unconstitutional because they deny whites to marry blacks, even though it applies universally on both sides of the fence. The principle is that the state must take a blind eye to who can marry whom, unless there is a strong social reason otherwise, as there is in the case of incest.
What you have to understand is that the courts are not “finding a new right” for homosexuals to get married. In virtually all cases, they are simply not finding any basis for the state to deny gays the right to marry that everyone else has. It’s true that this right has been denied them for many centuries, but it’s not true that no one ever wanted this right until recently. Gay couples in lifelong “marriage” to one another have always existed, in the closet or just in the breach. When I was growing up in the 1960s, living in the suburbs on a private road, the people living at the end of the road, off into the forest in a private setting, were a homosexual couple. Everyone in the neighborhood knew who they were and what they were about, but they kept to themselves so as I’m sure to avoid any confrontations about their relationship. They were as married as any other couple on the block, except for the paperwork. And they probably never thought it would be possible to be legally married, but I’m sure they would have been very happy to have the chance. And I’m sure in every generation there have been couples just like them living on the fringes of society, wary of their acceptability and suffering not just social stigma, but legal stigmas. So let’s not pretend this is actually a new issue for the people it actually affects. It may be a new issue for straights, but not for gays.
Long-suffering and even unacknowledged denials of human rights have been part of human history for a very long time. Most such rights have only recently been acknowledged, and only partially backed up by law. Not every denial of human rights is unwarranted, of course. But unless a pressing reason for such denials can be made, they should not be honored by the law any longer. Do you honestly disagree?
Thomas,
I have no problem on a social level with the existence of “norms”, so long as we don’t pretend that everything outside the norm is harmful, and should be legally excluded from society. You say you are not interested in persecuting gays, and I believe you. I believe you even believe that denying gays the right to marry is not a form of persecution. I think you simply need to look more closely at the facts of the matter, and see that it most certainly is.
Marriage has always been viewed as a basic human right. It has also always been restricted in various ways, both legally and socially, based on class, economics, religion, ethnicity, race, and obviously sexual orientation. There has never been a “definition of marriage”, and there isn’t one now either. It has always followed the various cultural and economic mores of the time. And over time in modern cultures, the various restrictions and customs that have limited who one can marry have been struck down, one by one. Why? Because the reasons for enforcing those restrictions have not withstood the test of our cultural and legal reasoning and accepted practices. Same sex marriage is simply another restriction upon a basic human right that no longer stands up to the light of reason, especially in the context of our modern culture, society, and constitutional law.
To say that there has never been a basic right to marriage for gays is to suggest that such rights don’t actually exist until they are granted by society. But that ignores the fundamental reason they are called “rights” in the first place. The legal basis for the concept of “rights” is that they have always existed, but simply not been properly acknowledged.
The foundation for our enshrinement of human rights in the constitution is the notion that man has inherent rights, given by God, and that the most just form of government is one that acknowledges and protects those inherent rights, regardless of what the majority wishes. The whole idea is to protect the rights of minorities against the majority, so that a great burden is placed on any legal regime that would deny people their rights. That burden is simply not met in the case of denying gay people their right to marry.
Now, I understand that your concept of God only gives the right to marry to straights, and not to gays, but to enshrine that notion of God in our laws would be the state making laws on the basis of religion, and that is simply forbidden. Actual evidentiary reasons have to be put forward that stand the test of strict scrutiny in order to justify denying marriage rights to gays. And that simply hasn’t been put forward by you or anyone else that I’m aware of. It always boils down to some kind of personal sense of moral outrage, disgust, or religious conviction, none of which is something that our laws can be based upon. So, do you really have anything more than that to argue?
[...] have enjoyed Rod Dreher’s new blog, he’s a “provocateur” too . He takes on Andrew Sullivan’s poor attempt to stigmatize Christians, Apple’s architectural hubris and says he would [...]
[...] have enjoyed Rod Dreher’s new blog, he’s a “provocateur” too . He takes on Andrew Sullivan’s poor attempt to stigmatize Christians, Apple’s architectural hubris and says he would [...]
[...] have enjoyed Rod Dreher’s new blog, he’s a “provocateur” too . He takes on Andrew Sullivan’s poor attempt to stigmatize Christians, Apple’s architectural hubris and says he would rather [...]