Gay Marriage And The Pure Relationship - Road to the Middle Class

WHAT WOULD legalization of gay marriage mean? Is it just a matter of human rights or does it interfere with the institution of marriage, that is the union between a man and a woman? Or even further, the basic equilibrium of society?

NRO’s Stanley Kurtz has written a number of articles on the subject, attempting to show that, based upon the European experience, gay marriage is part of a general movement to loosen the institution of marriage and to divorce the identity between marriage and children.

But here in the United States the advocates of gay marriage argue that it would strengthen marriage, since it would regularize gay unions and encourage long-term relationships among gays.

Now Kurtz has taken a look at the theorists behind the movement away from marriage. He’s provided us with a booklist that makes the case for sexual relations between any kind of partners for any kind of reason.

Most notably, Kurtz offers the work of Anthony Giddens, and his The Transformation of Intimacy as Exhibit A.

Anthony Giddens is no extremist. He is Director of the London School of Economics and a major influence on Tony Blair.

By looking at the implication of Giddens’ main argument, the idea of a secular movement from conventional marriage towards a “pure relationship,” Kurtz sees that the gay marriage advocates are either mistaken or dissembling.

Giddens’s point is that modern marriage is slowly being divested of connections with anything beyond the purely emotional bonding of adults. It used to be that the love of husband and wife was only part of the picture. Men and women were held together by love, but also by economic interdependence, and a shared commitment to parenthood. But gradually, says Giddens, the marriage alliance is becoming less and less about a shared project of prosperity and parenting. Increasingly, marriage is being reduced to a strictly emotional connection between two adults: “the pure relationship.”

If you look at the psychological model of Spiral Dynamics you can see that this approach is characteristic of the orange, creative level, where people experience life as a game to be won, and rules as something you make up as you go along. For instance:

[M]onogamy, Giddens says, should be adopted, if at all, as a result of negotiation and understanding between two particular partners, and not because of some institutional obligation embedded in marriage itself.

Leave aside Kant’s notion of the categorical imperative, that you should ask the question: What if everyone did this? We already know what happens when a society implements this kind of radical individualism. It stops having children.

The reason is pretty straight forward. If you have no children, or one child, you can create an individual “lifestyle” in which you balance all your interests and activities. But if you have two or three children, then what you have is a life raising children.

The problem with gay marriage, with the pure relationship, and with “lifestyles” is that you devote your life to tangents instead of the mainstream of life. Which is generation. The generation of the next generation.

It is curious that our lefty friends, the ones pushing the elimination of conventional marriage are the ones who demand we live simply so that others may simply live, the ones who want organic, natural foods. They are also the ones who are most likely to be childless. What is so natural about that?

Sphere: Related Content |

Christopher Chantrill blogs at www.roadtothemiddleclass.com. His Road to the Middle Class is forthcoming.

TAGS

Faith & Purpose

“When we began first to preach these things, the people appeared as awakened from the sleep of ages—they seemed to see for the first time that they were responsible beings...”
Finke, Stark, The Churching of America, 1776-1990

Mutual Aid

In 1911... at least nine million of the 12 million covered by national insurance were already members of voluntary sick pay schemes. A similar proportion were also eligible for medical care.
Green, Reinventing Civil Society

Education

“We have met with families in which for weeks together, not an article of sustenance but potatoes had been used; yet for every child the hard-earned sum was provided to send them to school.”
E. G. West, Education and the State

Living Under Law

Law being too tenuous to rely upon in [Ulster and the Scottish borderlands], people developed patterns of settling differences by personal fighting and family feuds.
Thomas Sowell, Conquests and Cultures

German Philosophy

The primary thing to keep in mind about German and Russian thought since 1800 is that it takes for granted that the Cartesian, Lockean or Humean scientific and philosophical conception of man and nature... has been shown by indisputable evidence to be inadequate.
F.S.C. Northrop, The Meeting of East and West

Knowledge

Inquiry does not start unless there is a problem... It is the problem and its characteristics revealed by analysis which guides one first to the relevant facts and then, once the relevant facts are known, to the relevant hypotheses.
F.S.C. Northrop, The Logic of the Sciences and the Humanities

Chappies

“But I saw a man yesterday who knows a fellow who had it from a chappie that said that Urquhart had been dipping himself a bit recklessly off the deep end.” —Freddy Arbuthnot
Dorothy L. Sayers, Strong Poison

Democratic Capitalism

I mean three systems in one: a predominantly market economy; a polity respectful of the rights of the individual to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; and a system of cultural institutions moved by ideals of liberty and justice for all. In short, three dynamic and converging systems functioning as one: a democratic polity, an economy based on markets and incentives, and a moral-cultural system which is plural and, in the largest sense, liberal.
Michael Novak, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism

Action

The incentive that impels a man to act is always some uneasiness... But to make a man act [he must have] the expectation that purposeful behavior has the power to remove or at least to alleviate the felt uneasiness.
Ludwig von Mises, Human Action

Churches

[In the] higher Christian churches… they saunter through the liturgy like Mohawks along a string of scaffolding who have long since forgotten their danger. If God were to blast such a service to bits, the congregation would be, I believe, genuinely shocked. But in the low churches you expect it every minute.
Annie Dillard, Holy the Firm

Conversion

“When we received Christ,” Phil added, “all of a sudden we now had a rule book to go by, and when we had problems the preacher was right there to give us the answers.”
James M. Ault, Jr., Spirit and Flesh

Living Law

The recognition and integration of extralegal property rights [in the Homestead Act] was a key element in the United States becoming the most important market economy and producer of capital in the world.
Hernando de Soto, The Mystery of Capital

mysql close 0