I’m working on an article about how young adults are increasingly likely to call themselves pro-life, and increasingly likely to support gay marriage. There are a lot of narratives you could tell about how someone comes to hold either or both of these beliefs; I want to get some sense of which narratives people tell themselves. [ETA: Whoa, that phrasing is awful! "Which narratives people tell themselves" = how people explain, in their own words, how they came to hold their beliefs.]

So! If you are pro-life, pro-gay-marriage, and under 25, please email me at eve_tushnet@yahoo.com . If you know other people who fit the bill, please give them my information! And if you’re on any mailing lists which might truffle up some responses, I would be thrilled if you’d repost this request.

Being over 25 and having gotten considerably more skeptical of gay marriage since I first started writing about it, I am unable to help directly, but I suppose some of you all can oblige? I think the piece Eve is working on may be for TAC, actually.

P.S. Eve’s “Romoeroticism” essay that was published at Inside Catholic the other week is really excellent, and I can’t believe I haven’t linked to it yet! It might help to shed some more light on the idea that was at the core of my unpublished Culture11 essay.

P.P.S. Will Wilson asks marriage traditionalists some good questions, and the correct answers are “Yes” to “B” and “C”, and “Not so much” to “A”.

Marriage, as a political/societal tradition has at its core the truth that it is essential for society that family units be officially bonded and recognized, and that children, if at all possible, be brought up in families (death can be a circumstantial complication here, however). The form that the tradition stipulates is a man and a woman. Society, however, has moved away from that form, and – if divorce rates are to be allowed to speak their meaning – away from the idea of marriage in any form as much more than a legal contract. (My opinion of divorce is hardly Catholic, but when divorce rates are at 50%, it’s hard to make the case that marriage hasn’t been devalued somehow and that the stability of the nuclear family has been jeopardized.)

The move to make, such thinking would say, would be to alter the form to better preserve the underlying truth within society. That is to say, expand marriage to include same-sex couples, but make it clear in doing so that it is not because marriage and family mean whatever we want them to mean, but because of the importance of family in stable form to society.

And this all leads up to my objection to the idea of removing government from “marriage” altogether and calling everything a civil union. It defeats the purpose of expanding marriage to defend marriage and the nuclear family: in fact, it only devalues the idea of marriage by having the government declare that, for all political and society purposes, marriage is nothing more than a contract. Understanding marriage as something divorced from family (this should not be taken as saying that a valid marriage must produce children, or somesuch thing) is far more damaging to marriage, and certainly more against the tradition than altering the traditional form of marriage.

(Though note that JL, like me, is decidedly uncomfortable with that latter sort of alteration, too.)

… given the thrust of public opinion, either we’ll get private marriage, or gay marriage. The latter seems much preferable to me, even to a reactionary like me. Gay marriage might lead to the destruction of the institution of marriage, but privatizing marriage would be the destruction of the institution.

There actually was a time when I was tempted by the sort of position that James is taking on here, but his response shows quite effectively why no real defender of what’s come for better and worse to be called “traditional marriage” ever should be. Human beings are not, and never can be, creatures whose self- and other-understandings are constructed independently of societal context; we’re political animals, and like it or not this means that the laws and common understandings of the polities we inhabit have deeply pervasive effects on the ways we live our lives. And so when marriage becomes, as it would if its status were relegated to the fast-shrinking sphere of the “religious”, not an aspiration for all humankind but instead simply a special kind of inner state, a move in a private language game that only a god can divine, marriage then becomes nothing at all; it has not just been redefined, but defined away, made trivial in its faux-“sacredness” because of course we know that trivial is exactly what the supposedly sacred is. It is, I’d vouch, precisely for this sort of reason that the Church doesn’t refuse to acknowledge civil or otherwise extra-ecclesial weddings as constituting the real article: marriage is indeed a sacrament and deserves to be recognized as such, but the grace of the sacrament resides in what is fundamentally a human institution, one which is open even to those who don’t fully understand it for what it is. Marriage is indeed something sacred, but despite that it must still be allowed to be profaned, lest what remains for those in the “merely” public square is an even paler simulacrum of the real thing than the contractualized, divorce-ridden sets of interpersonal “arrangements” that we’ve presently got. There is nothing tradition-preserving at all about making marriage the province of the priests, and letting the public at large work out something altogether different.

In my view, the singular focus upon abortion as THE issue over which conservative Catholics will brook no divergence and around which we are called to rally reveals, to my mind, not evidence of robust Catholic culture as much as its absence. It seems to me that – along with the opposition to gay marriage – this issue represents the last stand, the inner-most wall barely keeping the hordes from overrunning the sanctum. The ferocity over this issue – and this issue almost to the exclusion of nearly every other issue that might be part of a rich fabric of Catholic culture – suggests to me that Catholic culture, where it existed, has been largely routed. And, in fact, it suggests further that it is precisely for this reason that this issue has become largely defined politically – and not culturally – with an emphasis on the way that the battle over abortion must be won or lost at the ballot box (and, by extension, Supreme Court appointments).

Mr. Bush espoused a horrifyingly heterodox religious vision, one far more akin to the messianic Americanism that forms part of what Bacevich has called national security ideology than it is to anything that could fairly be called orthodoxy. To the extent that Linker’s favorite targets, the so-called “theocons,” were more or less entirely on board with what Mr. Bush was doing, even if they felt compelled to use their own teachings in distorted form to do it, they were not championing orthodoxy at all. One might go so far to say that as they became stronger supporters of Mr. Bush, the less orthodox they tended to become, because the arguments they had to employ to defend Mr. Bush’s outrageous actions and gnostic impulses necessarily ate away at orthodox teachings.

It helps to think of what Daniel is exposing here as a variant on the Unicornism Fallacy: that all of history’s greatest villains lacked a belief in unicorns is no reason at all to think that failure to believe in unicorns leads to evil deeds; and in the same way, that Bush and many of his advisers and supporters were Christians is in itself no ground to blame Christianity for what they did. It was the contents of their beliefs that motivated them, and those contents included a host of radical and decidedly unChristian views concerning the permissibility of wanton killing, the inherent goodness of democracy, the possibility of remaking foreign peoples in our own image, and so on. That they were Christians clearly shows that such faith is no sure bulwark against even very serious sins, but then again we already knew that; to move from there to the claim that Christianity needs to be abandoned altogether is, however, not only to throw out the baby with the bathwater, but to insist on drowning it in the ensuing puddle as well.

P.S. In the same vein, tarring opponents of same-sex marriage as “the successors of those who defended slavery and segregation on Biblical grounds” (no, really) is obvious slander, unless by this one means to call attention to the fact that we are all the inheritors of a great tradition of human wickedness; and once again we already knew that, too. If slippery-slope arguments and the insinuation of guilt by association are out of place (as they are!) when used against SSM advocates, then according to what principle may the very same tactics appropriately be used by them?

I mean, the marriage debate is a debate over a word: but like a great many of our words, “marriage” isn’t a mere word, but rather a word that has a rather central place in our cultural self-understanding and so can’t change its significance without having pretty dramatic effects on many other aspects of that self-understanding, too. Hence Eve:

Gay marriage is a big deal for the same reasons given by its supporters!–it is a real change in the culture, a deeply significant change, and a change with far-reaching public implications. I don’t think you can write paeans to marriage as a public and cultural status, then turn around and say that gay marriage will have very limited public effects. Marriage isn’t designed to have limited public effects.

I think this is spot-on. How we understand marriage is a big deal, and the push for same-sex marriage is a push to have quite a lot of us – by which I mean: perhaps not those of us who attend fancy schools and live in DC or Berkeley, but still quite a lot of us – change our understanding of marriage in pretty dramatic ways. And the idea, which is trotted out with disturbing frequency given how transparently absurd it is, that the push for same-sex marriage is anything short of this, i.e. that it’s just a push for a change in the legal code that won’t have to have any wider cultural consequences unless people allow it to, is … well … transparently absurd. Note well the title of Eve’s post: the language we speak is an essentially public language, and politics and publicity just don’t come apart like that, which means that a change in how marriage is treated in our politics simply has to be a change in how it is treated by our culture; the only real question should be whether you think such a change would be a good one.

To repeat: the real question is whether you think such a change would be a good one. And I think it’s quite possible to argue that it would be: there are, after all, many cases in which things change for the better, and indeed if your view of history is sufficiently optimistic you might think that that is usually how it is, and so that there’s reason to assume that the normalization of same-sex marriage will follow a similar course, with homophobia and traditional gender roles going the merry way of racism the aristocracy. But then the point is that this is an empirical claim, and even if you’re not (as I’m not) the sort of person who gets all fearful about religious freedom or slippery slopes or All the Awful Things That Might Happen you still have to acknowledge the likelihood that some good things would be all-but-irretrievably lost as a consequence of such a change, that there would be some less than fully salutary effects of modifying our cultural self-understanding in the way that the push for same-sex marriage proposes that we should. Some changes are like the Wild Card and the invention of the forward pass, while others are more like interleague play and the BCS; and even if allowing same-sex marriage turned out to be a change like the first two there would still be at least some ways in which the self-understandings of future generations would likely be impoverished relative to our own.

Yes, Quine showed us that the meanings of words can and do change. And yes, such changes are often very much for the better – just think of how our concept of space, incomprehensible as it would have been to Aristotle or Newton, allows us to understand the universe in incredibly illuminating ways. (Though think also of how, having gotten beyond the scientific naïveté of the ancients, we often find ourselves at a loss when it comes time to account for the presence in a world like ours of things like mindedness or mind-independent value.) And, finally, yes, our public understanding of marriage has already changed in a host of dramatic (though as dramatic as this one?) ways in both recent and not-so-recent years. But all of that only sketches the background; it does not show where we should go from here. “Marriage” does not pick out a natural kind, but rather a kind that is created, and given that it is up to us to shape that word’s significance in ways that meet our deepest human needs. The challenge is to do this as best we can, and given that challenge’s obvious immensity the confidence of gay marriage proponents that they have an easy solution that can’t be called into question by anyone but bigots and homophobes strikes me as evidence of a deeply dangerous sort of hubris.

Addendum: In the morning light, this post looks to be worded a bit differently than I’d have put things if I wrote it right now. But such is the Internet; I’ve made some very minor stylistic alterations, but I stand by the content.

Now, maybe this is because I’m coming at this argument from a Jewish perspective and tradition, but something seems flawed when Andrew Sullivan writes,

But once that is conceded, marriage equality is not only inevitable but logically necessary, and drawing the marital line at those who never can reproduce – as opposed to those who can but choose not to – can only be seen as a function of animus (or, in Rove’s empty calculations, short-term political advantage). That is especially true when civil marriage no longer even makes a pretense at being connected to procreation. I mean: how many post-menopausal wedding announcements have you read lately in the NYT?

The assumption that the question of the proper role of sex in marriage is always about reproduction (or, potentially gender roles, which Andrew also brings up, though not necessarily in relation to sex itself) has perplexed me for a while.  Though it sounds almost corny, the Jewish view is that sex is also about unity and through that (as well as reproduction) holiness.  In a marriage, the act itself is a mitzvah and integral to the marriage itself.  Reproduction is a commandment, but sex (as far as I know) is still a mitzvah after menopause or if one partner (or both) is infertile.  And, to paraphrase a bright young Orthodox rabbi I know, the Jewish view is that sex isn’t a mitzvah unless and until both partners achieve orgasm.  (I haven’t actually checked that bit of halakhah myself, however.)

The objection, from that perspective, isn’t that the sex can’t result in reproduction, but that it isn’t the type which constitutes a mitzvah.  And without “Jewishly legal” sex, a marriage can’t be whole.  Of course, the Christian perspective is possibly (likely?) rather (?) different.  But because of that, the, “Oh, so you think sex is only about reproduction?  Well what about menopause and infertility?” arguments always strike me as straw men.

Do I think that it is the proper role of the government to enforce a more or less traditionally Jewish (or, if we prefer it, Christian, “Judeo-Christian,” or maybe just “traditional”) definition of marriage if the majority of citizens would rather that it not?  No.  Do I think, however, that one can make an argument against same-sex marriage because a certain type of sex is vital to the essence of marriage, without being accused of political crassness or medievalism?  Yes.

Yes, there was perhaps a real value in a world where everything reflected the same widely accepted Truth, and all questions had answers, and all answers were a function of religious obedience, and a brilliant Catholic interpretation of Aristotle. But Rod, like all other mature Westerners, must know that that world is over. You either deal with it or you follow Alasdair Macintyre’s advice and disappear into a monastery.

But as I pointed out the other day, that just ain’t MacIntyre:

… a tradition, as opposed to a mere ideology, is never something that is static, [but] is always something that is ready to modify and adapt itself to the new sets of problems – philosophical, scientific, cultural, political, or whatever – that arise during the course of its existence. (I take it that this is, at least roughly, what MacIntyre is not a Burkean.) A tradition that fails to do this is a dead tradition, which is really to say that it is no tradition at all; hence a tradition, unlike perhaps a constitution, cannot be the sort of thing it needs to be unless it is a living thing, which is to say a growing and changing and always at work at problem-solving thing. But when self-conscious attunement to one’s inescapable place in a tradition becomes, as it does in Rod’s language, a simple commitment to “traditionalism”, to preserving those “ancient structures” that are the only things standing between us and those who wish “radically [to] undermine the foundation of our moral order”, it seems to me to fail in this crucial task.

Note that none of this is to say that MacIntyre is anything but a skeptic of modernity, nor is it to make any claims about his views on same-sex marriage. (Any of you Domers out there want to get the scoop on that front?) But the notion that the author of, say, Dependent Rational Animals is concerned to shuttle us off to monasteries and have us pretend that the Enlightenment never happened is more than a bit ridiculous, and I suspect that Andrew knows it.

Quite honestly, I have difficulty following this logic.  First of all, the court was taking into account the constitutionality of the ban on gay marriage in the first place, and quite rightly found that it was not, in fact, constitutional.  Revoking the ban is not activism; it is a reaction to activism.

This seems to me to miss the point quite widely, since the question at stake here is precisely whether the court was right in finding the gay marriage ban to be unconstitutional, i.e. whether the finding of its unconstitutionality was or was not genuinely reflective of the constitution. If it wasn’t, then “activist” and – especially – “lawless” seem quite reasonable appellations. Hence Jacob Sullum, himself no conservative and a very firm advocate for gay marriage:

… this decision, like the California Supreme Court’s similar ruling last year, seems to be another example of result-oriented jurisprudence that ultimately undermines a constitution’s ability to constrain government action and protect individual liberty. If you read the court’s analysis as it goes through the arguments for a gay marriage ban and (correctly, in my view) finds each of them wanting, it’s hard to see how this process differs from what legislators do.

It’s clear that the Iowa constitution’s equal protection clause, at the time it was adopted, was not understood to prohibit a law limiting marriage to a man and a woman (assuming the issue would even have been intelligible). So the basis for saying that such a law is inconsistent with that clause today has to be an evolving understanding of what equal protection entails, especially regarding what it means to be similarly situated. But barring a constitutional amendment, judges can implement this new understanding only by reinterpreting the clause to mean something it did not mean at the time it was written. That sort of license can lead to all sorts of mischief, as the evolving understanding of the U.S. Constitution’s Commerce Clause (to pick one especially pernicious example) illustrates.

Assuming – as I know is not entirely uncontroversial! – that laws cannot change their meaning, and that the function of the judiciary is simply to interpret that meaning and not to enact new laws, Sullum seems clearly right to me: whether or not ending the gay marriage ban is, as Erik writes, “an undeniably good thing”, and indeed whether or not he is right (as I think he surely is) to complain that conservative skepticism of judicial “activism”, and the corresponding attachment to “representative government” as an alternative, tends to be every bit as “result-oriented” as the kind of jurisprudence that Sullum is criticizing here, it can still be the case that the Iowa ruling overstepped the court’s proper bounds (read: was lawless). An “attack on traditional marriage”? Perhaps not. But it can, for all that, still be an illicit attempt by a branch of government whose lawful power is only that of interpreting existing laws instead to create new laws where none had existed before. If doing a similar sort of thing wasn’t okay for the Bush executive branch, then what makes this an occasion to cheer on the Iowa Supremes?