July 21, 2009
commenting on commentings...
Hale Adams wrote, in a comment on the previous post,
I've said it before, John, and I'll say it again: You're mixing religion with politics.
If the Church wants to insist, for its own purposes, that homosexual or multiple unions are not marriages, that's fine. Far be it from me (and it should be far from anyone else) to dictate to the Church how it deals with parishoners who break its rules.
As far as the State is concerned, however, marriages are simply contractual arrangements voluntarily entered into by the parties concerned. Yes, traditionally, such arrangements have been between one man and one woman, but if two men or two women (or any permutation of one or multiple men and/or women) want to enter into such a contract-- I say, "Let them." Maybe their arrangements will work, maybe they won't. And if (when?) the arrangements don't work, then they should suffer the messiness inherent in the dissolution of the contract. (It just might discourage others from following their example, and your position carries the day, John.)
Actually, even if marriage is just a contractual arrangement, what I wrote is still valid—that the argument made by Boies is fallacious, since it sneaks past the point that people are really divided about. (And any state regulation of contracts involves defining things, and people will always have a valid gripe if someone moves goalposts by slipping in a re-definition of terms. I myself have a valid gripe on a purely contractual level, since I'm a party in a marriage contract, and now people are trying to change what my contract says!)
But I don't think that people will ever consider marriage just part of the realm of contract, nor will they want the state, which reflects our wishes, to do so. (Nor do I think you really believe that, Hale.)
In California we already have a domestic partners law which is close to a marriage contract, and hardly anyone notices it. WHY?
People sometimes understand things without being able to think clearly about them. They drift along with what they are told by "experts," (like, say, materialists who think life can be just regulated by contract and majority vote) not realizing where the small steps are leading. Until they crash against something like the marriage issue. Then suddenly they are howling in pain, and the experts say, "Tsk tsk, how irrational the little people are. Democracy is a poor system of government. Decisions should be left to the experts."
In fact the experts usually know where they are heading all along, and carefully conceal the truth, just because democracy works pretty damn well when people have enough information. And boy do they heap contumely upon anyone who says that such-and-such a small step is leading to some big step that people will hate. The people who said that overturning state sodomy laws would lead to gay marriage were called crazy, and bigots!
Politics and religion are always going to intersect, because they are both about what human beings really are. They both define us, although politics is much less explicit about this. In America we hope to use politics to merely create a neutral space for personal decisions to be made. But that is pretty much impossible, because even the smallest political decision tends to define us. If the small town of Mudville puts up the first traffic light on Main Street, that says something about the people who go along with it. A little bit of customary law has been replaced by explicit law, and that changes the definition of citizens of that town.
It seems silly to say it about such a small matter, but it is a religious decision. A tiny bit of life has been removed from the realm of conscience and morality and personal responsibility. After that when the preacher gets up in the pulpit and says that our moral choices have big consequences, and that even tiny sins can lead to bigger ones and get us into trouble, the government has also preached a tiny but different sermon.
Everyone has a religion. That is, everyone has beliefs about the universe and existence that are not based on logic or science. Hale Adams has a religion. He is making a political proposal based on his personal faith; he has no formal or scientific proof that his view of what people are is true.
Update: Actually, Hale's sentence: "If the Church wants to insist, for its own purposes, that homosexual or multiple unions are not marriages, that's fine..." is, itself, a religious position. One which the Catholic Church rejects. We think that our view of marriage is part of Natural Law, and is just as valid—and real—in the Cannibal Isles as it is among Christians.
John writes:
I myself have a valid gripe on a purely contractual level, since I'm a party in a marriage contract, and now people are trying to change what my contract says!
Not at all, John. Your contract with Charlene was to "love, honor, cherish", etc., etc., along with the usual State-administered legal boilerplate concerning community property and such. The extension of that State-administered legal boilerplate to, uh...... non-traditional groupings...... doesn't change your contract with Charlene one iota. You might not like the State extending the protection of the marriage laws to non-traditional groupings (and I'm not sure that I like it, myself), but you are not damaged by that extension, either.
As for mixing religion with politics, of course religion and politics intersect. The ancients knew that, too: "Render unto Caesar that which is Caesar's, but render unto God that which is God's." A post or two back, I noted that the chief failing of modern-day "liberals" is that they try to render unto Caesar that which is God's, often with catastrophic results. (Ask any former inmate, er, subject of the Soviet Union or its all-too-many monstrous progeny.) I think what the defenders of "traditional morality" forget is that rendering unto God that which is Caesar's can lead one into serious error as well.
At its most serious, of course, you have the giving over of political power to religious figures, who then proceed to abuse it and enslave everyone, believer and non-believer alike, to their particular vision of how the world should be. And one can't get away from it because the Church is the State. (It's the mirror-reversed twin of Communism, in which the State is the Church.)
Even in situations that fall well short of full-blown theocracy, rendering unto God that which is Caesar's can still lead to subtle and needless errors, which only serve to undermine the Church's message and its authority. Yes, there have to be strong penalties for acts (and failures to act) that result in physical or economic harm to others, such murder, rape, theft, robbery, fraud, and other similar things traditionally understood as crimes. Once one goes beyond that relatively small list of prohibited things, trouble sets in.
As the list of prohibited, punishable-by-law things grows larger, the reasons for them become ever less obvious. (I'm sure that a well-trained priest could lecture at great length about how these things are in fact harmful, but 99 44/100% of his audience aren't going to take him at his word, not least because priests aren't as pure as the driven snow any more than their flocks are.) The prohibitions may well be rooted in Natural Law, and that is-- believe or not-- the problem.
It's an old saying that God will not be mocked. A modern, secular version of that might be something on the order of "The Universe works in certain ways, and always wins in the end." Both those statements (I think) are colloquial statements of Natural Law. Such laws (whether physical, moral, or of human nature) are pretty much self-enforcing. Because they are more-or-less self-enforcing, little or no help is needed from the State to enforce them. The "problem" or "trouble" that I alluded to a paragraph or two back is that the defenders of "traditional morality" are often too ready to put the powers of the State into the service of the Church to stamp out behaviors that already have a built-in tendency to die out.
This is a problem because, people being people, they see something being prohibited and they automatically want to engage in it. And so the traditional moralists and the Church wind up encouraging the very things they wanted to discourage, and in fact would have been discouraged if they had only left things well enough alone.
[bangs head against the wall in frustration]
Posted by: Hale Adams at July 21, 2009 07:45 PMOh, and while I'm feeling verbose this evening......
John writes:
"Actually, Hale's sentence: 'If the Church wants to insist, for its own purposes, that homosexual or multiple unions are not marriages, that's fine...' is, itself, a religious position."
Nope. It's a political position, John, as politics is about who gets to do what to whom, and why.
I (the "who") am not going to use State power to force any particular position regarding non-traditional marriage (the "what") on the Church (the "whom") because this is a free country and the Church is a private institution (the "why").
Posted by: Hale Adams at July 21, 2009 08:08 PMAt this rate, I'm going to be here all night, John......
John writes:
"But I don't think that people will ever consider marriage just part of the realm of contract, nor will they want the state, which reflects our wishes, to do so. (Nor do I think you really believe that, Hale.)"
In my capacity as a human being, John, I don't want marriage to be regarded as merely a contract. That would be far too cold a way of thinking of such an intimate part of human life.
In my capacity as a citizen of the United States (and the People's Democratic Republic of Maryland, alas), I have to bear in mind that the State is not love, it is not warmth, it is not puppies and kittens and unicorns: it is FORCE. The State has no business telling me how to act out the inner details of any marriage I might enter into, beyond those things necessary for the public safety. That the State is force is why it must be confined to matters of contract. Otherwise, we set foot on the road to Hell.
Posted by: Hale Adams at July 21, 2009 08:31 PM
