Why Abortion Won’t Go Away

Ross Douthat has an outstanding short essay on the media response to Kermit Gosnell, the doctor who killed newborns. He quotes, at length, from abortion rights advocates, and gives them their due. They are right in saying that doctors like this would be a lot less likely to exist if there were easy, convenient access to professional abortion clinics. In a perverse way, restrictions on access actually enable devils like Gosnell.

Where such abortion rights advocates never go, however, is the bloody and physical reality of late-term abortions. They don’t focus on the actual fetuses/babies –one different from the other only by the matter of whether a doctor is operating on them inside the womb or outside. And that, Douthat points out, is what is so awful and compelling about Gosnell’s case.

One might have expected abortion controversies to have dried up long ago. The reason they persist–the reason why abortion is not really accepted after forty years of legal practice–is simply those fetuses/babies. It is very difficult to focus on them and remain free and easy about abortion.

Clearly, we live in a time when people want to go about their sexual business without minding anybody’s moral scruples. Most would rather live and let live and not think about it. Given that strong current of sexual individualism, I can’t see abortion rights really becoming threatened in the foreseeable future. But at the same time, I don’t see the issue quite disappearing, either. We don’t have to think about those fetuses/babies most days. But cases will surface to remind us of them.

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?”

Jesus’ Silence

I heard it again a few days ago. “Jesus never said anything about homosexuality, only Paul did.”

People say this thinking that Jesus’ silence is a point in favor of affirming homosexual behavior. But they really haven’t thought it through. The silence of Jesus, if it is meaningful at all, is a point against affirming homosexual behavior.

Jesus was a Jew who spent almost his entire ministry among Jews. It’s well known that 1st century Jews had a strong ethic of heterosexual marriage. Like many conservative communities through history they did not accept homosexual behavior. Their Scriptures were against it. Their social structures made no space for it. Homosexual behavior was common and approved in Greco-Roman culture, but Jews found it decadent and abhorrent.

I assume that some Jews in first century Judaism had homosexual desires. But it is very unlikely that those who lived in Judea had opportunity to act on those desires, except in the most secretive way.

Jesus might have spoken up against this. He did speak courageously against his culture and religious tradition on other issues. For example, he opposed the tightly restrictive understanding of Sabbath, a volatile subject. He opposed the way men used divorce. He was never shy about speaking out against the status quo. But he didn’t speak about homosexuality. Why not? Probably for the same reason he didn’t speak about many other issues. The community had a settled policy that he had no quarrel with. If he disagreed, he would surely speak. Since he didn’t, the most likely explanation is that he was, regarding homosexuality, a conventional 1st century Jew.

You can’t prove anything from silence, but that’s certainly the most likely explanation.

Why was Jesus silent while Paul addressed the topic several times? That’s easy: Paul’s ministry was in the diaspora, where Jews mixed with Greeks and Romans. Homosexuality was prevalent. Paul addressed the topic because it was a question, in a way that it was not in Judea. He, too, reaffirmed a traditional Jewish stance.

We are in the midst of a social revolution regarding sexuality, and I don’t find it at all easy to know what to say on many issues, including homosexuality. It would be easiest to dispense with religious traditions and simply affirm the 21st century ethic of individual liberty. For those who retain respect for (let alone obedience to) Jewish and Christian traditions, however, it’s important to be honest. Jesus didn’t speak about homosexuality, so far as we know. That leaves us with the Jewish tradition unaltered and carried forward into Christian tradition.

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.

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.”

Why Men Should Not Be Ordained

A friend (a woman, naturally) passed this on to me. I thought it was pretty funny. Also helpful in reminding ourselves that what passes for an argument often isn’t.

Ten Reasons Why Men Should Not Be Ordained For Ministry

10. A man’s place is in the army.

9. The pastoral duties of men who have children might distract them from the responsibility of being a parent.

8. The physique of men indicates that they are more suited to such tasks as chopping down trees and wrestling mountain lions. It would be “unnatural” for them to do ministerial tasks.

7. Man was created before woman, obviously as a prototype. Thus, they represent an experiment rather than the crowning achievement of creation.

6. Men are too emotional to be priests or pastors. Their conduct at football and basketball games demonstrates this.

5. Some men are handsome, and this will distract women worshipers.

4. Pastors need to nurture their congregations. But this is not a traditional male role. Throughout history, women have been recognized as not only more skilled than men at nurturing, but also more fervently attracted to it. This makes them the obvious choice for ordination.

3. Men are prone to violence. No really masculine man wants to settle disputes except by fighting about them. Thus they would be poor role models as well as dangerously unstable in positions of leadership.

2. The New Testament tells us that Jesus was betrayed by a man. His lack of faith and ensuing punishment remind us of the subordinated position that all men should take.

1. Men can still be involved in church activities, even without being ordained. They can sweep sidewalks, repair the church roof, and perhaps even lead the song service on Father’s Day. By confining themselves to such traditional male roles, they can still be vitally important in the life of the church.

By Paul Neeley

And You Think You Have Gender Issues

See if you can guess who this sweet little girl might be.

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