Back to basics with gay marriage

I've been allergic all my life, and for the last 15 years or so plagued by nasal polyps. A couple of months ago I started taking Nasonex and for the first time since I can remember I've been consistently breathing clear through my nose. I enjoy this immensely. I lie down in bed on my back, close my mouth and fill up my lungs. Breathing has become a thing.

I also enjoy being married -- happy to come home in the evening when my wife is home, happy to spend every weekend together, etc. And with gay marriage filling the headlines, I notice the pleasure and privilege of it a bit more.  Marriage has become a thing.

Gay activists, or simply the rising visibility of gay couples, have made marriage cool again. They've raised its value in my eyes, or rather made me a little more conscious of its value, which is pretty much the same thing.  And I think that the drive for gay marriage has raised the institution's value materially by making the whole society think hard about what it's really about.

The west has valorized marriage for true love, as the free choice of two people who decide they're right for each other, for more than a century. That ideal was getting a little worn around the edges, pecked at by perspectives from biology, and psychology, and probability, and economics, and political ideology -- and by postmodern skepticism generally. In real terms, too, the institution as we knew it has eroded, thanks first to divorce and then to the advancing tide of out-of-wedlock births.

Gay marriage is not going to change that, or arrest change in this ever-changing but indestructible human institution. But it has made the enduring reality of individual choice and the eternal viability of lifelong commitment and the value and utility of two-parent families a bit clearer.

God evolves

It's good news, I suppose, that more and more pastors and theologians are finding scriptural sanction for gay marriage, as  Evan McMorris-Santoro reports -- a nice illustration of Robert Wright's thesis that God grows kinder and better as human society evolves socially and ethically.

The process involves obvious self-delusion, as interpretation of texts invested with supreme authority always does. Here, for example, is Obama ally and megachurch pastor Delman Coates putting his "flexibility" on display:

Coates is a Biblical scholar and said his own views on marriage equality came from studying his faith's holy book....He said his understanding of Christian faith has always required flexibility and open-mindedness.

"We are evolving. Not just in our understanding of civil marriage, but we're also evolving in our understanding of what the scripture is affirming and what it is condemning," Coates said. "I think as more reasoned Christians take a look at scripture, it's pretty clear."

You say you want an evolution

Our understanding of how politicians "evolve" is, I think, evolving.

As Obama moved through his slow dance toward embracing gay marriage, the word became obvious code for "I'm picking my moment to change my position" -- i.e., "reveal my true attitude," which had been on record since 1996. He first set the clock running in October 2010 (all Obama quotes below are taken from this ABC 5/912 timeline):

“I have been to this point unwilling to sign on to same-sex marriage primarily because of my understandings of the traditional definitions of marriage,” President Obama said during an interview with liberal bloggers. “But I also think you’re right that attitudes evolve, including mine. And I think that it is an issue that I wrestle with and think about because I have a whole host of friends who are in gay partnerships.”

By the time he went the last yard more than a year and a half later, his "evolution"  had become a punchline. The process was at once disingenuous, since the conclusion was foregone, and candid, in that he did describe a mental process that in some sense and at some time probably did take place:

A worrisome microsamplling

My takeaway from several articles published in the wake of Obama's statement of support for gay marriage was that the 'evolution' would not significantly hurt his support in the African American community. Perhaps not. But trolling for voter registrations and supporter signups in a couple of parks in Allentown, PA yesterday, my little group encountered three African Americans who said they would not vote for Obama because of his stand on gay marriage. Can't say how many people, or black people, we spoke to overall.  But those reactions did jolt a bit.

Santorum double-blind

The core of Rick Santorum's domestic policy and governing philosophy is to boost the two-parent family. That's his anti-poverty program. Here he is in today's debate in New Hampshire:

And I believe that there’s one thing that is undermining this country, and it is the breakdown of the American family. It’s undermining our economy. You see the rates of poverty among single- parent families, which are -- moms are doing heroic things, but it’s harder. It’s five times higher in a single-parent family.

We -- we know there’s certain things that work in America. The Brookings Institute came out with a study just a few -- couple of years ago that said, if you graduate from high school, and if you work, and if you’re a man, if you marry, if you’re a woman, if you marry before you have children, you have a 2 percent chance of being in poverty in America. And to be above the median income, if you do those three things, 77 percent chance of being above the median income.

Obama sets a clock ticking on gay marriage

In this afternoon's press conference, Obama made it very clear that he is gearing up to give way on his nominal opposition to gay marriage:

     With respect to the issue of whether gays and lesbians should be able to get married, I’ve spoken about this recently.  As I’ve said, my feelings about this are constantly evolving.  I struggle with this.  I have friends, I have people who work for me, who are in powerful, strong, long-lasting gay or lesbian unions.  And they are extraordinary people, and this is something that means a lot to them and they care deeply about.

     At this point, what I’ve said is, is that my baseline is a strong civil union that provides them the protections and the legal rights that married couples have.  And I think -- and I think that’s the right thing to do.  But I recognize that from their perspective it is not enough, and I think is something that we’re going to continue to debate and I personally am going to continue to wrestle with going forward.

How can you 'continue to wrestle' when you haven't left yourself a leg to stand on? What would Obama have us think he says to those gay friends who don't think his support of civil unions is enough?  This is someone not even trying to hide that there's nothing behind this stance but political expedience.

Dept. of unpublished letters, cont.

To the Times, on Monday:

In his contrast of marriage, sex and childbirth patterns in red  and blue states, Ross Douthat notes that more liberal states' lower rates of teen and out-of-wedlock birth depend in part on heavier recourse to abortion. 

 

How can blue states retain their more stable marriage and childbirth practices while reducing abortion? One partial answer is universal health care. A study published in the New England Journal of Medicine this March finds that abortion rates declined significantly during the first two years that Massachusetts implemented its comprehensive health insurance plan.  In the same vein, T.R. Reid observed in a Washington Post op-ed that wealthy countries with universal health care all have far lower abortion rates than those prevalent in the U.S. 

In a March 21 column, Douthat grouped Reid's implicit claim that the health reform bill would reduce the U.S. abortion rate with other "liberal" claims about the bill's likely good effects and concluded, "As a conservative, I suspect they're wrong." He did add that as an American he hope that he himself was wrong, since the bill would become law. 

I trust that as an opponent of abortion, Douthat particularly hopes he's wrong about the new health reform law's long-term effects on that front.

From a short history of sexuality

From a NYT account (by Jeremy Peters) of weak opposition to gay marriage in New York, this jumped out:

The state’s Roman Catholic bishops have been somewhat distracted, too, having focused their lobbying energies this session on defeating a bill that would extend the statute of limitations for victims of sexual abuse to bring civil claims, and have appeared unprepared for the battle over marriage.

Let's not say they were caught with their pants down...

Brooks' assault on reason

Funny that David Brooks dismisses moral philosophy because studying it doesn't seem to increase "proactive moral behavior."

The values that one would think a non-Christianist American conservative would hold most dear are a product of moral philosophy:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed....

Brooks sagely reports that moral judgements are "rapid intuitive decisions" rather than the product of deliberation. Day-to-day, perhaps they are. But millions of Americans were persuaded by watching southern policemen club nonviolent demonstrators that segregation was wrong. Sit-in participants and freedom marchers were demonstrating a very clearly articulated moral philosophy (see Letter from a Birmingham Jail) that changed this country.

Perhaps Brooks finds it comforting to think that morality can be entirely explained by evolutionary biology. Conservatives often find it hard to acknowledge that human ethics advance over time - and to accord judges the authority to incorporate those advances into law.

Over time, however, Americans have been persuaded that slavery is wrong. That women deserve property rights, the vote, equal pay for equal work. That 60-hour work weeks for children are wrong. Now, we're in the process of concluding that marriage for gay people is right.

Those advances in morality were not (are not) "rapid intuitive decisions." They worked through public spectacle, and public discourse, ultimately informed by moral philosophy.

If evolution shapes our values, it shapes them through our reason as much as through emotion. Just as perception and evaluation can't easily be separated, neither can thought and feeling.