Via American Power, I found this little culture war essay at a place called The Western Experience.  There is a lot to unpack here—tons of typical wing nut bullshit—but two things stand out from the rest.

First, Mr. Experience makes the demonstrably false assertion that “marriage is not an evolving paradigm.”  This means that he is either willfully ignorant or a liar.  Greek and Roman marriage required no civil or religious recognition, and the Romans recognized several variations on marriage, and even accepted homosexual marriage until 342 CE.  Until only recently, few married for love; marriage was usually a business relationship between families who arranged marriages between their children for economic or political reasons.  The Church did not involve itself in marriage until the Council of Trent in 1545, and wedlock was not defined as a lifelong commitment until the Roman Catholic Church defined it so in 1566.

Marriage not only evolved over time, it even varies across societies today.  Different ethnic, national, and religious groups define it differently—marriage is a social construct—and this is easy to see in the growing normative understanding that stigmatizes marriage without love.  Earlier constructs simply did not include this component.  Given the economic origins of formal church and state recognized marriage, tying men and women into family units probably has more to do with protecting existing power structures than with organizing life according to God’s instructions.  It is, after all, no accident that key components of marriage have to do with division and inheritance of wealth, and of assigning parenthood to children.  A child born to my wife, for example, belongs to me by definition, whether or not I am the father.

This is not a matter of opinion: the social institution we call marriage has changed dramatically since its inception.  Marriage may still define the family, but that definition has changed.

More broadly, Jason also made me think a bit about the meaning of Conservatism.  I won’t presume to guess at his definition, but at a minimum it must include the protection of existing institutions.  Yet Jason here seems to think that expansion of the institution of marriage to include an out group poses a threat to the regime.  If, as he seems to argue, the family forms the bedrock of a strong society, it is hard to understand how permitting gays to form and normalize their families according to a traditional institution is a bad thing.  Since gays are not organizing a competing institution, we must assume that they want to participate in society according to the shared understandings Jason prefers.  My brother Greg—a militant homosexual—objects to gay marriage on these grounds: he does not believe gays should subsume themselves into the traditional culture represented by matrimony as Jason and other religious conservatives understand it.

Jason also attacks the judiciary, another existing institution that protects traditional power structures.  Here he frames the problem using the old “activist judges” trope, complaining that the judiciary makes “sweeping policy decisions” that are “easily seen as broadly political, and not terribly focused judicially.”  Without getting into the question of why citizens should not have a right to seek redress from one branch of government when another ignores them, I have to wonder how much more judicially focused an opinion could be than using a sentence like “nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws” to require extension of marriage rights to every citizen.  “Conservatives love to interpret Constitutions and Bibles literally—except when they don’t.

In the end, the culture wars for Jason have little to do with protecting a strong, free society, and everything to do with creating a society Jason likes.  Fortunately for the rest of us, he is losing.

Tags: Culture Wars, Marriage, Neoconservative