My fellow Hang Togetherites are outstripping my ability to keep up! I’m going to have to follow Dan and post over the weekend or lose my window to cause trouble.

Karen agrees with Dan that the state’s interest in marriage arises almost entirely from the fact that sex can produce children. I know this is what all the bigshot Christian intellectuals say. It’s also politically convenient in that it minimizes libertarian/conservative tensions and relies as little as possible on metaphysical claims.

This is exactly the problem. The metaphysics of marriage can’t be conveniently walled off from its legal and political ramifications. The universe just isn’t that neat and tidy.

Let’s look at another issue for comparison. What’s the case for the prohibition of recreational drugs? On paper, the libertarian case looks good. Not everyone who uses coke drives while high or steals to support his habit. Why not just punish the behavior that harms others? If you ban drugs because they make people more likely to harm othes, where will you stop?

But in fact the act of consuming poison for pleasure really is qualitatively different from other behaviors (say, dropping out of high school) that make you more likely to be a threat to society. It is – formally and not just accidentally – a direct attack on my own status as a responsible agent. Admittedly the lines for self-harm are fuzzier than for harm to others. But if no self-harm whatsoever can ever be restricted as a matter of principle, it becomes impossible to argue that human life has intrinsic dignity, and thus impossible to justify prohibitions on murder, theft, etc.

What does this have to do with marriage? Sex creates (always, every time) a permanent metaphysical link between the participants. Like drug use, this has far-reaching consequences we aren’t free to simply ignore.

The proposition that sex is a metaphysical act is not a Christian teaching or even a religious teaching particularly. It’s the universal presupposition of all humanity throughout history and around the world except in the secular West for the last generation. Christianity certainly does add much profound religious teaching on top of this, teaching that explains the great mysteries of sex and also reversals to us even more profound mysteries. But the abbarant fact, the extraordinary datum that requires explanation and accommodation, is not that Christians think sex is metaphysical but that secularists do not.

Why does this matter? Partly because the moral imperatives associated with reproduction alone are an insufficient basis for a sound shared morality of social ethics for sex, just as libertarianism on feeding yourself poison leaves us unable to justify prohibitions on feeding other people poison.

It’s also partly messaging. What the world hears from us now, in effect, is: “Sex is about reproduction and nothing else! Nothing, do you hear, you wicked libertines! Stop enjoying sex right now!” Restoring the metaphysical mysteries of sex to the public conversation would both improve the credibility of our message on marriage and also restore some plausibility to Christianity itself. It wouldn’t hurt us to remInd people that the gospel can help make sense of the mysteries they themselves have admitted are central to human meaning.

Does this position imply every sexual sin should be illegal? Of course not. We’re allowed to say that we have a shared cultural understanding that greed is evil without making evey greedy act against the law. The same here. We have to reopen the public conversation on sex at a deeper level than mere reproduction. Otherwise it’s hard to see much hope.

Dan replies to my reply with a challenge:

 So, Greg, is it your *hope* that the signs of movement represent an interest in returning to traditional marriage, or can you analytically determine they are something more than evidence of a dead-cat bounce?  And can we reasonably say it is not similar to liberal lionization of Ronald Reagan, now that he is safely gone and no longer able to hurt them?

In previous posts I’ve deftly dodged Dan’s dialectical daggers by quibbling over definitions and by quibbling over metrics. This time I shall quibble over methodology.

I could respond to Dan’s challenge by piling up additional instances of elite cultural institutions labeling the collapse of marriage as a problem; this has run (recently) in the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Atlantic, and other major media. Brad Wilcox’s research is being taken seriously. Etc.

But I get the feeling that no matter how high I piled the examples, to Dan it would still look like just a big pile of dead cats bouncing. (You’re welcome for the mental image.) What we really need to do here is get a sense of what counts as a live cat.

Here are my standards:

1. Connection to established fundamental imperatives. These institutions can’t say the breakdown of marriage is damaging the poor, women, and children (especially among minorities!) and generating a rigid bifurcation of social classes, and then say “but we don’t necessarily have to do anything about it.” That would be like the pope saying the male priesthood and the authority of the magisterium are essential to the church’s identity as the incarnation of Christ, but hey, that doesn’t mean they’re, like, a big deal or whatever, like he’s going to lose any sleep if they went away. If the dinosaur media say the breakdown of marriage is damaging the poor, women, and children, etc. they aren’t going to be able to walk away from that.

2. No more “mixed and inconclusive” BS. I’ve been in the school choice movement for ten years. I knew we were winning when the media stopped falsely characterizing the academic findings on the impact of vouchers as “mixed and inconclusive.” They never were that, but it took years of effort to get the reporting to start to match the reality. We’ve seen the same change for marriage. (Not yet on gay marriage, but on divorce.)

3. It’s science! Science is the last remaining uncontested source of social authority. If science agrees it’s bad, it’s bad. I’ve written elsewhere about why that’s a bad development overall, but here’s a case where it properly works in our favor.

That’s enough to be going on with for now, I expect. Looking forward to getting slapped with the next dead cat from Dan.

My reply to Dan on the prospects for marriage is up on First Thoughts.

Just look at him. Would you trust this man with a razor?

While I compose my response to Dan’s provocative post, the more cerebral will enjoy reading this reflection from Michael Brendan Dougherty on some dangerous tendencies in certain quarters to romanticize the High Middle Ages and blame all our problems on Ockham and Luther. For those who are interested in such historical/philosophical questions, it’s worth the read just for the part about “medieval hipster ironies.” More broadly, the warning against “reverse Whiggism” is much needed. My long-term interest in drawing on John Locke as a moral and cultural resource (while being mindful of his theological and metaphysical limitations) is all of a piece with this. And so, in a broader sense, is the moral consensus idea.

Moral consensus stands against both optimistic and pessimistic Whiggisms. The thing they have in common is elevating some past historical moment (the Glorious Revolution and the American founding on one side, the High Middle Ages on the other side) as a great historical culmination, the ultimate manifestation of the moral law (and even the gospel) in the social order. A central insight of the moral conensus view, which traces its roots through Augustine, is that human civilization is always a realm of compromise – is always a place of moral/spiritual edification and failure simultaneously – such that no particular social order or cultural situation is ever a final destination or moral entelechy. There is no end zone for the moral/spiritual development of human civilization; there is only the best compromise available in each situation.

Hmm. Maybe I’ve already composed my response to Dan after all!

Dan Kelly, this one’s for you.

(Backstory)