Marriage, Morality, and Culture
[Ed. Note: An excellent read. Cheryl M. Wetzel]
http://www.firstthings.com/onthesquare/2009/09/marriage-morality-and-culture
September 10th, 2009
By R R Reno, First Things, Professor of Theology at Creighton University
The tide is going out. Words like fornication have a musty, antiquated ring. Unwed mothers no longer suffer social stigma. Divorce has become common. The large, complicated human reality of sexual desire, mating, romance, and childrearing no longer finds itself ruled by elaborate and widely accepted social norms. And now, of course, we are in the midst of a drive toward same-sex marriage.
I’m not surprised by the latest development. In my years as an Episcopalian, I came to see that homosexuality plays in important role in the much larger phenomenon of changed social mores in the area of sex, family, and marriage. The image of two men or two women kissing gives a dramatic immediacy to the many aspects of sexual revolution: real people, genuinely felt desires, new possibilities, the courage to transgress old norms, and the hope for the lasting happiness based on love’s unifying power.
In other words, homosexuality richly suggests freedom from an old, restrictive moral order, freedom from the inhibiting power of shame, freedom from the burdens of judgment, censure, and condemnation. And it evokes the promise of existential freedom, the inner release from inhibition and fear of social censure.
The allure of existential freedom is not new. In 1859, John Stuart Mill published On Liberty, an argument for expanding the scope of human freedom beyond the realm of the political narrowly understood. In order to undertake what Mill famously called “experiments in living,” we need to be able to escape from “the tyranny of the prevailing opinion and feeling.”
Mill was correct. We are social animals. Hardwired to want to fit in, all of us feel the soft coercion of cultural norms. As a result, a deep freedom to live as we please requires more than political rights. We need something like “social rights” that give us leverage over and against inherited culture.
To a very great extent, the cultural history of the twentieth century can be understood as the gradual acceptance of “social rights.” In America, a long dominant Protestant and bourgeois ethos eroded—and then in the 1960s collapsed. In a short decade, divorce went from something dangerously shameful to socially acceptable. Premarital sex and cohabitation followed the same trajectory. Acceptance of out-of-wedlock childbearing came more slowly, as did same-sex relationships. But the end result is now the same. Gay couples now have a social right to live their personal lives free from social censure.
Our courts tend to reflect social reality. In 1965, the Supreme Court was faced with a case (Griswold v. Connecticut) that challenged a law against contraceptives. In its majority decision, the Court identified a right to privacy. As a legal right narrowly understood, it means that the government has no business policing bedrooms. However, it has become more expansive, most notoriously to include right to abortion. Today, the right to privacy pretty much accords with Mill’s notion of freedom from “prevailing opinion and feeling.” It amounts to a right to conduct one’s personal life as one wishes, unhindered by other people’s ideas of right and wrong.
This expansive legal right has been reinforced by a new social consensus. Today, it is singularly gauche to announce that you regard someone’s marital, sexual, or parental choices to be “wrong” or “immoral.” Indeed, the very fact that I put scare quotes around “wrong” and “immoral” is telling. We are now heavily socialized to be tolerant and non-judgmental—with the exception, of course, of refusing to tolerate the intolerant and quick to judge the judgmental. But there is no contradiction. Both the tolerance and intolerance serve to provide and reinforce the now dominant culture, one that believes we should be able to live as we wish.
The controversial question of same-sex marriage is so interesting and important because it marks decisive new phase in our cultural drive toward an every deeper freedom to live as one pleases. Freedom from censure is no longer sufficient. Today, we see an emerging right to cultural approval and endorsement.
Some months ago, the Supreme Court of Connecticut handed down a decision that required the state legislature to make provisions for same sex marriage. The most interesting part of the opinion concerns the alternative of civil unions. As the Court recognizes, the artifice of “civil union” is a bloodless affair designed to remove the legal disadvantages that adhere to the private choices of same-sex lovers: matters of inheritance, health coverage, and so forth. The Connecticut judges deemed civil unions separate but unequal, and their reasoning is telling. Civil unions are unsatisfactory, because they lack the “transcendent historical, cultural, and social significance” of traditional marriage. Read more…