The Pastor in me simply cannot contain itself anymore. I have to speak to this issue of the homosexual mindset.

In one of the most used scriptures in the book of Romans, the Apostle Paul speaks about homosexuality at the end of chapter 1, verses 18-32. While this passage has been used to declare that homosexuality is wrong (which is certainly taught by these verses), we forget Romans 2:1 where Paul says “you, therefore, have no excuse, you who pass judgment on someone else, for at whatever point you judge another, you are condemning yourself, because you who pass judgment do the same things.” A shocking statement since I am not a homosexual.

But Paul’s point is that I AM a homosexual. Paul chose homosexuality because it is the most obvious outworking of a selfish way of thinking that wants what is wants regardless of what God says. In fact, it rejects God and the truth for what it wants–to worship and serve itself. And Paul is saying that we are all homosexual in thought and philosophy if not in practice.

Nowhere is this more visible than in the current state of heterosexual marriage in this country. We stand and condemn gay marriage while at the same time allowing a degradation of heterosexual marriage in no-fault divorce, wanton adultery, abuse, abandonment, and the like. Regardless of what our political institutions may declare about gay marriage in the future, we have a real self-worship problem in our society and in our heterosexual marriages.

Many previous posters have pointed out this problem, that gay marriage is simply the end, not the source of the problem. Our selfish, self-worshipping, self-seeking mentality is the problem and we see this played out in the current state of all marriages. We want what we want when we want it.  Why then are we so shocked when homosexuals do the same thing? We have the same thought pattern!

Paul’s words in Romans 1 are not a declaration that homosexuality is wrong. That is actually assumed by his words. Rather, he is accusing us all of being homosexuals, even if we are in heterosexual marriages!

We live in a society that does not simply legislate marital relationships but rewards them. Married couples in this country file taxes together, receive social security benefits, and can be insured together. The United States government should not be viewed as a  ‘sex police,’ what the government is involved in is granting legal and financial recognition to marital relationships. The intent is not meant to create incentives for marriage but to financially assist married couples. The unintended result, though, is that one is rewarded for being married, a reward that gay couples would like to benefit from as well.

The opposite has happened in Australia where the tax code actually hurts married couples. I’m afraid I have no data other than reports of missionaries to that country who state that even couples in the church do not seek legal marriages because of the financial repercussions. Instead, they simply cohabitate. Was this the goal of the Australian government? Probably not. Was the United States trying to encourage marriage? I don’t think so, but in attempts to financially assist couples who got married they indirectly rewarded and incentivized marriage.

Consider that tax credit for children. Is this fair to those couples who do not have children? Probably not. However, childless couples do not have the financial expenditures that couples with children do. The government was not attempting to reward couples with children as much as to financially assist them.

This seems to be the issue at the heart of the gay marriage question. Should gay couples receive the same financial breaks and rewards as non-gay marriages. What Dan and Greg seem to be suggesting is that government institutions are rewarding marriages because marriages are good for society, but I’m not sure that this is the government’s way of thinking. I’m guessing that the government has simply made a tax decision unrelated to anything other than financial assistance.

The real political question is really whether or not gay couples need financial assistance and tax breaks like other married couples. Social security benefits support one person if a spouse dies so as to assist with the loss of child care, home care, etc., not loss of wages. A gay couple has no need of this support because they normally do not have children and the loss of one partner does not have a huge impact on the other financially. From a pure economic perspective, the issue of gay marriage should not really be one of reward, but of necessity. Do gay couples need assistance? I think not.

Our conversation has been focused upon the morality, social expediency, and such of marriage and gay marriage. Gay marriage has become a discussion of agendas. It seems that the real question for fiscal policy should be why gay couples need a financial benefit. You don’t here me demanding I should get social security?!

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.

As I’ve been reading (with delight!) the ongoing exchange between Dan and Greg (inter alia) concerning bouncing dead cats and marriage and such, I find myself wondering why we’re dancing around the issue of children a bit. Not entirely dancing around it; Dan provided a clear explanation of the state’s interest in marriage in his original post: “The state cares about marriage because if a man and a woman get together and produce a child, someone has to care for the wee little one. And if it is not the child’s parents, the burden falls on society.”

It seems to me, then, that the third facet of marriage (see Dan’s original post) isn’t so much between the couple and the state as it is between the family and the state. It’s true that the state probably has some interest in regulating property disputes between childless divorcing couples, but other than that, as Dan rightly points out, the interest of the state in marriage is in the relationship between marriage and procreation.

As Dan notes, as of a few generations ago we have “intentionally decoupled sex and its consequences from the institution of marriage”. But crucially, we’ve also decoupled sex and its consequences, or at least its most, well, consequential consequence? Meaning, babies. The idea that sex and babies are intrinsically linked – something that all human beings simply knew since, well, always – is now scoffed at. We’ve fixed that problem. Sex is recreation, and children are work, and now we can maximize the former and minimize the unintended instances of the latter.

But what it that problem wasn’t actually a problem? What if sex and babies were in fact supposed to have some sort of necessary connection – both ways, not just in the “if you want to have a baby you’ll normally have to have sex” way, but also in the “if you want to have sex you should be prepared to have a baby” way? If that proposition were in fact tenable, then that should probably figure into our diagnosis of whether marriage is dead. Why? Because, as Dan also pointed out, the marriage debates have missed the point of talking about “the heart of the issue, which is the nature of marriage itself.” I submit that it is both – in its very nature – both unitive and procreative. (Fine, I didn’t come up with that one.) So if we want to blame liberal divorce laws for aiding and abetting the destruction of the unitive aspect, we should probably start looking at what killed the procreative face of marriage.

Gigantic disclaimer: I don’t mean to be cruel here; I absolutely agree with Dan that couples who don’t have children are not at all “less married” than those who do. But I really do wonder why the state should care about marriage if children are only accidental and not essential to it. And, yikes, what stands in the way of reducing sex to sport if we engineer natural consequences out of it.

I realize I’m treading really dangerous waters here, and I don’t mean to be glib or, certainly, offensive. When I say that children are essential to marriage, I mean that the nature of marriage, not each case of it – i.e., a married couple should be open to the possibility of children, while of course in some cases it won’t be possible for various reasons. But it seems like a point that needs some attention if we’re attempting to figure out what went wrong with marriage and how to save (or resuscitate) marriage.

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.