[Vision2020] Another View Point.......

[Ted Moffett]

Who wrote this?  Maybe I did not read carefully enough, but there is no
signature at the end, nor any indication of authorship at the beginning.
Perhaps Wayne Price wrote this, the name in the "From" box?  I guess not...
A Google search reveals the following author:

http://fathertalkstoofast.blogspot.com/2012/05/same-sex-marriage-debate-third-option.html

http://www.blogger.com/profile/16406376933563447526
---------------------------------------
Vision2020 Post: Ted Moffett

On Tue, May 15, 2012 at 12:54 PM, Wayne Price <bear at moscow.com> wrote:

>
> *The Same-Sex Marriage Debate: A Third Option?*
> Same-sex marriage has been a big topic of discussion for about fifteen
> years. Same-sex marriage has been nearly the *only* topic of debate for
> the last fifteen days. And frankly, I hate the debate, because, well, most
> everybody sucks at it. You've got (at least) two sides talking right past
> each other. I get frustrated when the pro-gay-marriage people presume that
> their opposition only acts out of bigotry, and I get livid when the one
> man-one woman people think that it makes sense to make arguments from
> Christian revelation when debating civil rights in a pluralistic secular
> democratic republic.
>
>
> I would prefer to not write a blog post to just "address a current topic",
> especially without greater opportunity to build a common vocabulary and see
> if there may be some principles that people can agree on. And I'd always
> prefer a one-on-one conversation in something as heated as this. But I've
> had about ten people this week ask my opinion on this, or ask how they can
> address this question without seeming hateful. So, I feel compelled to say
> my thoughts. And I think I'll be upsetting staunch activists on both sides
> pretty severely.... so, keep your blood pressure pills handy.
>
>
> I'm first going to lay out a traditional Natural Law argument for keeping
> the civil institution of marriage available only to a man-woman pair who
> intend to remain faithfully married to each other alone. It's the position
> I held all my adult life until the last year or two. This argument is
> remarkably solid....and it's almost utterly unhelpful in the current
> scenario. After that, I want to look at another solution that holds the
> same root Natural Law points, but actually could fit 2012 America.
>
>
> Let's understand first why I am taking the Natural Law angle(s). America
> might have been founded but a group of Christians and Deists, but it's not
> a "Christian country". It may have a general history of Judeo-Christian
> moral fiber, but the precepts of monotheistic revelation are not a
> legitimate final authority in a pluralistic secular society. Atheists are
> right when they say the First Amendment's (Non-) Establishment Clause keeps
> Christian revelation from becoming the standard of the law. Using religious
> arguments in a secular state's debate over the civil institution of
> marriage is like bringing a badminton racket to your Jeopardy appearance:
> you can use it, but it won't score any more points. This is an error of
> many Christian conservatives.
>
>
> But before the pro-family people declare me anathema, let's clear up a far
> more widely held error of social progressives: the claim that "you can't
> legislate morality." Of course you can—and we do, all the time. Making
> murder, rape, theft, molestation, and plagiarism illegal is definitely
> "legislating morals". The Affordable Care Act makes the positive
> declaration that a citizen not having real access to health insurance is
> moral unacceptable, and therefore is now legally disallowed.
>
>
> So, the real question is: "Which morality should a state be
> proposing/protecting if it shouldn't be some religion's revealed morals,
> and not just whatever the majority capriciously wants to declare?" Natural
> Law is really the only moral philosophy that one can hold to in order to be
> able to explain why "X is more just than Y" or why "A is a fitting solution
> for Problem B". Whether one thinks that his thoughts fit into the more
> traditional systems of Natural Law, this thinking is certainly what people
> instinctively do. All but the most self-willed people understand on some
> level that the nature of the thing tells us about what's good for it.
> Natural Law's process is threefold: 1) look at the nature of the thing, 2)
> see what's good for it, 3) know how to treat it. A "good pair of scissors"
> is one that cuts things easily; scissors cut well by remaining sharp and
> aligned; cutting copper wire with scissors dulls the blades, so we can
> reasonably declare that "cutting wire is bad for the scissors". Most people
> agree we can cut down trees and kill cows to get natural resources, but
> also we recognize that while cutting limbs off a tree and letting it live
> is okay, hacking steaks out of a living steer and leaving it alive isn't.
> Why? Because while the natures of both of these have life and bodily
> integrity, the steer also has pain and motion that would be suffering
> violence which the tree doesn't suffer when cut.
>
>
> Therefore people ought to, and have, attempted to base laws not on mere
> desires, opinions, or prejudices, but on human reason's ability to discern
> justice for things based on their natures. Even the same-sex marriage
> camp's main argument has been essentially one of Natural Law: "Humans
> possess personal love and freedom of will; if Bob and Sue can choose to
> enter a permanent bond of love, so should Bob and Bill." Natural Law
> (however one calculates its conclusions) should not be seen as the weapon
> of one side (usually considered the province of the one man-one woman
> crowd), but rather as the only tool with which one can hold a debate in a
> pluralistic country. If you think there are real *reasons*—not just
> religious dictums or personal opinions—for why your side is right, then you
> believe in a reasoned Natural Law. Ultimately, I'm saying: "If you want to
> have a worthwhile logical debate on this, then using reason alone is your
> only route. Put away your Bibles and put away the word 'bigot'."
>
>
> One last thing before my arguments: Let's make sure we keep distinct the
> questions of
> 1) same-sex attraction/orientation,
> 2) same-sex activity, and
> 3) same-sex civil marriage.
> The TV and the Internet are currently swarming with people on both sides
> not keeping these distinct. Someone who opposes #3 does not necessarily
> hate people in #1, or even necessarily object to #2 done in the privacy of
> a bedroom. Likewise, a given religion's rejection of #2 does not mean that
> they think #1 is morally wrong, and that particular religion may have
> nothing to say about #3 whatsoever, since the debate is over *civil* marriage
> licensing. I happen to agree with Clint Eastwood<http://www.gq.com/entertainment/movies-and-tv/201110/leonardo-dicaprio-clint-eastwood-gq-september-2011-cover-story-article> that
> speaking of the "sanctity of marriage" is fallacious. Some Christian groups
> believe in a sacrament of matrimony (which is much more narrowly defined),
> and they can speak of "sanctity" there, but that doesn't speak to the
> sanctity of civil marriage. And just because civil marriage is an extremely
> ancient human institution, doesn't make it sacred. Since 2003<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawrence_v._Texas>,
> any laws limiting #2 have been abolished, and they hadn't been enforced or
> retained for decades before anyway, so the subject currently for debate is
> strictly #3.
>
>
> I'll now present a Natural Law argument against same-sex civil marriage.
> No, it has nothing to do with whether the bodies of two same-gendered
> humans "go together right". The question we should ask isn't "Why not gay
> marriage?", but rather "Why civil marriage at all?" We can, perhaps, see
> why religions, which often solemnize births and deaths, would want to mark
> marriage, but why should the state? Why would they care? States don't
> bother to regulate, legislate, or validate your friendships. You don't
> mention your siblings, boyfriend, or BFF on your 1040 form. But the state
> does track marriages and it does ask for your spouse on your tax form. Why?
> Because states want to protect, encourage, and reward entities that are
> good for the commonwealth. We give tax breaks to clean energy initiatives
> because we want more of that. We break up monopolies because business
> competition is good. We regulate and underwrite public schools to ensure an
> educated citizenry.
>
>
> Ancient humans learned that a child was brought up best when her parents
> stayed together (humans are notoriously slow-developing and need years of
> cooperative rearing) and if her siblings had the same parents too (a family
> being a better bonder than a boarding house). So they developed some rules
> to encourage and benefit these pairings, like recognizing the transfer of
> property and influence, and they made other rules to protect the nascent
> institution, like forbidding adultery and rape and allowing retribution for
> injuries to one's family members. Successive generations added greater
> formality, but all to the same end. States granted privileges to this
> institution which they didn't grant to other relationships because it
> benefited the states in a unique way as the institution reared their
> children and provided great stability in this basic building block of
> society.
>
>
> Now, many have pointed out that perhaps marriage in the modern context has
> been over-privileged, to the detriment even of other relationships. That
> may be true. Marriage lets one spouse inherit all the other's property
> without a tax, she can collect his social security, he gets to be on her
> insurance for free, she gets privileged access to his medical data and
> life-and-death decision making, etc. People who are single, or living with
> someone, or in a same-sex union are, by comparison, seemingly
> disenfranchised. Gay partners were denied access to hospital visits that
> wives' husbands got without question. For at least a decade I've heard a
> solid rejoinder to this in the form of, "This perhaps is unfair, but that
> means we should adjust those specific rules, not rewrite the immemorial
> institution." And many places have done that: allowing all employees to
> share their health insurance with one other person regardless of
> relationship, opening up who can have access to medical consultations and
> visitations. People regularly debate whether the estate tax is good for
> anyone. This objection by the same-sex marriage advocates is perhaps just,
> but seems to fight the wrong set of rules.
>
>
> The other counterpoint to a Natural Law "societal good" argument is that a
> lesbian couple may be just as good of a societal building block as a
> straight couple. The classic refutation would be: "Perhaps so, but the
> lesbian pairing doesn't make and rear children, so there's not the reason
> to privilege it." The immediate response would be that they could get
> inseminated or adopt. The rejoinder to that will be that since *their* *
> union* doesn't produce the children, the state still doesn't have the
> same interest. The obvious rebuff to this will be that, then, infertile
> straight couples should not be considered married. To which the reply would
> probably be, "Yes, but to grant a privilege to a couple that should likely
> be fertile (and later on could still be) and then take it away from them is
> quite different from granting a privilege to a couple that can never be
> fertile." This is probably enough to convince some on the fence, but not
> all, nor will it likely convince the staunch same-sex advocate.
>
>
> This is the most common, and, I think, a pretty darn compelling argument
> for states enshrining faithful, permanent, childbearing marriage in a
> protected (and exclusive) status. Religious and non-religious alike have
> argued it for years. [A recent, much-crisper version of this argument from
> an economist's point of view comes from Adam Kolasinski<http://tech.mit.edu/V124/N5/kolasinski.5c.html>at
> MIT.] The argument it reasonable, does not rest on bigotry, nor on
> religiously-revealed truths, nor does it address anything other civil
> marriage.
>
>
> And up until about two years ago, I thought it answered the question, and
> was exactly what the one man-one woman camp needed to use to get over the
> accusation of trying to make this an imposition of religious moral views.
>
>
> But while I still believe the above argument is utterly valid in theory, I
> don't think it remotely works in America in 2012. It may have been valid in
> 1950, but not now. The reason is simple: America is not a country dedicated
> to preserving marriages or forming children within those families. Given
> that abortion and no-fault divorce are enshrined rights, and that
> contraception and sterilization are the *sine qua non* of the "modern
> family", it's ridiculous to say that civil marriage exists for the
> procreation, formation, and welfare of children, or that the U.S. values
> the family as the firm bedrock on which our society rests.
>
>
> It's common to hear things like: "50% of marriages end in divorce, 15% of
> marriages have physical abuse, Kim Kardashian got divorced after 72 days,
> and you think gay marriage will destroy the sanctity of marriage?!" And
> they're right!—civil marriage is a farce. If the state protects your right
> to not have a fertile marriage and to not have to stick around to raise
> your progeny, it seems the centuries-old privileges of the civil
> institution are pointless. I'm amazed at the number of Christians so
> desperate to protect the "institution of marriage"—amazed either because
> that entity is already dead, or because they support the things that killed
> it. Gay-activist (and someone who understands the concepts of Natural Law) Andrew
> Sullivan <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Sullivan> writes<http://brothersjudd.com/index.cfm/fuseaction/reviews.detail/book_id/339>:
> "The heterosexuality of marriage is intrinsic only if it is understood to
> be intrinsically procreative; but that definition has long been abandoned
> in Western society." And he's right—at least from the point of civil
> marriage. There's no small number of Christians who reject same-sex
> marriage, but accept abortion. There's a colossal number of Christians who
> despise gay marriage (and sometimes gays) but will defend to the last
> no-fault divorce and contraception. They must be basing this on Leviticus,
> because they're not basing it in logic.
>
>
> So what do I suggest? End no-fault divorce and contraception? No, I don't
> think those genies can go back in their bottles. Granted, the "3rd Way"
> solution I support instead is, at first blush, only somewhat less radical,
> but it is still a Natural Law solution, and equivalent in its root
> principles to the first one. I did reject it for the first 30 seconds after
> Dr. Jim Madden proposed it as a possibility, but since then I see it as the
> only thing that keeps those principles, deals with the situation we have,
> and fits perfectly within the pluralism of the modern secular democracy.
>
>
> The answer is simple: Get the state out of the marriage business.
> Eliminate, or at least create no more, civil marriages, and then stop using
> it as a civil category. Let's stop giving any legal privilege (or even,
> credence) to Kim Kardashian's marriage, or anyone else's for that matter.
> Allow people to marry privately in whatever form and ceremony they want,
> but simply cease having a civil institution that means so little, protects
> so little, and expects so little. Denominations and other "marrying
> establishments" won't have their consciences infringed upon, and they can
> be as narrow or broad as they want in the matrimonial services they offer.
> So now Bob can go to the Missouri Synod Lutheran pastor and he'll marry Bob
> to Sue, the Episcopalian priest will marry Bob to either Sue or Steve, the
> Mormon bishop will marry Bob to Sue, Sally, and Kate together, and Bob's
> buddy Bill who got his officiant's license on-line will marry Bob to any of
> the above, or to a goat. The Elvis wedding chapels would be free to be as
> traditional or progressive as they wish. Of course, you'll still have
> lawyers to sort out any separations, but they'll do like they do already
> for cohabiting boyfriends and girlfriends, joint home owners, and
> businesses. Taxes, finances, and insurance, would be simplified. There'd
> still be marriages and families, but the secular and sectarian definitions
> wouldn't clash any more. Religious groups may actually find this freeing.
>
>
> Europe already kind of does this, not institutionally, but *de facto* because
> so many don't bother with getting married at all. And if they do, the civil
> and sectarian ceremonies in Europe are separate. Want a gay marriage? Just
> don't go to the local Catholic parish. Want a polygamous arrangement? Just
> don't go to the civil authority about it. My plan would go even one step
> further, and it avoids the contradictions that currently exist in Western
> civil marriage. Honestly folks, it's 2012—with so many competing
> definitions of marriage, why is the state even in the marriage business
> anymore? America isn't just pluralist in terms of its religions; it's
> pluralist in its conceptions of marriage.
>
>
> Frankly, I don't think this would actually change much of life. Already a
> Catholic marriage tribunal doesn't recognize the validity of a civil-only
> marriage for a Catholic, nor acknowledge the existence of divorce. Already
> a civil court cares nothing of whether or not a partner is faithful or not.
> Already anybody can get licensed to be the legal officiant at a wedding,
> without any training in civil law or in preparing people for marriage.
> Already there is nothing more required to get married than to be of age, to
> not be too closely related, and to be not currently married. Heck, there's
> not even a minimum required form of the modern wedding ceremony or
> contract. You can say "I like your face and I hope we keep having lots of
> fun" and that's a legal marriage "vow".
>
>
> Now, I'm sure some same-sex marriage advocates will see this as
> traditional marriage fans simply "taking their ball and going home because
> they can't have it their way". It may look a bit like that, but that
> forgets what has already changed. It's not that it would be taking away the
> possession that homosexuals wanted, it's an acknowledging that in a mere
> fifty years this country *has ceased to possess* that institution that
> humans for millennia called marriage. If the goal of the same-sex marriage
> initiative is to gain the final mark of equality by laying hold of the
> beautiful, worthy, centuries-old bond of unshakably stubborn trust,
> concern, and fidelity, I regret to inform them that the institution they'd
> gain access to is not *that* ancient treasure of devotion. Frankly, in
> the future, gays and lesbians, in groups and congregations, may be able to
> develop for themselves far more worthy notions of mutual support than what
> "civil marriage" is at the dawn of the 21st century.
>
>
> In the end, I just don't see what the battle is over. The object both
> sides are fighting over is the burned-out shell of a broken, discarded
> institution. They are violently fighting for—one side to "save", the other
> side to "win"— an entity that no longer exists.
>
>
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