Marriage shapes the motive for joining it.

Posted by Chairm

"To treat marriage simply as the seal set upon a (possibly fleeting) sexual relationship, rather than a mutual assumption of the burden of social reproduction, is to deprive the institution of its rationale."

-- Roger Scruton, professor of philosphy at the University of Buckingham, writing in The Meaning of Marriage, 2006.

The marital relationship is transformative. The man makes the woman his wife and the woman makes the man her husband. In the normal course of things, husbands and wives become fathers and mothers. Their children become the next generation of men and women, husbands and wives, fathers and mothers.

First and foremost a social institution.

Across society the social institution works its influence: it makes normative the marital basis for sexual relations and for generating the next generation. This is a public relationship that arises from the two-sexed nature of humankind, the opposite-sexed nature of human procreation, and the both-sexed nature of human community. The human institution of marriage bonds them and holds them together as much as, if not more than, their private sexual commitment one to the other.

Weaken the meaning of the social institution and weaken its rationale; abandon its rationale and abandon the societal preference for marriage.

That is how social institutions are destroyed -- or de-institutionalized. Marriage is no exception despite its foundational importance to civilization. Yet, despite this peril, marriage is a universal institution across the anthropological and historical record. The SSM idea, not so much.

Sexual difference.

In a paper appearing in The Meaning of Marriage, a book of essays by various authors, Roger Scruton wrote that the central issue in society's regard for marriage is "the place of sexual difference in desire and in all that is built on desire."

[Click here to read the rest of the blogpost.]

He explained that the man-woman sexual relationship "is imbued with the sense that your partner's sexual nature is strange to you, a territory into which you intrude without prior knowledge and in which the other and not the self is the only reliable guide."

He continued:

"This experience has profound repercusssions for our sense of the danger and the mystery of sexual union, and these reprecussions are surely part of what people have had in mind, in clothing marriage as a sacrament and in the ceremony of marriage as a rite of passage from one form of safety to another. Traditional marriage was not only a way of endorsing and guaranteeing the raising of children. It was also a dramatization of sexual difference."

Speaking of the not-too-distant past (like 10 minutes ago) when society's preference for the marital sexual relationships was an uncontested social fact of life, Scruton wrote that the coming together of the sexes,

"became an existential leap, rather than a passing experiment. The intentionality of desire was shaped by this, and even if the shaping was -- at some deep level -- a cultural and not a human universal, it endowed desire with its intrinsic nuptiality, and marriage with its transformatory goal. To regard gay marriage as simply another option within the institution is to ignore the fact that an institution shapes the motive for joining it.

"Marriage has grown around the idea of sexual difference and all that sexual difference means. To make this feature accidental rather than essential is to change marriage beyond recognition. Homosexuals want marriage because they want the social endorsement that it signifies; but by admitting same-sex marriage we deprive marriage of its social meaning, as the blessing conferred by the unborn on the living. The pressure for same-sex marriage is therefore in a certain measure self-defeating. It resembles [English King] Henry VIII's move to gain ecclesiastical endorsement for his divorce by making himself head of the Church. The Church that endorsed his divorce thereby ceased to be the Church whose endorsement he was seeking."

I refer to Roger Scruton not as an expert whose words decide the matter but rather as yet another voice who puts forth the view that this is the crux of the matter.

And, in the manner of Scruton's reference to King Henry VIII, I think that the SSM idea is stuck on stupid because it argues against the justification for the special status marriage while seeking to gain this status for SSM.

Same as marriage but different from the rest?

SSM does not share with marriage the centrality of sex integration. Nor the centrality of responsible procreation. SSMers remind us of this all the time. The SSM campaign has pretty much denounced the importance placed on marriage as social institution and instead has emphasized marriage as legal creature owned by Government. Well, for the sake of argument, let's suppose that SSMers are right on these points.

What then is the SSM idea's essential features? That is, what is the stuff without which SSM would not be SSM, in their view of Government's creature?

SSMers continue to fail to distinguish the type of relationship they have in mind (aka SSM) from the rest of the types of relationships and types of living arrangements that are also in the nonmarriage category. They fail to show that the essentials of the SSM idea are 1) shared by marriage and 2) not shared by nonmarriage. Many don't even bother to try.

On the the other hand, they unfailingly begin by pointing at Government licensing while skipping past the type of thing that is licensed. That is, the pre-government thing; the thing that exists before pinning the label and license and status on it.

But they do openly emphasize gayness. They do seek societal endorsement of gayness -- via license and special status for SSM. Yet they insist that objective and societal reasons for showing preference for marriage are superseded by the subjective and personal motivations of those who demand that society issue licenses.

With such thinking, SSM argumentation runs a winding path upon which many SSMers become disorientated and lost. But ultimately they are blunt: the essentials of marriage are not the business of society, they say. It is far more a matter of privacy rather than public regard. Government is not society, they assert, and what's more, Government dictates to society.

Leave us alone and treat us special.

And yet, even at that, with personal motivations superseding societal concerns, and with Government seperated from and looming above the governed, they say that low participation rates and low interest in same-sex householding are irrelevant factors. SSM is not a good means to deliver government benefits to a largely nonparticipating homosexual population. Nonetheless, they are convinced that society as a whole must give special treatment to this SSM idea and this marginal practice. Their end justifies their means.

This is a poor substitute for the marriage idea, for the principles of good governance, and for the rationale for special place of marriage in civilization. It is a dangerous idea to complain about the supposed arbitrariness of marriage law and then to rely on the arbitrary exercise of governmental authority to impose a merger of SSM with marriage.

Patched together from remnants and self-referential dogma.

The SSM idea is hacked together from the remnants of various academic arguments that conceptually deconstruct the social institution of marriage. But this is a fragile fabrication and depends on the dogma of identity politics to glue it together.

SSM is not an organic social idea and nowhere is it but a marginal practice -- in whatever form -- within the modern homosexual population itself. This is the case even in heavily pro-gay places.

Contrary to the SSM campaign, the SSM idea is not one and the same as the marriage idea. Nor does the SSM idea self-justify. Nor does it self-sustain. Its "truth" is not self-evident. It is an idea rich in fatal contradictions and impoverished by the lack of essential features. Its argumentation is self-defeating.

But the hardline SSMers make it abundantly clear that SSM is not intended to sustain itself nor to justify itself. Nor to become a rich depository of meaning that is evident even to the most sympathetic neutral observer. The SSM idea is not a social construct for shaping homosexual behavior. Its purpose, and likely outcome, is not to make the practice of SSM normative for the homosexual population; the purpose of the SSM idea is to make homosexuality normative for the rest of society. To get from here to there, the marriage idea must be quashed. The SSM idea is driven by a leap of faith in the primacy of gay identity politics. As I've said before, for these hardliners this is not about justice but about "just us". And so they arrogantly self-reference and thus reveal the true meaning of their endorsement of the SSM idea itself. It is their idea and they believe, on faith alone, that it is their gift to society. Of course, it would be a gift imposed rather than a gift freely accepted. And one with repressive reprecussions.

Trojan Horse. Where's the threat?

Worse of all, the merger of marriage with SSM can not be sustained without Government enforcement of the hostile notion that the core meaning of civlization's foundational social institution, its rationale, is intolerable.

That is the reason that SSMers have come to demand that the big hand of Government become the servant of identity politics of the gaycentric kind. It began with pleas for tolerance and has rapidly progressed to demands for crushing dissent and opposition both in the law, social policy, and culture.

The marriage idea does not come with this political baggage. It is an organic idea that has sustained itself for millennia. Its opposite-sexed basis is sexual, social, moral, and conceptual.

The threat of the SSM campaign is that this rich inheritance will be squandered for no good reason. Indeed, to reject the core meaning of marriage requires an extraordinarily good reason for such an extraordinarily destructive act of Government.

None has been forthcoming.