Wednesday, January 30, 2013

Ten arguments in defense of marriage (Part I)

In the very excellent Touchstone Magazine, Anthony Esolen has given given ten arguments why same-sex marriage would be bad for society:

Most people believe that the principal objections, or even the only objections, to the drive to legalize homosexual “marriage” spring from religious faith. But that is not true. I can offer ten objections that have nothing to do with any religion at all, except insofar as the great religions of the world reflect the nature of mankind
Read the first six of these ten arguments here.

7 comments:

Lee said...

Martin, those arguments are only going to sound convincing to a Christian, I'm afraid.

Singring said...

I had trouble spotting any arguments at all.

His first three 'points' (if you want to call them that) don't even attempt to make any coherent argument for why same-sex marriage should not be legal. Sure, Esolen let's us know in excrutiating verbosity what he sees wrong with today's society (never citing a single source to back up his claims and frequently just flatout asserting things). But nowhere is there any mention of how exactly allowing gay marriage would have any effect-positive or negative- in thsi context? How would allowing gay marriage exacerbate problems like pornography or sexual liberation (if that is his worry)? He doesn't say.

And then we have howling nonsense like this:

'5. It will curtail opportunities for deep and emotionally fulfilling friendships between members of the same sex, opportunities that are already few and strained. This is particularly true of men.'

What?

This is absurd on the face of it - but Esolen does his best to try and explain his concern in this area:

'That environment makes almost impossible the depth of friendship described by Cicero, when he said that a friend was another self, or one before whom you could utter your thoughts aloud.'

Cicero? Ancient Rome? Are you kidding me? Homoeroticism was rampant at Cicero's time and Romans were taking slaves and young boys as homosexual partners even then! So if Cicero was capable of having this depth of friendship in 'that environment', how would it be threatened today if we allowed homosexual marriage?

But Esolen doesn;t curtail his absurdities there:

'One of my students related to me an incident that happened to him in a bar. His closest buddy had been abandoned by his girlfriend, and was weeping freely as the young man cradled his head in his arms. A young lady walked up to them and chirpily asked them if they were gay.'

Two responses:

1.) What does it say about Esolen and his confidence in his own sexuality, his maturity and his mental fortitude if he shudders at the thought of being asked if he was gay at a bar? Is he that homophobic that he panics at the thought of others thinking of him as gay? The poor man's tender sensibilities apparently can't survive such a shocking scenario, so he'd rather leave his friend to weep alone in a corner.

What moral character!

2.) So let's think this through: Esolen says that male friendships are compromised by the 'threat' of being thought of as gay - but then he gives an example that illustrates that thsi stuff is going on already - without gay marriage being legal. So what then is the argument against gay marriage?

There is so much more to sift through in this drivel, but one thing I can say is that if this is the level of argument that is supposed to convince secularists of the dangers of gay marriage, this race is truly run.

KyCobb said...

Most of his arguments boil down to a claim that allowing marriage equality will make it more difficult to turn the clock back over fifty years and repeal the sexual revolution (even more than that, we also have to make homosexuals moral pariahs again and force them back into the closet). I see a couple of major problems which makes this argument nonsense. First, conservatives already face insurmountable problems with reversing the sexual revolution, and marriage equality will not significantly change the equation one way or another. To achieve his goals, you have to amend or at least reinterpret the Constitution to eliminate the right to privacy, which would allow you to attempt to make contraception and abortion illegal, and you'd have to abolish no-fault divorce and repeal civil rights law to allow gender discrimination so that women can be made economically dependent on men again, not to mention creating an economy with plenty of high paying jobs for men without college degrees so that they could actually support a family. If you had that kind of political power, repealing marriage equality would be a snap, but in reality there isn't the slightest chance that such an extreme agenda could ever be enacted, which means blocking marriage equality won't bring you any closer to your goal of returning to a mythological golden age which never really existed. I know you don't like me saying so, but the claim that oppressing LGBT people is the solution to society's ills can best be described as homophobia.

Hank Reynolds said...

Martin, what a bunch of obfuscating nonsense.

From your commenters, I mean. Esolen's article is brilliant. If you can't spot an argument in it, then I would agree that you have trouble spotting any arguments at all. Are we to take the hackneyed retort of accusing the writer of being insecure in his own masculinity as more reasoned and eloquent?

Among Esolen's excellent points is a fact that I, as a musician often think about, but which goes largely unremarked. Pop music, which defined succeeding generations, has died. Youth is devoid of poetry. There is nothing requiring artistic expression; everything is literal, every desire merely an impulse to be acted on.

"We have these days witnessed the last petering out of a tradition of song and poetry that had lasted eight hundred years, from the troubadours of Provence to its last and decadent efflorescence among the rockers of the 1960s."

That's an empirical observation, not an aesthetic judgment, and it is a clear indicator of a diseased and dying culture.

Singring said...

'If you can't spot an argument in it, then I would agree that you have trouble spotting any arguments at all.'

Is that so?

Let's look at Esolen's first 'argument', then:

'1. The legalization of homosexual pseudogamy would enshrine the sexual revolution in law.'

If the 'argument' contained therein is so easy to spot, could you please quote it for us? I'd really like to know what it is. I'd really like to know,f or example, what gay marriage has to do with '...unwed mothers, of aborted pregnancies, of children growing up without a parent, usually the father.'

As far as I can tell, Esolen doesn't even try to tell us. But maybe you are better at spotting the argument in this mess.

'"We have these days witnessed the last petering out of a tradition of song and poetry that had lasted eight hundred years, from the troubadours of Provence to its last and decadent efflorescence among the rockers of the 1960s."

That's an empirical observation, not an aesthetic judgment, and it is a clear indicator of a diseased and dying culture.'

Now, if Esolen's article was entitled 'Ten arguments against bad pop music' or 'Ten reasons why pop music today is awful.', your point would make a semblance of sense. (By the way, you will have no trouble convincing me how awful much of today's popular music is)

As it stands, I'll just have to assume that, in the mind of a zealous conservative, gay marriage is to blame for Lady Gaga - or the other way round, one really can't be too sure.

One more reason why people like Esolen cannot be taken seriously.

Martin Cothran said...

Singring,

I'm surprised you are having trouble detecting the argument here, especially since its the kind of argument you are always telling us is superior to all other arguments.

It's an inductive argument:

In all cases in the past, the legalization and wide acceptance of sexually permissive practices has led to disastrous social consequences

Pseudogamy is another sexually permissive practice.

Therefore, legalizing it and making it widely acceptable will lead to further disastrous social consequences.

You've defended induction several times on this blog. And now you are abandoning it since it militates against your own views. Tsk, tsk.

Singring said...

'In all cases in the past, the legalization and wide acceptance of sexually permissive practices has led to disastrous social consequences'

Two points:

1.) I have long learned that in the crazy world of VR, anything can pass for a credible argument, so it doesn't surprise me that you are once again conflating two separate issues.

What you outline is not an argument against gay marriage, it is an argument against homosexuality per se.

If you want to convince us that Esolen is trying to argue for a general ban on homosexual behaviour, then go right ahead. I'm sure proposing bans on gay sex is going to positively thrill the secular voters of America and drive them back into the arms of the GOP. Brilliant strategy.

To make my point explicit: How exactly would legalizing the consensual, legally binding union of two men or women constitute a 'sexually permissive practice'?

This is as if I were to say that heterosexual marriages encourage are sexually permissive practice.

The whole point of a marriage is to strengthen the monogamous union between two people. This is, incidentally, a point where Esolen blatantly contradicts himself. One of his other ten 'arguments' turns out to be that homosexuals are literally killing themselves via their promiscuous gay sex and we need to save them from themselves. Obviously, the way to do that would be to strengthen monogamous relationships between homosexuals.

If you want to go the opposite way and ban homosexuality altogether, all I can say is good luck at the polls!

2.) 'Therefore, legalizing it and making it widely acceptable will lead to further disastrous social consequences.'

Just asserting this nonsense doesn't make it true, I'm afraid. You seem to have forgotten that inductive arguments are actually based on empirical evidence and observation. So I would like to hear about some actual evidence that illustrates how society in in a 'disastrous' state thanks to pornography and/or the because of sexual liberalization?

How exactly is gay sex causally related to abortion? Or no-fault divorce? Can Esolen show us studies in which divorce rates are causally linked to sexual permissiveness? Last I read, divorce rates in the US are worst in states where the laws have traditionally been the most restrictive. How does that mesh with Esolen's 'argument from induction'. Seems to me he's inducing things from out of the blue sky. This is precisely why the Prop 8 defendants in California were laughed out of court. They had a lot to moan about, but nothing to actually build a coherent argument that would convince a secular court.

Esolen nowhere even attempts to indicate how these issue are related - he just throws them all into a vast melting pot of conservative paranoia and malcontent. In a sense Esolen is the ultimate grumpy old man - full of vitriol, short on coherent argument.