posted on November 23, 2003 09:30:05 AM new
Whether you're pro or con gay marriage, you're probably for marriage itself. This is a powerful and stunning description of what marriage is all about--from a conservative columnist, no less, in the New York Times.
November 22, 2003
By DAVID BROOKS
Anybody who has several sexual partners in a year is
committing spiritual suicide. He or she is ripping the veil
from all that is private and delicate in oneself, and
pulverizing it in an assembly line of selfish sensations.
But marriage is the opposite. Marriage joins two people in
a sacred bond. It demands that they make an exclusive
commitment to each other and thereby takes two discrete
individuals and turns them into kin.
Few of us work as hard at the vocation of marriage as we
should. But marriage makes us better than we deserve to be.
Even in the chores of daily life, married couples find
themselves, over the years, coming closer together, fusing
into one flesh. Married people who remain committed to each
other find that they reorganize and deepen each other's
lives. They may eventually come to the point when they can
say to each other: "Love you? I am you."
Today marriage is in crisis. Nearly half of all marriages
end in divorce. Worse, in some circles, marriage is not
even expected. Men and women shack up for a while, produce
children and then float off to shack up with someone else.
Marriage is in crisis because marriage, which relies on a
culture of fidelity, is now asked to survive in a culture
of contingency. Today, individual choice is held up as the
highest value: choice of lifestyles, choice of identities,
choice of cellphone rate plans. Freedom is a wonderful
thing, but the culture of contingency means that the
marriage bond, which is supposed to be a sacred vow till
death do us part, is now more likely to be seen as an
easily canceled contract.
Men are more likely to want to trade up, when a younger
trophy wife comes along. Men and women are quicker to opt
out of marriages, even marriages that are not fatally
flawed, when their "needs" don't seem to be met at that
moment.
Still, even in this time of crisis, every human being in
the United States has the chance to move from the path of
contingency to the path of marital fidelity - except
homosexuals. Gays and lesbians are banned from marriage and
forbidden to enter into this powerful and ennobling
institution. A gay or lesbian couple may love each other as
deeply as any two people, but when you meet a member of
such a couple at a party, he or she then introduces you to
a "partner," a word that reeks of contingency.
You would think that faced with this marriage crisis, we
conservatives would do everything in our power to move as
many people as possible from the path of contingency to the
path of fidelity. But instead, many argue that gays must be
banished from matrimony because gay marriage would weaken
all marriage. A marriage is between a man and a woman, they
say. It is women who domesticate men and make marriage
work.
Well, if women really domesticated men, heterosexual
marriage wouldn't be in crisis. In truth, it's moral
commitment, renewed every day through faithfulness, that
"domesticates" all people.
Some conservatives may have latched onto biological
determinism (men are savages who need women to tame them)
as a convenient way to oppose gay marriage. But in fact we
are not animals whose lives are bounded by our flesh and by
our gender. We're moral creatures with souls, endowed with
the ability to make covenants, such as the one Ruth made
with Naomi: "Where you go I will go, and where you stay I
will stay. Your people will be my people and your God my
God. Where you die I will die, and there I will be buried."
The conservative course is not to banish gay people from
making such commitments. It is to expect that they make
such commitments. We shouldn't just allow gay marriage. We
should insist on gay marriage. We should regard it as
scandalous that two people could claim to love each other
and not want to sanctify their love with marriage and
fidelity.
When liberals argue for gay marriage, they make it sound
like a really good employee benefits plan. Or they frame it
as a civil rights issue, like extending the right to vote.
Marriage is not voting. It's going to be up to
conservatives to make the important, moral case for
marriage, including gay marriage. Not making it means
drifting further into the culture of contingency, which,
when it comes to intimate and sacred relations, is an
abomination.
___________________________________
Junk: Stuff we throw away.
Stuff: Junk we keep.
posted on November 23, 2003 09:39:37 AM new
Most of the conservatives I have heard arguing against homosexual marriages harp on the "marriage is for procreation" angle. Haven't heard the "women domesticate men" angle. Hmmm. When you consider all the stuff we do to domesticated animals, no wonder so many men want nothing to do with marriage... Censorship, like charity, should begin at home; but unlike charity, it should end there --Clare Booth Luce
posted on November 27, 2003 07:32:13 AM newToday marriage is in crisis
It is ? Marriages today are no more in crisis than they ever were. The only reason we see more divorces is because they are much easier to get. If you think men and wonman are less happy in modern marriages or are more faithful or committed, you need a reality wake-up call.
If you want marriages to stay intact like they did in the past, all we need to do is make divorces hard to get and remove women the work force.
Marriages remained intact in the past because woman faced a bleak life if they were even able to divorce, and men rarely sought divorce because they practically had a slave through the marrige.
I am amazed how the writer distorts history to make us think that humans used to be more moral than now. Pure non-sense.
