Filed under: Culture
The following thoughts were originally sent in an email to a few friends and former coworkers. I was encouraged to share them, so I shall.
Sitting on the Amtrak Regional train to Philadelphia on my way home for Thanksgiving, I stare out the window at graffiti covered landmarks and the rest of urban sprawl’s slow, benign destruction of my country and wonder why things are the way they are. Having deemed the replacement of the Mona Lisa with modern slop and William Shakespeare with Nicolas Sparks insufficient, we now look to the amber waves of grain. purple mountains majesty, and the fruited plains as impediments to mini malls and Wal-Marts. Formerly the world’s greatest producer, we are poised to abandoned American industry and its millions of jobs and priceless history in favor of trillion dollar care packages for multinational corporations. What was formerly cliché spitting-into-the-wind about America’s long descent has become reality. Parents can’t take care of their kids anymore; it takes a village. Yet small towns are sacrificed to this urban and suburban mess.
I am aware of the irony. I type this on a laptop. I am a passenger on a train system abhorred by my anti-modernity predecessors such as President Martin Van Buren. I have an ipod and a fairly sophisticated cell phone. But to argue that the advent of technological progress has not in any way dumbed-down our society is nearly impossible, especially if you find yourself–as I recently did–in front of the idiot box trying to figure out how we got from Dickens’s packed-house reading of A Christmas Carol in Boston to “The Hills” and “Gossip Girl.” Or even, over a relatively shorter period of time, Fugazi to Good Charlotte, Bruce Springsteen to Jack Johnson or Dave Matthews. The only question more frightening than “How did we get here?” is “Where are we going?”
The following was posted on The GW Patriot’s blog in response to some discussions on gay marriage. The original post can be found here.
Andrew Clark, if you ever have trouble publishing for the Hatchet, I am extending, unilaterally, an invitation to write for the Patriot. Why? Mr. Clark has inspired a level of vitriol normally reserved for Patriot staff after writing this piece in the Hatchet. Our own Bill Flanigen has called it “Dumb, dumb, dumb.” Travis at the Colonialist–you remember those guys, the ones that drooled over “the most awe-inspiring, jaw-dropping, intellectually honest, honest, beautiful speech I’ve ever heard in my life. His face, his eyes, his voice: a serrated poem of a man,” followed by enormous joy over the ground breaking notion that Obama is getting a puppy for the White House (OMGGZ KIRK!)–refers to Clark as “a backwards thinking individual tolerant of discrimination.” How open-minded! That being said, Clark is off-track in his argument, but I’ll get there in a moment.
Travis’s claim that “this isn’t about opinions” is right for all the wrong reasons. Culturally, the definition of marriage was decided long ago, and no California proposition can change that. Whether the State redefines marriage to include homosexual, poly-amorous, bisexual, etc. marriages is irrelevant to the institution itself. It will always be between a man and a woman because it is religious in nature, and the state does not apply to the same authority the Church does. As St. Thomas More once declared, “I die the king’s good servant, but God’s first.”
It may seem contrary to my point to declare the religious argument irrelevant. I do so because, whether I believe it should be this way or not, the state has become extremely involved in marriage for some time. Indeed, it is my own personal belief that monogamous, faithful couples of all stripes should be given tax breaks, and if that means universal civil unions than so be it. If marriage was just about consenting civil contracts, than it would be solely the business of the state, as Bill presupposes. But it’s not.
Travis, rather comically (they are a humor blog, right?) confounds the right to marry to the right to clean water for blacks in the 60’s. But the states have prohibited citizens from marriage for a long time with little objection. Roughly half of all states prohibit first cousins from marrying, and all prohibit marriage of closer blood relatives, even if the individuals being married are sterile and in love. In all states, it is illegal to attempt to marry more than one person, or even to pass off more than one person as one’s spouse. Some states restrict the marriage of people suffering from syphilis or other diseases. Are these the next boundaries to go?
I do not mean to say that all of these situations are equal (I can see the comments now: YOU BELIEVE HOMOSEXUALITY IS A VENEREAL DISEASE??), but rather that marriage is an institution with strict rules. Marriage, founded as an institution between man and God, is subject to moral and religious scrutiny. This MUST be addressed. Travis and others urge folks like Andrew Clark to “just think” but they fail to articulate an argument deeper that “this is love” and “their love for one another is real.”
If marriage was about love and only love, than this would be an easy issue. Unfortunately, this logic is absurd. Marriage is a cultural, moral institution meant to be a steadying force for societal progress. For centuries, the basis for marriage has not been love (imagine how romantic a proposal from your’s truly would be) but the transmission of one generation to the next through the creation and nurturing of new life. Dr. Somerville of McGill University’s Centre of Medicine, Ethics, and Law has said: “By institutionalizing the relationship that has the inherent capacity to transmit life — that between a man and a woman — marriage symbolizes and engenders respect for the transmission of human life.”
Dr. Somerville continues:
To change the definition of marriage to include same-sex couples would destroy its capacity to function in the ways outlined above, because it could no longer represent the inherently procreative relationship of opposite-sex pair-bonding. It would be to change the essence and nature of marriage as the principal societal institution establishing the norms that govern procreation. Marriage involves public recognition of the spouses’ relationship and commitment to each other. But that recognition is for the purpose of institutionalizing the procreative relationship in order to govern the transmission of human life and to protect and promote the well-being of the family that results. It is not a recognition of the relationship just for its own sake or for the sake of the partners to the marriage, as it would necessarily become were marriage to be extended to include same-sex couples.
What the world seems intent on doing at the moment is completely changing what marriage is supposed to mean. The benefits to society of monogamy and stability in relationships is unquestioned, and should be rewarded by civil unions and any other governmental benefits possible. But as society’s degredation can be measured by the destruction of the nuclear family by the out-of-wedlock pregnancies and innercity deadbeat fathers of heterosexual couples, further degrading the institution’s child-rearing nature will only do more damage.
What about couples that do not intend to have children, you ask? Irrelevant, says I. Marriage between opposite-sex partners symbolizes the reproductive potential that exists, at a general level, between a man and a woman. Society is built on a societal-cultural paradigm where symbolism is just as important and is often indiscernible from actual rules and boundaries. The reproductive potential of opposite-sex couples is safely assumed at a higher level and the societal-cultural paradigm won’t allow for a case by case analysis. Such a case by case philosophy would submit any law to constant illogical scrutiny.
In short, the issue is all about what marriage actually is. If marriage is about loving relationships and if the reason for denying homosexuals marriage privileges is our inherent disrespect for their loving and possibly stable relationship, than we are wrong to exclude such people from marrying. But if the reason to exclude homosexuals and others from marriage is to protect the very essence, nature, and substance of the institution intact, than such exclusion is ethically acceptable for society.
If anyone just skipped here to the end, simply read Sam Schulman’s nearly-flawless defense of marriage, or even just this snippet:
I believe, in fact, that we are at an “Antigone moment.” Some of our fellow citizens wish to impose a radically new understanding upon laws and institutions that are both very old and fundamental to our organization as individuals and as a society. As Antigone said to Creon, we are being asked to tamper with “unwritten and unfailing laws, not of now, nor of yesterday; they always live, and no one knows their origin in time.”
Admittedly, it is very difficult to defend that which is both ancient and “unwritten”–the arguments do not resolve themselves into a neat parade of documentary evidence, research results, or citations from the legal literature. Admittedly, too, proponents of this radical new understanding have been uncommonly effective in presenting their program as something that is not radical at all but as requiring merely a slight and painless adjustment in our customary arrangements. This is simply wrong… The gods move very fast when they bring ruin on misguided men.
In the end, Travis is right. It’s not about opinions. It’s about history, culture, and society. The rules were written a long time ago with a very specific plan in mind. It’s time we started playing by them.
If there was ever an election for conservative political cynics to drown in their misery, this was the one. On one side, the Democrats nominated arguably the most liberal candidate in modern history whose empty rhetoric was somehow resonating with the middle-class. On the other side, the GOP nominated the bellicose McCain, a political liberal on immigration, the role of government, campaign finance, and touting a neoconservative foreign policy far more aggressive and ambitious than Bush II’s. So given the poor choices in front of voters, it would seem difficult to discern any major mandates bestowed upon President-elect Obama. But for several reasons, it seems clear that Americans have as a whole rejected the principles that America was once based upon in favor of “progress” towards the complete welfare-warfare state.
From the conservative perspective, there seems little hope. If any election was ripe for a successful third-party conservative, 2008 was that election. Yet the presumptive conservative alternatives–Baldwin and Barr–did not reach 1% combined. Far from playing spoiler, they were a footnote, destined to be quickly forgotten. Indeed, the oft-ignored and maligned Nader won more than the two candidates combined, and that was in an election with a popular liberal candidate running for the Democrats. For those traditionalists still left that feel conservatism in its purist forms offers hope for the United States, it is nearly impossible to feel anything but disappointment and shame in the nomination of a Wilsonian-liberal and the ignoring of the one principled conservative in the primary race, Ron Paul.
But beyond this election being yet another defeat for the Old Right, the response Americans had to Obama’s campaign and his subsequent election says a lot about the direction our country is headed. The thing that for so long made America a special nation was not its willingness to go abroad and slay imaginary dragons in the name of freedom, as Limbaugh and O’Reilly would lead you to believe. America was special because, in a world teetering on the brink of economic collectivism, cultural degradation, irreligious evangelism, and hell-bent on the eradication of national sovereignty, America was different. The “city on a hill” was not one meant to dominate foreign lands or collectivize it’s enterprise under an all-powerful state. It was meant to be a land that valued individual liberty above all else, and to stand athwart tyranny by being a shining beacon to the rest of the world.
The country that placed supreme worth in the possession of private property; the country that valued voluntary community over involuntary collectivism; the country that protected its citizens and stayed out of foreign quarrels; the country that was sickened by European society’s rejection of European tradition in favor of decrepit multiculturalism and materialism; the fading light of this America, my America, grows ever dimmer with the approach of this new administration. Suffice it to say, things look bleak.
But there are strands of light. If you look hard enough you will find them. They can be found in micro-breweries, independent baseball and softball leagues, small family farmer’s markets, local music scenes, independent publishing companies, and Church groups full of the brave faithful that pray hard for peace in our time of endless conflict. I’ve felt the unique and special nature of the small in small hardcore clubs in Philly, a 60 man fraternity at a school of 10,000, and privately owned Christmas-tree farms in New Jersey. That is our America, and as Bill Kauffman has said, “Their side is bombs and tanks and television. How can we lose?”
“The patriot never under any circumstances boasts of the largeness of his country, but always, and of necessity, boasts of the smallness of it.”
-G.K. Chesterton
In an era of big government and big business and big wars, let’s not forget that small is still beautiful.
Sorry for the inactivity… with exams and a depressing election season, I have tried to stay away from the political and cultural. One recurring issue that I keep being asked about is worth a return.
Of the many elements of the 2008 election that have struck me as odd, the crowning of Louisiana governor Bobby Jindal as the savior of the Right is perhaps most disturbing. We have witnessed, over the past 8 years or so, a conservative movement that was at one time dominant fall apart and submit to the Left on a host of key issues, only breaking with liberals, astoundingly, on the most damaging issues, such as the Iraq War. Abandoning popular conservative issues like secure borders and balanced budgets for expensive wars, bailouts, and ever-increasing expansion of big-government only brought failure for the GOP. Future success is dependent upon a reevaluation of conservative ideals and a reexamination of the party loyalists that have led traditional conservatism to the brink of extinction.
Instead, party-hacks and purists alike are ready to push forward the 2012 nomination process and nominate Jindal as soon as possible. The buzz is eerily similar to that which surrounded Obama after the 2004 Democratic Party convention, and an analysis of Jindal’s policy prescriptions suggests it is similar in its emphasis on style-over-substance. He is a proud supporter of our foreign misadventures and is a strong advocate of the security state, having voted for electronic surveillance without a warrant, intelligence gathering without civil oversight, and federalizing drivers licenses.
What is also mysterious is Jindal’s overwhelming approval amongst conservatives unhappy with the GOP. Why is Jindal any different from the rank-and-file Republicans that have driven their party into the ground? The honest answer is: he isn’t any different. He caucused with the GOP 97% of the time when part of the 109th Congress. He was a member of the Republican Study Committee. He has also pushed for the teaching of intelligent design in public schools.
Despite these problems, Jindal is said to be the next, best hope for the Right. The real reasons are simple. He is young (at 36, the youngest governor in America), He is the first non-white to serve as Louisiana governor since Reconstruction, and was the first Indian American governor in U.S. History. It seems that conservatives, not learning the lessons of the past decade, have decided it is easier and more effective to conduct what amounts to plastic surgery on a cancer patient. It’s not the same old GOP: now we have color.
Is Jindal a more principled conservative than McCain? Without a doubt. With a strong record on illegal immigration, a good budgetary history, and a stellar record on abortion, he boasts a resume significantly stronger than McCain did. But what is to ensure he does not become another George W. Bush; a candidate who entered preaching fiscal conservatism, a humble foreign policy, and brought the “culture of life” rhetoric but left having spent more than Clinton, grown government more than it had grown in decades, and allowed Roe to remain as strong as ever. Not to mention, most middle-American Republicans can recognize that the warfare-state, security-state may be worth at the very least a reexamination. Shouldn’t the party be able to assure Americans that they are sending poor farm-kids off to die for a worthy cause?
Jindal demonstrates, I fear, an unwillingness on the part of the Right to examine its past sins and return to principle. Could Jindal be a good candidate in 2012. It is very possible. But conservatives should learn a lesson from the Obama-craze: stirring up political passions with superficial nonsense can help elect a president, but it can’t elect a great leader.
