Like Reaching For An Apple When One Wants An Orange

Via Instapundit

Brian Anderson's South Park Conservatives (which I've now finished) notes that campus conservatives seem to split with middle-aged ones on the question of gay marriage, not least because they've seen so much marital hypocrisy from their parents' generation. As one student observes, heterosexuals have already done plenty to cheapen marriage.

It seems to me said student's frame of reference is a bit limited and too convenient. While I'm not arguing in favor of marital infidelity, comparing it to gay marriage for its potential to undermine society's conception of the institution of marriage is a reach no matter how you look at it.

If you're concerned because infidelity has allegedly damaged our valuation of the marriage pact, why advocate something that might damage it even further? That's defeatist, at best. Wouldn't the preferred position be to highlight the incidence of infidelity in modern marriages and advocate or initiate a conversation aimed at reducing infidelity?

Or, from a totally different perspective, the reality is that extra-marital relations have been part and parcel of marriage for ages and still are, particularly in an enlightened Europe the student might actually admire in some ways. French and Italian history and literature more than document that fact. Making the leap from infidelity to same sex marriage doesn't wash as a serious argument for me.

Making some not too unreasonable assumptions, the student is holding up a concept of marriage relatively new in historical terms - that being defined as puritan. Isn't puritanical thinking the enemy of the left, or a liberal? If so, it seems a might convenient to hold up the possible failings of a relatively new puritanical view of the marriage pact to justify a position on same sex marriage that deviates completely from any known historical context for the social institution.

If forced to make a choice, I think I'd prefer to make the sacrifice of rolling back the puritanism to take a paramour - such are the lengths I'd go to in defending the vital institution of marriage. Though I'm sure some might view my reasoning as just a bit convenient, too.

Comments

[Rhod]

The question for me...at least since these types of arguments flared up in the 1960's... is that you don't eliminate hypocrisy by eliminating the standard which leads to it.

The old saw about hypocrisy being the tribute vice pays to virtue is true. Liberals of a certain kind have always demanded the purity of honest corruption as the cure for dissembling imperfection. Besides being a specious argument, it is also stupid and relativistic. Does a moral or standard become irrelevant because people betray it?

Marriage has actually never been about virtue anyway. The State's interest in sanctioning the institution has always been about the protection of women and children, which assumes a procreative relationship between man and woman. If this ideas seems quaint and outdated, we have no way right now to know that for sure.

If gays were honest about this thing, they would not attempt a redefinition of marriage, but campaign for an elimination of state endorsement of marriage entirely. They aren't doing that, even though among groups of activist gays, that's the motive behind the push for gay marriage.

What needs to be discussed openly with gays is why gayness seems to have a subversive effect where it is narrowly confined and widely practiced, either in health issues, within the priesthood (this was not a problem of pedophilia, it was an problem of homosexuality), or among security services like the British MI-5 and quite possibly elsewhere. To raise these issues is not homophobic, and if you think so, fuck you, whoever you are, straight or gay. It serves no one to deny or misinterperet emprical evidence. If it's wrong, prove it or change it.

[David]

Mostly what he (Rhod) said... :-)

And then,

"Making some not too unreasonable assumptions, the student is holding up a concept of marriage relatively new in historical terms - that being defined as puritan. Isn't puritanical thinking the enemy of the left, or a liberal?"[DR]

Well, if you mean the slander of Puritanism fostered by Nathaniel hawthorne and his ilk that has become ht pejoration of the term "puritan" most recognized today, then yes, that might be considered the enemy of the classical liberal. But the current crop of so-called "lberals" (who have literally nothing in common with classic liberalism except for having co-opted the word "liberal") have their own form of "puritanism" (as the term is commonly misused today) known by most as "political correctness" where, like the terms "liberal" and "puritan," nearly every term has its own Orwellian meaning that is the opposite of its once common meaning, such as "gay" referring to the sad lifestyle of homosexuals and "free speech" referring to censorship, etc.

In point of fact, the New England Puritans of the 17th and 18th century celebrated sexual pleasure and taught that it was one of the greatest gifts from God... just within the confines of marriage.

But, of course, that classically liberal approach to proclaiming the joys of sexual relations—liberty with responsibility— _is_ anathema to the libertine approach of those who claim the name of liberalism (or progressivism) today. That the Song of Solomon is not the functional and moral equivalent of Howard Stern is what really chaps their gizzard, so they ignore the fact that biblical Christianity makes no bones about the fact that sex is—and should be—gloriously enjoyable.

Yeh, I assert that "puritanical thinking" is the enemy of the Left, just not for the reasons most people think of when they see/hear the word "puritanical." The Left is grimly anti-joy, while true puritanism is joyfully celebratory of whatever is good.

[Rhod]

Wow, David. Your post is a keeper.

Liberalism has long since died, and the reanimated tissue-shedding corpse is Leftism. None of the things included in Leftism, in my view, are life-affirming. It all seems to be a defined by what leftists do NOT believe. That is, a void which is filled by cynicism, appalling ugliness and scorn.

Maybe Emerson also had something to do with defining Puritanism down, since he compared it favorably only to the month of February in New England. Faint praise, indeed. But Lefties need symbols, totems and incantations to pretend they're thinking...so Puritanism and McCarthyism and all the other chants have a purpose.

One of them seems to be to drag everyone and everything down to their level. There's a moral in there somewhere.

[Dan]

I think the keyword emerging from all of this is "responsibility." In reality, whatever words we use to couch the discussion, the primary difference between the liberal of today versus yesterday is some sense of responsibility to something greater than one's own temporal gratification - physical or meta-physical.

The very people defined as "puritans" today, were arguably the most liberal of their time. They threw off God and country in their revolution and sought to establish themselves in America for some greater good in the form of a New Jerusalem.

They did not do it to satiate some unquenchable desire for anything less than freedom, dutifully encumbered by a responsibility to the survival and even a transcendance of the many, or all, and not the one.