Gay Marriage is Conservative Victory?

A very interesting column from David Brooks. He salutes gay marriage as a lone modern indicator of people voluntarily seeking to bind their freedom in commitments.

“Once, gay culture was erroneously associated with bathhouses and nightclubs. Now, the gay and lesbian rights movement is associated with marriage and military service. Once the movement was associated with self-sacrifice, it was bound to become popular.”

Gay marriage is thus a conservative victory, in his telling, and he wonders whether it will lead to a trend. ” Maybe we’ll see other spheres in life where restraints are placed on maximum personal choice.”

Gay Marriage Is a Done Deal

Gay marriage is a done deal. It will soon be legally sanctioned nearly everywhere in America, regardless of what the courts say. Public opinion has swung decisively.

It’s certainly surprised me. I remember reading Andrew Sullivan advocating gay marriage (in 1995?) and thinking he was far out on the edge.

How could America change its mind so quickly? Here are some reasons:

–Gays comprise a very small percentage of the population, indivisible from the rest of us (i.e. not identified with any ethnicity or income level or gender). It’s hard to imagine such a tiny minority making much difference in society. Thus it’s not that threatening. And it’s hard to stigmatize gays as belonging to “them” once you know a few. The brave homosexuals who came out of the closet and demonstrated that they were ordinary folks have driven a lot of this change.

–As David Brooks wrote yesterday, gay marriage is socially conservative. It values family stability and lasting love. In contemporary America gays seem to be virtually the only people thoroughly excited about marriage. How can you be horrified? Plus they make their appeal on the basis of fairness, a hard claim for any American to deny.

The really odd thing is that while gays rush toward marriage, marriage is in trouble among non-elite Americans. If you didn’t finish college your chances of getting married and staying married are small. The odds are good that a child in non-elite America will grow up without two parents.

The acceptance of gay marriage is closely related to a deeper, longer-running trend toward defining marriage by love alone. Through most of history marriage was also an economic partnership and an arrangement for producing offspring. (Reading Anthony Trollope’s The Way We Live Now impressed this on me once again.) Many also saw marriage as religiously holy, a window into God’s relationship to his people. Such factors operate on a longer timeline than merely human love, which is famously volatile. (Consider Shakespeare’s sonnets.)

What will marriage look like a generation from now? Gay marriage will certainly be part of the mix. But marriage may be a temporary, shifting affinity significant to only a minority of people. Because what is the point, if all you need is love? You don’t need marriage to love. And when love dies, is anything left?

While gay marriage is here to stay, it’s not clear how great a prize it will prove to be.

The Sexual Revolution: A Brief Report in Progress

I grew up in an era when sexual freedom first intoxicated a generation. It made a perfect match between individualism and technology, loosening the communal ties that bound us.

Thanks to technology we had learned how to have sex without making babies, and we had learned to cure diseases passed on through sex. Liberated from nasty side-effects, people could pursue pleasure without fear. And, many did.

These developments attracted a lot of media fascination, and many denunciations from pulpits. It was a dramatic time, but in the end less confrontational than you might think. The culture mainly groaned and made room for the new ways. Unsupervised coed dorms became the norm. Playboy became the winking bad boy of mainstream culture.

I don’t think it occurred to many people that marriage would really change–only the double standards and hypocrisy of relations leading up to marriage. There had always been hanky panky. Now it was normalized.

So the second wave of the sexual revolution came as a surprise: a dramatic increase in divorce. That wasn’t planned. Again, though, society groaned and rolled over. Experts opined that it was probably good for the children not to be raised in unhappy circumstances; and certainly good for the unhappy partners to leave each other behind.

Simultaneously a revolution was occurring in homosexual behavior: out of the closet, defiantly out of the closet, for a time engulfed in extraordinary displays of promiscuity, eventually settling down, almost, into happy domesticity.

Abortion also became mainstream: often grieved in private, but widely practiced and accepted in public.

We had, by the end of the eighties, generally accepted premarital sexual activity and an unprecedented divorce rate. But in most people’s minds, the fundamental structure still hadn’t changed. Eventually most people got married. Children were produced by married couples.

However, the revolution kept rolling, and it is rolling still. Divorces continued, and the children of divorce were even more prone to divorce, or never to marry in the first place. The scandal of out-of-wedlock babies gradually disappeared. First those young mothers were treated with sympathy; then with admiration. Today, fathers are optional and babies come through many avenues. Test-tube babies, surrogate mothers, lesbian couples producing babies with the help of artificial insemination–once the province of science fiction these choices are all absolutely mainstream today. Young couples not only have sex without a thought of marriage, they live together not as a prelude to marriage but simply as a state of preference or convenience. Weddings are a possible event in the life of a couple, but marriage and partnership are now only loosely connected.

It goes further. The very nature of male and female has come under question. People can and do change gender.

Since my college days alarmists have been predicting that the dominos will continue to fall. They have been consistently proved right. What seemed impossible a generation back–gay marriage? gender transformation?–has come true.

And Christians, while still serving as alarmists, really don’t have much to say. For one thing, by most measures Christians behave much like everybody else. More importantly, nobody much cares what Christians think. We can perhaps scare and shock the believers, but we can’t even get a faint rise in the pulse rate of anybody else. The culture has moved on.

**

I sometimes used to think the pendulum would swing back, but we’ve lived with some pretty horrendous consequences of the sexual revolution– millions dead of AIDS, a fatherless generation–and there’s not the slightest sign of retreat. What I foresee is more. Whatever structures remain are on shaky ground.

The chief remaining taboos–rape, sexual harassment, child sex abuse, child pornography, man-boy relations–have in common that there is a youthful or non-consenting victim. Maybe that reservation will hold. We’ll see.

I’m not trying to scare anybody. I’m past the alarmist stage. I am just waking up and asking myself: how does one live as a Christian in a truly post-Christian society? In some areas–human rights for example–there is reason for encouragement that post-Christian society has continued to advance Christian values. But sex is pretty basic stuff. Fidelity has some appreciation. Chastity has very little.

My question isn’t finally about sex. It’s more about identity. Do we abandon traditional mores and adapt our expectations to a new situation? Do we become “anonymous Christians,” as I understand is common in Sweden? Do we form strict, isolated counter-cultural colonies, as the Amish do? Do we preach an unrelentingly unpleasant message on the streets, as Jeremiah did?

I’m asking myself, “What would Jesus do?”

For This One Day

A few days ago our friend John came to see us–John whose wife Nancy died a year ago. They were a lovely pair and very close. John wanted very much to talk about Nancy and her death, showing us photos of her last days and letting us inhabit the grief he is going through. It was a great honor, and very touching, to share with him. It reminded me what marriage is meant to be.

I asked John how he managed. He said sometimes he was not sure that he could. It just seemed to be too much. But when he reflected on Nancy as a gift given him for 33 years, an extraordinary gift greater than he could ever deserve, he found that he could manage. He wasn’t sure that he could live without Nancy for the rest of his life, but he could live for this one day.

Where Is Mrs. Jesus?

I liked Ross Douthat’s commentary on the recent “Mrs. Jesus” media frisson caused by an obscure, late, possibly forged document mentioning Jesus’ wife. The only reason this made the news is because it suits us to reimagine Jesus in our image, and “our image” is certainly not celibate.

Douthat points out the classic “scholarly” move (scholarly only because it is made by scholars) in puzzling over why none of the original sources mention Jesus’ marriage. He cites the Smithsonian piece quoting the document’s discoverer, Harvard’s Karen King:

The question the discovery raises, King told me, is, “Why is it that only the literature that said he was celibate survived? And all of the texts that showed he had an intimate relationship with Magdalene or is married didn’t survive? Is that 100 percent happenstance? Or is it because of the fact that celibacy becomes the ideal for Christianity?”

Two options: either random accidents of history have misplaced those documents, or else there was an early church conspiracy to erase them. The possibility that no documents mention Jesus’ marriage because he wasn’t, in fact, married, is too simplistic, too unsophisticated, to consider.

A Separation

I’d like to recommend “A Separation,” an Academy Award 2011 movie made in Iran. The film is not violent but it is extremely intense. It’s about a quarreling husband and wife, living an urban, car-driving, apartment-dwelling life. Children’s school examinations and the care of an Alzheimer’s-afflicted parent are the crucial issues–not Israel or, in fact, any kind of political or religious ideology.

On one level, this is a movie about how the dissolution of a marriage affects people–regular, fundamentally decent people. At a deeper level it’s about willfulness and stubbornness, which means it speaks to all of us, whatever our circumstances. I won’t give away the ending, which is a surprise that sticks in your mind.

While the movie is not particularly religious, it’s interesting in depicting an Islamic society. Just as is the case in America, religion touches people in many very ordinary ways. The devout and the non-devout act quite differently in some ways, and in others are just the same. It’s not a pro-Islamic movie. I would say, however, that it reflects a fundamentally Islamic view of family and marriage, perhaps because of the makers’ convictions, and perhaps simply because that is what the artists had to work with in making an Iranian picture.

From what I can tell, Islam is a religion profoundly in crisis, trapped in a dead-end. Nevertheless, the Islam behind this film is deeply humane, and its convictions about humanity are both strongly felt and relevant to all people. It spoke to me.

Learning comes from many sources, including some that we find surprising. That is one more reason to take care not to demonize others.

Why Marriage

My friend David Andersen sent me this quote, from G.K. Chesterton’s The Man Who Was Thursday:

Through all this ordeal his root horror had been isolation, and there are no words to express the abyss between isolation and having one ally.  It may be conceded to the mathematicians that four is twice two.  But two is not twice one;  two is two thousand times one.  That is why, in spite of a hundred disadvantages, the world will always return to monogamy.

With all my heart, two is two thousand times one. And I embrace, “his root horror … isolation.”

Why Marriage?

My daughter got married a few weeks ago. Having participated in planning this wonderful extravaganza I can assure you that weddings are not an endangered species. Marriages are. During the same period that weddings have grown so much more elaborately celebrative—and so much more expensive–we have seen the bottom dropping out of marriage in America. Divorce, cohabitation, singleness, all up. Intact marriages, down. We’re not yet where Scandinavia is, but we’re getting there fast.

When I was growing up, one’s life plan was captured in a jingle: first comes love, then comes marriage, then comes Mary with a baby carriage. Looking around at the wedding party for my daughter, that jingle didn’t appear fully operative. For many, the “marriage” part was tentative and delayed, and the sequence of events was jumbled.

Which doesn’t mean that men and women will stop pairing up in relatively stable ways. Some things don’t change. The tendency of men and women to become lasting partners is a function of our natures.

So are the infidelity and discord that destroy many such relationships. These also are cross-culturally robust, and a consistent feature of relationships between men and women through history. Our draw toward monogamous, heterosexual partnerships and our draw toward that which destroys those partnerships will continue to collide, as they always have. So I expect.

The change comes in societal supports for lasting partnerships, the religious and social mores that create expectations of permanence, and disapproval and opposition to breaking apart. These have grown weak. A lot of people would say: if people love each other and want to marry, we will celebrate with them, but if they don’t want such commitments, or if they feel they can’t sustain such commitments any longer, “no problem.”

Why fight for marriage? Why make it a societal project? Why take sides for marriage, and against dissolution?

Jeff and Janet Johnson, both long-time mentors of my daughter, shared the officiating in my daughter’s wedding. Janet made the case for marriage:

Your love is priceless and needs to be guarded.  Selfishness, pride, lack of forgiveness and inattentiveness are but some of the many thieves capable of stealing away your love. In a sense your marriage is like a treasure chest forming a protective casing around your love, preventing your love from being stolen. Treasure chests have hard sides. The hardness protects what is on the inside…

Many people live with the false assumption that love enables a marriage to survive. But that is not the case. Your love will not ensure your marriage will survive; it is your marriage which will ensure your love will survive. This is the very reason God ordained marriage. Marriage keeps love alive, not love keeps marriage alive.

I would add that the love protected in marriage is more than the feelings of one partner for the other. It involves a broader community of interest: children, neighbors, church, extended family. That community suffers when a marriage breaks, or if a marriage never forms. It loses some measure of reassurance, security, stability, and delight.

That is why our communities should fight for marriage, to do what can be done in a gentle way to sustain and protect marriages. I say gentle. I don’t favor the savage sanctions of some earlier eras. They left such a bitter taste that they undermined their own purposes. And they were often unjust. Surely, though, there are good and gentle ways to show our tireless support for marriage, ways that enhance human flourishing.

Living Alone

Sunday’s New York Times has a fascinating piece by NYU sociologist Eric Klinenberg. It begins with this startling statement: “More people live alone than at any other time in history.” It notes that in Manhattan and Washington, D.C., almost half of all households have just one occupant.

In a chart comparing nations, the most solo country of all is Sweden, where 47% live alone. At the bottom are India and Pakistan, where 3% of households have just one occupant. The U.S. and Canada are in the middle of that broad range, at 27%.

Klinenberg puts a rosy spin on the trend, noting that people who live alone aren’t necessarily lonely or isolated. In fact, he says, “living alone can make it easier to be social, because single people have more free time, absent family obligations, to engage in social activities.” He notes that “compared with their married counterparts, single people are more likely to spend time with friends and neighbors, go to restaurants and attend art classes and lectures.” It’s true of older people too: “Single seniors had the same number of friends and core discussion partners as their married peers.”

We’re not necessarily becoming more solitary or isolated, then, but we are shedding obligations. When you live alone you can be as socially engaged as you wish—on your schedule and your terms.

When you share a living space, on the other hand, you have certain nagging obligations: to cleanliness, to schedule, to shared expenses… and perhaps also to shared meals and social times. Obviously marriage and family—which are equally in decline—obligate you much more deeply. Is there any doubt this is the environment where character and spirituality are formed?

It’s not a simple matter. Freedom and privacy are terrifically valuable, and our evolution from tribe to democracy is progress, I believe. Nevertheless, I feel some deep concerns over this trend. Libertarianism enthralls the right on certain issues and the left on certain other issues. (Economic liberty, gun-toting liberty, abortion liberty, sexual liberty.)There are good grounds for wanting to be left alone, especially by the government. But there are also good grounds for entering a covenant commitment, whether to people sharing your apartment, to a wife or husband or children, or even to the government formed by “we the people.”

Clearly, we’re moving in the general direction of “we the individualists.”

A Liberal and Conservative Mash-up

David Brooks has a good column in today’s NYT on the way social breakdowns—in marriage and family and education—interact with global economic change. He shares the story of a young woman who, though tough and hard-working, loses out on a good education because of her family problems and an early pregnancy. She’s stuck, unable to advance because she doesn’t have the education she needs. Raising a child alone holds her back. Taxing the rich won’t help her; neither will cutting taxes on the rich and deregulating the economy. Both Democratic and Republican policy prescriptions seem to miss her situation, and to miss the American economy and its actual issues.

Brooks says we need bold action to strengthen families and support education, so that the whole population—not just an educated elite—can compete in a globalized economy. He says we also need a revamped, lean tax-and-regulatory system so that business can compete globally. “This agenda is libertarian in the capitalist sector and activist in the human capital sector.”

Two caveats. First, taxes aren’t about punishment, but about allocating resources. We’ve cut taxes for the rich so that they pay at the lowest rates in modern history. Nudging that back a bit isn’t the second coming of Robespierre. It can help provide some of those family and educational supports that people need. The money has to come from somewhere.

And second, it’s not clear that American business is in trouble because of excessive taxes and regulation. There are problems, certainly, but right now we’re digging out of a hole enabled by under-regulation. “Libertarian in the capitalist sector” sometimes produces disaster—just as often, I would say, as does “activism in the human capital sector.” Deregulation and simplification of taxes have to be done right—and there are plenty of capitalist forces, throwing lots of bribes in Washington, who want to bend the rules in their favor.

That said, I agree with the thrust of Brooks’ piece. I doubt the government is ever very good at industrial policy, advancing “green jobs” or whatever. I want the government to set the rules—including a carbon tax—and let the forces of capitalism find the preferred way.

The government is really the only way, however, to provide good social services including education for the less-than-elite. This is not just do-gooding; it helps bring economic opportunity to people who will work hard and play by the rules. This too has to be done right. But when it is, that is good for us all.