False Denials of Comparison Between Roads and Families

In further proof of his lax moral standards,* it took Mangeek too long to read my post responding to one of his recent comments for his own response to attract much attention, so I'll reprint it here:

... what I'm trying to say, Justin, is that I think conservatives (for the most part) are finding all the wrong explanations for why things are the way they are...

I can put a dollar-value on the per-pound impact of the weight of a car on roads. It's a direct cause-and-effect relationship that allows large vehicle drivers to externalize part of the societal costs they are responsible for onto those of us who live more modest lifestyles.

Meanwhile, while you can draw correlations between marital status and costs on society, I'm not sure they're cause-and-effect. In any case, we already 'reward and punish things we like/dislike' via different tax rates on married people, homeowners, business owners, and trust-fund kids.

Maybe society would be better-served overall if families were encouraged to (for example) drive safer, more efficient, and less costly vehicles (or buy smaller homes, or not take out $BIG student loans, etc.) than if we mandated which gender and legal configurations they were allowed to be. Just Sayin'.

It's important to note that my post was in reaction to his questioning the necessity of moral judgment in society. In the above, he does little more than agree that he's got no problem with the practice in concept, just on the particulars.

But on those particulars, his argument is clearly flawed. As a point of fact, he cannot "put a dollar-value on the per-pound impact of the weight of a car on roads." He could, perhaps, put such a value on the effects of a specific car under very narrow circumstances, but it could hardly accurately describe the different usages of the actual people he'd like to tax.

Let's say Joe drives a vehicle with a heavy curb weight — some kind of SUV — but he hardly ever puts additional weight inside it (after all, he's only 120 lbs), and he only drives it a quarter mile each morning and afternoon before he is across his city's border and therefore off the roads for which he's ostensibly being taxed. Meanwhile, 400 lb Bob has a much lighter curb-weight car, but he typically drives it filled to brimming with books and other heavy objects; moreover, his routine calls for him to drive it 10 miles each way across the town in which he lives.

And that's before we get into their driving styles. Joe takes it easy, while driving, and tries to slow down for intersections over greater distances. Bob is heavy on the gas pedal and the brakes, very often peeling out when starting and skidding when stopping.

In short, Mangeek cannot present his moral preference as a clear transfer of cost in a cause-effect relationship. Indeed, work in all of the relevant variables and defining the cost of cars by their weight isn't much different than attributing costs to divorce and out-of-wedlock births. All else being equal, I've no doubt that heavier vehicles exact more of a toll on the roads, but the same can be said of broken families.

Nowhere is Mangeek's skewed comparison more clear than in his closing. We aren't comparing a soft "encouragement" of vehicle types to a stiff penalty against particular relationships. Quite the opposite is true: He wants to exact a penalizing tax against owners of larger vehicles, while he objects to mere recognition of a family type that still ought to be considered to be ideal.

* Note: This opening phrase is tongue in cheek.

A Father Is a Father

At its core, the key argument against same-sex marriage is that it prevents our society from creating any distinction between relationships that are plainly different in significant ways. Men and women are different, and when they pair up, their intimate relationship has consequences that no other form of relationship has. Moreover, an ideal doesn't have to apply absolutely in every case for it to remain valuable for society to be able to describe and uphold it.

Such were the thoughts to come to mind when reading that fathers make a difference in their children's lives, and that fatherhood is in decline:

While it is well known how important a father's involvement is to healthy child development, a very interesting and lesser known finding comes from a 26-year longitudinal study which says that the strongest factor indicating whether children practiced high levels of empathic concern for others in their adult years was whether they had an involved father in their life. In fact, father care was a stronger indicator here than the three strongest maternal factors combined! The study explained, "These results appear to fit with previous findings indicating that pro-social behaviors such as altruism and generosity in children were related to active involvement in child care by fathers."

This does not in the least gainsay the important of mothers. It does, however, suggest that we oughtn't dramatically modify the cultural institution — marriage — that marks as uniquely desirable the family units that bring mothers and fathers together.

Different Is Not Equivalent

State Senator Donna Nesselbush (D, Pawtucket) gets to the heart of the civil unions/same-sex marriage matter:

Nesselbush said she initially planned to support [civil union legislation] "as a step forward," but changed her mind because of language — added on the House floor — that exempts religious groups from recognizing a civil union or treating such couples the same as they would treat married couples.

In her comments on the Senate floor, Nesselbush said those who support the bill are "essentially institutionalizing inequality."

"So while extending valuable rights, if passed, this legislation would essentially establish a separate status, and separate is never equal," she said.

The bottom line is that separate and unequal are entirely appropriate when two groups are not similarly situated. Unless one takes the extreme radical view that men and women are not differentiable — that they are entirely the same — then there will remain the possibility that it's reasonable to treat the relationships that they have with each other as unique.

What activists like Nesselbush wish to do is to disallow society from observing the uniqueness of intimate relationships between members of our species' two genders, which by their nature have the capacity to generate new human beings. Judgment might be different were our government not so pervasive in its regulation of everyday life — were it possible for social institutions to make the substantive statement of behaving as if their beliefs are actually true.

The religious exemption in the civil union bill at least preserves that ability in some minimal (albeit insufficient) way. Every individual and organization ought to be empowered to treat marriage between a man and a woman as uniquely worthy of recognition, and our government ought to do the same.

Rhode Island Hurts Famlies

In a moving letter (that does not appear to be online), small-business-owner David Durfee of North Scituate tells of his historical need to work harder to "overcome the obstacles created by the General Assembly" but expresses gratitude for having been able to be nearby for his father during his final days. He goes on:

It was then that I realized what the politicians in this state have taken from us. How blind I was to a problem I could not resolve with just hard work!

It is that our sons and daughters see no future for themselves in Rhode Island. My two oldest children have already moved out of state. I now realize the increasing likelihood that the pleasure of having my children around me as I age has been stolen from me. More friends are talking about moving to be with their children. With them will go their wealth and businesses.

Such are the effects of bad governance. I continue to fear that a line may have already been crossed: That enough families have up and left over the years that there is no longer a voting base to turn the situation around. Still, except for those few who are well enough connected to secure employment for their entire families (such as the Iannazzis and Ruggerios), the damage described by Durfee is applied to most of those who benefit from Rhode Island's bad governance as well as those of us who don't.

The Media Style Book on "Rights"

The Providence Journal reprint of this article has the headline "Gay rights: The backlash" and the following lead:

Some who oppose gay rights say their views are targets of discrimination.

I'm not sure I've ever seen such an excellent example of the way in which media bias begins even at the level of the style book. With one exception, every example of the "rights" in question is same-sex marriage. The one exception isn't even about any kind of rights, but about a group encouraging gays to change their orientation.

In other words, an objective media would have characterized it as same-sex marriage opponents who are the targets of discrimination. That doesn't quite have the same propagandistic ring, though.

Re:Who Is Michael Chippendale?

Representative Chippendale responded to my thoughts on his comments related to civil unions:

Hi guys, it's the horse's mouth here...

I used scripture for 2 reasons. First, I'm a Christian and we use the word of the Lord to help guide us when making decisions. There are guiding principles that are far worse - I can assure you. The General Assembly prays every day before session... God isn't a four letter word in the State House (yet). And Secondly, and perhaps more importantly, I had been receiving a lot of comments from folks who were using scripture to justify their position against the bill... so when I rose to speak (which was not planned, I figured that I would just shut up and vote, but I was compelled to engage) - I was saying (in a 'between the lines' sort of way) "I can use scripture too. And I choose to use it to offer a different perspective than what all of us (legislators) have been hearing since January!"

So don't read too much into the simple verse I used. It is not a Republican v. Democrat issue... it was an issue where everyone in the room had their own reasons and feelings behind their votes...

And as a footnote, I still can sit at the cool-kids table...

Before offering further response on the specific issue at hand, I should address a common misconception about my commentary. When I hear somebody say something that interacts with political philosophy in an interesting way, I point it out. That I think a statement represents an erroneous application of this or that principle does not mean that the speaker is thereby to be pushed into the Crowley category and ostracized. It doesn't even mean that I take the comment to be an accurate indication of the speakers whole philosophy on life.

In this specific instance, I think Rep. Chippendale's comment was not only reckless in the view of appropriate governance that it expresses (i.e., that an elected official should not feel empowered to vote a particular way on a legitimate public policy question) but also erroneous in its theology (i.e., in recasting love of fellow human beings as requiring elision of real differences between relationship types).

Who Is Michael Chippendale? An Elected Official.

Ed Fitzpatrick highlights the reasoning that state Representative Michael Chippendale (R, Foster) offered for voting in favor of the recently passed civil unions bill, and that reasoning seems to me to be incomplete. I'll note, first, that I come to much the same conclusion as Chippendale, although I favor civil unions that build a slate of rights and privileges from scratch, rather than with reference to marriage, which is what the legislation does:

15-3.1-6. Benefits, protections, and responsibilities. -- A party to a civil union lawfully entered into pursuant to this chapter shall have all the rights, benefits, protections, and responsibilities under law, whether derived from statutes, administrative rules, court decisions, the common law, or any other source of civil or criminal law as people joined together pursuant to chapter 15-3.

15-3 is the chapter that describes civil marriage, and as I've said before, if as a society we're going to create a relationship that confers marriage-like rights, we ought to be explicit about what rights ought to be included and why. Marriage, as traditionally understood, still has the distinction that, by their nature, a husband and wife can create children. In terms of state law, it's absurd for Fitzpatrick to call this legislation "a weak substitute for legalizing same-sex marriage," because there are no benefits to marriage that it leaves out. It may, from his standpoint, have been morally timid not to merge the institutions, but the only sense in which the law, itself, can be said to be "weak" is that it doesn't force religious people or organizations to eliminate their own understanding of marriage everywhere beyond the pulpit.

But back to Chippendale:

Chippendale noted he'd voted against the civil-unions bill in committee and that people quoted Scripture in testifying against the bill.

"But you know what?" he said. "At the end of the day, if my Lord Jesus Christ were here, he would say what he already has said: 'What you do to the least of my children you do to me.' And who in God's name am I to stand here and push a button that would injure one of my brothers and sisters? As a man of faith, I don't have that right."

Chippendale, a Catholic whose district extends to Foster, Glocester and Coventry, voted for the bill, saying, "I'm going to have a lot of people to answer to in my district. But I'm going to say to them: What you do to the least of God's children you do to him."

Who is Chippendale to push a vote button in the General Assembly? Well, he's an elected representative voting on an issue of public policy, and if a society cannot determine through representative democracy that one relationship is different from another in a key way that suggests different benefits, responsibilities, and codification in the law, then there really is no right to self governance.

What's particularly objectionable about Chippendale's reasoning is that it is about as close to theocracy as anybody is apt to get in our time and place. The tolerance of Catholic Christianity does not negate our rights to shape our society in a way that has proven to be the most effective at growing prosperity, decreasing poverty, increasing liberty, and maintaining peace. We'll all have different notions of what that requires, but to insist that setting some small space aside in our society and in the law for the particular human coupling that tends toward the creation of children is hardly injury to our brothers and sisters. Indeed, to the extent that doing otherwise further erodes the institution of marriage, right down to the underpinnings that any traditionalist reform would require, such actions truly do harm "the least of God's children"; they just aren't there in front of us holding protests and applying rhetorical pressure..

Fox Proposes Civil Unions

Ian Donnis broke the story that House Speaker Gordon Fox is throwing his weight behind Civil Union legislation in lieu of a gay marriage bill:

Based on your input, along with the fact that it is now clear to me that there is no realistic chance for passage of the bill in the Senate, I will recommend that the House not move forward with a vote on the marriage equality bill during this legislative session. I will instead support full passage of a civil unions’ bill that grants important and long overdue legal rights to same-sex couples inRhode Island.

I have had conversations with Senate leadership and, unlike the marriage equality bill, I am optimistic that a civil unions’ bill can gain passage in both chambers during this legislative session.

The new civil union bill is currently being drafted and will soon be ready for introduction and public inspection. I will be one of the sponsors.

This has been the pragmatic approach all along and its obvious that Speaker Fox is taking what he can get. Besides the legal considerations granted to gay couples, let's hope that the bill also includes allowances for non-gay couples (siblings, parent/child, friends, etc.).

UPDATE: More from Ian - MERI isn't pleased.

The Way the Marriage Battle Should Be Resolved

It appears already to be doomed, but this bill is precisely how state governments should go about addressing hardship experienced by couples that cannot marry:

Sponsored by Rep. Peter Petrarca, D-Lincoln, the bill would allow "any two ... unmarried persons who are excluded" from marrying under state law to establish "reciprocal beneficiary agreements" that allow their partners to oversee issues such as emergency medical care, medical decisions and decisions on "the disposition" of a person’s remains.

The relationship formed in homosexual couples is different in substantive ways from the relationship formed between heterosexual couples, most critically in the latter's ability to create children almost casually. It is not bigotry to insist that such an ability is not frivolous, and it is eminently reasonable to suggest that civic policies should maintain room for the encouragement of cultural acknowledgment of that difference. Doing so does not "create two classes," as Marriage Equality Rhode Island spokesman Bill Fischer asserts; it accurately recognizes two categories of behavior.

There are rights, however, to which people who've taken on the responsibility of caring for each other should have access, but they should be assessed on their individual merits. That appears to be what Petrarca's legislation would do.

It's interesting to note, by the way, which group is the de facto moderate in the local debate:

The Rhode Island chapter of the National Organization for Marriage, a traditional marriage-advocacy group, supports the bill, said its executive director, Christopher Plante.

"We don't oppose it. We think that it's a good way to try to address some of those issues that gays and lesbians, and not only gays and lesbians, have when they try to assign rights to significant others," said Plante, who also did not attend the hearing.

Perhaps on an emotional level it's true, but intellectually, the same-sex marriage cause is not about equal rights; it's about erasing a real distinction between two different human relationships. And it's about eliminating the right of Americans to recognize that distinction.

My Social Cause for Your Law and Order

Most people probably have an idealized image of the legislative process as one in which legislators draft bills that they desire, other legislators sign on as they're interested, and everybody votes according to their understanding of the consequences. It seems somehow foreign to everyday life to trade votes on unrelated issues and such, but in a vote-counting occupation like lawmaking, it's inevitable.

And so, state representative Doreen Costa (R, Exeter, North Kingstown) is surely doing no more than offering a look into the regular processes of the General Assembly by going public with one example:

The bill's main sponsor, state Rep Teresa Tanzi last week asked Doreen Costa if she wanted one of the five coveted spots as an official co-sponsor. The legislation is meant to prevent people like Michael Woodmansee---who killed a 5-year-old boy in the 1970s---from leaving prison early. Tanzi, a Democrat, represents South Kingstown, where the boy lived. ...

"I have to horse trade," Tanzi replied, according to Costa. "She said, 'You have to vote gay marriage out of committee.'"

In one sense, there's nothing surprising about this at all. Tanzi has a desirable legislative property, and she wishes to trade partial ownership of it to remove a roadblock on an issue about which she's interested, for whatever reason. In a practical sense, also, there's little to remark. As Costa makes clear, co-sponsorship is not a prerequisite for her vote, so the offer does not affect the likelihood of the bill's final passage.

Still, when we reapply the context, the matter takes on a distasteful aroma. Tanzi has under her control a sensitive issue concerning the gruesome murder of a young child and the ability of victims to be assured that dangerous killers will not roam the streets again while still relatively young. Using that ownership to buy votes for a long-discussed and still-controversial issue like same-sex marriage is cynical, to say the least.

Hard Cases Make Bad Law

If one's stand on a political or social issue is principled, then it ought to be maintained even when it is emotionally difficult to do so, and in the case of Pat Baker, it is certainly difficult.

Baker was recently diagnosed with terminal lung cancer, and she is now spending her days advocating for a change in law that would make the woman whom she married in Massachusetts in 2005 eligible for survivor benefits through Social Security:

"I worked for those benefits. And when I say worked, I worked hard. You name it, it's happened. I've found inmates hanging; I've found inmates dead from suicide. I've been traumatized mentally and physically, only to get to this point in my life when I'm terminally ill ... and I find out my wife is being begrudged $1,861 a month," Baker said.

The circumstances highlight both the rationale for the survivor benefits and the risk in expanding marriage to same-sex couples. On the first count, throughout most of the time that Social Security has been around (and even more of the time before it was), it was understood that, typically, one spouse had been less active economically and more active domestically. Depriving the non-working spouse of retirement benefits because the working spouse had died ignored the very notion of marriage as a means of creating a single entity of two people, who then spend their lives working as a team, particularly with the activity of raising children.

To be sure, frequent divorce and remarriage has decreased the confidence with which such assumptions can be made, but the cultural understanding of marriage is still very much intact, and our society should be looking to bolster it, not modify it further.

It's quite predictable that allowing two people of the same sex to marry and, thereby, gain the benefits of spouses will change the culture of the institution. Why, for one, would it not become common for marriage to develop into a relationship for late-life companions, even if they are only what used to be known as "friends"? The incentive to pair up for the purpose of maximizing retirement and other benefits would be tremendous. If that's something that we want to encourage — and there are definitely worthy arguments for it — then why have any restrictions at all, such as those against marrying near kin and multiple people?

Of course, as I've said before, if same-sex marriage were to arrive in conjunction with tighter laws against divorce, then the calculation would change. I've yet to find, however, an advocate for SSM who thinks that spouses shouldn't be able to dissolve their marriages very easily.

In the specific case of Social Security, the easier solution would be to transition it toward a defined-contribution plan that creates an asset capable of being bequeathed.

What Inspires Political Activity?

A recent iteration of First Things' "While We're at It" feature mentioned the Wall Street Journal lament of feminist Erica Jong that breeding and raising children is a fad that just won't die. From the lament:

Unless you've been living on another planet, you know that we have endured an orgy of motherphilia for at least the last two decades. Movie stars proudly display their baby bumps, and the shiny magazines at the checkout counter never tire of describing the joys of celebrity parenthood. Bearing and rearing children has come to be seen as life's greatest good. Never mind that there are now enough abandoned children on the planet to make breeding unnecessary. Professional narcissists like Angelina Jolie and Madonna want their own little replicas in addition to the African and Asian children that they collect to advertise their open-mindedness.

The intellectual problems that Jong evinces are plentiful. (Why, for one, should we criticize celebrities for adopting third-world children in addition to having their own, even as we point to "abandoned children" as a standing problem?) Much of what she writes can be dismissed on purely ideological grounds; that is, if the reader doesn't share the ideology, the points are without sense.

However, the First Things blurb is a little unfair, in that Jong's initial statements of ideological gunk are really just a foundation on which she builds more interesting walls, some of which are certainly reasonable, even insightful:

What is so troubling about these theories of parenting—both pre- and postnatal—is that they seem like attempts to exert control in a world that is increasingly out of control. We can't get rid of the carcinogens in the environment, but we can make sure that our kids arrive at school each day with a reusable lunch bag full of produce from the farmers' market. We can't do anything about loose nukes falling into the hands of terrorists, but we can make sure that our progeny's every waking hour is tightly scheduled with edifying activities.

Our obsession with parenting is an avoidance strategy. It allows us to substitute our own small world for the world as a whole. But the entire planet is a child's home, and other adults are also mothers and fathers. We cannot separate our children from the ills that affect everyone, however hard we try. Aspiring to be perfect parents seems like a pathetic attempt to control what we can while ignoring problems that seem beyond our reach.

In her attempt to connect these dots, Jong joins strange principles that jar discordantly with reality:

... although attachment parenting comes with an exquisite progressive pedigree, it is a perfect tool for the political right. It certainly serves to keep mothers and fathers out of the political process. If you are busy raising children without societal help and trying to earn a living during a recession, you don't have much time to question and change the world that you and your children inhabit. What exhausted, overworked parent has time to protest under such conditions?

If there's a conservative who has advocated "attachment parenting" — which entails parents' effectively binding themselves to their children — I haven't read his or her work. And, moreover, if there's a politically active right-winger who wants to divert devoted parents from the political fight, he or she has wisely learned to keep that counter-intuitive intention quiet.

Perhaps her imagination doesn't reach that far, but Jong need only have brought to mind the conservative's vision of an ideal family... even a cliché version of that vision: One parent able to stay home with the children, neighborhoods full of such nuclear, one-income households and churches full of such families. After all, the kids don't need such close watching when there are parents watching from nearly every house on the block.

And I can't help but wonder, too, what the motivation for political activism is supposed to be (apart from dedicated advocacy for the Special Interest of Me) when children aren't part of the equation.

"Democracy" Is Whatever Gets the Special Interest Its Way

One can only be grateful for the first word in Stephen Fortunato Jr.'s title of "retired Rhode Island Superior Court judge," given his recent equation of voters in voting booths to clansmen in sheets and, implicitly, voting to lynching. (It would seem that fears of a judicial oligarchy are hardly misplaced when the institution is or has been in the hands of such men.)

Even before the jurist slams down his over-sized gavel on the heads of the population whom he was once presumed to serve, though, Fortunato's reasoning is deeply flawed:

NOM's push to put the question of the gay unions on a ballot is a ploy to subvert the orderly workings of our democratic processes. Representatives are sent to the State House to exercise their good judgment after they have heard testimony and been lobbied by all sides. In a case such as gay marriage, testimony will be presented by advocates on both sides, including religious leaders, psychologists, constitutional scholars and statisticians, not to mention a few buffoons. These hearings and debates will be reported in the media, dissected and criticized. The legislators will vote on the issue and then face praise, rejection or indifference from their constituencies.

The anonymity of the ballot box on issues of fundamental rights permits no such discussion, and NOM has capitalized on this in the 30 states, including in supposedly tolerant California, where it has defeated gay-marriage referenda. The outcome has usually been different when the matter has been argued in open and transparent legislatures and courts.

The issue is not that arguments won't be aired in both cases. The distinction is that legislators draw all of the interest in the issue toward a limited number of politicians who will sit through some perfunctory hearings. In the case of a referendum, interested parties will make their arguments as broadly as possible — op-ed pages, television advertisements, and so on.

It's also interesting that Fortunato slips into passive voice when he writes that "representatives are sent to the State House." By whom? Well, presumably by the same voters whom he doesn't trust to vote on same-sex marriage. Of course, when electing a politician, the issue is never as clear as voting according to one's own opinion; not only are politicians able to triangulate across multiple issues, but there's a reason for cliches about dishonesty.

Domesticity Will Always Look Domestic

An interesting article in Sunday's Providence Journal paints delays in marriage and increases in cohabitation among young adults in an almost Rockwellian light:

For starters, young adults today aren't just delaying marriage, but other milestones as well, Settersten says. Many of us are leaving our childhood bedrooms later, taking time to see the world, pursue advanced degrees and foster early careers before thinking about marriage or kids. ...

It's also not uncommon for unmarried couples to purchase homes together.

Falling real estate prices, the first-time homebuyer tax credit and a cramped apartment prompted Jessica Willis, 27, and Joshua Hatch, 32, to buy a fixer-upper in Tiverton last April.

The couple, who have been in a relationship for three-and-a-half years, say they plan to get married at some point, but feel no rush.

I've no doubt that Willis, Hatch, and the other examples cited in the article, are responsible adults with a real commitment to each other, but the article thereby glosses over one glaring fact: it describes the lifestyles of responsible, relatively secure adults. As I've argued many times in the context of the same-sex marriage debate, the institution functions by building cultural expectations for people in certain living situations.

The responsible people label their relationships as marriage so that society has a model toward which it can nudge those who require one. Adults having sex, having children, buying homes, and so on should do so on a foundation of long commitment, and that commitment is known as marriage.

The fact that those who are truly committed and responsible will eventually get marriage doesn't answer the problem of example, because it merely strengthens the principle of "when we're ready," which the less committed and responsible will never be. It also pushes back the milestone at which marriage is considered a necessity.

This point arose back in the early-to-mid '00s, mainly when commentator Stanley Kurtz studied family trends in Scandinavia. Some of the relevant articles are no longer online, but here's a post that I entered into the debate. What was clear, for that region, was that couples were beginning to have their first children out of wedlock and that instances of the same behavior among couples with more children was increasing, with most rapid increase among single-parent households.

Sure, it makes for an interesting lifestyle piece to examine the decisions of individual people, but it misses the broader trend. Moreover, while it would be obnoxious to attack those people for decisions that they make given their own perspectives and circumstances, we also should not brush the trends that they represent aside.

Make Sure One set of Rights doesn't trump Another

We hear a lot of the rights-based arguments being made in favor of same-sex marriage hereabouts, including the call to RI Founder Roger Williams and the "separation of church and state". The arguments for religious liberty have seemed muted in the coverage of the debate. In today's ProJo, Professor Robin Wilson (co-editor of the book Same-Sex Marriage and Religious Liberty: Emerging Conflicts) explains how RI's proposed gay marriage laws do a bad job of ensuring religious liberty, stating, "Every other state law authorizing same-sex marriage provides more protection..." He also explains that, to his mind, religious exemptions would go a long way towards a compromise solution:

Exemptions provide a middle way, respecting both the interests of same-sex couples and religious liberty. By avoiding a winner-takes-all outcome, exemptions turn down the temperature on a contentious issue.

Exemptions also serve the interests of same-sex marriage supporters by taking a powerful argument against same-sex marriage away from opponents.

He gives examples of such exemptions contained in other same-sex marriage laws:

•  a religiously affiliated group that owns a reception hall limit its space to celebrating only traditional marriages when to do otherwise would violate their religious tenets, a basic protection provided by every same-sex marriage statute outside Rhode Island.

• a religiously affiliated adoption agency place children only with heterosexual married couples so long as they don’t receive government support, as Connecticut did.

• religiously affiliated fraternal organizations, such as the Knights of Columbus, limit insurance coverage to spouses in traditional marriages, as Connecticut and Vermont allow.

•  a religiously affiliated organization extend spousal benefits only to individuals in marriages recognized by its faith, as New Hampshire, Connecticut, and Vermont have all done....

Without specific protections, religious organizations that step aside from celebrating same-sex marriages may be subject to private lawsuits under laws prohibiting discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation or marital status. And these organizations may face stiff penalties from the government.

In addition to such institutional safeguards, Wilson explains that protections for religious individuals--in the spirit of Roger Williams--should also be included:

As broad as the exemptions enacted elsewhere are, they leave out much-needed protections for individuals. Judges, justices of the peace, marriage-license clerks, and individuals in ordinary commerce — bakers, photographers, caterers — who prefer for religious reasons to step aside from same-sex marriages should be allowed to do so when no hardship will result to same-sex couples.

I don't think that sincere religious opponents to same-sex marriage will be mollified by such pragmatic compromises, however. But politicians might.

Gay Marriage Hits the State House

By now, I think we're all familiar with the arguments. The ProJo covered the story and GoLocalProv's Stephen Beale has a piece regarding a potential compromise being floated that would have all Rhode Island marriages be called civil unions. The details:

“There seems to be an issue with a word and I want to make sure there is equality,” said state Rep. Karen MacBeth, a self-described conservative Democrat from Cumberland. “If we’re hung up on a word, let’s use a different word.”

If the current bill to legalize gay marriage successfully makes it to the House floor, MacBeth is considering offering an amendment that would substitute the phrase “civil unions” for “marriage.” As a result, the state would stop offering marriage licenses and instead offer civil unions to both straight and gay couples.

One veteran state rep whom she declined to name has told MacBeth that it would be too much of an undertaking to strip the word “marriage” from all state laws. MacBeth, however, points to the recent debate over taking out the phrase “Providence Plantations” from the state name. “If we can take a vote on changing the name of the state, we can certainly vote on changing the word ‘marriage,’” she said.

While several legislators across the political/ideological spectrum seem in favor of enacting a civil union law of some sort--or at least putting it before the Rhode Island voters--it doesn't look like the activists on either side of the issue are crazy about this "cut the baby in half" solution.

How To End the Tyranny of "Held For Further Study" II

Three high-profile bills go before their Rhode Island House of Representatives committees this week, 1) the bill, referred to the Labor Committee to be heard today, that would make the provisions of former Governor Carcieri's executive order on illegal immigration into law, and 2 and 3) bills, referred to the Judiciary Committee to be heard on Wednesday, one establishing same-sex marriage at the statutory level, the other defining marriage as being between a man and a woman at the Constitutional level. (h/t Ian Donnis)

Given the recent history of legislature action in Rhode Island, the question is, once these bills go to committee, who will make the decision on whether they are eventually sent to the full House for a floor vote: the members of the committee together, or the Speaker of the House alone? Does a committee decide what happens to the bill referred to it, or does a committee immediately hand bills back to the Speaker of the House and say "you tell us what to do"?

I have no inside information on what the majority committee positions are in the case of the immigration and the same-sex marriage bills, but they are certainly not instances where straight party-line votes are expected. And if any RI Representative believes that that a majority of a committee on which they serve would decide the fate of a bill differently from what the House leadership would allow, there are the procedures she or he can follow (consistent with Mason's Manual of Legislative Procedure, referenced in the House Rules) to help a bill get its rightful consideration.

1. If the committee meeting begins, as is common practice in Rhode Island legislative committee meetings, with a motion to hold every bill on the current agenda for "further study", any representative can make a motion to "divide the question", and have the bill they are interested in (same-sex marriage, immigration, etc.) considered as a separate vote.
   
2. If the legislature follows its own customs and practice, the motion to divide the question should be granted by the committee chair automatically, without a vote being needed. If you check the Journals of proceedings on the House floor, motions to divide the question are routinely granted without a vote being taken, as long as the Speaker rules that a question is divisible. There is absolutely no question that a motion to vote on multiple bills at the same time is divisible into separate votes.
   
3. Then when the bill of interest comes up for its separate consideration, if a motion to "hold it for further study" is immediately made, that motion opens the question for debate (it the language of parliamentary law, any motion that would send the bill out of committee falls into the category of a "main motion" which opens general debate on the subject). Any representative who wants to speak on the substance of the question should be afforded the opportunity to do so, before any vote is taken, and the debate should follow the same rules that are followed when bills that have been blessed by the Speaker and the Committee chair are considered. However, just as importantly...
   
4. Motions to either postpone definitely, or to lay the bill on the table (two separate options) are now in order. The important difference between a vote to "hold for further study" and a vote for "to postpone definitely" is that further study sends a bill back to the full House, where its fate is placed into the hands of the Speaker, while "definite postponement" keeps the bill in committee, where its fate must still be decided at a later time by a majority vote of the committee, no matter what the Speaker or the committee chairperson thinks.

   A motion for definite postponement could take the form, for example, of a motion to postpone consideration of bill until after the people who have come to testify on that day have been heard, or until the next committee meeting, or until the first committee meeting after witnesses have been heard, etc. Also, according to Mason's Manual, the motion for definite postponement is debatable to the degree that the "propriety of the postponement" is discussed, meaning that it would be perfectly in order for the Rep who made the motion (or any other Rep on the committee) to explain to the other members of the committee (and the audience for the hearing) during their speaking time how this motion keeps the fate of the bill in the hands of the committee, instead of transferring it to the Speaker. (The first time this procedure is used, this might also make for some interesting blank and confused stares on the faces of certain legislators).
   

5. The motion to postpone definitely does have to be voted on -- which means the real question about invoking this process centers on whether the members of a committee charged with considering a bill believe that the Speaker of the House would make the same decision on the bill that they would. If they think the Speaker would not allow a bill to get a vote on the House floor, even though a majority of the committee would supports it, then they should follow the procedure described above.

Look, I know that the 19th century language used as the names for some of these motions can make parts of the process sound arcane, but this is not parliamentary trickery being sketched out. This is, in fact just the opposite, a review of some accepted and staid rules, adopted over the centuries of American democracy, to ensure that legislatures are run as the gatherings of equally-ranked representatives of the people that they are intended to be. In the specific context of the RI legislature, those particular principles that need protecting are...

1. That legislatures make decisions on substantive matters by majority vote.
2. That legislators cannot be forced to vote on substantive matters, before they have had an opportunity to deliberate them.
3. That legislators cannot be required to consider unrelated bills at the same time.

If you think those principles are unreasonable, then the form of government you believe in is something other than democratic.

When One Group's Ascendency Must Prevent Another's

It's fascinating to hear people who wish to radically alter the law and culture by any means necessary and silence their opposition attempt to explain why the other side is the home of oppression and closed mindedness. One specimen of the genre, oddly not apparently online, comes courtesy David Adams Murphy.

After introducing his subject as a response to Providence Bishop Thomas Tobin's "anti-secularist blather," in a prior op-ed about Governor Lincoln Chafee's apparent aversion to public prayer, Murphy explains the First Amendment as intended, in part, "to keep any one faith from having ascendancy over another in government." How this is to be accomplished — that is, how the worldview of a majority of Americans (whatever that might be) is to be suppressed so as to give it equal weight to the worldview of a minority — he does not detail. Instead, Murphy elides all evidence that the Founders were religious believers, some of whom stressed the importance of religion if a democratic republic could hope to survive. He then whips out the secularist's cheat-sheet list of Christians' improprieties and atrocities.

Finally, Murphy presumes to declare Tobin's true purpose:

Why does the bishop call for religious influence on government? Because he desires a power to influence he doesn't deserve, but nevertheless enjoyed over Governor Chafee's nitwit predecessor. The unelected leader of this diocese, selected by the pope (who is nothing less than a bureaucratically appointed monarch), seeks to form public policy from his pulpit, dictate laws that conform with his interpretation of scripture, and doubtless funnel public monies to his church's coffers.

Doubtless. Of course, the fact that some sort of prayer has been a tradition long preceding Governor Carcieri does not come up for consideration. It would be far too much to expect the likes of Murphy to ponder the significance of the fact that a religion's political power, such as it is, derives mostly from its ability to persuade voters that its assessment of reality is correct and applies to a particular issue in such-and-such a way.

Murphy's central concern is clearly to disallow Christians to bring their religion to the table for public debate or even, one can justifiably suppose, into the voting booth. He therefore must paint their spiritual leaders as power-hungry descendants of barbarians and dictators and stir up the specter of insidious corruption in the modern day.

If Mr. Thomas Tobin, resident of Rhode Island, were Murphy's actual target, his string of vitriol and hostility would be manifestly inappropriate. One can conclude, therefore, that it isn't the bishop himself that Murphy fears and loathes, but the electoral majority that might agree with him. David Adams Murphy's declaration of "disgust" points mainly at the rest of us, and his insinuation is that we, his fellow Rhode Islanders, are mere op-eds or homilies away from burning witches and Joan D'Arc. We must be stopped. We must be prevented from hearing the seductive lure of clerics who ask us to acknowledge that political leaders are only human beings in need of guidance and humility about the extent of their authority.

In other words, Murphy's tones are those of the totalitarian, not Tobin's.

The Scope of Religious Freedom

A recent article (apparently not online) in The Rhode Island Catholic summarized same-sex marriage legislation introduced to the General Assembly as follows:

Both Chafee and House Speaker Gordon Fox support allowing same-sex couples to marry. Last Thursday, Rep. Arthur Handy and Sen. Rhoda Perry filed bills that would recognize "civil marriage" between same gender individuals, but giving religious institutions the opportunity not to participate.

Having some history following this issue, I thought to take a look at the actual language that the local diocesan newspaper treats as containing religious exemptions. Here's the text of the relevant paragraphs of H5012:

Protection of freedom of religion in marriage. – (a) Consistent with the guarantees of freedom of religion set forth by both the First Amendment to the United States Constitution and Article I, Section 3 of the Rhode Island Constitution, each religious institution has exclusive control over its own religious doctrine, policy, and teachings regarding who may marry within their faith, and on what terms. No court or other state or local governmental body, entity, agency or commission shall compel, prevent, or interfere in any way with any religious institution's decisions about marriage eligibility within that particular faith's tradition.

(b) Consistent with the guarantees of freedom of religion set forth by both the First Amendment to the United States Constitution and Article I, Section 3 of the Rhode Island Constitution, ordained clergy, ministers or elders as described and authorized in sections and 15-3-6 of the general laws to officiate at a civil marriage shall not be obligated or otherwise required by law to officiate at any particular civil marriage or religious rite of marriage.

The legislation also adds a paragraph distinguishing legally recognized marriages as civil marriages. Arguably, a hostile judge could find that language describing eligible "officials empowered to join persons in marriage" does not mean clergy have a right to perform civil marriage if they refuse to do so without regard to the gender of the spouses.

More importantly, the freedom-of-religion section of the bill is narrowly worded to protect "decisions about marriage eligibility within that particular faith's tradition." That includes the definition of marriage for activities related to the exercise of religion, but does not necessarily include the definition for activities related to employment within the religious organization or to receipt of services provided thereby. In other words, the fact that a church does not recognize same-sex marriage for the purposes of its religious rites does not mean that it will be permitted to do so when providing benefits to employees spouses or when determining what counts as marriage when distributing charitable services.

Religious faiths tend not to segment their religious activities apart from the way they live their lives in all capacities. That is, to believers charity is an expression of faith, as is one's interaction in the workplace. The government (and this particular legislation) does not share that broad view.

Marriage as Healthcare Policy

Pankaj Ahire, of Charlestown, uses extremely condemnatory language, laying the potential death of his same-sex partner at the foot of RI Roman Catholic Bishop Thomas Tobin:

The lack of marriage equality implies that my excellent health and dental insurance does not cover my partner. Unfortunately, my partner has had health issues, and could not go to a doctor. To see him suffer when I could have provided for him is agonizing to say the least.

But more importantly if tomorrow something happens to my partner, you can bet that I will take him straight to emergency room. Who foots the bill now? The State of Rhode Island. In this economic climate, shouldn't taxpayers try to get coverage for as many people as possible? Marriage equality is a way to do that.

Ahire provides an excellent example of the error in progressive thinking that has wrought so much damage throughout the United States and Western society at least since the mid-1800s. Radically altering cultural institutions in order to serve immediate economic and personal desires and needs — no matter how just and urgent they may be — ignores the pillars that have evolved over centuries and that such institutions developed to support.

Marriage is fundamentally about joining of the two halves of human biology, man and woman, most significantly in the bodies of the children that only a man and a woman can create. The ability to extend employment benefits to a loved one is not its key quality, neither is tax policy, neither is a government stamp of equality, and behaving as if any of these ancillary aspects should be focal points undermines an institution that is in dire need of fortification, in our time.

Mr. Ahire would be more rational to direct his ire at those who've held up healthcare reform. He'd be more intelligent to advocate for reforms that lower the cost thereof and increase freedom and choice when it comes to insurance plans and means of acquiring medical services.

Grappling with Truth Isn't Easy

One of the more amorphous aspects of the Catholic Church that persuades me of the wisdom of its approach to conceptualizing life is that it eschews easy answers to thorny problems. (That doesn't mean, of course, that individual Catholics or even broad movements of them don't from time to time slip into human habits.) Bishop Tobin raised a case-in-point example of this quality in a September essay:

The gist of the letter [from the grandmother of a homosexual young man] is found in this paragraph: "Many men and women could not find themselves in love with a person of the same sex unless God made them that way. What is very serious is the attitude of disapproval and even violence that is often extended to gays. We are called to love everyone and not to be judgmental. When Church leaders speak out, it gives silent permission to others not to love gays."

Bishop Tobin cycles through a number of issues that create similar challenges for the reconciliation of the Church's call to love with its moral conclusions, returning to the topic at hand:

As I wrote to my correspondent, the fact that the Church has love and respect for homosexual persons does not mean that we can ignore the immorality of homosexual acts or the homosexual culture. Nor does our respect for homosexual persons mean that we should sit back silently while a highly-organized political movement seeks to hijack the institution of holy matrimony and change its definition as a union of man and woman — a definition that comes from God and has existed from the beginning of mankind.

That people with homosexual inclinations are human beings worthy of love and respect, that they experience their own intimate loves no less intensely than do heterosexuals, and even that their desires are natural do not negate the moral reasoning of the Church when it comes to their expression of their love — much less the longstanding and well developed theology that centers on the institution of marriage.

The easiest path is to grab onto any justification to allow people to do as they want to do, but what people want to do is not always (even often) the same as what they ought to do. If the "progressive" tendency is to cut loose tradition and moral gravity in order to accommodate the mores of the day, an equally facile mirror tendency is to cut loose the requirements for tolerance and compassion.

Neither approach fully accomplishes the goal toward which it is oriented. By letting love become license, the dogmatic liberal shirks the responsibility to guide and to be faithful stewards of the culture that has brought humanity so far. By letting responsibility become a yoke of rules without regard to the difficulties that they impose and rejection that they might imply, the dogmatic conservative fails to adequately apply the lessons of the culture that he strives to protect.

The Bourgeois Change

Jonah Goldberg makes an interesting point about the particular victories of America's homosexual movement:

... Watch ABC's Modern Family. The sitcom is supposed to be "subversive" in part because it features a gay couple with an adopted daughter from Asia. And you can see why both liberal proponents and conservative opponents of gay marriage see it that way. But imagine you hate the institution of marriage and then watch Modern Family's hardworking bourgeois gay couple through those eyes. What's being subverted? Traditional marriage, or some bohemian identity-politics fantasy of homosexuality? ...

Or look at the decision to let gays openly serve in the military through the eyes of a principled hater of all things military. From that perspective, gays have just been co-opted by The Man. Meanwhile, the folks who used Don't Ask, Don't Tell as an excuse to keep the military from recruiting on campuses just saw their argument go up in flames.

Deep tradition and culture travel through time more as planets than comets, so they tend to absorb radical satellites that orbit them, but over time, the relatively small changes do shift their course. This speaks to the basic distinction, I think, between a conservative approach to addressing social change and the liberal one: there are ways to domesticate the gay subculture (or, rather, to give homosexuals a more domestic option) that reinforce the purpose of marriage rather than undermining it; there could have been ways of advancing equal rights for women and ending institutional male chauvinism without damaging family structure and reordering education to the detriment of boys; and there could have been ways of ushering black Americans from segregation to true equality without creating lasting racial divisions and a racial underclass, especially in inner cities, for whom hope is little more than a political slogan.

Essentially, the better approach is to maintain basic structural principles — such as the integral relationship between marriage and procreation — and allow the culture to do the slow work of kneading injustices and unnecessary restrictions out of traditions. The more radical approach of pushing social change through legal manipulation and pop-cultural affirmation has the effect of undermining the critical structural principles even as the tradition moves along with its own momentum. Consider another paragraph from Goldberg:

As a sexual-lifestyle experiment, they failed pretty miserably, the greatest proof being that the affluent and educated children (and grandchildren) of the baby boomers have re-embraced the bourgeois notion of marriage as an essential part of a successful life. Sadly, it's the lower-middle class that increasingly sees marriage as an out-of-reach luxury. The irony is that such bourgeois values — monogamy, hard work, etc. — are the best guarantors of success and happiness.

Those who are already educated and whose families are already on a healthy path draw from the lessons of tradition for their own benefit, but because the essential rationales of the traditions have been voided, they do not reinforce them. They marry, for example, because marriage ensures the best environment in which to raise children, but they do so as if of their own personal assessment of individual circumstances, not because the institution of marriage is such that it ineradicably binds two adults together and to the children that they create. The consequence emerges first with those who can't articulate the value of marriage or the importance of their children, but who have in generations past felt compelled to follow the family model nonetheless. Younger generations that once benefited from their parents' conformity no longer will, because their parents will understand marriage to be mainly about themselves and their own preferences.

In summary, Goldberg's essay ultimately comes down to an observation that radical change does not repercuss instantly. Civilization is a long-term project, though, and its course can move from one of continued advancement toward one of dissolution.

The Proper Frame of Traditionalist Mind

Advocates or same-sex marriage do everything they can to paint supporters of traditional marriage as motivated by animus and hatred. They strive to obscure the very basic difference between biological pairs that, by their nature, can create children and those that cannot. It's all too easy, under that fire, to back into a small range of argument that does little to contradict their more outlandish and offensive assertions.

Ron Sider reminds traditionalists — specifically evangelicals, in his case — that we should fight back against such attacks by making them manifestly implausible:

Tragically, because of our own mistakes and sin, we evangelicals have almost no credibility on this topic. We have tolerated genuine hatred of gays; we should have taken the lead in condemning gay bashing but were largely silent; we have neglected to act in gentle love with people among us struggling with their sexual identity; and we have used the gay community as a foil to raise funds for political campaigns. We have made it easy for the media to suggest that the fanatics who carry signs announcing “God hates fags” actually speak for large numbers of evangelicals.

Worst of all, we have failed to deal honestly with the major threat to marriage and the family: heterosexual adultery and divorce. Evangelicals divorce at the same rate as the rest of the population. Many evangelical leaders have failed to speak against cheap divorce because they and their people were getting divorced just like everyone else. And yet we have had the gall to use the tiny (5 percent or less) gay community as a whipping boy that we labeled as the great threat to marriage.

The difficulty, on the latter count, is that the same-sex marriage movement has pushed the front line of the marriage debate away from divorce, because the nature of the couples is logically prior to the appropriate rules of their relationships. Sider is correct, when he writes:

... we should seek to change the divorce laws, especially no-fault divorce. When children are involved, the law should deny no-fault divorce and in other ways make divorce more difficult. This, not gay marriage, is the area of marriage law that affects the vast majority of our children. We should be spending the overwhelming majority of the time we devote to marriage law to changing the law that permits cheap divorce for heterosexuals.

But if society's concept of marriage as a relationship is such that it explicitly excludes the capacity for shared biological children as its sine qua non, then the argument for tightened divorce laws loses much of its punch. SSM presents marriage as an emotional and legal arrangement between two consenting adults; on what grounds does the government disallow them from divorcing? Having discarded the notion that the marriage is written into our biology and deserves support as a cultural institution above government, there would seem to be little basis for forcing unhappy couples to take a broader societal good into consideration as they order their affairs.

The Concern About Marriage's Future

A comment that Mangeek left to a recent post on marriage and polygamy merits thought and response:

I'm having a really hard time seeing what's so bad about polygamy that it needs to be prohibited. I'm guessing that even if gay marriage and polygamy were allowed, the vast majority of people will still choose the 'standard configuration' we're all familiar with.

I'd rephrase his guess: The majority of people may continue to incline toward opposite-sex pairs, at least while the cultural echo of traditional marriage continues, but that doesn't mean that they'll continue to enter into them — particularly not with the sense of longevity and obligation that has been the key to the institution's success in Western society.

Same-sex marriage puts the final, irrevocable tear in the notion that the biological ability of men and women to create children through their intimacy is the single most relevant factor in marriage. Parents who pair up for life resolve questions of responsibility. They firmly set their children within lines of lineage tying them to the families and societies into which they're born. They affirm that they are joined in the children that they have jointly made and instill a sort of existential security on which healthy worldviews and habits can be built.

If that one basic requirement is removed, marriage is ultimately about the choices and well-being of adults. Don't get me wrong: the recent plausibility of same-sex marriage is a result of the institution's deterioration, not the cause of it. We've been treating marriage as a personal lifestyle choice for decades with the common practice of the serial polygamy of divorce and remarriage. Once same-sex marriage is written into the law and thereby enforced in the culture, it isn't even arguable that the traditional view of marriage applies except as an individual option among many.

I've argued many times that the whole point of responsible adults' investing in the institution of marriage is to create a culture of marriage that draws less responsible adults toward it, thus being an active force in society, rather than a mere marker of legal responsibilities and benefits. If marriage is, by contrast, about the mutual care and support of adults, then it is a real question whether a particular woman (to pick one gender) is better off slogging through life with a peer husband or signing on as wife number 2 or 22 of a billionaire.

We're still wrapped up in the romantic sense of marriage, so from our current place in history it seems universal and unchangeable that people will marry for love, rather than security, but it that won't last. Indeed, creating that sense was part of what made traditional marriage a powerful force for directing our culture. Without it, not only would children not be as thoroughly intertwined with diverse and dispersed cultures (as opposed to local tribes and insular nations), but the society would drift toward hierarchies defined not merely by money and political power, but by family structure.

This is the point at which I'd bring up Russ's comment, immediately following Mangeek's:

Ummm, cause and effect requires that something actually has been tried (exactly what the professor above said). As Drucker put it...

"There is no 'scientific' way to set objectives... There are rightly value judgements ... one reason for this is that the decisions stand under incurable uncertainty. They are concerned with the future. And we have no 'facts' concerning the future."

Russ is responding to my suggestion that radicals/progressives have taken, as their method of operation, grand experiments with human society, basing rapid changes on the limited ability of people to foresee consequences. He doesn't really object so much as restate his willingness to ignore the objection.

Lost in the spat, though, is the fact that tradition and cultural competition is human society's way of experimenting over time and recording the results. Looking back at history, it appears to me, at least, that society's that fostered a strong tradition of opposite-sex, two-person marriage became more democratic, more free, and more prosperous. That's not a record with which we should experiment except by the long slow process of cultural adjustment, not by the fiat of politically captured legislatures, and certainly not by the declarations of unelected judges.

Chafee's Aimin' to Give It

What's the famous H.L. Menken quotation? "Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard." I suspect that's going to be the unofficial slogan of the Linc Chafee years in Rhode Island. It came to mind when the Department of Revenue found that Chafee's plan to tax everything that moves in Rhode Island would actually increase the taxes that we pay by $121 million, rather than the $89.4 million that he'd been claiming:

The list of 93 items that are exempt from the existing 7-percent state sales tax, in addition to food, clothing and medicine, is made up of items that state lawmakers deliberately chose not to tax, among them: school meals, prosthetic devices and sales to charitable, educational and religious organizations. Also included: equipment purchased for manufacturing purposes and adaptive equipment that helps amputee veterans drive their cars. [Don't forget heating fuel.]

When asked last week whether Chafee favors taxing such items, his spokesman, Michael Trainor, said the former U.S. senator "never wavered" during the campaign from his plan to establish a 1-percent tax on exempt items, and is not wavering now.

"Certainly, in the early days of his administration, there needs to be additional revenue," Trainor said. "He views this as a temporary extension to the exempt items that would be retired as soon as the budget situation is under control."

And what happens when "the budget system" (along with spending) becomes more out of control? Well, the difference between items currently taxed at 7% and those to be taxed at 1% is minimal, wouldn't you say?

The quotation came to mind, again, when Chafee dug in on his pledge to wipe away E-Verify at the state level, doubled down with an intention to bring this campaign across state borders, and offered this non sequitur, which raises serious questions about the governor-elect's capacity for reason:

"We have a disaster of an economy. Unemployment is one of the worst in the country. We're way worse than our neighbors, who all have the same labor laws as us," except for the immigration order, he said. "Obviously it's not working."

Blaming the state's economic woes on the fact that the state government has at least minimal controls against the hiring of illegal immigrants is nonsense on its face. Can the man who is soon to be the chief executive of our state think no more clearly than that? Even the Providence Journal editors think Chafee's way off, on this one:

The governor-elect argued that E-Verify "simply doesn’t work" and "has proved ineffective."

That would surprise people with much greater expertise on the subject, including Janet Napolitano, the secretary of homeland security for President Obama, whom Mr. Chafee strongly supports.

"E-Verify is a smart, simple and effective tool that helps employers and businesses throughout the nation maintain a legal workforce," Ms. Napolitano said this month, in announcing that the program is being expanded at the federal level to include U.S. passports and passport cards for employment verification. Thirteen states now mandate E-Verify and the number will grow. (See "Chafee understates use of E-Verify system," news, Nov. 19.)

And even you don't agree with Chris Plante and the National Organization of Marriage, perhaps you'll hear echoes of Menken in the Chafee camp's handling of Plante's effort at least to be heard on the issue in the governor's office:

[Dhavee spokesman Michael Trainor] also denied ever telling Plante "that the governor-elect would sit down with him." In fact, Trainor said, his letter reflected his belief that a meeting would probably "not be productive" in light of Chafee's "long-established position" on the issue.

But Trainor said Chafee is, in fact, open to talking with Plante one-on-one about the issue. Explaining why his own letter to Plante did not raise this possibility, Trainor said it was sent without the governor-elect's knowledge, amid "literally hundreds of requests for meetings."

"But now that Mr. Plante has decided to make a public issue of this, Lincoln Chafee is more than willing to have him in and to have a conversation."

It's just basic politics to make some effort to allow the opposition to feel as if it has had input, thereby defusing some of the bitterness from the debate. Governor Carcieri, for one, met with advocates for same-sex marriage even though his stand was at least as strong in the opposite direction as Chafee's.

The frightening theme that recurs with every article concerning the soon-to-be governor of Rhode Island is that the people of the state are going to have to look to the General Assembly for balance and reason while Chafee's in the executive seat. Those who believe that the healthiest outcome for Rhode Island would be a hastening of its demise (and therefore, its recovery) may soon get their wish.

The Radicals' Approach to Social Engineering

This entry to a recent First Things "While We're at It" column contains a familiar intellectual construction:

... The British Columbia Supreme Court will consider the legality of the province's laws after two members of a Mormon community in Bountiful, British Columbia, were charged with polygamy. The case will center primarily on religious freedom, but it may provide an opportunity to rethink the justification for banning polygamy.

"The problem," says Queen's University law professor Beverley Baines, "is that Canadian culture has changed significantly and there are many people living secretly in polygamous relationships. There is an assumption that polygamy is bad for women and children--but as long as it's a crime, no one is going to belly up and say they're living in the relationship. Until they decriminalize it we can't know if it's harmful in Canada."

The first thought to mind is Nancy Pelosi's admonition that Congress had to pass ObamaCare to see what it contained, but it hadn't previously occurred to me how apt a summary of the radical, or progressive, approach to social change that statement really was. It's all a grand experiment to them, no matter how many lives are damaged by the cultural underpinnings that they're so eager to sweep away.

Of course, to the extent that they are willing to consider evidence at all, progressives are likely aware that so many factors come into play, in the social arena, that no instance of cause and effect is ever free of the opportunity to dissemble and make excuses.

The Marriage Disconnect

In linking to a post by James Joyner, Instapundit Glenn Reynolds directly conveys Joyner's concern, which the latter states thus:

I'm not sure what's shocking: That the rate for blacks has tripled in my lifetime or that whites have now surpassed the level of pathology Moynihan described.

But note this part of the extended block quote that Joyner draws from the relevant AP article:

As the issue of black unwed parenthood inches into public discourse, Carroll is among the few speaking boldly about it. And as a black woman who has brought thousands of babies into the world, who has sacrificed income to serve Houston's poor, Carroll is among the few whom black women will actually listen to.

"A mama can't give it all. And neither can a daddy, not by themselves," Carroll says. "Part of the reason is because you can only give that which you have. A mother cannot give all that a man can give. A truly involved father figure offers more fullness to a child's life."

Anchor Rising readers are familiar with this point, but this point of view belongs fully articulated in the same-sex marriage debate. It makes for a disjointed set of ideological points to lament out-of-wedlock birth — especially in these terms — and not to explain why it is less lamentable than the inability of homosexual activists to change the definition of marriage.

There's the "M" Word Again

Jennifer Marshall approaches a point frequently made on Anchor Rising from another direction:

Waiting until marriage to have children is the second of three "golden rules" for avoiding poverty that researchers identified over the years: (1) graduate from high school; (2) marry before having children; and (3) get a job.

Actually, being married is even more significant than graduating from high school for avoiding poverty. Robert Rector, a senior research fellow at The Heritage Foundation, shows this in a new paper, "Marriage: America's No. 1 Weapon Against Child Poverty." By contrast, typical responses to poverty call for more spending on government programs. Far from helping poor Americans escape dependency, however, massive increases in welfare spending over the past four decades have entrenched poverty across generations.

Marriage and childbirth must be inextricably linked, conceptually, to foster a society in which (1) having to get married feels like a real potential consequence of the behavior that leads to childbirth and (2) children are born into households in which their parents have formed a partnership for their emotional and economic well-being. For the subsequent generation, having close familial relationships with both male and female parents — creating direct lines of lineage along a family tree — will decrease the behavior that leads branches into dire circumstances.

The Marriage Game, as Predicted

A recent editorial in National Review concerning same-sex marriage is a good summary of arguments that traditionalists, like me, have been making for nearly a decade now:

If it is true, as we are constantly told, that American law will soon redefine marriage to accommodate same-sex partnerships, the proximate cause for this development will not be that public opinion favors it, although it appears to be moving in that direction. It will be that the most influential Americans, particularly those in law and the media, have been coming increasingly to regard opposition to same-sex marriage as irrational at best and bigoted at worst. They therefore dismiss expressions of that opposition, even when voiced by a majority in a progressive state, as illegitimate. Judges who believe that same-sex marriage is obviously just and right can easily find ways to read their views into constitutions, to the applause of the like-minded.

The emerging elite consensus in favor of same-sex marriage has an element of self-delusion about it. It denies that same-sex marriage would work a radical change in American law or society, insisting to the contrary that within a few years of its triumph everyone will wonder what all the fuss was about. But its simultaneous insistence that opponents are the moral equivalent of the white supremacists of yesteryear belies these bland assurances. Our tolerance for racism is quite limited: The government, while it generally respects the relevant constitutional limits, is active in the cause of marginalizing racists and eradicating racist beliefs and behaviors. Moreover, social sanctions against racism, both overt and implied, are robust. If our society is truly to regard opposition to same-sex marriage as equivalent to racism, it will have to undergo change both dramatic and extensive. Churches that object, for example, will have to be put in the same cultural position as Bob Jones University was in the days when it banned interracial dating, until they too join the consensus.

There was a notable shift, following the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court's Goodridge decision, when advocates for same-sex marriage ceased to try to conduct an intellectual discussion, as Andrew Sullivan had most notably been doing for many years prior, and simply ceased to respond seriously to objections. The entire movement, right up to the judges who have answered the call for activism, has proceeded with large blinders to the possibility that those who disagree, first, might have a point, and second, have a right to shape the relevant law in their system of supposed self government.

The practice continues, even as the obvious next steps emerge before our very eyes:

TLC, the network responsible for behemoth family exposes like "Kate Plus 8" and "19 Kids and Counting," is turning its reality TV attention to another kind of domestic abundance: polygamy. "Sister Wives," premiering at 10 p.m. today, follows a fundamentalist Mormon family composed of one daddy, three mommies and 13 children living under one roof.

"It just felt like our story needed to be told," said Kody, the affable patriarch who works in advertising and lives with his family in Lehi, Utah. "There's a lot of stereotypes out there that are actually perpetuated by the press. I wanted to make sure the world understood that we're polygamists, but we're not the polygamists that you think you know."

Questions of Law and Questions of Power

Edwin Meese is not impressed with U.S. District Judge Vaughn Walker's decision that the Constitution requires recognition of same-sex marriage:

By refusing to acknowledge binding Supreme Court precedent, substantial evidence produced at trial that was contrary to the holding and plain common sense, the ruling exhibits none of the requirements of a traditional decision. This opinion is arbitrary and capricious, and its alarming legal methodology and overtly policy-driven tenor are too extreme to stand.

Regardless of whether one agrees with the result, structurally sound opinions always confront binding legal precedent. Walker's is a clear exception because the U.S. Supreme Court has spoken on whether a state's refusal to authorize same-sex marriage violates the equal protection and due process clauses of the 14th Amendment. In 1972, Baker v. Nelson, a case over whether Minnesota violated the Constitution by issuing marriage licenses only to opposite-sex couples, was unanimously thrown out on the merits, for lack of a substantial federal question. The Supreme Court's action establishes a binding precedent in favor of Proposition 8. But Judge Walker's ruling doesn't mention Baker, much less attempt to distinguish it or accept its findings.

A summary of the legal history of Baker illustrates that many of the arguments for the maintenance of traditional marriage were the same back in the early '70s as they are now — notably that marriage is intrinsically tied to procreation, that some opposite-sex couples' decision not to fulfill that link (or inability to do so) in no way eliminates the norm, and differences of race and of sex are not equivalent. The difference, nowadays, is that a significant portion of the ruling class — those in the judiciary leading the way — has decided simply to ignore basic meaning and common sense.

The Basic Point on Marriage

Ross Douthat states well the essential argument for preservation of traditional marriage that I've been making:

So what are gay marriage’s opponents really defending, if not some universal, biologically inevitable institution? It's a particular vision of marriage, rooted in a particular tradition, that establishes a particular sexual ideal.

This ideal holds up the commitment to lifelong fidelity and support by two sexually different human beings — a commitment that involves the mutual surrender, arguably, of their reproductive self-interest — as a uniquely admirable kind of relationship. It holds up the domestic life that can be created only by such unions, in which children grow up in intimate contact with both of their biological parents, as a uniquely admirable approach to child-rearing. And recognizing the difficulty of achieving these goals, it surrounds wedlock with a distinctive set of rituals, sanctions and taboos.

The point of this ideal is not that other relationships have no value, or that only nuclear families can rear children successfully. Rather, it's that lifelong heterosexual monogamy at its best can offer something distinctive and remarkable — a microcosm of civilization, and an organic connection between human generations — that makes it worthy of distinctive recognition and support.

Douthat goes on to note the long deterioration of the ideal among heterosexuals, but he doesn't present the specific relevance of same-sex marriage thereto. He's right to decry serial polygamy (multiple marriage partners throughout life via the mechanism of divorce). However, same-sex marriage doesn't stand in potential contrast to that trend; it locks into law the view of marriage that enables it: being primarily about mutual care and romantic affection between adults, with the binds of procreation secondary. Worse, it lays the foundation for further dissolution of the institution to an anything-goes practice centered on the benefits permitted to spouses.

Generation Why Bother

I guess it's among the hardships of wealth. Jeff Opdyke laments that his son doesn't have the drive that he did, as a teenager, to earn money, mostly because he and his wife have admittedly been a bit too generous:

We get a lot of satisfaction in doing that. But it comes with a pretty big downside—one we're only now beginning to grasp. Because of it, our son, who understands money far better than his young sister at this point, doesn't understand what it means to pay his own freight. He has learned to count on Mom and Dad.

I remember, at a very young age, walking around my apartment complex trying to sell toys that I no longer wanted. At one point, I set up a stand on a semi-main road selling pictures that I'd drawn. (I think I charged a quarter each, tacking on another dime if the picture was signed.) My career advanced to soccer referee and then record-store retail.

Perhaps the objects of desire make a difference. At thirteen and younger, I mainly wanted action figures and comic books, which had a low enough price tag that the work translated quickly into things. It seems that higher ticket items are more prominent these days — videogames and iphones and such — which probably contributes to the nonchalance of Opdyke's son at the prospect of making a few bucks mowing lawns.

Although, there's surely something cultural in play, whether broadly (covering most families) or narrowly (depending on the attitudes of nearby friends). My friends and I would patrol miles of neighborhoods selling the service of snow shoveling.

Of course, there's the opposing concern of parents:

[A former colleague's] daughter, on the other hand, "always had jobs when she was old enough, and offers the opposite lesson," my friend says. "She worked too hard and didn't enjoy herself enough when she had the opportunity. Now she has a full-time job, has her two weeks off, and I think she missed out."

Missed out on what? A teenager's job becomes part of the experience of youth. And without enough money to keep up with peers, kids can miss out anyway. I started down my path of debt when my first credit card arrived just in time to allow me to go on a beech vacation with my late-teenage pals. If I hadn't already had experience with what it means to work, I'd probably be in an even deeper hole, now, and with less natural drive to work my way out of it.

It's a complaint of every generation of parents, no doubt, but it feels as if the times aren't helping — what with all of the comforts and distractions, on one hand, and the well-honed traps that make spending money easy. As Opdyke suggests, "physical, maybe even uncomfortable, low-paying work" can be a healthy experience, of itself, if it serves to motivate young adults, but with the wireless glow of gadgets all around and the comforts of even working class homes, the lesson of "why bother" can take some effort to impart.

Marriage However They Want It

Yes, there are distinctions, and obviously, it is possible to argue both points simultaneously, but consider the circumstances that some early federal judicial rulings on same-sex marriage have created. A judge in Massachusetts has declared that the U.S. Congress and President cannot define marriage for the purposes of federal law, because the Constitution leaves the definition of marriage to the states. Now, a judge in California has single-handedly insisted that the people of that state, following the process of changing their constitution in order to affirm the definition of marriage as a relationship between members of the opposite sex, have violated the national Constitution.

Perhaps I'm not alone in inferring that the game is rigged and in taking this instance as evidence of the broader relentlessness of a ruling class that disagrees with the people of, by, and for whom the government is supposed to exist. On the blog Gay Patriot (via Instapundit), B. Daniel Blatt highlights some evidence that Chief U.S. District Judge Vaughn Walker ruled based, above all, on his own value system, rather than the law or the consensus of Americans:

Whoah, this guy is given more to popular jargon that to constitutional interpretation: "the evidence shows that Proposition 8 harms the state's interest in equality, because it mandates that men and women be treated differently based on antiquated and discredited notions of gender." Antiquated and discredited notions of gender? Discredited by whom? Sociologists writing in the 1970s, inventing a social construct out of thin air?

Commenting to a related post on the Volokh Conspiracy, Bart DePalma extrapolates the broader oligarchical question well:

The federal courts are not doing the Dems any favors.

Missouri's Prop C showed that the voters are already in full rebellion over an imperial Congress taking control of their health insurance against their will.

Then, last month, a district court judge in AZ decreed that the most popular law in the country — Arizona's attempt to enforce federal immigration law — was likely unconstitutional because it would be contrary to Obama policy not to enforce the law.

Now, a district court judge in San Fran has literally decreed that homosexual unions are marriages and the voters of CA were irrational to vote otherwise.

The courts may have just added law and order and social issue voters to the tsunami already headed to the ballot box in November.

How many more times does the ruling class think voters can be denied before there is a revolution — first at the ballot box and then if that fails on the streets?

If I may paint in even broader strokes: Incremental imposition of a national worldview — which is not very far, at all, from an organized religion — had served progressives well for a number of decades, as they infiltrated opinion-forming sectors of society, such as education and entertainment. By that method, they numbed and isolated their opposition. By a more political method, they drew in constituencies wanting some change to the order of American society, whether by encouraging dependency on government or picking the sides in cultural battles that appeal to our most basic desires and disruptive impulses (sex most prominently).

In recent decades, cultural conservatives aligned with civil libertarians and began building means of conveying their ideas even when locked out of more traditional media. At the beginning of this millennium, I'd have wagered that the conservative arguments thus promulgated would gradually win the day against the bankrupt and totalitarian ideas of the Left, and that the discoursive struggle would be between the right-leaning erstwhile allies. Unfortunately, the combination of 9/11 and President Bush's "compassionate conservatism" confused the trend and ushered in a far-left Democrat Congress and President Obama, who slithered into office on a centrist lie and a stolen dream.

Perhaps liberals have lost faith in incrementalism and are attempting to leap several rungs of the ladder at a time. Or perhaps conservatives are now better positioned to respond to the usurpation of our civil society. Whatever the case, big questions have been brought forward for pivotal answers, and support for immediate outcomes could come at the cost of much more fundamental concerns.

Liberty Isn't Their Concern

Somehow the headline "Voicing their views" feels a bit discordant over an article that includes this detail:

Speakers from the New Jersey-based National Organization for Marriage seemed startled as they were encircled by counter-protesters who yelled, sang and waved the rainbow flag associated with the gay-pride movement. Then, as some 170 protesters — most wearing red T-shirts — rattled plastic bottles filled with coins as a distraction, the group's president pointed to their tactics as yet another example of why same-sex marriage should not be legalized.

Two days earlier, the same-sex marriage advocacy group Marriage Equality RI had held its own rally, got its free publicity, and if there was any counter-protesting on the scene, it wasn't so overt as to be noticed by reporter Randal Edgar. But allowing the opposition that much courtesy is apparently a step too far for SSM activists. For them, those who disagree must be silenced — driven from the public square.

I'd ballpark the likelihood that legalized SSM will satisfy that aggression at zero percent. The next movement to be drowned out and intimidated will be that seeking permission for traditionalists to hold to their views of marriage in their private capacity — in the way they conduct their businesses, associate in groups, and offer their charity.

Not to make too much of a theme of it, but once again, one can observe that the urge to be on "the right side of history" is easily manipulable to put well-intentioned citizens in league with those who would oppress others because they've woven a translucent cloak of victimhood from conflicts of the past. That force that we've personified as Evil is perfectly happy to switch from oppressing homosexuals to leveraging homosexuals to oppress traditionalists and knock down the social structures that enabled our society to advance to its current state.

(Indeed, a traditionalist, myself, I'm inclined to see that as the intention all along.)

Marriage Is What We Make It

Commenter Rasputin scoffs at my suggestion that, as men become less useful as economic partners and less attractive as mates, heterosexual women will begin marrying each other. You can call the idea crazy, but remember that you did so when the New York Times or Dateline runs a story about the trend of "BFF second marriages" within a decade of pervasive same-sex marriage.

To the extent that the SSM movement retains the centrality of children to our idea of marriage, it insists that men and women are entirely interchangeable in their raising. They proffer having two parents as somehow the key to that task but insist that their genders don't matter. The overall message of SSM, however, is that marriage is not about children at all.

So what does that leave marriage to be about? It made sense, as our civilization came up with the social formula that brought us to our current level of advancement, for a layer of romantic mystique to be woven into the marriage culture for added profundity, but our society is burning the last fumes of such notions of soul mates and couples' being "meant for each other." Common and easy divorce and cultural narcissism are eliminating the last vestiges. Some people even argue that we're simply living too long for expectations of a single mate to be realistic. With the removal of the real miracle of childbirth — whereby a child literally joins the two parents in one body — from our understanding of marriage, there's no need for romance to play a role.

Best-friend marriages won't start out as sexual relationships. Divorced mothers will quickly realize the advantages of teaming up, and marriage will help them in that regard. (Kate & Allie was a popular TV show back when it was still considered craziness to predict the probability of same-sex marriage.) Over time, individual couples and next-generation pairings may move to satisfy each other's sexual desires, but it isn't really necessary for the cultural phenomenon to occur; it's long been a joke, after all, that married couples stop having sex, anyway.

We tend to forget, as these public debates develop, that our basic sense of what things mean — the essential understanding that everybody shares — changes. Everybody currently over thirty formed their sense of marriage before SSM was considered a possibility, so it's easy to fit the new relationships into the old formula and expect everything else to stay the same. That won't be the case.

Part of the very reason to have marriage is to create cultural expectations that men and women who behave in such a way as to create children will provide those children with stable homes consisting of their mothers and fathers. If that behavior is no longer in the equation, then there's no reason for sex to be, and to the extent that marriage continues to offer practical benefits to the spouses, it will become an attractive option to anybody (pairs, at first) who trusts somebody else — whether divorced mothers or shiftless young men.

Getting Past the Circular Fiat

Accusations of bigotry notwithstanding, I've long maintained that what drew me into the same-sex marriage debate about a decade ago was the intriguing and telling argument driving the innovation. The point is perhaps best summed in a passage from Andrew Sullivan's Virtually Normal, which I quoted in a post some years ago:

Some might argue that marriage is by definition between a man and a woman; and it is difficult to argue with a definition. But if marriage is articulated beyond this circular fiat, then the argument for its exclusivity to one man and one woman disappears.

My proximate concern was that this reasoning justifies any change to marriage, and its method any change to anything. If we put aside, for example, that marriage is by definition a relationship between two people, well, the argument for polygamy is perfectly coherent and logical. Obviously, if we define marriage beyond its definition, then its definition is something else. That there are reasons for the mere definition is a fact that we neatly put aside.

That dynamic has occurred to me as we've had internal debate about the Tenth Amendment reasoning in District Court Judge Joseph Tauro's rulings on the topic of same-sex marriage (here, here, here, and here). From my perspective, Tauro's reasoning proceeds as if from the "what if" of whether the federal government has a right to tie strings to its spending. The argument may be perfectly coherent and logical from that point on, but I haven't yet heard a satisfactory argument about why that's an appropriate starting point.

It's certainly an attractive way to begin an argument for some fundamental change in previously held beliefs — putting, as it does, defenders in the position of decoding all of the internal justifications that cultural evolution has built into the definition and belief. But it's surely inadequate. Back when I was arguing against Sullivan and his allies, in the earlier days of the public debate, nobody considered this route to finding the Defense of Marriage Act unconstitutional. The two paths to that result were thought to be the Full Faith and Credit clause of the Constitution or the Equal Protection provisions of the Fourteenth Amendment.

One can argue that Massachusetts Attorney General Martha Coakley divined an argument that we all had overlooked, but it seems to me at least probable that the reason we overlooked it was that it conflicted with our beliefs about the government's right to set policy around its own programs. Perhaps we were wrong, but a bit more explanation related to that error should be required.

Be that as it may, we're well into the realm of folks who prioritize cranial activity, and that's simply not how most people come to their conclusions. For most, the answer to the question of "what if there's no difference between opposite-sex couples and same-sex couples" is something like: "Then I can stop being called a bigot by emotional people and feel as if I'm on the 'right side of history.'" Well, as understandable as that response may be, it's not a formula for the preservation of principles that have worked for our society or for progress as we seek to move forward.

The same is true of Tauro's rulings, which add a legal, wonkish layer of recircled fiat on top of the cultural one that men and women are interchangeable within sexual relationships.

Congress Lacks a Constitutionally Granted Power to Define Marriage, † Œ Ø ¿

Andrew's #5 makes me wonder whether he isn't too enamored of the opportunity to oppose lefitsts in the course of supporting a liberal judicial ruling. I'll admit that I, too, find it very interesting that my reasons for disagreeing with Judge Tauro's rulings (as I understand them) ought to ally me with a variety of left-wingers. They dislike federalism that subverts their statist aims; I dislike federalism that collects taxes that will transfer to states with no federal definition of terms required.

I'd note, for one obvious instance, that it is accepted practice that it is left to sovereign states to regulate abortion, as long as women have the right thereto (per Roe v. Wade et al.) according to some basic requirements. How would Tauro's reasoning not invalidate such legislation as the Hyde Amendment, preventing federal funding of abortions? If a state determines that abortion should be among the procedures covered by public healthcare programs,then it would seem that Tauro has left the federal government no recourse but to supply money to the state without defining the limits of acceptable procedures.

More to the point, though, I'm not persuaded that Andrew's #2 actually answers my objection (and Brassband's). Note, especially, the first sentence:

Attorney General Coakley's argument, which Judge Tauro agreed with, is that when the Federal government creates its own definition of marriage, it requires states to keep track of different types of marriages, even if the states don't recognize the Federal distinctions in their own laws.

In the case (essentially) of contractual requirements for the issuance of federal dollars, "marriage" is a definable term, not unlike "eligible participant" or "owner" or "the company" or "applicable service." Given the complexities of our layers of government and their many overlapping programs, the fact that "marriage" means something different for the purpose of federal contracts than for state contracts hardly creates an undue burden.

Under such an approach, it would be impossible for the federal government to do anything without exceeding its powers, in some way. Recall that the Constitution leaves authority not just to the states, but also to the people. According to the reasoning that Andrew describes, he could just as well say that the federal government, in creating any job or office, should not be able to set requirements because "it is not enough to say the [applicant] can opt-out of this requirement by not participating."

I write all this, of course, from within the belief that the federal government should not be as big and all-spending as it is. Wishing for a less powerful national government, however, should not lead us to accept a government that's small in control of taxpayer dollars but just as big in handing them out.

Re: Congress Lacks a Constitutionally Granted Power to Define Marriage

As Andrew's post on Judge Tauro's ruling concerning the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) proves, conservatives will find a great deal of intellectual meat in the development — setting principles of federalism against a traditional understanding of marriage. I'll have more to say on the issue in days to come, but for the moment, discussion in the comment section is definitely worth a look. Commenter Brassband offers an objection:

I haven't had a chance to go through these opinions with any care, but based on what I've seen I don't get the 10th amendment argument.

There's nothing that compels a state to participate in Medicaid -- or in a range of other federal programs.

For a state that is offended by DOMA's application to Medicaid recipients within its borders, the solution is to reject Medicaid and provide all of the funding for that type of program from State funds, and give the benefits to whomever the State likes.

Doesn't seem like a very well reasoned 10th amendment decision, from everything I've seen.

To which Andrew responds:

On the technical side, Judge Tauro's Tenth Amendment ruling is based on a First-Circuit precedent...

In United States v. Bongiorno, the First Circuit held that "a Tenth Amendment attack on a federal statute cannot succeed without three ingredients: (1) the statute must regulate the States as States, (2) it must concern attributes of state sovereignty, and (3) it must be of such a nature that compliance with it would impair a state’s ability to structure integral operations in areas of traditional governmental functions."

More broadly, the ruling basically says that if the states have never given away their authority in an area of governance (and, according to Bongiorno, the area is integral to the state), then the 10th Amendment makes clear that the states remain sovereign, and the Federal government cannot make its own set of rules in that area. I know that's not usually how the 10th Amendment has been interpreted (on the few occasions that it has been), but it seems to be closer to its original meaning than is the idea that the Federal government has a broad authority to do anything it decides for itself promotes the "general welfare", with states being allowed to opt-out of programs that are not based on more specifically enumerated powers.

It seems to me that Andrew's explanation (and, I take it, Tauro's) doesn't address Brassband's objection. The key is number 3 in the internal blockquote, which requires that a challenge on Tenth Amendment grounds involve a regulation:

... of such a nature that compliance with it would impair a state’s ability to structure integral operations in areas of traditional governmental functions.

DOMA doesn't regulate a state's activities as a sovereign entity. It regulates them as a dependent entity. That is, the state need only comply with the regulation to the extent that it (for example) chooses to rely on federal funds for Medicaid.

I've written before that I think that the spending mechanism for federal imposition of policy is corrupting of states' sovereignty, but circumstances are much worse if the federal government is seen as merely a source of nationwide taxpayer dollars for individual states. Where conservatives typically decry the strings that come with federal dollars, it's directly related to the regulation. This occurs, for example, when the feds offer aid for education and then dictate how individual school districts must construct their programs (or their faculties or student bodies).

In this case, even that isn't happening. The government isn't saying that states can only receive Medicaid funds if they define marriage along federal guidelines; it's saying that the funds can only be distributed in ways that accord with the federal government's understanding of marriage. Applying this to the Bongiorno rules for a Tenth Amendment challenge, one would have to argue that (again, for example) refusing Medicaid "would impair a state’s ability to structure integral operations in areas of traditional governmental functions." That's undoubtedly true, in a practical sense, but codifying it into law isn't a turn of events that ought to encourage conservatives (and libertarians, much less).

The most immediate reason conservatives should be wary is that it means that Americans no longer possess a substantive say in the application of their taxdollars, when those dollars are given to the states. The secondary reason, which will perhaps prove more insidious, is that it opens up a new area in which the federal judiciary has authority to determine when taxpayers retain that right and when they don't.

Massachusetts District Court Says that Congress Lacks a Constitutionally Granted Power to Define Marriage

In a decision issued yesterday, the Federal District Court for Massachusetts overturned a portion of the Federal Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) for reasons including the violation of the Tenth Amendment and Congress lacking an enumerated basis for defining marriage, in the case of Massachusetts v. Department of Health and Human Services.

Section 3 of DOMA prohibited any definition of marriage other than that of a union of one man and one woman from being used by the Federal government, including eligibility rules for Federal benefits. Massachusetts Attorney General Martha Coakley challenged the law last year arguing, amongst other points, that...

Congress lacks the authority under Article I of the United States Constitution to regulate the field of domestic relations, including marriage [and that] Section 3 of DOMA violates the Tenth Amendment, exceeds Congress’s Article I powers, and runs afoul of the Constitution’s principles of federalism by creating an extensive federal regulatory scheme that interferes with and undermines the Commonwealth’s sovereign authority to define marriage and to regulate the marital status of its citizens.

In other words, Congress lacked the power to define marriage, even for Federal law, because a power to involve itself in regulating domestic relations had never been delegated to Congress. And in deciding the case, District Court Judge Joseph Tauro agreed that Federalist arguments have to be taken seriously in this and in any other area...

It is a fundamental principle underlying our federalist system of government that "[e]very law enacted by Congress must be based on one or more of its powers enumerated in the Constitution." And, correspondingly, the Tenth Amendment provides that "[t]he powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people." The division between state and federal powers delineated by the Constitution is not merely “formalistic." Rather, the Tenth Amendment “leaves to the several States a residuary and inviolable sovereignty." This reflects a founding principle of governance in this country, that "[s]tates are not mere political subdivision of the United States," but rather sovereigns unto themselves.

In its defense, the Federal Government argued that an enumerated power allowing Congress to define marriage can be found in the "Spending Clause" of the US Constitution (Article I section 8)...

The Congress shall have Power To lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises, to pay the Debts and provide for the common Defence and general Welfare of the United States; but all Duties, Imposts and Excises shall be uniform throughout the United States

...which has been interpreted to allow Congress to set conditions on how Federal monies are spent, in pursuit of the promotion of the general welfare. But Judge Tauro rejected this justification as a basis for DOMA, on the grounds that...

1. The courts have previously held that the broad grant of power in Spending Clause cannot be used to justify Congressional actions that violate more sharply defined section of the Constitution, and
2. Section 3 of DOMA "violated the equal protection principles embodied in the Fifth Amendment to the United States Constitution" (decided in Gill vs. Office of Personnel Management, the companion case to Massachusetts v. HHS, and decided by Judge Tauro on the same day).

Judge Tauro's ruling also made note that the scope of Section 3 of DOMA extended beyond just "spending"...

It is...worth noting that DOMA’s reach is not limited to provisions relating to federal spending. The broad sweep of DOMA, potentially affecting the application of 1,138 federal statutory provisions in the United States Code in which marital status is a factor, impacts, among other things, copyright protections, provisions relating to leave to care for a spouse under the Family and Medical Leave Act, and testimonial privileges.

...suggesting that the Spending Clause might not have been an adequate justification for Section 3 of DOMA, even if it had been decided that there was no conflict with the rest of the Constitution. Given that the opinion makes no further mention of whether the impacts of DOMA outside of spending or monetary benefits can be justified by the Spending Clause, I believe the implication is that there is no way that DOMA could have met Constitutional requirements in any non-spending area of the law, if it was unable to meet Constitutional requirements directly related to spending.

The rationale offered by Judge Tauro with regard to the Tenth Amendment was more direct. He found that Section 3 of DOMA violated it, without dependence on any other Constitutional provisions...

That DOMA plainly intrudes on a core area of state sovereignty -- the ability to define the marital status of its citizens -- also convinces this court that the statute violates the Tenth Amendment...

This court has determined that it is clearly within the authority of the Commonwealth to recognize same-sex marriages among its residents, and to afford those individuals in same-sex marriages any benefits, rights, and privileges to which they are entitled by virtue of their marital status. The federal government, by enacting and enforcing DOMA, plainly encroaches upon the firmly entrenched province of the state, and, in doing so, offends the Tenth Amendment. For that reason, the statute is invalid.

However, while this part of the opinion directly invokes the Tenth Amendment, it does so in a manner more limited than the plain wording of the Amendment would suggest. Judge Tauro's opinion, drawing from established circuit-level precedent, stresses that the Tenth Amendment applies to areas which, in addition to not being delegated to the Federal Government, must also be areas which clearly belong to the state governments. This adds an extra condition on Tenth Amendment protections, not found in the Amendment's text, which makes no reference to a subset of non-delegated state powers being the special ones that are protected.

So while I can applaud Judge Tauro's general principle of taking the idea of enumerated powers and Tenth Amendment seriously, the specifics of his ruling highlight a substantial gap that currently exists in our nation's Federalism-related jurisprudence. While the Federal government cannot intrude into an area that is fundamental to the sovereignty of a state, and cannot use the "Spending Clause" to justify actions that conflict with other parts of the Constitution, there is still a large range of possible Federal actions whose Constitutionality is not clearly defined by the courts, i.e. actions that courts do not declare to be essential to state sovereignty, and that are not in conflict with the Constitution but that are not expressly delegated to the Federal Government.

Proving Sex Ed Policies a Failure

One hears, from time to time, that abstinence only sex education has been proven to be a failure.
Not only is the proof arguably incorrect, but the entire premise misses the mark. Abstinence education hardly enjoyed meager implementation, let alone the pervasive reinforcement that would be necessary for society-wide effect.

But I do wonder what those who continue to offer the common complaint that a small devotion to abstinence in the broad sphere of public school sex ed didn't change anything would say about this:

The United Kingdom’s Daily Telegraph has an article this morning documenting the high rate of repeat abortions among young girls in Great Britain. According to the article, 89 girls aged 17 or under who terminated a pregnancy last year had had at least two abortions previously. Furthermore, 2009 figures from the Department of Health indicate that for the first time, more than a third (34 percent) of abortions were performed on women who had already ended one or more pregnancies.

While these statistics are tragic, the article unfortunately fails to link these outcomes to Britain's permissive policies with regard to abortion, contraception, and sex education. For instance, England has no parental-consent requirement. In both 1982 and 2006 the courts ruled that minor girls can obtain abortions without their parental permission. These high rates of repeat abortions provide good evidence that effective parental-involvement laws might be able to prevent minors from obtaining multiple abortions by providing parents with an early indication of their child's sexual activity.

Abortion isn't the only indicator that "comprehensive" sex ed, British-style, has failed to resolve or has in fact made worse. But it's such an article of faith that all we have to do is teach children how to have sex safely that few stop to notice that the operative clause in that belief is "teach children how to have sex."

UPDATED: Doggedly Raising the Contraceptive Point

Frankly, the comments to my post on contraception were about what I expected. The Pill, condoms, and their less common company are secular sacraments, and people are very reluctant to place them on the table for skeptical scrutiny. (It might... or might not... go too far to imply an underlying sense of prickliness about their insinuation of naughty behavior.) One comment I'd like to highlight, though, comes from Dan:

I think not having three kids by the time I got out of school has worked out pretty favorably for me. A girl in my high school class did things the old fashioned way and is now a mother of three who works at a local Stop and Shop (along with significant government aid). I suppose for the 10% or so of young adults who can, voluntarily or involuntarily, plausibly commit to total abstinence until marriage it works out alright.

The first thing to say is that it's a little peculiar for a libertarian principalist to argue such things from anecdote. If that's the standard, I'll see Dan's "girl from high school" and raise him dozens of men and women with whom I've been acquainted, during my adult life, who've spent their lives childless and still wind up menially employed and in need of assistance. If readers wish to head in such a direction, we could take up the question of whether effective self-sterilization leads to perpetual adolescence among people who never face parental responsibility.

The larger point comes with the second thing I'd say in response to Dan. He's reluctant to accept the notion that modern contraception bifurcated the "mating market" into distinct "sex" and "marriage" markets, but it doesn't contradict the argument to ignore it. Indeed, his rejoinder is fully in keeping with the analysis that I cited by Timothy Reichert, who notes (for example) that two-income couples have decreased the value of labor and increased the cost of such essentials as homes. Reichert summarizes this aspect of his argument as follows:

By now, it should be clear to the reader that, in my view, contraception is, contrary to the rhetoric of the sexual revolution, deeply sexist in nature. Contraception has resulted in an enormous redistribution of welfare from women to men, as well as an intertemporal redistribution of welfare from a typical woman's later, childrearing years to her earlier years.

In other words, the benefit that Dan has derived has arguably come at a cost to young families — with an emphasis on women and children. In my earlier post, I suggested that the loosening of young women's inhibitions has overall been to the benefit of men. Dan's reply, as a young professional male, is that he's enjoyed that benefit quite a bit. Well, fine.

It's interesting, in this context, to introduce a recent study of teens' attitudes toward sex. I note, in passing, that contrary to Dan's 10% number, a majority of the teens reported having not had sex. As the full report (PDF) makes clear, teen sex has actually been decreasing. Unfortunately, there's a dark lining to the study:

It found that most teenagers do not frown on having children outside of marriage, however.

"The majority of teens -- 64 percent of males and 71 percent of females -- 'agree' or 'strongly agree' that 'it is okay for an unmarried female to have a child'," the report reads.

I offer the hypothesis that the bifurcation of the "mating market," following the contraceptive revolution, was among the factors that placed our society on a path away from the "marriage market," perhaps suggesting that the "sex market" will ultimately replace the "mating market." With the commonplace declarations that pregnancy and childbirth are ultimately the woman's choice and the market dynamics described by Reichert, men have been moving away from the sense of responsibility for their offspring, which is not an option for women, who have nonetheless had incentive to begin behaving, culturally and sexually, more like men.

ADDENDUM:

As I began this post by implying, something strange happens when one raises this topic — or any topic having to do with the behavioral revolutions of the past half-century. It's as if we all become teenagers defending our habitual misbehavior.

To clarify what I'd thought was clear: I'm not suggesting that we could or should put the contraceptive cat back in the bag. There are circumstances in which they're necessary, and truth be told, I wouldn't restrict their usage by adults were I able to conform the law entirely to my liking. (Although, I would still argue that the residents of individual states should have that authority, acting democratically.)

But the fact that something is — on the whole — good, neutral, or just not worth repealing does not mean that it is beyond reproach, just as the fact that something has harmful effects does not mean that we must attempt to rip it out of the law and culture in its entirety. Rather, by openly discussing problems, we can make the slow cultural adjustments that conservatives tend to prefer on such matters.

Contraception and Distortion of a Market

Timothy Reichert had a very interesting analysis in the May issue of First Things applying economic and social science principles to the effect of the Pill on American relationships. (Unfortunately, the magazine appears to be having long-term technical difficulties with its firewall, so even a subscription might not enable access.) Here's the premise with which he begins:

What are the social processes that should be logically included under the rubric of contraception? First and foremost, contraception divides what was once a single mating "market," wherein men and women paired in marriage, into two separate markets — a market for sexual relationships that most people now frequent during the early phase of their adult lifetimes (I will refer to this as the "sex market"), and a market for marital relationships that is inhabited during the later phases (I will refer to this as the "marriage market").

Challenging the unmitigated blessing of birth control has been a secular apostasy for most of my adult life, but that's just another indication of the recklessness with which our society pursues immediate gratification without consideration of consequences. Even clearly positive developments — such as the end of racial segregation and the beginning of women's liberation — can have negative consequences that are exacerbated by the way in which a change of practice comes about and is sustained. It behooves us, then, to be frank about those consequences as something distinct from the emotional cry against recrudescence.

In the case of contraception, writes Reichert:

The result is easy to see. From the perspective of women, the sex market is one in which they have more bargaining power than men. They are the scarce commodity in this market and can command higher "prices" than men while inhabiting it.

But the picture is very different once these same women make the switch to the marriage market. The relative scarcity of marriageable men means that the competition among women for marriageable men is far fiercer than that faced by prior generations of women. Over time, this means that the "deals they cut" become worse for them and better for men.

Reichert doesn't take the obvious tangent of observing that women — especially young women — have been responding to this new dynamic by behaving increasingly like men in the sex market. Indeed, it's not a new point to suggest that the loosening of young women's inhibitions is overall to the benefit of men — young and old. Indeed, if letches of old had sought to design a system that played to their lusts, they couldn't have done much better than the path that we're currently on.

Reichert goes on to explore the effects of the split of the "mating market" on various aspects of life and relationships, and consistently finds that the changes are ultimately to the detriment of women — and the children to whom women are naturally more deeply bonded. The details are too extensive to summarize, here, but a passage that Reichert quotes from a 2009 article by Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers offers the upshot:

... measures of subjective well-being indicate that women's happiness has declined both absolutely and relative to men. The paradox of women's declining relative well-being is found across various datasets, measures of subjective well-being, and is pervasive across demographic groups in industrialized countries. Relative declines in female happiness have eroded a gender gap in happiness in which women in the 1970s typically reported higher subjective well-being than did men. These declines have continued and a new gender gap is emerging — one with higher subjective well-being for men.

How the Accommodating Institution Declines

Apparently, in fields that debate such things, there's been an attempt to apply economic principles to explain the ebbs and flows of attendance in different churches. John Lamont does some difference splitting and paints a persuasive picture (subscription required). Because "the rewards of religion are supernatural and, therefore, unseen," the healthy religion, he explains, requires a different form of evidence, which is more visible where it is more distinctive:

Zeal and commitment are also necessary to lessen the "free rider" problem that plagues all voluntary groups — the problem of members who take the benefits of membership without contributing themselves. One can add to these considerations the fact that much of the appeal of religion comes from its providing moral principles with which to structure one's life. Such principles are far more effective when one sees that most of the people around one are following them. A community of people who, by and large, follow the principles of a morally demanding religion is far more effective moral educator than any amount of preaching — a factor that is especially important for parents. Thus, a church has to set high standards for membership in order to be attractive, and the churches that set high standards are the churches that will grow. Those with low standards will shrink because low standards reduce the rewards for religious commitment below the required cost in time and effort. This is why, as Finke and Stark assert, "the churching of America was accomplished by aggressive churches committed to vivid otherworldliness."

The problem arises with each incremental argument that this or that rule is arbitrary and may be discarded, often with the ultimately erroneous expectation that the church might be more attractive if its costs were lower. Lamont quotes from The Churching of America, 1776–2005: Winners and Losers in Our Religious Economy, by Roger Finke and Rodney Stark:

... other things being equal, people will always be in favor of a modest reduction in their costs. In this fashion, humans begin to bargain with their churches for lower tension and fewer sacrifices. They usually succeed, both because it is those with the most influence — the clergy and the leading laity — who most desire to lower the level of sacrifice and because each reduction seems so small and engenders widespread approval.

This perspective applies, to some degree, to cultural matters, as well. With marriage, for example, a great many people who formed their fundamental understanding of the institution long ago don't see why an easing of divorce, here, and the erasure of gender rules, there, ought to have any effect on their own marriages. As the rules ease, though, and boundaries of the institution become less clear, those who are not already formed in their perspectives have less reason to follow the well-trodden path.

The benefits to the individual spouse are, as with religion, supernatural, but they're also social and cultural. (Of course, the benefits to children born into stable marital homes are quite tangible.) If people don't draw the satisfaction of feeling a part of something greater, upon which participants agree — that is, if an institution merely provides a title for something that each participant defines for him or herself — the calculated rewards for forming relationships that are insoluble even when difficult or for devoting time and energy to religious practices even when disruptive become more and more difficult to reconcile.

Marriage and Parenthood for Minorities

Although those who wish to fling accusations of bigotry seldom manage to hear, I've long maintained that same-sex marriage is a bad idea because of its effects on the institution, not a matter of oppression. The typical response is the intellectually inept claim that calling a particular same-sex relationship "marriage" will not affect any particular existing opposite-sex marriage. That's more likely than not to be true, but it's the cultural effect that will have repercussions, harming the most vulnerable in our society, for whose welfare a strong marital culture should be reclaimed and maintained.

The point arises, at this time, because of an echo in a race-related AP article that's been widely published over the past few days (emphasis added):

The founder estimates more than 300 celebrations are being held this weekend. The aim is to try to stabilize, if not reverse, the trend of non-commitment within the black community. According to 2009 census figures, 41.9 percent of black adults had never married, compared to 23.6 percent of whites. Studies show blacks also are more likely than other ethnic groups to divorce and bear children out of wedlock.

Experts blame the disparities in part on high black male unemployment, high black male imprisonment and the moderate performance of black men in college compared with black women.

They also note the lack of positive images of black marriage in the media and several misperceptions about matrimony - that it's for white people, that it's a ball and chain, that fatherhood and marriage are not linked.

If marriage is principally about the love and comfort of the adults, and not about the fact that what they do tends to create children, then those inclined to shirk responsibility are free of a cultural mechanism to tie them to their children, and the other adult with whom those children are biologically linked. Our society has certainly gone too far down that path, already, but changing the legal definition of "marriage" would cement the flawed principle into the culture.

The Bigger Government, the More Established Its Religion

An editorial in the Rhode Island Catholic points to another Catholic charity pushed out of business by redefinition of the ground out from under it:

Time and time again proponents of homosexual marriage have promised churches and religious institutions they have nothing to fear from their radical proposal to redefine marriage. Yet last week Catholic Charities of the Archdiocese of Washington announced that it is ending its foster care and public adoption program after the District of Columbia said the charity would be ineligible for service because of the new law recognizing homosexual "marriage." The D.C. City Council's law recognizing homosexual "marriage" required religious entities which serve the general public to provide services to homosexual couples, even if doing so violated their religious beliefs. Exemptions were allowed only for performing marriages or for those entities which do not serve the public.

For 80 years Catholic Charities has provided high quality social services to the most vulnerable in our nation's capital. It seems surprising that the local D.C. government would want to put the Catholic Church out of the foster care business. Corporal works of mercy are no less important to the life of the church than its sacramental ministry. Forbidding the church to perform them is a serious blow to its religious liberty. Why would the government do that? Under the guise of equality and tolerance they seek to impose the radical homosexual agenda to redefine marriage and family life at all costs; even violating the religious freedom of the Catholic Church. Their commitment to equality is apparently so strong that they are willing to put Catholic Charities out of business because it won't promote an agenda that it views as morally wrong.

As we've noticed before, and with even more advanced evidence from Europe, the tendency is for government to define religious liberty ever more narrowly. The extreme would be a proclamation that one is permitted to believe however one wants, but not actually to pollute the public discourse with those beliefs by doing anything so secular and communal as speaking publicly.

Churches stop too soon in their assessments of such controversies, though. Sure, it's a violation of their liberties for the government to mandate that they treat marriages identically even when their constituent parts are substantially different. But right now, they're engaged in dueling civil rights claims, making it a political matter, not a principled one, who will win.

What the Catholic Church, especially, ought to be considering is that, were it not for pervasive government involvement in charitable endeavors, the threat to religious charities would be minimal. Yet, one often hears Catholic priests and other religious officials advocating for even more expansive government involvement in social welfare. Once government takes on the responsibility as a hub for good works, it will inevitably define how and to whom they must and can be provided, and once that definition is available to the political process, special interests, such as the homosexual movement, will seek to turn it toward their own ends.

Everybody Needs a Dad

In a recent column, Julia Steiny ran through various ways in which fathers are, in general, distinguishable from mothers. Here's a sample:

... dads bring other huge contributions. For one thing, they play. That fatherly roughhousing that most kids love actually aids brain development. Play has been proven to enhance learning, and dads usually play with their kids more than moms. This play "promotes confidence in motor skills, courage, risk-taking and autonomy. It puts the kid on the path of healthy development and gives the child strong self-esteem," Glantz said. Even as they're wrestling with one another, the child can feel the love. And, "Dad's love is valuable like nothing else."

What all of the differences come down to, it seems to me, is that a father has unconditional love, like a mother, but without the sense of unity. As Steiny quotes from researcher Tonya Glantz:

"... think of how dads talk. It feels like: 'You are here with me' as opposed to 'You are a part of me.'"

That somewhat different relationship is not only something learned by the experience of being an actual parent, but also something that has been woven into our personalities and culture, in conformance with out biological natures. Whether you want to believe it's purely evolutionary or admit a Maker, fatherhood is expansive in the subtlety of its inherent effects on our society. (Which, of course, ties into the theological discussions that we've had around here, from time to time.)

What I've written above will have broad currency, in our culture, when the topic is education, parental responsibility, social work, and so on. However, much as fatherhood is broader than, say, an economic relationship, the concept of fatherhood and its importance ought to have implications for how we conceive of such things as marriage.

The Providence Journal and Advocate

The Providence Journal news departments have clearly been populated by advocates for same-sex marriage for quite some time. Staff Writer Maria Armental takes it to another level with this:

Politically liberal, Rhode Island is split when it comes to gay issues: it remains the only New England state that hasn’t recognized gay marriage.

(Maine voters overturned that state’s same-sex law in November).

If you didn't already know the whole backstory — the imposition of marriage redefinition through the judiciary and the targeted big-money advocacy through state legislatures, combined with a populist push to maintain the traditional understanding of the institution — you'd likely miss the fact that Rhode Island is not the "only New England state" that doesn't "recognize gay marriage." I don't see any explanation for Armental's subtle language except an intention to mislead readers of her newspaper. Most people won't read "that hasn't recognized" as "that hasn't, at some point in its history, recognized"; they'll think Maine voters overturned the traditional definition.

Objective reportage, one supposes, would have come too close to conveying the impression that the same-sex marriage "split" across New England is between the politically powerful and the people for the Providence Journal.

A Cultural Turnaround Based on Experience

Here's an interesting result from a survey of U.S. Catholics done by the Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate at Georgetown University in Washington, appearing in an article in the Rhode Island Catholic, but not apparently online anywhere:

"The youngest Catholics ... look a lot more like the pre-Vatican II [than the] Vatican II or post-Vatican II cohorts," [social scientist Barbara Dafoe Whitehead] said. "Huge majorities - 80 percent or more - of these youngest Catholics believe that marriage is a lifelong commitment and that people don't take marriage seriously enough when divorce is readilly available."

Many children of this generation have experienced divorce in their own families, and they are determined not to divorce themselves, Whitehead said.

Of course, one should also consider the possibility that increasing liberalism after Vatican II led to fewer Catholics of the sort who would disagree with this young generation and a concentration of traditionalists among those who are still religious (which could be a leaping point for further discussion about the effectiveness at liberalizing doctrine to be more amenable to shifts in cultural mores). Still, it's not difficult to imagine cultural backlash among a generation that's been on the receiving end of negative life-changing trends such as increases in divorce.

What would be the texting jargon for "'til death do us part"?

Successfully Avoiding Divorce Requires Marriage

I've been meaning to point out a problem with Lefteris Pavlides's objection to a recent report that Rhode Island is among the unhappiest states in the country. Declares Pavlides:

Year after year the so-called "happy" states are on the top of broken homes and children in single families. For my money whole, two-parent families have a better chance at true happiness. The states with the highest divorce rates also have the lowest taxes, which means they have the lowest services for those suffering and the worst educational opportunities for their children. These not very children-friendly places can not be very happy.

His evidence for this claim is that the supposedly most happy states have higher divorce rates than the unhappy states. It's been a while since I dug into these numbers deeply, but I'm sure my 2004 discovery holds: Divorce rates are calculated per 1,000 of the population, not of marriages, and the states with the highest divorce rates per 1,000 residents also have much higher marriage rates per 1,000 residents.

If I were inclined to provocation, I'd suggest that married Northeasterners should hold on to their spouses for dear life... miserable people might find it difficult to find gold twice.

Marriage Every Which Way

The typical response from the opposition has been simply dismissive when I've argued the inappropriateness of civil rights claims for same-sex marriage. Marriage is a relationship between a man and a woman, and it's plainly true that nothing bars homosexuals from entering into such relationships except their own desire. Advocates for the redefinition of marriage respond, essentially: "Gee, great. They have a right to something they naturally do not want and are barred from equating what they want with that to which they have a right."

In that context, one discerns a degree of self-refutation in such testimony as that offered by Erna Howarth, of Coventry:

I was married to a wonderful man for 26 years before his passing. I am now in a committed relationship with a wonderful woman. We have been together for eight years. There is no difference! ...

This country was founded to allow its citizens to live and believe freely, despite our differences. It was founded to prevent discriminatory laws that deprive the minority the same rights as the majority!

As an American citizen, I have the right to marry the person I am in a committed relationship with, to live and work where I choose. No one has the right to tell me no!

How much clearer can it be that Ms. Howarth has precisely the same right as any of her fellow Americans to enter into the relationship that the society understands as marriage? What she is actually claiming is a right to define the terms by which her fellow Americans may define their society. She claims for herself, that is, the right to deny those with whom she disagrees the ability to affirm the bleedingly obvious distinction between male-female relationships and, in her case, female-female relationships.

The conversation could proceed in a variety of directions — from the relative importance of self-governance to the requirement of specificity in the law to the variety of "committed relationships" to which Howarth's argument may also be applied. The fundamental disagreement will follow us on all counts, however. To the Howarths of the modern day, one need only recast one's preferences as a "right" in order to demand wholesale reworking of the entire civic sphere.

That Which You Cannot Believe

Frankly, I believe a newspaper should have the right to take this sort of action, but I think it sufficiently outrageous that advertisers and readers should react negatively:

Larry Grard, 58, of Winslow covered the November election for Maine Today, the vote in which Maine citizens rejected homosexual "marriage." Subsequently, he received a press release at work from a homosexual activist which read: "We will not allow the lies and hate – the foundation on which our opponents build their campaign --- to break our spirits." Being a devout Catholic, Grard was offended by the release's blanket reference to opponents of same-sex marriage.

So, using his private email accounte, Grard wrote back:

Who are the hateful, venom-spewing ones? Hint: Not the yes on 1 crowd. You hateful people have been spreading nothing but vitriol since this campaign began. Good riddance!

Subsequently, the long-time employee and his cooking-columnist wife lost their jobs with the paper. Message sent, I guess.

Anti-Intellectual Radicals

I've been meaning to offer kudos for this excellent letter by David Carlin, who is, somewhat surprisingly, a sociology and philosophy professor at CCRI:

The question of whether or not anti-SSM people are motivated by bigotry is an empirical question, and I submit (as would Dr. Harrop, I believe) that if their motives were empirically examined, it would be discovered that they are not so motivated. But those associated with the gay movement are rarely interested in this empirical question. Instead — behaving in a purely propagandistic and thoroughly unscientific manner — they simply classify anybody opposed to their agenda as "bigoted" and "homophobic." Thus no amount of empirical evidence to the contrary will persuade them to withdraw their accusations.

One of my great objections to the gay movement is its profound anti-intellectualism — that is, its absolute refusal to keep its mind open to empirical evidence that might contradict its propaganda.

That's from the November 22 Providence Journal. I wonder whether the professor's had any threats against his job, or the like.

The SSM Train's Lost Momentum

You may have heard that same-sex marriage failed to gain approval in the New York legislature. William Duncan makes an astute observation:

That is why the marriage redefinition push has relied so strongly on the inevitability claim — to overwhelm legislators' and voters' qualms about same-sex marriage with a fear that they will be labeled bigots. The leader of the Human Rights Campaign reacted to today's vote with this inevitability talking point: "The senators who voted against marriage equality today are on the wrong side of history, but the history of marriage equality will not end with today's vote."

Again and again, the inevitability claim has been rebutted by reality, but it is a tenacious idea, at least partially because it appeals to the cult of novelty that holds sway among media elites. That's why every "setback" for gay marriage is proclaimed a "shocking" development even though each is just a repeat of something that's happened over and over again.

It isn't bigotry to believe that society should maintain a special categorization for relationships that tend to create human life. Redefining marriage to include people of the same sex would disallow our ability to acknowledge this distinction and thereby hinder cultural efforts to ensure an appropriate respect for that biological power. Advocates would do well to stop insisting that this is all post hoc rationalization extending from an unstated hatred of homosexuals and, instead, accept that it's a sincere position with obvious political force and perhaps even a point or two worth considering during efforts to radically remodel the structure of our society.

The Importance of Ideals

In the cycle of my reading list, I've finally come back around to The Feynman Lectures on Physics and have been working through Volume II, Mainly Electromagnetism and Matter. An off-topic note for the wide margins of the page came to mind while reading the following paragraph (emphasis added):

We have gotten the following interesting result: If we go high enough in frequency, the electric field at the center of our condenser will be one way and the electric field near the edge will point in the opposite direction. ... At the edge of the plates, the electric field will have a rather high magnitude opposite the direction we would expect. That is the terrible thing that can happen to a capacitor at high frequencies. If we go to very high frequencies, the direction of the electric field oscillates back and forth many times as we go out from the center of the capacitor. Also there are the magnetic fields associated with these electric fields. It is not surprising that our capacitor doesn't look like the ideal capacitance for high frequencies. We may even start to wonder whether it looks more like a capacitor or an inductance. We should emphasize that there are even more complicated effects that we have neglected which happen at the edges of the capacitor. For instance, there will be a radiation of waves out past the edges, so the fields are even more complicated than the ones we have computed, but we will not worry about those effects now.

Repeatedly throughout the lectures, Feynman notes where the equations and principles on which he's expounding represent ideal, not necessarily real or even possible, circumstances. We codify those ideals because, for a range of practical applications, they are "close enough" and because the basic rules are preliminary requirements for understanding subsequent adjustments and variations. There's something similar in Platonic and Augustinian philosophy, wherein an ideal of everything exists in another dimension (in God), and we take advantage of such abstractions in order to understand how the world works and to establish baselines from which to progress.

My marginal note had to do with a letter by Vivian Olsiewski Healey in the latest issue of First Things (not online):

Bodily Union is very important, but it is arbitrary to assume that it is more important than any other element of marriage. Should a paraplegic who cannot perform sexual intercourse be denied the right to marry? People with such disabilities are married within the Catholic Church, which shows that bodily union cannot be isolated from the other aspects of interpersonal union.

Once we accept that many couples married in the Catholic Church do not live up to the ideal of complete sacred unions of bodies, minds, and spirits, we will see that the sanctity of marriage is not bassed solely on physical union.

One often hears a sort of negative variation of this argument, pointing to deficiencies in individual marriages or deviations from the ideal as evidence that the institution ought to be redefined to exclude the requirement of opposite sex, because it's more about the spiritual connection than the physical. To fulfill its social function, though, marriage must maintain a plain, ideal definition to which individuals make their adjustments, and erasing the bodily union of a man and a woman in the person of their child changes the institution's intrinsic nature.

Built according to plan, a strong marital culture will have positive effects at its edges and beyond. The existence of those effects, like the imperfections in its core, do not justify refashioning according to different ideals.

The Conservative Eagle Has Two Wings

Periodically, one picks up a hint from the libertarian quarters of the broader tea party movement that they see, in it, an opportunity to assert economic conservatism apart from social conservatism. As I noted while observing the size and diversity of the crowd at the marriage-vow-renewal ceremony hosted by the National Organization for Marriage - Rhode Island, I don't see that as a plausible political strategy. The point emerges, again, with this information from NOM's national head Maggie Gallagher:

Over in New York, the collapse of Dede Scozzafava is another big story. Scozzafava was handpicked to become the first openly pro-gay marriage Republican in a district where the vast majority of Republicans and independents (and even a big chunk of Democrats) oppose gay marriage.

A National Organization of Marriage poll of likely voters in New York's 23rd Congressional District revealed that fully 50 percent of her opponent's supporters said that Scozzafava's vote for gay marriage was a factor in their decision not to support her.

Granted, I watched that race only peripherally, and political horse-race commentary tends to focus on less, well, mushy subjects than social issues (which is to say it tends to be wonkish), but I hadn't seen the marriage issue mentioned as a factor in Doug Hoffman's out-of-nowhere wave. Obviously, Maggie has reason to emphasize her core issue, and the shorthand of "liberal v. conservative" still includes the social issues in most cases.

Still, it's worth reasserting that conservatism will fail if it doesn't apply its principles across the board. In conjunction with liberal morality, conservative economics only feed an aristocracy and modern conservative governance fails, but not before creating a seedy underclass.

On "Conservative Cases"

Conservatives should appreciate the organic nature of public discourse. Leave it to leftists to long for a controlled setting — like a classroom or a non-profit board meeting — in which some mediator decisively declares points won or lost. In the broader society, topics move forward and swing back to the beginning as new participants make discoveries of arguments that others thought had been addressed long ago.

Admittedly, it does take some effort to appreciate such a process, and with the ease of the Internet as a record keeper, it's frustrating when obvious, already repeated counterarguments are not quickly found. For example, in Providence Journal columnist Ed Fitzpatrick's discovery, on Sunday, of the "conservative case" for same-sex marriage, this is the entirety of his summary of the opposing opinion:

In opposing same-sex marriage, some conservatives cite the Scriptures and talk about values. But they could just as easily cite those sources in support of same-sex marriage, talking about the values of fidelity and commitment, fairness and equality, love and acceptance.

Fitzpatrick dutifully spends several paragraphs rebutting the appeal to Scripture. He subsequently offers a bait-and-switch when he addresses the appeal to procreation as the unique marker of the male-female relationship, which justifies a unique category for their intimate relationships. For that, he relies on a California judge's questioning, of Proposition 8 supporters, what harm same-sex marriage could do to the goal of furthering stability in procreative relationships and why marriages between elderly men and women don't have the same effect.

This is well-trodden ground. The idea of marriage is a matter of basics and obvious realities that any sentient adult can perceive: Men and women who have sex tend toward procreation. That is, they can create children with no direct intention to do so. To say that marriage is a relationship between men and women, and only men and women, is a recognition that that fact is at least sufficiently important to merit a special institution that society can leverage to maximize the number of children born and raised by the parents who created them. The age of the spouses has no effect on this simple equation, not the least because it isn't obvious to all who see the couple at the grocery store that their relationship has never been procreative.

Fitzpatrick is correct, in his quoting of New York Times columnist David Brooks, that "we should consider it scandalous that two people could claim to love each other and not want to sanctify their love with marriage and fidelity." The problem is that, relative numbers being what they are, it would be a travesty to allow the "conservative case" for same-sex marriage to come at the expense of the conservative case for opposite-sex marriage. Several of Fitzpatrick's sources emphasize that marriage and fidelity are on the ropes, with adultery and the serial adultery of divorce and remarriage, but they leave it as implied (not argued) that broadening marriage's scope will somehow strengthen its force.

This 2008 article by Joe Kort, in Psychology Today, comes to mind:

I've wanted to write an article on this topic ever since I began working with a gay male couple who told me that they were monogamous. After several months, however, they informed me they had had a three-way. When I asked if they had changed from monogamy, they said, "No."

I was confused. Maybe I hadn't gotten the correct information in our initial consultation? I told them, "I thought you told me you were monogamous," and they said, "We are." Now I was REALLY confused! So I said, "But you just told me you were monogamous."

Their reply was, "We are monogamous. We only have three-ways together, and are never sexual with others apart from each other."

Here's something a little closer to home, by Timothy Cavanaugh and David Abbott, in Medicine and Health Rhode Island (emphasis added):

Without stereotyping gay men as promiscuous, providers need to address the role that sexual activity may play in their patients' lives. In a recent behavioral survey of gay men, 75% had more than one partner in the past year; 27% had 10 or more. Some gay men find their sex partners at bars, bathhouses, private sex parties, public "cruising" areas like parks and rest stops, and, increasingly, on the internet. Others have traditional dating experiences, and many gay men have been happily partnered for years, despite their inability to legally marry. A longstanding relationship does not ensure sexual monogamy: many gay men have sex outside their relationships, often with the consent of their primary partners.

Gay columnist David Benkof notes that even mainstream homosexuals might not mean "monogamy" when they say "monogamy." Similarly to the concept of marriage, they've redefined the word to suit their subculture.

None of this is meant to derail the debate into accusations of wickedness or to prove, in some sense, that homosexuals aren't worthy of marriage. Indeed, the weakness of heterosexuals is what makes a strong marital culture so important. The point is that introducing a radical element to the faltering institution of marriage won't affirm its principles, it will collapse them.

For all the talk of marriage and fidelity among them — and criticism of conservatives who've divorced — it's a glaring omission that nobody who finds the "conservative case" for same-sex marriage persuasive advocates for tighter divorce laws in the mix. Is nobody concerned with the practical and legal risks of modifying a designation with far-reaching implications (such as immigration, rights to employment benefits and pensions, and even protections against testifying in court) in such a way as to include any adult pair, while allowing that designation to remain easily dissoluble?

Of course, it's been clearly stated for years that homosexuals want marriage as it is: little more than a cultural nod with benefits. As I explained in my 2005 National Review article on Andrew Sullivan and his advocacy for same-sex marriage, they want the full range of choices available to heterosexuals, whatever those choices might be and no matter the relevance of a given choice to them.

By the nature of their relationships, homosexuals cannot create children as a nearly accidental matter. Therefore, while society should certainly develop some mechanism to encourage them toward more stable relationships, doing so should not be accomplished by flatly denying the consequence of that which makes opposite-sex intimate relationships unique.

Continued Advocacy

As expected, the Providence Journal Sunday edition marks the fourth out of the last five days that the gay-funeral/governor-veto story has landed on the front page, this time with the personal story, by Randal Edgar, of Mark Goldberg, one of the advocates for the legislation.

Goldberg's experience with the current law was terrible — so much so that it's difficult to believe that a more efficient government wouldn't have been able to resolve the matter much more quickly (and humanely) under existing policies. That said, I disagree with the governor; this "piecemeal" approach is precisely appropriate — certainly more so than legislation granting "all but the name" marriage-like partnerships for homosexuals. The reason is that, as we enact laws recognizing relationships, we should ask ourselves the questions of "what" and "why."

Take, for example, this explanation for Goldberg's motivation, in today's paper:

GOLDBERG SAYS the delays were all the more frustrating because he was grieving.

"Here's somebody just lying on a slab, and you're thinking, what is the dignity in this," he said. "I still loved the man and I wanted to do what was right for him, what was honorable, and respectful."

Are married people, homosexual partners, and people with nearby family members the only ones with a claim to dignity in death? Compassion provides no explanation for the expansive definition of "domestic partner" provided in the vetoed legislation. Why must one be "financially interdependent" in order to have a sincere desire to execute the last wishes of somebody for whom one cared? Why, for that matter, does the legislation contain language stating that such partners could not be "related by blood to a degree which would prohibit marriage in the state of Rhode Island? Under the funeral law, all such relations have rights to claim bodily remains.

It's difficult not to suspect an ulterior motive in injecting the definition at some highly emotional point in the law. Personally, I say we do away with that necessity: Put the legislation's description into the law somewhere more central, defining the "domestic partner" relationship for all purposes, and then on an issue-by-issue basis, decide whether a particular right or privilege ought to apply... or ought to be expanded more broadly.

Did Somebody Mention Propaganda?

Curious to note that today marks the third time in four days that the Providence Journal has run the governor-as-bigot story on the front page. And unless I've missed it, the paper's reporters have yet to indicate that they've any interest in disrupting that there is nobody in Rhode Island whose views fall within any proximity to the governor's stance. Indeed, for today's article, Steve Peoples sought comment from Marriage Equality Rhode Island, but didn't apparently bother to call the National Organization for Marriage Rhode Island.

We'll see whether the newspaper's advocacy carries over to the big Sunday edition.

As Maine Goes....

Maine became the 31st state to reaffirm via popular vote (and agree with President Obama) that marriage is between a man and a woman. The contrast was really between the coast and the inland/north. A look at the vote breakdown by county reveals that, in the end, the coastal counties of Cumberland (dominated by Portland and surrounding 'burbs) and Hancock (Bar Harbor, Acadia and various coastal "arts" towns) counties were the only to support gay marriage. Those voting to overturn the legislature-approved gay marriage law held a razor-thin margin in the 3 coastal counties of York, Sagadahoc and Knox, had a bigger margin in Lincoln and Waldo and handily won in Downeast Washington county and all of the internal counties. {There is a more detailed, town by town map here - ed.}

On the other hand, Maine voters approved medical marijuana, rejected a Taxpayer Bill of Rights and rejected a proposal to decrease the excise tax. Mixed message? Not really, if you consider the independent nature of the average Maine voter. Ideology doesn't fare very well in the Pine Tree state. Some may call it middle-of-the road, or moderate, others pragmatic. On the tax issues, Mainers don't think you should take away funding vehicles for programs that many have come to depend upon. Whether that dependence is good or bad is a different matter--if the programs are there now, they have to be paid for somehow.

On social issues, Mainers generally have a laissez-faire attitude. You leave them alone, they'll leave you alone. And, if it ain't broke, don't fix it. One would think that would translate into an opposite result on the gay marriage issue. But Mainers really don't like other people telling them what to do--or changing what things mean out from under them. If you're going to impose your will on them without asking them first (even if they elected you), they're not going to like it. That being said, I suspect that if a civil union arrangement similar to that proposed in Referendum 71 in Washington state (note, the same coastal/inland divide) were proposed, it would pass in Maine (and many other places). The word and traditional understanding of marriage still matters, for now.

Looks Like a Turnaround

We'll hear all sorts of contradictory analyses, in the days to come, among which will be assurances that there are no broad conclusions to be drawn, but key votes up and down the East Coast, yesterday, certainly don't disprove the notion of a turnaround toward our nation's Republican, conservative strain:

• Republican Chris Christie took the New Jersey governor seat from Democrat Jon Corzine.
• Republican Bob McDonnell took the Virginia governor seat from Democrat Creigh Deeds.
• Democrat Bill Owens narrowly won a New York Congressional District race, with 49% of the vote, against Conservative Doug Hoffman's 46% and RINO Dierdre Scozzafava's 6%. Had the Republicans not gone with the "Republican who can win" and attacked the Conservative, it isn't unreasonable to suggest that they would have won that race, too.
• Voters in Maine nullified the legislature's imposition of same-sex marriage, for the state, making it the 31st of 31 states in which the people have affirmed the traditional definition of marriage, regardless of the imperious maneuverings of judges and votes bought by ultrarich left-wing activists.

Actually, looking at that last bullet point, it mightn't be accurate to characterize the national results as "a turnaround." After all, President Obama supported traditional marriage, as a candidate, and ran overall as a centrist, even a fiscal conservative in some fevered minds. If there's a lesson in this for the president, it's probably that the people of the United States of America have figured out that he lied.

Fathers as Biological Stimulus

One can only extrapolate so much from this news, but it's certainly interesting — especially given various discussions of family types:

Conventional wisdom holds that two parents are better than one. Scientists are now finding that growing up without a father actually changes the way your brain develops.

German biologist Anna Katharina Braun and others are conducting research on animals that are typically raised by two parents, in the hopes of better understanding the impact on humans of being raised by a single parent. Dr. Braun's work focuses on degus, small rodents related to guinea pigs and chinchillas, because mother and father degus naturally raise their babies together.

When deprived of their father, the degu pups exhibit both short- and long-term changes in nerve-cell growth in different regions of the brain. Dr. Braun, director of the Institute of Biology at Otto von Guericke University in Magdeburg, and her colleagues are also looking at how these physical changes affect offspring behavior.

Generally speaking, it has seemed to me that nature sets upper and lower boundaries as well as proclivities, while nurture directs the individual within that range. Ultimately, it makes no sense to draw a stark line between biology and psychology; they're more of a continuum.

A Difficult Judgmentalism

While by no means condoning his behavior, some commenters decline to judge the lifestyle of George Holland, which Marc described on Thursday. Writes Joe:

I don't know - it seems the guy was genuinely liked by these women [with whom he fathered children] - they probably wouldn't all get on the same page to fabricate a story if he were that bad. I don't like to judge other peoples' lifestyle arrangements because there are "conventional" families wherein the worst imaginable types of abuse occur, out of sight, out of mind.

Our society has determined that non-judgmentalism is a virtue, but it seems to me to be as facile and irresponsible as a judgmentalism that follows a strict, unconsidered line and conveniently exempts the behavior of the person who's being judgmental. Passing judgment shouldn't be done frivolously or as a means of directing attention away from one's own behavior, but leveling all personal decisions ignores millennia of cultural experience and shirking the duty to exert individual social pressure ensures that we'll all pay the price, in the forms of both government cleanup and cultural decay.

Tabetha offers anecdotal evidence of one such abusive "conventional family":

Lakesha Garrett, who was recently accused of murder, was once a promising straight A student at Classical HS with 3 scholarships lined up for college. I know this because she and I were very close friends as teenagers. However, she was the victim of horrible abuse - abuse so terrible that there is actually a child abuse law in RI named for her family. To the outside world, Lakesha came from a "conventional" family. Her mom and dad were married, she and her siblings shared the same two parents, and her parents were outwardly religious, church-going folks who owned several rental properties in the West End and Southside area. However, there was a much darker side to this family. ... So, while the children of this guy Holland may not be living in what many consider ideal circumstances, perhaps they will turn out much more well-adjusted than some kids that you think are living with "proper" families. The mothers of these children may be doing a better job than some of the families you think are great. I don't know since I don't know these people myself. It is not always easy to see where children are most open to harm.

Perhaps. Maybe. Earlier, Tabetha implies that the children of folks like Holland might be justifiably removed, but it shouldn't be difficult to find examples of foster and adoptive homes that turned abusive.

Humanity isn't formed with cookie cutters, and few are entirely evil. Therefore, it isn't enough to say that one guy who resigned his children to an "unconventional family" was decent and tried to do the best for them, while this other family looked normal and did horrible things to their kids. If Holland had made the not-so-difficult decision to limit his fatherhood experience to the mother and children with whom he'd begun, it's reasonable to suggest that he would have advanced in a more healthy direction, rather than a direction such as Tabetha describes in the Garretts. On the other hand, imagine if Mr. Garrett had lived after Holland's example.

Holland's children and others who've observed his story have learned from him and from the women's reactions, that his behavior was just fine. And maybe we could accept that if the qualities that mitigated the effects, on his part, were universal. But his sons might not be so apt to consider their children. His daughters might not see similar behavior in their boyfriends as a warning sign. To the extent that societal approval affects those who are making the right decisions (and the effect isn't nil), why should they work so hard at building families and restraining their temptations when they'd avoid negative reactions were they to freewheel just shy of abuse and drug dealing?

Pretending that we don't know where this path leads when taken not by a single family, but by a society, is irresponsible and doesn't absolve us of guilt any more than freely pointing fingers at everybody else does.

Marriage Is a Social, Procreative Institution

In the current issue of The RI Catholic Fr. John Kiley has a worthwhile counterpoint to the pro-SSM event that I covered last night. Unfortunately, Fr. Kiley's essay doesn't appear online, but the he captures the gist in the following:

... Nowadays marriage has become almost entirely a matter of personal relationships. Marriages are supposed to be romantic affairs, or so most of Western society would like to believe. Yet love as the sole basis for marriage is fairly new in history.

As the popular musical "Fiddler on the Roof" testified, it was the matchmaker who drew couples together in peasant villages. Elsewhere it was parents and property and inheritances and religion and nationality that largely guided the marital destinies of young people.

The unifying principle behind various examples that Fr. Kiley describes is that marriage is about lineage and community development. Over time (notably in parallel with increases in economic comfort and medical proficiency), Western society has rightly increased individuals' right to decide how to participate in and define that development, but same-sex marriage would undermine the very principle. It would make marriage, by its definition, nothing other than a legal compact between two currently extant individuals.

Divorced from the biological possibility of children — explicitly rejecting the idea that marriage has anything inherently to do with their creation — the institution whereby society has set apart the specific circumstance in which two people, two families, and potentially two cultures are literally joined and embodied in a unique human life would relegate that continuity to the whims of individuals.

Marriage from Their Perspective

Yes, I still have video to post from the afternoon session of the Republican Northeast Conference, as well as from John Loughlin's healthcare forum in Tiverton, but since RI Future's Brian Hull was at last night's same-sex marriage event, as well, a competitive streak spurred me to secure initial bragging rights for coverage. (I say "initial" because he was closer and will probably have better results.)

Click the "continue reading" link below for the rest of the video. Of potential interest to some is RI Democrat Chairman Bill Lynch's spiel spanning clips six and seven about the importance of electing liberal Democrats, which non-liberal Democrats might want to consider as we move toward the next election.

Continue reading "Marriage from Their Perspective"

Taking in the Other Side

Maybe it's a creeping infection of journalistic curiosity, spurred on by the purchase of an inexpensive camcorder and a new addiction to YouTubing, but I decided to come to the panel discussion hosted by the RI Young Democrats and some college student lawyer groups on The Future of Same-Sex Marriage in Rhode Island. I'll say this for the Left: if this venue is any indication, they opt for much more comfortable seating. (Although, the downside is that, after a day spent climbing up and down ladders custom-milling exterior trim to patch rot, the comfort may not be conducive to my continued lucidity.)

Within moments of my arriving, Kim Ahern came over to introduce herself and to forewarn me that it wasn't the intention of this event to present both sides. I assured her that such was not my expectation.

I see that Brian Hull from RI Future is also videotaping. I wonder if my doing the same will make him feel any pressure to cover right-leaning events, too.

7:11 p.m.

Roger Williams University Law Professor Courtney Cahill is currently reviewing the legal history of the issue, tracing through Hawaii in 1996, the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA), the Massachusetts Supreme Court Goodridge ruling.

7:14 p.m.

Cahill spoke against the argument that marriage is inextricably linked with procreation, offering the usual claims about fertility and such. That goes right to the basic, frustrating difficulty that emerges with the defense of traditional marriage: The link with procreation is so implicit that the laws built on top of it essentially did little more than adjust the application of the principle, but folks treat those adjustments of evidence against the essential nature of child birth and parenting.

Curiously, one of Cahill's points was that, if marriage were about procreation, then the law would permit couples to sue for divorce after a period of proven infertility. What's odd is that one doesn't need such an excuse to sue for divorce. A law allowing such a thing would be redundant. As I've written many, many times before, advocates for same-sex marriage would likely find waning opposition if they promoted, in concert, stronger divorce laws.

7:22 p.m.

Representative Frank Ferri (D., Warwick) just took the table with Representative Art Handy (D., Cranston) to bring the audience up to speed on relevant legislation in Rhode Island.

Ferri began by saying that his experience with his Canada-granted marriage has been that, as neighbors and others have gotten to know the couple, opposition to same-sex marriage has faded with familiarity. That's certainly understandable, given a common difficulty among people to partition their thinking such that liking somebody who wants a certain change in the law becomes the main reason to support it. Understandable, but not conducive to civic or social health.

7:31 p.m.

I was going to note that Elizabeth Dennigan is here and speculate about her relationship to the progressives, but then Frank Ferri noted all of the lawmakers in the room, and there are allmost a dozen.

7:34 p.m.

RI Democrat Chairman Bill Lynch began by saying: "I think I'm here because I've sort of become the punching bag for Governor Carcieri on this issue." He specifies that he's here in personal capacity.

7:37 p.m.

Lynch noted that, if he had been hit by a car on the way over here, "a chain of events" would have helped her wife through it, but his sister's same-sex spouse would not have the same benefits. Personally, I agree that people should be able to set up such legal entanglements with whomever they like, but I fail to see why it should be a prerequisite that they're sexually intimate (or in a relationship that mirrored such).

7:40 p.m.

The ACLU's Stephen Brown thinks "the writing is on the wall, no matter what anybody on the other side might say."

Rev. Eugene Dyszlewski expressed happiness to be sitting on the "far left of the table."

7:47 p.m.

First question: Why was this state in the vanguard to offer homosexuals protections for various matters, but slow on this particular one.

The general answer has been the Catholics in the state. Lynch read a letter chiding him about effectively calling Roman Catholic "sectarian extremists." He didn't really address the charge; he just says he sometimes likes to "have fun at the governor's expense" and in no way intends to disrespect others' rights to believe what the like. Bull.

7:48 p.m.

Second question, directed first to the reverend, had to do with religions' standing on the issue. His response was, essentially, that the Roman Catholics shouldn't try to impose their beliefs on the state. That's a distraction.

Frank Ferri says minds are changing, and he expects SSM in RI within the next two years.

7:52 p.m.

Ferri: Catholic preachers have been telling parishioners that gays "are evil, that we're going to hell." You know, I've been Catholic for a number of years, now, and I've never, ever heard that sermon. Indeed, I've periodically be disheartened to hear insinuations in the other direction.

7:53 p.m.

Lynch noted that President Bill Clinton has, within the past couple of weeks, saying that he's chanaged his mind and believes that the nation should institute same-sex marriage state by state.

Lynch: Vitriol about the governor's speaking at the Massachusetts Family Institute as an "insult" to Rhode Islanders. Somehow he doesn't see the parallel to his ability to come here and declare that he's speaking on his own behalf, not the party's. He's repeating, again and again, that people should vote out Catholic Democrats and those who agree with them. As I've said before, no Roman Catholic Rhode Islander can support the party of Bill Lynch.

7:57 p.m.

The Democratic list is now at 30%, with about 60% unaffiliated.

7:59 p.m.

Art Handy thinks the real obstacle to SSM legislation has been the inevitability of a gubernatorial veto that the legislature couldn't overturn. That may (or may not) have a bearing on the Democrat primary.

8:02 p.m.

It would be nigh upon a statement of fact that I'm the attendee most opposed to same-sex marriage, but I wonder if there's even anybody in the room with reservations.

8:04 p.m.

Audience question about the slippery slope argument to poligamy et al. Handy is stating, pretty much, that all arguments against same-sex marriage are all red herrings.

Stephen Brown is likening opposition to same-sex marriage to racism prior to Loving v. Virginia, which erased bans on interracial marriage. Interestingly, Maggie Gallagher frequently points out that, following the legalization of SSM, those who believe in traditional marriage will be treated as racists are now treated. Not quite a red herring, huh?

8:11 p.m.

A woman who says she works in a very Catholic law office in which the common wisdom is that the state is just too Catholic for same-sex marriage to pass. She then cited the recent Taubman Center poll finding support for same sex marriage, which reminds me that I have yet to hear back about demographic factors in the survey.

8:18 p.m.

Stephen Brown just derided the absurdity of the RI Supreme Court ruling against same-sex divorce, even as the law allows the nullification of marriages (e.g., in cases of bigamy and incest) entered into elsewhere. Do these folks not understand or just ignore the obvious point that there is a difference between holding a marriage to be illegal and holding a relationship not to be a marriage in the first place.

8:27 p.m.

If I may echo, with tongue in cheek, a statement to which I've objected in other events that I've covered: Surprisingly, the evening went off without any violence... or even violent rhetoric. (Of course, I haven't made it to my car, yet.)

I missed her name, but I do want to compliment the moderator, who kept an admirably tight ship.

The Extremists Among Us

An editorial in the latest RI Catholic takes state Democrat Chairman Bill Lynch to task for calling Governor Carcieri a "sectarian extremist" for associating with the Massachusetts Family Institute. More germane, I'd say, are the following paragraphs from an op-ed in the previous issue by Michelle Cretella and Arthur Goldberg:

As for the premises, first there is no "gay gene." Homosexual attraction is not genetic like skin color. Numerous experts including Dr. Dean Hamer, the openly homosexual "gay gene" researcher and Dr. Francis Collins, Director of the Human Genome Project agree that homosexuality is not hard-wired by DNA. Avowed lesbian, Dr. Anne Fausto-Sterling, Professor of Developmental Biology and Women Studies at Brown University, summarized the situation well 8 years ago, "[Although the claim that homosexuality is genetic] provides a legal argument that is, at the moment, actually having some sway in court, [f]or me, it's a very shaky place. It's bad science and bad politics."

"Bad science" because persons of differing sexual orientation are genetically indistinguishable and sexual orientation can change. Fausto-Sterling herself is an example. She had been married prior to her committed same-sex relationship with playwright Paula Vogel. Regarding her experience of sexual plasticity Fausto-Sterling explains, "The women's movement opened up the feminine in a way that was new to me, and so my involvement made possible my becoming a lesbian."

Over 100 studies document change of homosexual orientation. Even Dr. Robert Spitzer, the father of the Diagnostic Statistical Manual, the "Bible of Psychiatry", altered his lifetime view and now supports the right to re-orientation therapy. In 2003 he published a study confirming that many dissatisfied homosexuals can make substantial long-term changes in their orientation.

I highlight this section because Lynch's response to the editorial would be that opposition to same-sex marriage is reasonable, but that the MFI goes much farther. His argument, in other words, probably wouldn't differ very much from the statement by Queer Action RI that the Family Institute "basically wants to eradicate gay people." But the MFI does not go any farther, in truth, than Cretella and Goldberg, who in turn do not go any farther than the Catholic Church.

I emailed Mr. Lynch with the specific question of how he differentiates between the "sectarian extremists" of his imagination and the church to which so many Rhode Islanders belong, and I received the following response:

Thank you for your recent email sent to me via the RI Democratic Party. While I may not agree with you I appreciate your sincere interest and thank you for taking the time out of your schedule to inform me of your thoughts on this issue. Regards, Bill Lynch

Clearly, the unlikelihood of my supporting Lynch in any way counts against me in his cost-benefit analysis of considered response, but I don't see how faithful Catholics can support Mr. Lynch in any fashion until he shows enough consideration of their Church to take a moment to explain why they are not "sectarian extremists" of such evil that the governor shouldn't associate with them in any way.

Government and Society

Robert George offers an important basis for emphasis here, but there's an important inward extension to his description of the law:

The law is a teacher. It will teach either that marriage is a reality in which people can choose to participate, but whose contours people cannot make and remake at will, or it will teach that marriage is a mere convention, which is malleable in such a way that individuals, couples, or, indeed, groups can choose to make of it whatever suits their desires, goals, and so on. The result, given the biases of human sexual psychology, will be the development of practices and ideologies that truly tend to undermine the sound understanding and practice of marriage, together with the development of pathologies that tend to reinforce the very practices and ideologies that cause them.

The inward extension is that, as much as the law is a teacher, its "students" in a democratic society must ultimately approve of the lesson. It's a matter of give and take — mutual reinforcement. The country's people construct the law, and the law helps to guide their behavior. Regulations act as guidelines toward a desired end.

This same adjustment must be made to an excellent piece by RI locals Michelle Cretella and Arthur Goldberg:

Legislators and justices will do well to heed the findings of J.D. Unwin, British anthropologist and author of Sex and Culture. After studying 86 societies spanning 5,000 years of history he found a distinct correlation between increasing sexual freedom and social decline. Unwin postulated that when social regulations forbid indiscriminate satisfaction of sexual impulses, the sublimated sexual impulses are channeled into a "social energy" that builds society. Conversely, he found no instance in which a society retained its creative energy after abandoning monogamous male-female relationships.

The described findings certainly represent a crucial splash of cold water, but it isn't merely "legislators and justices" who should feel its chill. Indeed, if such personages come alone to the revelation, it would be inappropriate for them to impose it on an unwilling nation. It is the entire network of intellectual and cultural elites that must heed the warning.

The unique project of the United States is to regulate outside of the law as much as possible. American society comes to agreement about the minimum boundaries within which everybody can achieve their goals, and the law provides those boundaries. The difficulty when it comes to marriage is that one side would like the law to enable its goal of declaring same-sex relationships to be indistinguishable in any profound way from opposite-sex relationships. Cultural elites have proven scandalously blind to the fact that such a proposition is utterly preposterous in just about every light (biology not least among them), requiring traditionalists to point out that the requested modification to the law would make it more difficult for our society to maintain its goal of advancement — even cultural survival.

It would be difficult to overstate the fundamental importance of this debate, because the culture of marriage is perhaps the most significant means of non-government regulation of behavior. Reading Cretella and Goldberg, those of us who trace political threads might find significance in the fact that sexual libertinism is so often married with statist, progressive movements. Just so, it's difficult not to wonder whether radical redefinition of our entire society isn't the actual goal of those who wish to modify marriage.

When She Chooses the Scarlet Letter

Oft overlooked, at the end of Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter, is Hester Prynne's resistance to calls for her to become a sort of feminist messiah. Having turned toward prudence, she suggests that the archetypal woman will not conquer through deviancy, but through fulfillment of her feminine character. A recent letter from Don Rittman of East Greenwich arguably touches on the theme from the other side of a poorly chosen history:

A society cannot destroy all the premises, both good and bad, that support a fundamental social norm and expect that norm to remain healthy. Responsible fatherhood had basically become such a norm. We still believe in it; we just don't believe in the things that made it possible. Neither, frankly, does Froma Harrop, not from what one sees in most of her "social-issue" writings, which are fraught with wishful thinking.

A recurring theme, in the story of mankind, is our, well, infelicity when making cultural decisions. When we presume to make calculations and radically alter policy in the name of expediency, we let our prized cattle out with the rats. By contrast, when we allow freedom to emerge as an outgrowth of intrinsic tradition, with its millennia of embedded experience, our society advances in all ways.

In the case of freeing women from the oppressive conditions into which they'd fallen as an overcompensation in humanity's learning curve, making them equal in the law and stopping there would have allowed the culture to work through the significance of the change. Instead, lunging forces within the culture pushed for too much, too quickly. Beyond freedom from a particular man or even a broader patriarchy, progressives sought to procure freedom — essentially — from being a woman.

And as happens when we dive to push tradition out the window in contravention of human nature, the consequence tends to be the opposite of what's intended. As Richard Stith writes in "Her Choice, Her Problem":

Throughout human history, children have been the consequence of natural sexual relations between men and women. Both sexes knew they were equally responsible for their children, and society had somehow to facilitate their upbringing. Even the advent of birth control did not fundamentally change this dynamic, for all forms of contraception are fallible.

Elective abortion changes everything. Abortion absolutely prevents the birth of a child. A woman’s choice for or against abortion breaks the causal link between conception and birth. It matters little what or who caused conception or whether the male insisted on having unprotected intercourse. It is she alone who finally decides whether the child comes into the world. She is the responsible one. For the first time in history, the father and the doctor and the health-insurance actuary can point a finger at her as the person who allowed an inconvenient human being to come into the world.

Predictably, the counter action will be more laws, infringing on more freedoms, and with more unimaginable, yet foreseeable, consequences.

Living Together as Stall Technique

Here's an interesting check on received wisdom:

It seems to many like the sensible thing to do: Move in with your boyfriend or girlfriend, spend more time together, save money by splitting the rent and see if you can share a bathroom every morning without wanting to kill each other. ...

[Scott] Stanley, a University of Denver psychologist, has spent the past 15 years trying to figure out why premarital cohabitation is associated with lower levels of satisfaction in marriage and a greater potential for divorce.

Not surprisingly (now that somebody else has researched it), many of those who transition into marriage from cohabitation approach each step as the the least possible commitment at the time, so by the time they find a catalyst for release from the escalating promise that they didn't want to make, they find it must be done via divorce.

Extrapolating the findings a bit, it seems likely that erosion of the profundity that the culture attributes to marriage has been increasing the likelihood that people see the change in category as little more than a step in a spectrum — certainly not a fundamental change in one's state of being. The ease of divorce facilitates this impression by removing a trigger for deep consideration and discussion.

Silencing "Sectarian Extremists"

Dan Yorke has posted his conversation with gay activist Susan Heroux, who has been calling on the governor to withdraw from a speaking engagement with the Massachusetts Family Institute. Yesterday, Dan raised the issue with Governor Carcieri.

In between, RI Democrat Party Chairman Bill Lynch called in to discuss his press release proclaiming Carcieri a "sectarian extremist" for supporting such a group. What Lynch managed to clarify is that his willingness to raise the rhetoric to that level of heat — indeed, this entire controversy — is based on no additional information than the existence of this paragraph on the group's Web site:

MFI does not consider homosexual behavior to be merely an alternate lifestyle or sexual "preference"; it is an unhealthy practice and destructive to individuals, families and society. Our compassion for those plagued by same-sex attraction compels us to support the healing of those who wish to change their behavior. MFI strongly opposes any efforts by political activists to normalize homosexual behavior and all attempts to equate homosexuality with benign characteristics such as skin color, or the "gay rights" movement with the civil rights movement.

Those stirring up the issue have offered no evidence that the Massachusetts group actively introduces opposition to homosexuality for public debate as an aggressive campaign to turn back the clock. Their stance is wholly defensive. Indeed, the only current action in this area that I found on their Web site was opposition to a bill that would give men the right to enter women's facilities (such as bathrooms, locker rooms, and "single sex residential facilities like emergency shelters") provided they're dressed as women. This is sectarian extremism?

Regarding the mention of attempts to "normalize" homosexuality, the example on the Family Institute's Web site is a program by the Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network (GLSEN) to indoctrinate school children to, for example, avoid using gendered pronouns, hold "drag show" fundraisers, and be familiar with sexual reassignment surgery (PDF).

As I suggested when I called in to Dan's show on Tuesday, Susan Heroux's complaint against MFI's position "against gay people living as gay people" is a matter of defense of tradition, not attempts to impose a way of life on individual citizens. The whole campaign on the left, now including the RI Democrat Party, is to delegitimize such defense. (To put the issue in context, it would be interesting to know Lynch's position on unisex bathrooms and drag shows in public schools.)

I do not approve of the above-quoted paragraph and would argue that the Massachusetts Family Institute should adjust its position in such a way as to enable communication across the cultural divide for the purpose of encouraging healthier behavior and conservative family values without requiring a complete repudiation of attractions that many Americans take to be irrevocable attributes of who they are. But Heroux characterized the MFI as a slightly "less obvious" version of the KKK, and it's a short step to declaring, say, the Catholic Church as a gang of "sectarian extremists." That's where they're going with this.

Putting the rhetoric aside, the Massachusetts Family Institute pursues reactive resistance to an aggressive radical movement. Heroux and Lynch, on the other hand, wish to marginalize that effort and exclude such groups from civic discourse. So who's the intolerant extremist?

Civil Unions for All Means All Under the Government

Dan Yorke hosted an interesting conversation this afternoon on WPRO regarding the manufactured controversy over Governor Carcieri's plans to speak at an event hosted by the Massachusetts Family Institute. I've asked Dan to post the audio of his interview with Susan Heroux on his PodCast page, and I'm hoping to procure the audio of my subsequent phone conversation with him.

But while that's all in the works, it's worth responding to something suggested by a regular caller to WPRO, and pretty much weekly star of Matt Allen's open-line hour on Fridays before the Violent Roundtable (although I confess that my ineptitude with names leaves me unable to provide his). Being of the more libertarian conservative school of thought, he raised the suggestion that the government should offer only civil unions, with citizens free to sanctify their unions however they wish.

The essential problem with eliminating civil recognition of marriage in favor of universal civil unions is that a civil union is something granted by the government, while marriage entails the government's recognition of something that transcends itself. Marriage, that is, is prior to government; that's why it's a civil right; that's why it is evil for the government to dictate that, for example, black folks can't marry white folks. Civil unions would, by definition, be manipulable.

It's important for government to recognize marriage, as traditionally understood, because households built around intimate male-female relationships tend toward the creation of new life in an inviolable family unit. Again, this transcends government. Homosexual households are not equivalent because they must procure children by some means external to the relationship, and one way or another, that process already involves — requires — government regulation (as with adoption).

It should be noted, of course, that our freedom to associate with each other also transcends government (and ought to do so more), so homosexual relationships between adults are inviolable by that mechanism, in concert with a variety of other relationship types.

An Attack on Legal Representation

I hadn't heard of this (or don't remember having heard of it) before reading Maggie Gallagher's recent summary of the battle over same-sex marriage:

When word spread at Harvard Law School last month that one of the most successful recruiters of its graduates, Ropes & Gray, was helping Catholic Charities explore ways to prevent same-sex couples from adopting children, gay and lesbian students wanted to stop the law firm it its tracks. ...

Two weeks ago, Ropes said it would no longer do legal work to assist the bishops in their efforts to stop gay adoptions, and last week Catholic Charities said it would end its adoption program because it could not reconcile church doctrine, which holds that gay adoptions are "gravely immoral," with state antidiscrimination laws.

Unless I'm missing something, it would be more accurate to say that Catholic Charities wanted help avoiding same-sex adoptions, for its own operations, not preventing other groups from allowing them. That's not a small distinction.

Readers may find some relief in the fact that, according to the first link (from which I drew the blockquote), the young future lawyers had some qualms about bullying a lawfirm from serving a client, but as with much else, the gay agenda trumps.

Ending a Long History, I Guess

Here's a bizarre explanation for Blount Fine Foods' pulling sponsorship from the traditional marriage event on Sunday:

Corporate philanthropy and good citizenship has been part of Blount's mission since inception. In keeping with that, we have a long track record of donating Blount-brand chowder and other products to all non-profits in our home area that request it for events. These donations of soup are just simple gestures of goodwill and were certainly not intended to be interpreted otherwise. It's very concerning to us that anyone would think otherwise and as a result, we are reviewing our policy going forward.

Additionally, Blount notified the organizers of the Rhode Island event in question that the company would not be providing a donation, soup or otherwise.

A long history of goodwill... until same-sex marriage activists insist that there is no social sphere free of their politics. This speaks to a long-running cognitive dissonance behind positioning of SSM as a live-and-let-live movement. This gay activist (astonishingly the only "news" result for a Google search for "Maggie Gallagher Rhode Island) expresses scorn that Rhode Island is the only state "in the northeast that will tolerate these folks."

Yup, can't tolerate those traditionalists and Christians who gather together to listen to music, have a meal, and renew marriage vows. Rout us out. Lock us up until we swear to conversion.

The Daily Advocate

The Providence Journal outdoes itself with a much attenuated version of this AP filing. The Projo splashes the headline and lead:

Fighting gay marriage hurts Mormon image
Observers say the church's heavy-handed intervention into California politics will linger and has left the faith's image tarnished.

What observers does the article cite? The organizer of a gay "kiss-in" and the executive director of a San Francisco lesbian advocacy group, the latter of whom bases her observation on what she's hearing "from my community and from straight progressive individuals."

I wonder how much of the current angst in American society has its origin in the utter distrust of the news media to even attempt to offer an objective explanation of current events and policy debates.

NOM Marriage Picnic

Conservatives in this state must share a certain apprehension as they drive to ideologically tinted events — hoping that somebody shows up, but not the wrong people, and maybe it'll be an indication of our powerlessness, but what if we have to prove ourselves in front of a one-time crowd... Well, tea parties aside, the traditional marriage event that National Organization for Marriage Rhode Island is hosting at Aldrich Mansion in Warwick is definitely among the best attended right-leaning events that I've attended thus far. In fact, I may have to allocate some Anchor Rising resources to pay a parking ticket, since I'm not sure the line of cars down the street is actually legal:

And talk about gemstone corners of Rhode Island:

From where I sit on the stairs overlooking the lawn and the bay, I think I'm looking directly at the hill down which I walked my dog countless times and marveled at the view though I had no idea what I was looking at. How can Rhode Island encompass Rhode Island? [I apologize if that thought seems scattered, but I was interrupted midsentence by somebody who wanted to impress his young charges with the fact that I speak regularly with Matt Allen... certainly not an interruption that I minded!]

Whatever else this event proves, a major takeaway is just how abstract and intellectual is the argument that "fiscal conservatives" and libertarians can jettison us social conservatives. Attendance aside, this is by far the most diverse crowd that I've seen at any conservative event. You want hope shaking the opposition to its core? Come to an event like this.

I wonder if that explains some of the disgusting vitriol that social and religious conservatives attract from progressives...

ADDENDUM:

Here's NOM-RI Executive Director Chris Plante:

And NOM President Maggie Gallagher:

And to be fair and balanced, here's the protest out on the street just after Gallagher's speech:

ADDENDUM II

I don't agree with everything that the speaker who initiated the marriage vow renewal section of the program said. He ends the following clip, for example, thus:

You have not defined marriage, you have not shaped marriage, and you have not set its boundaries in place; rather, marriage has defined you. It has shaped you, and it has set boundaries in goodly places. And so it should be. We all choose to submit to marriage and should never seek to have marriage submit to us.

In terms of the functioning of marriage, as an institution, married couples do indeed define and shape the institution, which is why society must encourage them to respect the boundaries that it imposes. Put differently, it is because our own relationships define marriage that we must submit to it.

But minute disputes aside, hearing this speaker (especially in the context of the day) contributes to the sense that there's something peculiar about protesting such an event:

There were children running around with their faces panted. There were bouncy houses. The bulk of the performances weren't political, but musical. If right-wingers were to protest a similar gay family day organized by a group that advocates for same-sex marriage on a lazy summer Sunday, they'd rightly be lumped in with the Phelps family, but on the left, the impulse to protest — to frighten away attendees concerned with what their children might witness — is mainstream.

The small group of protesters who showed up, however, did evoke the tragedy of the issue. For the most part, they only wish to be accepted, to live their lives in as close an accord as possible to the ideals that the culture had put forward to them, but their ordering inclines incompatibly. Their predicament (meant neutrally) is one through which our culture has only recently begun to wend its rules, and understandably, they wish for it to bend as they desire.

Marriage is what it is, though, and it would be to universal detriment to divorce it from the principle that men and women are uniquely compatible with each other in ways of breadth and depth that no other relationship to similitude.

ADDENDUM III:

One absence that didn't strike me until I was getting ready to leave was that of politicians. The only candidate or current elected official whom I saw was Will Grapentine, and he's more ubiquitous at conservative events than either Caprio or the governor.

A Thread Through Culture-War Stories

In response to my reservations about grand preening in celebration of a "counter protest" that exponentially outnumbered the mentally feeble Phelps family whom it targeted, commenter Chris offered the following:

I approve of both the reporting, and the action. I like the idea that 1) our kids have learned to spot human junk, and react accordingly ( there's always a built-in respect for elders taught to kids. Its good for them to know when to shake it off ), and 2) the projo carrying it helps other kids to learn to markings of this kind of animal, and learn to reject it out of hand faster.

Its a pity violence isn't allowed. It would be a quicker lesson for those things.

Such comments are typically best let to evaporate like gasoline, because regardless of the extent to which they capture something existent in the thoughts and emotions of more moderate sympathizers, elevation of extremists repels all parties by pushing them to different corners. In other words, it doesn't help us to resolve disputes if one party gives the impression that it believes its opposition to have more common ground with the lunatics in its midst than with those engaged in conversation. It's difficult enough to convey innate sympathy despite disagreement.

But Chris draws with his bright red crayon a line to the anti-traditionalist assault in Warwick. Note the protective gauze that Providence Journal reporter Kate Bramson wraps around the perpetrators:

The weapons included mayonnaise, ketchup and salsa — but also pepper spray, a glass jar and fists.

A difference of opinion over gay marriage sparked the incident, and emotions escalated quickly. Punches were thrown.

A small group of men visiting Rhode Island this week urging people to support traditional marriage called the police.

Offended by the men's message, four young women now face charges of assault or battery and disorderly conduct. The youngest, 17, also faces a more serious charge — felony assault with a dangerous substance.

On a hot, sticky Tuesday afternoon, on a grassy area just in front of the Rhode Island Mall, stood six men from a group headquartered in Spring Grove, Pa. They were dressed in suits, red sashes flung over their shoulders. ...

Driving by, stuck at a red light on Route 113, two women saw the men. Once the light turned green and the driver accelerated, the passenger threw a bottle out the window. ...

The men dispute the women's account and face no charges. Four are listed in the police report as victims ...

"I feel immature," Scungio said Thursday. "... We obviously shouldn't have gone up to them at all, because none of this would have happened."

Bramson may have backed away (slightly) from reporter Maria Armental's jocularity, yesterday, but her spin is made more stunning by its incorporation of more details. In her attempt to excuse physical violence, including the use of pepper spray, Bramson casts the whole thing as a street-side debate gone wrong; even the weather and the traffic signal were culprits, let alone the audacity of those men with "red sashes flung over their shoulders." Never mind that the assault was premeditated. Never mind that two women somehow multiplied into four — with one just happening to drive by in time to participate in the attack. Never mind that the police report contravenes Bramson's scenario of a two-way dispute with the opposing tellings to be balanced equally. Nineteen-year-old Kristen Scungio and her pals just got carried away in their understandable "immature" reaction to that "anti" group.

Pat the kids on their heads; they're blameless, really. Chris's lesson appears well on its way to being learned.

Between the two incidents, the murder of abortionist George Tiller sparked discussion about the responsibility of pro-lifers generally for the flares of the occasional madman. Such associations are nothing more than political acts meant to silence opposition; freedom of speech — the entire principle of democracy — means little if taking a particular position about public policy of itself imparts culpability when the susceptibility of humanity to evil appears in an isolated stranger's horrific action.

Advocating on behalf of our traditional understanding of marriage does not translate into blame should somebody, somewhere take the issue as a context for the expression of his or her personal frustrations. By the same token, advocating for the redefinition of marriage to include same-sex relationships does not translate into blame for affronts in the other direction. However, publicly celebrating the sport of mocking extremists and making light of the escalating violence of "counter protests" against traditionalists leads us toward a future in which ignorance will be no defense. Sadly, it's embedded within the narrative according to which progressives choose and pursue their advocacy; according to the script, traditionalists are always the oppressors, and kids can hardly be faulted for their overly zealous support for freedom and equality.

Tolerance!

Remind me, again, who the intolerant bigots are?

The police are investigating an assault Tuesday on Bald Hill Road.

The weapon of choice: soda, salsa, eggs ...

"Your basic garden variety of food condiments," Capt. Robert Nelson said Wednesday.

It started as the four men stood at the median on Bald Hill Road and East Avenue around 2:40 p.m. protesting against same-sex marriage.

The location, Nelson noted, afforded them a roomy median and prime visibility.

They caught the attention of a group of women in one of the cars.

The women, who apparently objected to their message, flung a soda bottle at the men and vowed to return.

And back they were, about 15 minutes later, hurling at the men a mélange of food ingredients and drinks and a full repertoire of profanities, Nelson said.

One of the women swashed a protester with pepper spray.

No one was hurt and no arrests have been made, Nelson said

Note the jocular tone Maria Armental applies to her reportage and, in the game that is becoming all too frequently appropriate, imagine how the story would be presented if the men had been protesting for same-sex marriage.

Have Progressives Discovered the Tenth Amendment?

Massachusetts Attorney General Martha Coakley is suing the Federal Government on behalf of the state of Massachusetts, claiming that the Federal Defense of Marriage Act "interferes with the Commonwealth’s sovereign authority to define and regulate marriage". A portion of the suit alleges that the Federal Government has exceeded the limitations on its power set by the Tenth Amendment of the United States Constitution...

81. The Tenth Amendment to the United States Constitution expressly reserves to the states all powers except those limited powers granted to the federal government.

82. The Tenth Amendment ensures the division of powers between the states and federal government that is necessary for the dual sovereignty of the federal system.

83. The Tenth Amendment preserves for the states the authority to regulate and define marriage for their citizens.

84. Congress lacks the authority under Article I of the United States Constitution to regulate the field of domestic relations, including marriage.

85. Section 3 of DOMA violates the Tenth Amendment, exceeds Congress’s Article I powers, and runs afoul of the Constitution’s principles of federalism by creating an extensive federal regulatory scheme that interferes with and undermines the Commonwealth’s sovereign authority to define marriage and to regulate the marital status of its citizens.

86. Enforcement of Section 3 of DOMA unconstitutionally commandeers the Commonwealth and its employees as agents of the federal government’s regulatory scheme and requires the Commonwealth to facilitate the implementation of a discriminatory federal policy.

The suit stakes out the position that Congress doesn't have the right to establish a definition of marriage, even for Federal law, because establishing a definition of marriage is reserved to the states.

Though I oppose legalizing same-sex marriage (just like President Barack Obama and Vice-President Joseph Biden do), given that the power to define marriage is certainly not delegated to the Federal government anywhere in the Constitution, if some kind of reasonable alignment between written law and rationality still exists in the world of self-governance, then it is difficult to see where the definition of marriage isn't something that is outside of the power of the Federal Government to decide, if the Tenth Amendment has any meaning at all.

But I also wonder if progressives and other cultural liberals who support Attorney General Coakley's action will be able to identify other areas where the reach of the Federal government needs to be scaled back to be brought into line with the Tenth Amendment, or if their sudden discovery of its importance will be applied only to same-sex marriage, as a case of activists arguing principles they doesn't really believe in, in order to get the policy outcome they want.

In case you've forgotten, the Tenth Amendment reads...

The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.

(Note: Readers from Bristol, RI may want to check with town authorities, to determine if reading the above excerpt complies with all local regulations).

The Unknown Variable in the Marriage Poll

This recent letter from Lewis Prescott, of Lincoln, reminded me that I have yet to receive a response to phone and email inquiries about the age-range breakdown behind Brown professor Marion Orr's recent poll finding support for same-sex marriage. Prescott is suspicious:

If you ever want to take a poll and have the results turn out the way you would like them to be, then have Brown University do it. It has a system of convoluted questions and acceptable answers that could tilt the leaning tower of Pisa back to its upright position.

Me, I'm ready to believe the poll's results. I'd just like to be able to look for interesting patterns across polls and find it surprising that an Ivy League academic would obscure a very relevant variable.

Evolving Out of Social Chaos

Among the more foolish slams against traditionalists is that our views are arbitrary religious dictates disconnected from realms of clear reality like science. Folks who believe that trope would likely find Faye Flam's mention of homosexuality in her recent op-ed on male behavior to count as evidence:

I also learned there’s abundant homosexual behavior in male animals. Killer whales and manatees engage in gay trysts, while gay geese and ducks latch onto one another in devoted male-male partnerships. About 8 percent of domestic rams are gay — a persistent source of frustration for sheep breeders.

There are many theories about the persistence of homosexuality in nature — but one of the most interesting connects it to the power of diversity, which gives creatures the flexibility to adapt to different circumstances.

If homosexuality is natural, the errant thinking goes, then it ought to be fully accepted, and such relationships ought to be treated in like kind to the closest heterosexual relationship. That is, marriage should be redefined as an intimate pairing so as to incorporate the natural affections of gays. As it happens, I happen to agree that homosexuality ought to be accepted as natural, although I don't believe the government should strive to force any more than civil tolerance among those who do not accept it. On a personal level, I'd encourage homosexuals toward the strictures of what I believe to be an accurate religion, but in similar fashion to my encouragement of heterosexuals whose behavior is immoral by that measure.

On the marriage count, though, I'd raise a subsequent paragraph from Flam:

Other men just want to have fun. One man I interviewed admitted to having sex with more than 200 women by the time he turned 40. But he was ready to change — and hoped to find someone to inspire him to settle down. Others may start out devoted to one partner but then their circumstances change — they get elected governor of some state — and they start mating with other women, too.

Society's project is to mold rough human nature toward healthier, more productive ends — to learn over the millennia what practices are fruitful and which are detrimental. Marriage is a mechanism for just such a molding, so the fact that an impulse or desire is natural has no bearing on whether marriage ought to bend in its favor. Marriage is meant to pull that philanderer into the devoted relationship into which he says he'd settle down if somebody "inspired" him so that children aren't left without fathers and mothers without support for their children.

The plain biological reality is that these concerns do not exist in homosexual relationships. Other concerns do, and ought not be sloughed away, but insistence on total equivalence would be a reckless response to the existence of partial similarity.

The Clarity of the Point Is the Point Itself on Marriage

In a letter responding to my recent op-ed on same-sex marriage, Peter Asen does the service of illustrating why opposition to same-sex marriage is not the same as anti-gay bigotry. Readers should be apprised of the fact that I did not argue that homosexuality should be hidden from view. Rather, I suggested that marriage should remain an opposite-sex relationship that is fundamentally procreative in its meaning.

The Providence Journal was helpful in titling Asen's letter, "Boys already see gay pairs holding hands." Boys also see friends hugging and siblings kissing. My point was not that children cannot process the reality of differing relationships; it was that they should understand marriage to be uniquely intended for relationships that tend to have as an outcome (and typically an intention) the creation of children.

Asen misinterprets my point to be that girls and boys will grow up wanting to marry their friends, as if by first option. To be honest, I don't find it difficult to imagine older women bequeathing the honor on their dearest friends or young men finding it financially advantageous to sign each other up as spouses. A variety of circumstances might provide incentives — in a nation and culture of loose divorce rules — to enter into marriage, from work benefits to immigration policy.

That is not, however, my central concern, nor was it the argument of my op-ed. In a society with a multitude of relationship types, it remains true that children will eventually have to be told why they can't (or shouldn't) marry their friends, and with the innovation of same-sex marriage, the explanation can no longer include the fact that husbands and wives tend to make each other mommies and daddies. They won't, for that reason, conclude that marrying a pal is equivalent to marrying a lover, but they will, at the deep level of understanding what is just true, have a different sense of what it means to transform a lover into a spouse.

The Marriage Debate in the Wake of the Buckley Conservative Movement

For the opening speech of the Portsmouth Institute's Friday session, Maggie Gallagher traced the effects of a few cultural (particularly marital) trends on the conservative fusionism that William F. Buckley, Jr., helped to develop.

Some highlights:

• On the character Bill Buckley cut for himself by "refusing to grow" (meaning to become gradually more liberal upon becoming famous). Stream, download (52 sec).
• On the left's attack on conservative fusionism, assuming neutrality and leveraging Americans' general prosperity. The focus of this audio clip is abortion, but the interesting application to the same-sex marriage issue comes, first, in the further challenge of the notion that cultural traditionalism can coexist with limited government and, second, in the disallowance of traditionalists to continue to practice their faiths without bowing, in the public square, to a radical proclamation on marriage. Stream, download (2 min, 5 sec).
• On the intellectual difficulty that divorce and same-sex marriage present to those who wish to choose a traditional marital arrangement, in which both sides agree on the indissoluble nature of the relationship — are enabled, that is, to make vows that they truly know mean in the eyes of the law what they profess them to mean. Stream, download (3 min, 25 sec)
• On the same-sex marriage movement's attempt to make marriage address the cultural problem of toleration in such a way as to detract from the institution's ability to address its own mission. Stream, download (59 sec)
• On the danger (especially for cultural conservatism) that the traditionalism of the creative class — in which group Gallagher includes business people, especially entrepreneurs — are breaking away from the structures of society that have nourished our own. Stream, download (2 min, 25 sec)

Interesting Poll Results

One hardly needs to be a far-right-winger to observe that the Providence Journal has been a local booster of the same-sex marriage cause, so it's not but so interesting to compare for bias the front-page coverage of the Victor Profughi poll, commissioned by the National Organization for Marriage Rhode Island, finding more opposed than supportive, with the front-page coverage of Marion Orr's Brown poll finding conflicting results in May. The lead for the latter:

Nearly two of every three people surveyed in the Brown University poll favored the concept, and the results spotlight a generational divide

For the former:

But some question the pollster's methodology and challenge the results, which run counter to a previous survey's findings.

The different results are likely explained largely by the ages of the respondents. Random evening calls to registered voters netted Profughi only 31.3% under the age of fifty. Orr hasn't released comparable information from his poll, although like the Providence Journal, I've got a request in.

Left-wing Brown professor and congressional candidate Jennifer Lawless complains that Profughi used the word "personally," although she doesn't explain why seeing the issue in personal terms would increase opposition to same-sex marriage. One could just as easily argue that Orr's "Would you support or oppose a law that would allow same-sex couples to get married" might make it sound as if "opposition" means actively speaking out against it, and the vast majority of Rhode Islanders simply don't see the issue as that important.

More pointed criticism has been directed at a new question from Profughi:

Thinking about this issue further, some people say that gays and lesbians have a right to live as they choose, but they do not have the right to redefine marriage for all of society. Do you strongly agree, somewhat agree, somewhat disagree or strongly disagree with that statement?

Fifty-seven percent agreed, and 34% disagreed, but the problem with relying on this question to taint the other results is that the question was second to last. All of the other substantive questions had been asked and answered before this supposed "push poll" question entered the conversation, with the exception being the final question about support for teaching school children about gay marriage, which 66% opposed and 25% supported.

Putting aside the political wrangling over language and demographics, one thing that emerges from both surveys is that support for same-sex marriage decreases as the respondent considers it. Profughi recorded 36% support for same-sex marriage and 43% opposition, but after an interposing question about whether voters should "have the opportunity to decide" about same-sex marriage, he recorded 52% support for a "proposal" declaring that "only marriage between a man and a woman will be valid or recognized in Rhode Island," with 38% opposition. (The differences entailed folks coming off the "don't know/undecided" bench.) Similarly, Orr recorded 60% support for SSM and 31% opposition, but after a question about civil unions, only 55% supported marriage.

The reality of the issue is that most people don't want to have to be in the position of talking about it. When it comes up, their initial response is more favorable, as if to make the topic go away, but when other options are presented or other angles considered, underlying concerns begin to emerge.

What Marriage Means to Children

I've got a piece in today's Providence Journal in which I attempt to explain a subtle mechanism whereby the simple change in the definition of marriage to incorporate same-sex couples can have a profound effect on society. It isn't about the effect on adults' current marriages, but on marriages yet to be consummated.

After a Difficult Violent Roundtable, Part 3

As I intimated yesterday, conservatives' appropriate fear of populist movements connects with our conviction that the nexus of power and desire ought to be checked. (One can be fearful even of that which is necessary, of course.) During Friday night's all–Anchor Rising Violent Roundtable on the Matt Allen Show, Marc and Matt kicked off a related conversation in which the latter took the position that structures allowing more direct democracy — such as public referenda — ought to proliferate.

The problem with developing a taste for simple majority rule is that the masses know what they want, but not necessarily how to go about getting it or, even less, how to balance competing needs and interests. This isn't to take the line that the dirty common folk lack the intelligence to comprehend cause and effect and the possibility of unintended consequences; the salient factor filters through the mechanics of a movement. However well a given voter comprehends how his own interests might be balanced and what compromises would be tolerable in achieving them, by the time political action builds to critical mass, his interests and negotiable thresholds must be overlaid with thousands of variations.

If a movement is to avoid a fizzle from noise, it must be led. Only in sharp, very specific outrages will large groups of people congeal with minimal guidance to answer a question of public policy. In most cases, a handful of leaders with the time and motivation must sort out the series of binaries by which more subtle decisions are reached — "yes" to this policy, "no" to that one, "yes" to this request, "no" to that demand. When the democracy remains representative, those leaders may be held accountable for the results, even as their daily popularity rises and falls over each answer. When those leaders are as voices in the crowd — shouting out suggestions to which the populist cry returns a "hear, hear" — their accountability dissipates, as does the feasibility of subtlety. It becomes guidance by explosion, not by instruction. A herding of votes.

When it comes to the practical operation of a society, democracy is best enacted in escalating tiers — elections followed by referenda followed by revolution — but always with a philosophical tendency to worry about anarchic expressions of power. A population enthralled with its democratic override is at risk of wielding it too lightly, toward ends that are never adequately articulated until the knots cinch tight.

After a Difficult Violent Roundtable, Part 2

A second conversation in which sufficient articulation proved difficult on Friday night's all–Anchor Rising Violent Roundtable on the Matt Allen Show related to Matt's statement that the Catholic Church is in some respects an anti-American institution. Having such a strong statement catch one off guard doesn't make measured extemporaneous response an easy accomplishment, but upon reflection, I'd suggest that Matt is backing into a perilous political philosophy.

The Roman Catholic Church — any church, for that matter — should not be an "American" institution. The U.S.A. exists as an entity and as an idea; to the extent that an authentically American church were not redundant, it would be dangerous. A religion with policy conclusions in lock-step with the practice of the American idea would necessarily lend theological import to a quintessentially secular project. It would be a fundamental establishment of religion, marrying Church and State.

There is not only great value in, but essential need for cultural institutions completely separate from the reigning polity — with a source and structure of authority that is distinct from the nation's governmental strategy. Where members of the hierarchy are wrong in prudential matters, Catholics should discuss (even debate) the issues and argue for the Church's proper role, but all should realize that the Church's interests are not the same as the country's. Sometimes one will be wrong, or the human beings who guide it will step beyond their appropriate boundaries; sometimes the other will be the culprit; but that's reason to accept them as mutual ballast.

In an objective analysis, Matt's imputation of anti-Americanism on the part of the Church based on the public policies for which some of its representatives advocate is identical to the impulse of those within the hierarchy who wish overzealously to leverage the government's powers of taxation. Both sides judge and prescribe as if the two pillars of society ought to be more of a continuous support, in which the visibility of light is indicative of fatal cracks, not expected separation.

Let's not dilute anti-Americanism. I don't believe it is Matt's point of view that the Roman Catholic Church takes as its goal the downfall or diminution of the United States as a secular construct. The institutional Church has watched governments rise and fall throughout its history, and there are multiple bold lines between supporting policies that are arguably detrimental to the civic body and calling for the downfall of a Great Satan. An instructive distinction exists between President Ronald Reagan's characterization of the Soviet Union as an "evil empire" and Pope John Paul II's view of communism as "a medicine more dangerous than the disease itself" that became "a powerful threat and challenge to the entire world."

Both the United States of America and the Roman Catholic Church are centrally concerned with liberty. For one, it's liberty from oppression by people; for the other, it's liberty from oppression by sin and evil. Those concerned with either in particular should pay close attention to the other, but nobody should expect their requirements always to be the same, just as nobody should drive the two apart because one — accurately or erroneously — points in a different direction from time to time.

The project of post-Enlightenment conservatism (as we understand it today) is to layer balances and restraints against human nature, and theologically, the impulse to declare opposition amounts to a Church of Me, in which the individual pushes away a perspective that ought to be given credence. Here, the philosophical thread leads to a final point of contention on Friday night — namely, conservative wariness of populism — which I'll address after I've trimmed some hedges and made my way through the Sunday paper.

After a Difficult Violent Roundtable, Part 1

Last night's Violent Roundtable on the Matt Allen Show was the most difficult public appearance/talk show that I've done yet. Probably because Matt correctly assessed that an hour of harmony wouldn't have been very interesting, his questions touched on a number of weighty subjects on which expressing comprehensive thoughts on the spot is not easy.

For instance, take Matt's reference to Rep. John Loughlin's suggestion that the government get out of the marriage business, and permit everybody civil unions, because "marriage is a religious concept." That attempt at compromise (I'd call it a cop-out) is simply based on a false premise. Marriage is not a religious concept; it transcends religion, not only in the sense that all religions throughout history have recognized its opposite-sex nature, as I mentioned last night, but also in the sense that it resides at the intersection of multiple social strata: religion (yes), but also family, heritage, government, property, history, and so on, all of which find relevance in the biological fact of a man and a woman's ability to become one in the person of a child.

Religion's role in marriage is to lend the mysticism that makes the relationship profound, and therefore worthy of lifelong vows. Ancestry roots children in their society. Property gives motivation for productivity and economic prudence, particularly with a long-term view of generations. And government's role is to protect the community that it governs, in this context, by protecting the familial structure on which all of Western society's progress has been founded.

Consequently, government has even more objective, secular interest in encouraging stable marriages — that is, permanent unions between intimate men and women — than it does in encouraging the additional social good of consistent mutual care, which is ultimately what civil unions would recognize. Even the requirement of intimacy would be impossible for the government to require or assume, opening the door for civil unions between anybody and anybody (or anybodies).

For government to reduce all mutual care relationships to a level field, relying on religious groups to define their profundity, it would create a necessary equivalence between them. By declining to adhere to a consistent definition understood across the aforementioned strata, the government referee would be declaring the concept of marriage available for redefinition and throwing it to cultural forces that include not only religious organizations, but also pop-culture industries. If nothing else, the social noise would end the marital institution's utility.

Matt's suggestion — fantastic in principle — that we should refuse to acknowledge the government's authority as lexicographer skirts an assessment of what is actually happening. Drawn forward by well financed and highly motivated special interests and prodded by a complicit media industry, the government has been forcing a new definition of marriage into the culture. That being the case, following Matt's political philosophy would actually require the people to demand that the government explicitly affirm the definition of marriage under which their culture has operated throughout history until such time as it is understood by all to have changed.

In other words, the trajectory of the change currently involves the government's redefinition in order to manipulate the culture. Those playing defense on the traditionalist side are not the ones ceding authority to the political class, nor is there equivalence between our attempts to hold the government in place and the attempts of radicals to drag it into the cultural fight.

The initial question that sparked our discussion, on the radio, was whether the government should be granting heretofore marital rights and privileges piecemeal, one by one, to same-sex couples. The topic shifted a bit by the time it got to me, but my answer would have been that such an approach is precisely the appropriate one. Formed back when people actually believed that same-sex marriage was sufficiently inconceivable that a constitutional amendment was not necessary, my view has long been that the governments at various levels should affirm the traditional definition of marriage and do so in such a way as to enable state-level legislation easing the difficulties that those with other relationship types face. Require that legislation to define new relationships and their privileges without reference to marriage (i.e., no "all rights and privileges of marriage" language), thus requiring our society to come to consensus about the justification, purpose, and meaning of each change.

Cultural forces will vie to define the new unions, and it would be appropriate for those on the same-sex marriage side to refer to themselves as married, if they so choose, as well as to strive for the broader society's similar understanding of their relationships. Over time, the culture may come to see no significant difference between civil unions and marriage, or perhaps the distinctions between mutual-care relationships and procreative marriages will become more prominent. All the debate, however, and experimentation would be performed outside of the core institution of marriage and without the government's being used as a lever to roll the cultural boulder.

Is This How Democratic Compromise Is Supposed to Work?

Put aside the contentious context of the debate in question. Doesn't something just seem wrong about this?

Because a compromise must receive unanimous support to survive, Roberge was then removed from the committee and replaced with Sen. Matthew Houde, D-Plainfield, who voted with the majority. Roberge said she was disappointed she was removed.

What's the point of having a rule requiring unanimity if it means merely that a legislative body must be able to put the right number of agreeable people in a room?

As the 80's Rock Band Asia Almost Once Said: Your Inconsistency, It Really Comes as No Surprise…

Here is the core of Miss California Carrie Prejean's now-famous statement of her position on gay marriage…

I think that I believe that a marriage should be between a man and a woman.

And here is one of President Barack Obama's statements of his position on gay marriage, this one from an interview by the Reverend Rick Warren…

I believe that marriage is the union between a man and a woman.

For holding this position on gay marriage, Pat Crowley of Rhode Island's Future argues that Miss Prejean and President Obama (and former Warwick City Councilman Robert Cushman) should be considered "bigoted primadonas" (sic)…

Time was, considering people lesser beings, not entitled to the same legal protections as others, would rightly award you the moniker of bigot…NO MORE! Now, thanks to Mr. Cushman and the others that rose to the defense of Ms Prejean she wasn’t being bigoted at al…she was simply willing to speak her mind…and how American is that?...

So speaking you mind is courageous, but telling the person who speaks their mind they are a bigoted primadona who is using their platform to confirm their own superiority and reinforced the inferiority of others, well, that is unpatriotic.

Oh wait, Mr. Crowley doesn't include President Obama on his list of bigots. Or does he? Maybe at some point he'll clarify.

Commenter "Twisting the point" notes that Robert Cushman's op-ed is a viewpoint-neutral argument about the importance of "having the courage to speak our minds and stand up for what we believe" (Cushman's words), and takes no position one way or the other on gay marriage. So it's only Ms. Prejean and President Obama -- if this is about actual positions -- who are characterized as bigoted primadonas (sic) for disagreeing with Mr. Crowley on gay marriage.

Mr. Cushman stands accused only of questioning people's patriotism.

Actual Discussion on Marriage

Pat Crowley offered a pleasant surprise by actually making a counter-point in response to my recent post on encouraging marriage:

Because apparently now the law tells married couples that your ability to marry is relative to your ability to create children. Which makes many marriages, mine included, some how null and void. After all, my wife and I are deliberately choosing not to have children ( I have 3 from a prior marriage but that is a WHOLE ‘nother story). We must be somehow flaunting our liberty to interpret the reason behind the law as we see fit by not reproducing. And what about couples who want to have kids but can’t? And what about adoption? Are people who are married but adopt somehow exploiting a loophole in the law, thus violating the intent? Are they adoptive couples really still married or are they also re-defining the institution by adopting instead of conceiving?

Not to muddy the waters by quipping toward the issue of abortion, but I wonder whether a broader inference could be derived from Crowley's apparent understanding of the notion of choice. By his own admission, his failure to procreate with his current wife is a freely chosen decision, which means that, even if he were correctly understanding my argument, his marriage would not be "null and void," because he and his spouse have the ability to have children. Should they change their minds, or should their birth control method fail, they are already in the relationship into which society ought to prefer that children be born. For similar reasons, the notion of sterility is inadequate as a contradiction of my construct, because sterility is generally not known to be a problem until the couple is already attempting to have children, in which case, again, we want them to be married.

Be that as it may, Crowley makes a common error to the degree that he's actually attempting to understand the opposing side. Marriage is inherently related ("relative" implies degrees of marriage) to the "ability to create children" inasmuch as it has until recently been limited to those pairings that tend toward that end. Men and women tend to create children when they're intimate together, so limiting marriage to relationships that include one of each draws that line.

That a couple does not procreate, by choice or by inability, does not affect the cultural understanding of their relationship type. This is how the culture works — on the basis of principles. Principles are not like the law — which operates on the basis of rules — in that mild contradictions or variations don't represent a break.

(As for his comments on Charles Murray: It's apparent that Crowley has never read the Bell Curve, which did not put forward the argument that he attributes to it.)

Society Is a Long-Term Project, and Marriage Matters

Bob Kerr's dogged obliviousness notwithstanding, the concern of marriage traditionalists is that changing the definition of marriage will have cultural consequences stretching out into the future. Of course, ever since Massachusetts's Goodridge decision forcing just such a redefinition in that state, same-sex marriage advocates have made a point of addressing mainly strawmen and portions of opponents' arguments that don't risk pulling them off message.

From deep in New England, the strategy appears to be working, although other regions may allow other conclusions. Wherever one resides, however, some research explored by Charles Murray deserves a look. A study following women born between 1957 and 1964 found that, among white participants, the overall illegitimacy ratio was 11%. Dividing the group roughly 10-40-40-10 by socioeconomic class, that rate breaks down as follows:

• Overclass (17 years of education and family incomes over $100,000): 1.7%
• Middle class (family incomes over $60,000): 4.0%
• Working class (family incomes less than $60,000): 10.2%
• Underclass (fewer than 12 years of education and family incomes under $20,000: 44.5%

Murray is in the process of completing updated research, but he describes his current estimates:

Today, the illegitimacy ratio for non-Latino whites is 28 percent. How do the classes break down now? As it happens, I've spent the last few weeks exploring that question. I'm not done, and want to save that discussion for a formal presentation in any case, but here are some tentative estimates: The illegitimacy ratio for the white underclass is probably now in the region of 70 percent. I think that the proportion for the white working class may be above 40 percent. The white middle class is approaching 20 percent—a scarily high figure when you think about all the ways that the middle class has been the spine of the nation.

The white overclass? They're still living in the 1950s—their ratio is probably about 4 or 5 percent tops.

I don't know whether the "current" group includes all women (and therefore those in the previous study), but that ambiguity means that these numbers are a minimum for illegitimacy.

The relevance to same-sex marriage is that such an innovation hinders our society's ability to leverage the institution to arrest this downward slide by erasing the link between marriage and childbirth. Whatever definition of marriage rising generations absorb from our culture, the law will tell them that it has nothing to do with the spouses' ability to create children. Moreover, those toward the lower end of the socioeconomic ladder tend to be more susceptible to the broader culture than their better-off peers.

The women in the older study typically had their children in the '80s and early-to-mid '90s. That means that Murray's new figures trace women one or two generations subsequent. Where the numbers will be in another fifteen to twenty years we can only guess. But when some long-memoried blogger like me points out declining marriage rates, increasing out-of-wedlock births, compounding teenage pregnancies, and so on, we can predict that the short-memoried public will snort at the suggestion that redefining marriage could have had anything to do with the deterioration of marriage culture.

Denouncing Nuts... of Two Kinds

For the record, I have no trouble denouncing these people — a denunciation in which I include both the subject of the linked post and those who associate with its poster. By suggesting that I might "think like" the "God hates fags" lunatics, Crowley illustrates his profound lack of reading comprehension skills and vicious disregard for the truth.

I don't believe that God hates, period, and I have a deep sympathy for homosexuals who wish to live as closely to heretofore heterosexual norms as possible. I've written before that I can envision a route to inclusion of their relationships in the institution of marriage in the long term and have lamented that the zeitgeist and subculture of the same-sex marriage movement make that possibility virtually nil.

Fringe groups like the Westboro Baptist Church and Phelps family get their theology so wrong as to further the cause of evil in the world, both by their own offensive acts and the degree to which they justify the errors of those whom they oppose.

Not How It's Supposed to Work

One bullet stuck out in Mark Patinkin's latest scattered-thoughts column:

It doesn't work to seek your kids' sympathy by saying you had a harder day than they did, because as far as they're concerned, you're supposed to.

So true is this that it's typically a mistake to do the hardship tit-for-tat with one's children. Better to turn the emphasis around to encourage in them such fortitude as you display every day as an adult.

If anybody figures out how to do that, please let me know.

A World in Which Marriage and Sex Are Not About Children

The ACLU-type argument for general liberty to engage in destructive behavior for the preservation of a liberal aesthetic is easy to predict, but there's something new and disturbing in the following argument for the continued legalization of prostitution in the state of Rhode Island:

Critics, including Rose Perry, a Providence mother and member of the group Direct Action for Rights and Equality, said that even with the amendments the latest proposal ignores the harsh reality of what it takes for some families to survive in tough economic times.

"What about the woman who has children who is mainly prostituting to provide for them?" Perry asked. If she gets arrested "the children are going to go to [the Department of Children, Youth and Families] and that's going to be more state expense and then more expense for the woman going to jail. It's just ruining families. I feel what goes on behind closed doors should stay behind closed doors."

One could point out, of course, that Ms. Perry's point is extendable to a wide variety of behaviors, dealing and doing hard drugs notable among them. What's more profound is a juxtaposition, facilitated by the Providence Journal's physical layout, with Froma Harrop's latest column:

"Formality in the law serves some important purposes," Glesner-Fines responded. "It cautions people that what they are getting into is serious."

Yes, that's it. The seriousness of the legal bond between the parents — as well as from parent to child — helps foster a partnership in child-rearing, even if that bond later dissolves in divorce. Why so many women take on motherhood without such formality in place is a mystery. The sad result is a growing sisterhood of drudgery.

Whether she realizes it or not, that's a substantial progression from a woman who recently wrote this:

It's easy to understand why gay people would want to get in on the marriage gravy train. There's just no logic for there being one. A stable marriage is the ideal institution for raising children, but we already have tax benefits focused on parents. Given the growing percentage of unmarried adult Americans, the whole obsession with same-sex marriage has become rather dated.

Keep marriage as a romantic and religious ideal for those who choose to partake. Public policy, on the other hand, should be marriage-neutral.

Perhaps it's a "rather dated" notion, but I'd say there's no "mystery" to continued childbirth without the "formality" of marriage: Men and women are strongly driven to copulate; they're also driven (although with less immediacy) to procreate. Yet, society has long been telling them that sex outside of marriage is just fine and is increasingly declaring that marriage is not, in its essence, about joining parents together with the children whom they create.

When a state supreme court asserts as a footnote (PDF, p. 54) that a child's needing a mother and father is a stereotype, when activists are arguing in the State House that prostitution is a legitimate fall-back during a difficult economy, when other judges are demanding that the morning-after-drug be available over the counter to minors, it isn't surprising that three out of four non-virginal teenage girls report having had unprotected sex. It also isn't surprising that some of them have or go on to have children outside of wedlock or that the fathers feel no obligation to be involved.

If sex is about pleasure (or financial gain), and marriage is about feelings (or benefits), committing to support a family even during the worst of times, even when there is no sex, the feelings seem to fade, and the children prove a challenge, is just one more burden on which a culture of narcissists will not insist.

When the Dictator Branch Takes Over for the Representative One

Andrew McCarthy puts it well:

Courts are not there to resolve national controversies, to stand outside and above the United States. They were created as a sub-section of government to remedy individual injuries, and they were given no power to enforce their judgments. That, indeed, is why Hamilton (in Federalist No. 78) anticipated that the judiciary would be the "least dangerous" branch: It would be "least in a capacity to annoy or injure" the "political rights of the Constitution." In fact, the law of "standing," which addresses what grievances litigants may bring before courts, teaches that the more a controversy affects the body politic rather than the individual citizen, the less appropriate it is for judicial resolution. It is for just such controversies that we have political rights.

We're on track to cede our rights of self-governance to a global judiciary supported by an aristocracy of bureaucrats. Needless to say, we'd be better off if the cart were derailed.

Sex Is Not All

It's a tragicomic truism that members of the cultural movement, with roots in the "Sexual Revolution," that presses for the acceptance of ever more licentious behavior, that peppers popular culture with lewd images and innuendo, and that leverages carnal lust as an enticement toward the trap of its radical worldview often accuse those who stand against them in defense of our society of being obsessed with sex. Here, in the words of commenter Pragmatist:

And why not just admit that this criticism of the president is really about sex Justin? We all know that religious conservatives, above all else, are obsessed with sex: the consequences of straight sex and existence of gay sex. Religious concerns about the environment, war, torture, income inequality seldom pop up on the conseravtive radar. But sex? Well then, hold the presses!

It doesn't take much capacity for objectivity to observe that none of the other issues that Pragmatist lists find anywhere near the concerted advocacy of sex when it comes to promoting sin qua sin, from the religious point of view. Nobody advocates lessons in safe-torture to grammar school children. (Abstinence is unrealistic, after all!) Nobody proposes that war should be a matter of individual choice made as free of consequences as possible.

Moreover, those not quite so blinkered by hostility to the expression of traditional views will likely comprehend that, for religious conservatives, chief among the "consequences of straight sex" is the creation of human life, and therein lies the motivation for determination. Note, for evidence, that the conservative radar is also well tuned to the overtures of scientists to transform human life into a utility. Progressives appear to believe that conservatives see protection of embryos and objection to cloning as front-guard barriers against the fundamental normalization of abortion, which (the story holds) we oppose because cannot keep our minds off the activity that creates a being to be aborted in the first place. The failure to see the true consistent core of this belief system is strongly suggestive of a desperate need to maintain the feeling of moral imprimatur for the commission of evil.

But what of torture? Isn't that an evil act? Yes, of course, and I've yet to hear a religious conservative argue for torture of an anything-to-extract-information degree, and general agreement that torture is unacceptable contributes to the skewed public perception. Because we all agree that our government should not be lopping off fingers one joint at a time, the discussion quickly moves to determination of the line. Truth be told, I've had discussions with other religious conservatives in which I voiced my difficulty seeing mild sleep deprivation and droning music, even stress positions, as torture; that doesn't indicate that conservatism is a philosophy in which torture isn't an issue, but that some of us believe that interrogations of unlawful combatants can be a bit more strenuous than a questionnaire. It's also relevant that the conversation would be a non-starter were the principle under scrutiny the permissibility of performing "enhanced interrogation" on innocent civilians.

What of income inequality? Isn't greed one of the seven deadlies? Aren't we called to serve our brothers and sisters? Yes, of course, but we on the right believe that opportunity is the more effective means of assisting the poor and that coercively redistributive power in the hands of a government body is a recipe for even more damaging outcomes.

Indeed, cycling through the issues that he mentions, one thought recurs with each: Pragmatist really hasn't followed internal debates among conservatives. What emerges from such a study is that there are basic principles held to be irreducible and a broad, fluid field of prudential lines.

At the core of them all, of course, is life, and among the most thoroughly agreed upon conclusions among religious righties is that a society that encourages (not forces) healthy personal choices endows its people with the most powerful possible protectant against a corruption that deadens the instinct for justice across the board. The most sure sources of instruction for discerning social necessities are the traditions that enabled the moral and corporeal advancement of our culture over millennia in the first place.

Happiness Is Finding a Pencil

I find this discouraging, although probably not for the reason one would suspect:

Children do not bring happiness. In fact more often they seem to bring unhappiness. That is the conclusion of one academic study after the next — and there are so many that it makes one wonder if researchers kept trying, hoping for a different result.

What's bothersome isn't that the hard work and substantial expense of being a parent puts a damper on one's sense of happiness; anybody who has children or knows people who have children should expect such a result. Rather, it's disquieting that not only is the finding presented as a surprise, but it's presented as if it ought to make procreation inexplicable. Raising children is among those experiences in life that we undertake because it is part of living — part of what Charles Murray refers to as "a life well lived."

A society that loses its ability to value the rich experience of being human may perceive itself to be more satisfied for a short time, as it rolls forward on the momentum of the health of previous generations, but it will surely decline and lose its feeling of happiness in the process.

However, because I'm not persuaded that one can tease apart demographic categories as these studies do, I'd suggest that it would be a mistake to see child rearing as a socially necessary drain on our individual well-being. Consider that marriage brings the greatest non-income increase in happiness, a finding that holds true even if we factor in parenthood's negative effect. (It's worth mentioning, of course, that the decrease resulting from children would also include the surveys of divorced parents, who would seem more likely to be adversely affected by the responsibilities of parenthood than married parents. There may also be an explanation somewhere in this breakdown for the fact that two children decrease happiness less than one.)

In other words, if we take the family form handed down to us through generations of trial and error, in which children and marriage are held to be inextricably linked, with parenthood and espousal standing as mutually reinforcing components of a person's identity, we find ourselves happier and our society healthier. If we lose faith in our instinctive understanding of what a full life should encompass, we will embark on a selfish path toward general misery.

Statistics and Reasoning

At Rhody's suggestion in the comments to my post on the Iowa same-sex marriage decision, I took a look at Nate Silver's statistical assessment of the likelihood that Iowans will revoke the decision via constitutional amendment:

I looked at the 30 instances in which a state has attempted to pass a constitutional ban on gay marriage by voter initiative. The list includes Arizona twice, which voted on different versions of such an amendment in 2006 and 2008, and excludes Hawaii, which voted to permit the legislature to ban gay marriage but did not actually alter the state's constitution. I then built a regression model that looked at a series of political and demographic variables in each of these states and attempted to predict the percentage of the vote that the marriage ban would receive. ...

So what does this mean for Iowa? The state has roughly average levels of religiosity, including a fair number of white evangelicals, and the model predicts that if Iowans voted on a marriage ban today, it would pass with 56.0 percent of the vote. By 2012, however, the model projects a toss-up: 50.4 percent of Iowans voting to approve the ban, and 49.6 percent opposed. In 2013 and all subsequent years, the model thinks the marriage ban would fail.

The problem is that models don't think; they take what we put in. So, on one hand, the reality of same-sex marriages coming and going may soften Iowans' views. On the other hand, the Supreme Court of Iowa has just proven that statutory language is insufficient. People rightly seek the least extreme (and least difficult) method of accomplishing their goals, and if one's goal is to preserve the traditional definition of marriage, nothing within reach of the judiciary is now adequate.

To we who've been arguing this topic for years, that reality has been clear from the start, but it's been a core strategy of homosexual advocates (and progressives more generally) to limit expectations about the next step. Civil unions would never lead to same-sex marriage. Same-sex marriage in Massachusetts would never be exported to other states. And so on.

I wouldn't presume to make predictions, but it's going to be more difficult for SSM rhetoricians to insist that leveraging state (and federal) constitutions is overkill.

The Fundamental Dishonesty of an Antidemocratic Movement

If one knows the history of the same-sex marriage debate, the opening paragraph of this editorialized report in the DesMoines Register strikes an odd note:

Basic fairness and constitutional equal protection were the linchpins of Friday's historic Iowa Supreme Court ruling that overturned a 10-year-old ban on same-sex marriage and puts Iowa squarely in the center of the nation’s debate over gay rights.

The redefinition of marriage in Iowa took a peculiar path, indeed, beginning in 1996:

1. The Supreme Court of Hawaii declared a right to same-sex marriage.
2. Although the state legislature ultimately circumvented the court, the federal government passed the Defense of Marriage Act to limit the ruling's implications for other states.
3. Individual states, including Iowa, passed laws affirming that marriage is definitionally a relationship between people of opposite sex, typically with the intention of securing the protection of the public policy exception interpreted to exist to the full faith and credit clause of the Constitution. In essence, if a state explicitly does not recognize same-sex relationships as marriage, the Constitution cannot force it to treat as valid a same-sex marriage enacted in another state, so states like Iowa made their understanding of marriage explicit.
4. The Iowa judiciary has taken that statutory affirmation of preexisting principles as an occasion to redefine marriage in the state according to the judges' preference.

In a direct way, the judges of Hawaii exported their activism across state lines not in spite of laws designed to prevent such a thing, but because of those laws. The process does nothing so clearly as illustrate the extent to which democracy is becoming an (at most) dilatory control on the implementation of the social system preferred by the powerful. All that is required is for the powerful to couch their diktats in some mutable principle introduced in a high-level legal source (e.g., the Constitution); the most common such principle is "equal protection," but there may be others that are as yet unexplored.

In an interesting conversational thread on RI Future, commenter Brassband points to this mechanism when he questions the following sentences from the Iowa court's ruling (PDF, page 16):

The process of defining equal protection, as shown by our history as captured and told in court decisions, begins by classifying people into groups. A classification persists until a new understanding of equal protection is achieved. The point in time when the standard of equal protection finally takes a new form is a product of the conviction of one, or many, individuals that a particular grouping results in inequality and the ability of the judicial system to perform its constitutional role free from the influences that tend to make society’s understanding of equal protection resistant to change.

As a matter of grammar, what the court argues, here, is that a society may consider groups to be different in some legally allowable way until a particular individual or several individuals perceive discrimination and take the matter to the courts, and the judges — "free from the [social] influences" under which we ordinary humans labor — declare in their favor. Rhode Island College professor Thomas Schmeling subsequently puts that perspective in the company of a fundamentally sacerdotal yet "well-respected theory" that judges rule based on hunches that are justified in the fact that a jurist "not only has his/her own preferences but is also acquainted with constitutional principles, precedents, the views of other (and higher) court judges, so it's not totally subjective." Schmeling goes on to state the matter in terms of his own take:

... I think the Court here is actually making a sensible point, one which which you may well agree. Here's my read:

1. The legislature creates a classification. (let's use bans on interracial marriage as an example). That classification will remain until two things happen:

a. somebody becomes convinced that the classification creates an inequality (one that violates equal protection) and challenges it in court.

b. A court invalidates it.

Now, the legislation presumably embodies society's understanding of what "equal protection" requires, which (as in the case of bans on interracial marriage) may be nothing more than its irrational prejudices. If the courts do nothing more than reflect that understanding, it will never find any classification violative of equal protection and the court will have failed to fulfill its duty. (Do you agree so far?)

If the legislature's/society's judgement/prejudices accurately reflect the principle embodied in the Constitution's equal protection clause (state or federal...there might be a difference)...there is no problem.

However, if the legislature's/society's judgement departs from an accurate understanding of equal protection, that's a problem. To do its job, the court must obviously get beyond this judgement. To do this, the court must be "free from the influences that tend to make society's understanding of equal protection resistant to change". That is, the court should not simply reflect the views of the people and/or the legislature, it must uncover the "true" principle behind the equal protection clause, and use that principle to judge the classification.

If the members of the court simply say "I think equal protection clause should embody MY prejudices", I think we'll agree that the court has departed from its proper role.

If, on the other hand, the Court adopts a principled interpretation of the clause (which must, of necessity be independent of the prejudices of the judges AND of the prejudices of the legislature/society), the court has fulfilled its proper role.

Consider for a moment who has been excluded from the interpretation of equal protection's "'true' principle": the judges' personal views don't apply, the relevant legislators' personal views don't apply, the people's personal views (as expressed democratically) don't apply, and certainly the personal views of those who penned the Fourteenth Amendment back in 1868 don't apply. So from whence — by whom — is it determined that the true meaning of the equal protection clause requires that the true meaning of marriage be something other than what it has always been understood to be — a relationship between men and women?

Ah, there's the nub. The reality is that, like the interstate process of bouncing judicial rulings, the whole thing is a performance to enact the preferences of an elite class as written into the "hunches" of judges. On the page following the above quotation, the Supreme Court of Iowa states:

The same-sex-marriage debate waged in this case is part of a strong national dialogue centered on a fundamental, deep-seated, traditional institution that has excluded, by state action, a particular class of Iowans.

The whole dance — costumes, streamers, stage props, and all — is a distraction from the truth that the "particular class of Iowans" are not excluded by "state action," but by definition and by the way in which they choose to live their lives.* They are excluded by the fact that humankind has recognized a natural distinction of the intimate relationships into which men and women enter and sought to guide those relationships in the direction of social health — as understood not through contrived experiments, but by centuries of observation and social evolution — through an institution called "marriage," which it acknowledges and privileges as something unique.

Our nation's founders pursued representative democracy as a means of layering social control such that the most basic and profound questions would not become subject to immediate battles of power, but would require engagement of the process and efforts toward persuasion. Progressives' broad-based campaign has been to corrupt process for their own ideological benefit, and it will spell calamity whether the masses respond with a forceful expression of the only forms of power that remain to them or by stepping back and watching their civilization collapse out of an aversion to conflict.

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* I am not invoking, here, the "homosexuality is a choice" declaration. I'm merely pointing out that — quite reasonably — homosexuals opt to form their lives around their affections rather than a traditional family structure.

B. Frank: Invective Over Reason

Is he looking to create a distraction from all of the money he is costing us? Has he run out of substantive arguments on the issue itself?

"At some point, [the Defense of Marriage Act] is going to have to go to the United States Supreme Court," the congressman, a Democrat, said. "I wouldn't want it to go to the United States Supreme Court now because that homophobe Antonin Scalia has got too many votes on this current court."

I remain ambivalent enough on the issue of gay marriage to not have a dog in this fight. But I'm pretty sure of two things.

1.) Someone who opposes gay marriage is not axiomatically a homophobe, even if we expand the definition of "homophobe" beyond "a person who fears gays" to include "a person who dislikes gays". In fact, most people who oppose gay marriage are not homophobes.

2.) Childish name calling by an advocate isn't going to draw undecideds like me towards that side of the issue.

The Bastard Boom

It's a harsh title, I know, and I wouldn't have run it but for the very fact of diminishing stigma evidenced in recent statistics (which is to say that the term "bastard" has no real social force in accord with its actual meaning*):

The 4,317,119 births, reported by federal researchers Wednesday, topped a record first set in 1957 at the height of the baby boom.

Behind the number is both good and bad news. While it shows the U.S. population is more than replacing itself, a healthy trend, the teen birth rate was up for a second year in a row.

The birth rate rose slightly for women of all ages, and births to unwed mothers reached an all-time high of about 40 percent, continuing a trend that started years ago. More than three-quarters of these women were 20 or older.

For a variety of reasons, it’s become more acceptable for women to have babies without a husband, said Duke University’s S. Philip Morgan, a leading fertility researcher.

Even happy couples may be living together without getting married, experts say. And more women — especially those in their 30s and 40s — are choosing to have children despite their single status.

With cultural trends, causes and effects jumble over each other, so it presumes too much to tease them apart in search of the decisive, but analysts and reporters do a disservice to the public by not mentioning, in this context, the concerted movement over the past decade-plus to redefine marriage as something not intrinsically related to child bearing and rearing. Writing the radical new definition into the law would burn the bridge by which we're crossing into cultural no-man's-land.

That is one way in which same-sex marriages does indeed affect society at large.

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* Certainly, I believe it to be to the unmitigated good that children born under such circumstances face less social stigma than once was the case (if any at all). That the parents appear to face less and less, however, is among the contributing factors to our society's decline.

The Same-Sex Marriage Zeitgeist

I struck up an Internet friendship with artist and art reviewer Maureen Mullarkey back in the early days of blogging, begun with an initial contact concerning our agreement about same-sex marriage. That agreement has apparently plunged her into chilling circumstances:

Strange times we live in when it takes a ballot initiative to confirm the definition of marriage as the union of a man and a woman. Stranger still when endorsing that definition through the democratic process brings threats and reprisals.

In November, the San Francisco Chronicle published the names and home addresses of everyone who donated money in support of California's Proposition 8 marriage initiative. All available information, plus the amount donated, was broadcast. My name is on that list.

Emails started coming. Heavy with epithets and ad hominems, most in the you-disgust-me vein. Several accused me, personally, of denying the sender his single chance at happiness after a life of unrelieved oppression and second-class citizenship. Some were anonymous but a sizable number were signed, an indication of confidence in collective clout that belied howls of victimhood. New York's Gay City News asked for an interview because I was "one of only four New Yorkers who contributed more than $500."

I ignored the request, trashed the emails, and forgot about them. But the West Coast bureau chief of the New York Daily News did not forget.

The ensuing experiences included finding two men waiting at her apartment to "interview" her one night, receiving promises of professional retribution, and the implicit intimidation that comes with having one's home address published with the tone of "make the bitch pay."

For some, it seems, marriage is not so much about love as about self-validation and an expression of power. Whatever proves true of the former, we ought not expect the latter to be tempered by victory.

DOMA Was Never a Protector of Compromise

Back in the pre-Goodridge days, when those on either side of the same-sex marriage issue would have extensive debates on the merits of arguments, many on the pro-SSM side (notably Andrew Sullivan) argued that the Defense of Marriage Act would prevent a state judiciary from forcing nationalization of same-sex marriage. The traditionalist side pointed out that the arguments that were being made for SSM would be targeted directly at that legislation, and they've now been proven correct:

Now Ritchie, Bush and more than a dozen others are suing the federal government, claiming the act discriminates against gay couples and is unconstitutional because it denies them access to federal benefits that other married couples receive, such as pensions and health insurance. Plaintiffs also include Dean Hara, the widower of former U.S. Rep. Gerry Studds, the first openly gay member of the House of Representatives.

Yes, the "new lawsuit challenges only the portion of the law that prevents the federal government from affording Social Security and other benefits to same-sex couples," but "President Barack Obama has pledged to work to repeal DOMA." In any case, homosexuals from any state would be able to be married in the eyes of the federal government by acquiring the license in a state that offers it.

As I've been saying, the meaning of marriage is the key issue, here. That's why Rhody misses the mark when he comments, elsewhere, that "we can all agree we want to encourage the establishment of the family unit, which is definitely a conservative goal." The point is that a marital household, husband, wife, and (implicitly) their children should be a structure receiving especial encouragement. If there are no gradations to families — if they're all uniformly founded in the revocable choices between adults — then procreative pairs have no additional cultural motivation to see the possibility of having children as a change in the status of their relationship.

There's an ad for Blue Cross/Blue Shield in today's Providence Journal of a man and woman looking at sonograms. "You're a couple, but, you're about to be so much more," reads the caption. That "so much more" should be tied into the culture of marriage, and the main targets of its message should be couples that can become "so much more" even when they don't particularly want to.

What the Marriage Debate Means to Each Side

With my schedule, I wasn't able to attend this year's hearing at the Statehouse on same-sex marriage. The arguments that I've been making for years still stand, though, and to some extent, I'm not convinced that the battle has much to do with reason, anymore (if it ever did).

The dueling radio ads tell the story behind the debate. The traditionalist side, presented by the National Organization for Marriage, expresses concerns about the significance of cultural confusion when important definitions lose their meaning by putting some questions in the mouths of children. The radical side, voiced by Marriage Equality RI, features a marmish school teacher's voice explaining to her class how utterly obvious a civil rights issue marriage is.

The pro-same-sex-marriage ad is indicative of the mindset of the advocates behind its cause: There are no questions; nothing about the issue is so complicated or sensitive that teachers couldn't set about educating their public-school charges. It's amazing that they apparently don't realize how directly they are contributing to a central concern of their target audience: It isn't that Mike and Steve's wedding will affect any heterosexuals' marriages; it's that an entire worldview — one that has persisted throughout history and across boundaries — will be dismissed and attacked as deprecated bigotry as a matter of law and within our public institutions

Polls and Principles on Marriage

I have to say that I'm not sure what to make of Joe Trillo's planned strategy for dealing with same-sex marriage if he becomes governor and the issue comes up:

Were a bill allowing same-sex marriage to make it to his desk as governor, Trillo said he would let a public poll determine whether he vetoed it. "If over 60 percent of the people supported gay marriage ... I would not veto it." Conversely, he says he would "absolutely" sign into law Republican Sen. Leo Blais' bill to prohibit same-sex marriage.

But Trillo said he supports "civil unions" or "life partnerships" because "I basically believe in their cause" and "I think it needs a term or a word used to describe it that would make it totally understandable for what it is."

Now there's a guy hedging his bets. It's as if politicians have such an aversion to this topic that they don't wish to investigate why supporters of traditional marriage believe that the difference is more profound than just a word.

It would also be nice if the quoted political personages — or even the Providence Journal reporter who quotes them, Katherine Gregg — gave some indication of awareness that Senator Leo Blais has also placed on the table a proposal to create "reciprocal beneficiary agreements." Members of the public could justifiably argue that there's a difference from "civil unions," but at least the ruling class and the media would be furthering debate, rather than a cause.

Stumbling Down the Logical Aisle

Ray Hodges' ruminations on the morality of same-sex marriage are reasonable and presented with an even temper. Just so must be the tone of any dialogue on controversial matters. Unfortunately, his argument is a wholly erroneous construct, collapsing under the weight of misapprehensions, categorical non sequiturs, and an a priori conclusion.

The flaws emerge right at the beginning, when Hodges notes that his "question about gay marriage is not why [he, as a Catholic,] should be concerned about legalizing an immoral activity." Of course, the sexual acts to which he refers are already legal. The dispute, in the civic sphere, is whether those sexual acts are sufficiently indistinguishable from those associated with traditional marriage to negate all legal methods of treating the latter as unique. By the end of his letter, having determined to his own satisfaction that homosexual behavior is not immoral, Hodges admits no additional considerations prior to the leap to marital equivalence.

To take up that further argument, however, would rush past the fact that Hodges errs in hinging his reasoning on the false synonymity of "natural" and "moral." Indeed, immorality — sinfulness — comes so naturally to humankind that, we Christians believe, God offered a law to His chosen people (who had a terrible record of obeying it, thereafter) and ultimately went to the length of sacrificing His own Son to free us from the inevitability of sin and death. Natural law, in the Catholic Catechism, is not related to the popular notion of appearing in nature, but to "the original moral sense which enables man to discern by reason the good and the evil, the truth and the lie."

Even in secular terms, one need only trace the effects of humanity's foibles on civilization to see that morality seems most often to be a denial of "natural" tendencies. Marriage, itself, is meant to regulate the natural urge, especially among men, to stray from the families whom heterosexual activities tend to create. It is a foundational institution in our civilization's progress away from raw nature.

Mr. Hodges is free to brush aside core teachings of his Church, such as the critical importance of tradition, but the rejection of a theological worldview does not constitute a case for the innovation of same-sex marriage. We all want to be compassionate, and most of us wish to increase the world's sum of happiness, but radically altering the meaning of marriage is not a path toward either end.

Postponement and Corruption

Word on the street is that the RI Senate Judiciary Committee has indefinitely postponed its hearing on marriage issues.

On a related note, a source in a position to know informs me that the reason even informed citizens can be surprised by such events is that the General Assembly exempts itself from open meeting laws. Apparently, it's an annual tradition: The Republicans move to adhere to the laws, and the Democrats continue the exemption.

Nothing to see there, I guess.

Government and Marriage

I've been getting notices of an RI Senate Judiciary Committee hearing concerning three marriage-related bills on Tuesday afternoon, but there's currently no information online. The Judiciary Committee isn't on the legislative calendar, and the schedule for the committee lists no meetings.

Acknowledging the short time-frame in which they've been forced to act, the National Organization for Marriage — Rhode Island is asking people to get involved by attending the meeting, writing to the relevant legislators, and (although it's not mentioned on that page) to testify on behalf of the two bills that support traditional marriage.

Both of those bills were introduced by Republican Leo Blais, with one reinforcing the opposite-sex definition of marriage and the other creating "reciprocal beneficiary agreements" that would enable couples not eligible for marriage to gain some explicitly enumerated rights. As long-time readers will know, this is precisely the solution that I support: The government has an interest in supporting committed mutual care, but it also has an interest in affirming the unique relationship between one man and one woman. Inasmuch as it has no interest in, and no right to interfere with, a couple's non-procreative sexual activity (or lack thereof), there is no rational justification for making physical intimacy an implied requirement of an acknowledged relationship of reciprocal care.

Life's Potential

(H/T)

Sitting Down with the Treasurer

RI General Treasurer Frank Caprio invited Anchor Rising for a sit-down chat in his office last night, centering on pension issues, but touching on various other matters.

In general, I think the four of us in attendance were reasonably impressed with the treasurer's explanations for economic policies and his knowledge of political history in Rhode Island. In specific, some of the more detailed material is going to take time for us to digest prior to comment, but a few clips might be of interest to readers right off the digital recorder:

• On complete financial transparency in his office, to be unrolled in a few weeks: stream, download
• In opposition to the use of state-owned vehicles: stream, download
• I got a chuckle out of the notion of fear among those in his office promoted beyond the union's bounds to become (scary music) at-will employees: stream, download
• Caprio's got a merit-based promotion system in place with his workers' union, and he thinks the practice is transferrable across government: stream, download
• Apparently, Rhode Island "only" pays 7% of its revenue toward debt service. I wasn't wholly satisfied with the Caprio's description of the comparative appearance of that statistic against a typical business and wonder whether it's fair to compare the government to a mortgage-paying household: stream, download
• On the possibility of municipal bankruptcy (or entry into "a process"): stream, download
• On his pension-plan thinking. Apparently, much of the cost of switching to 401k would come from accounting rules, but with the possible loophole of diminishing, rather than "closing" the defined benefit program: stream, download
• The reason that Rhode Island actually ranks pretty well when it comes to retiree healthcare costs: stream, download
• On abortion and same-sex marriage, neither of which would be his center of focus for any campaigns or offices: stream, download
• Running for governor?: stream, download
• Wherein I continue to strive for an answer on the social issues: stream, download
• On eVerify and immigration: stream, download
• On branding the state otherwise than with corruption and mob films: stream, download
• With regard to a port project and other initiatives, the treasurer agrees with me that a broadly attractive economic environment (tax cuts included) ought to be the focus of policies: stream, download
• An interesting response to my question about his thoughts on Republicans running as Democrats ("Why not the reverse?") and a discussion of the RIGOP: stream, download

Nonsense Opposition to DOMA

One doesn't have to follow the same-sex marriage debate for long to recognize a strain of human tendencies with which I became familiar as an ideological minority in the college classroom.

As I duked it out with the professor, most of the students would rush to take his or her side (silence from others being an indicator that they may have feared to take mine), and any excuse to affirm their position would spark a declaration of the form, "See! That's conclusive." Sometimes the catalyst was a reasonable (but not decisive) point, but just as often it was a wholly inadequate analogy or even just a superficial semantic twisting of my own arguments.

Such is the Providence Journal's seconding of former U.S. Congressman and former Libertarian presidential candidate Bob Barr's recent op-ed arguing for repeal of the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA). Barr's key point is utterly nonsensical:

In effect, DOMA's language reflects one-way federalism: It protects only those states that don't want to accept a same-sex marriage granted by another state.

The Full Faith and Credit clause of the U.S. Constitution doesn't need to be guided in two directions on this matter. It simply isn't plausible to suggest that states that want to recognize same-sex marriage might be forced not to because another state does not.

There are only two actual reasons to support the repeal of DOMA. The first is to curry political favor with the homosexual movement and those who like to feel as if they can play the Right Side of History game on their behalf. The second is to enable the judiciary to force a radical change in the definition of marriage from coast to coast, thus enabling elected officials to allow their proclaimed personal view of marriage to be subverted in a way that leaves their hands clean.

In the process, mounds of verbiage are being piled up to excuse the imposition of a policy preference based on emotion, not reason, and to obscure the implication that supporters, while they may believe democracy to be a nifty principle, are much more interested in crafting the laws to suit their own tastes than supporting their fellow Americans' right to shape their own civil society.

Redefine a Word and the Problem Goes Away!

Some readers may have found cause for a sparkle of hope in the following turnabout, as explained in the NY Times:

The number of black children being raised by two parents appears to be edging higher than at any time in a generation, at nearly 40 percent, according to newly released census data.

Demographers said such a trend might be partly attributable to the growing proportion of immigrants in the nation’s black population. It may have been driven, too, by the values of an emerging black middle class, a trend that could be jeopardized by the current economic meltdown.

Unfortunately, I think Domenico Bettinelli is probably correct that the third explanation dominates... and invalidates:

The Census Bureau attributed an indeterminate amount of the increase to revised definitions adopted in 2007, which identify as parents any man and woman living together, whether or not they are married or the child’s biological parents.

Dom writes:

There's no denying that grandparents, aunts and uncles, foster parents, or just good-hearted folks who raise other people's children are better for these children than not having anything, the re-definition of the word and concept of "parent" broadens its meaning to insensibility and risks watering it down, not unlike what has been done to the word and concept of "marriage" by civil partnerships, same-sex "marriage" and no-fault divorce.

It is undeniable that children are better off when raised by both parents living together in a loving household.

Yep, and as Dom goes on to suggest, the forces of "progress" are laboring to ensure that we soon lack the necessary language even to discuss such plain realities.

All in the Name of Civil Rights

From the town hall to the courthouse, the same-sex marriage movement has been characterized by a willingness to disregard law and democratic practice. (Which isn't surprising, from a crowd that goes so far as to declare a desire to defend a pivotal cultural institution to be bigotry.) California Attorney General Jerry Brown is the latest to shirk his duties and infringe on the civil rights of a majority of citizens in the name of liberty:

In a December 19 press release, the attorney general said: "Proposition 8 must be invalidated because the amendment process cannot be used to extinguish fundamental constitutional rights without compelling justification." He thus endorsed the idea that marriage, as it has always been understood, is so grossly contrary to California's constitutional principles that an amendment protecting that understanding cannot be allowed into the constitution even if duly enacted by voters. ...

All of this serves to confirm the worst fears of Proposition 8's supporters. The political and legal elites of the state have done all within their power to endorse the idea that support for traditional marriage is the rankest kind of bigotry that does not deserve even a nominal word in its favor by