Posted on 06/26/2015 10:32:17 AM PDT by SeekAndFind
The Supreme Court next week will hand down a decision on whether the Constitution provides citizens the right to same-sex marriage. As recently reported in the New York Times, Jeb Bush pledged, and rightly so, to support further debate “irrespective of what the courts say.” Whether the Supreme Court plays kick-the-can back to the states or follows the more likely path of inventing legal fictions that turn constitutional silence on marriage into a redefinition of it, conservatives especially should be readying themselves for just such vigorous debate. But how should we proceed?
The most serious and, to my mind, persuasive philosophical and moral arguments against same-sex marriage have been mounted by Robert P. George, Ryan Anderson, and Sherif Girgis in What Is Marriage? Man and Woman: A Defense. Such arguments are essential to ongoing debate about marriage in this country, not only for those of us who believe that the union of man and woman simply is the definition of marriage but also for those who think that the judicial redefinition of marriage represents a usurpation of politics.
One crucial argument, however, has been curiously absent. It takes a step back from the question of sexuality and the right to certain benefits under law. One reason why marriage is not mentioned in the Constitution is that the Founders recognized that the institution of marriage was a common good of the society and prior to politics. Put differently: Constitutional silence on marriage indicates a commitment to limited government that has so far eluded our debates about marriage in this country.
Let me explain.
The fundamental distinction on which a commitment to limited government rests is developed in conversation with ancient classical thought. Augustine was probably the first great theorist of “society” as something that is “pre-political” and that finds its most basic unit in the family. But as Thomas Aquinas notes, Aristotle also recognized this. The Philosopher says in the Nichomachean Ethics that man is more inclined to conjugal union than political union. Human beings are “social animals” before they are “political animals.” This provides the West with an anthropology for understanding that future citizens come into the world through the union of a man and a woman and that therefore the state has a stake in recognizing and protecting the institution of marriage. The family belongs to our social nature, and it is how a civil society continues to flourish and self-govern. The political union is subsequent to this prior reality. A properly ordered state will recognize and protect conjugal marriage precisely to the extent that it believes in pre-political limits to the exercise of its power.
This is actually good news for politics. When the state recognizes the nature of marriage as something prior to itself, it secures its own limits. When we acknowledge and recognize that by nature we are both social and political, we suddenly change the nature of politics. Our government no longer is tempted to define the whole of reality.
What the state loses in terms of absolute power, it gains in terms of dignity of limit. When citizens, legislators, jurists, and voters recognize that the conjugal union is the source of life for civil society, they recognize something that is prior to the state. Such a view, rooted in the fundament of the Western political tradition, provides us with a “limited” conception of government as a means to “serve and protect” the common good of persons whose social nature constitutes the political union.
Now if we fast-forward to the present crisis, our debates about marriage should look different.
When the state recognizes the nature of marriage as something prior to itself, it secures its own limits. Our government no longer is tempted to define the whole of reality.
While the Supreme Court’s likely attempt to create yet another legal fiction in the steady expansion of its powers is particularly dramatic, we have seen a century-long attack on marriage, perhaps dateable to the early-20th-century embrace of artificial contraception, but certainly in its wake, between various modes of sterilizing efficiency, all the way to abortion, we have witnessed a total detachment of marriage from conjugal procreation.
The redefinition of marriage has been underway for some time, as many have noted. But we often miss the political significance of redefining marriage. What has happened is that the conjugal union is no longer posited as being prior to the political union, as it was for Aristotle, and even more strongly in the later development of the Western tradition. We have been witnessing the steady erasure of pre-political limits.
Marriage has been severed from nature as such, and it has certainly been severed from any notion that marriage is for the propagation of the next generation of a society. We may think of the cultural transformation happening organically, but everything from contraception to no-fault divorce to abortion has been enforced by the government — most often at the highest level of the judiciary. But we should ask ourselves: Who stands to benefit from these erosions of marriage?
One reason why a state might enforce a legal redefinition of marriage is that the conjugal definition reminds us that there’s something natural on which the state depends.
All the branches of our government stand to win a temporary increase in power from the erosion of marriage. The state will not resist any cultural attacks on conjugal marriage because such attacks further erase any notion of a social nature prior to the state.
To put it bluntly, the reason why we have seen so much power behind redefining marriage is not because it serves 1.8 percent of the population. It is because it serves Leviathan — the Hobbesian vision of an absolutely sovereign state with ever-expansive control over every aspect of our lives. There are natural checks that can curb this tendency toward absolute power, but we aren’t talking about marriage as an important pre-political makeweight to secure a free republic.
We urgently need to advance a debate about marriage and the limits of government. Our current judicial regime seeks not to recognize marriage but to redefine it on a political basis. In doing so, our government is claiming for itself a power that our Founders explicitly sought to limit. That’s the debate we are not having. And not having that debate will eventually mean a loss of freedom for everyone.
— C. C. Pecknold is associate professor of theological, social, and political thought at the Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C. He is the author of Christianity and Politics: A Brief Guide to the History. You can follow him on Twitter @ccpecknold.
I fear for my Republic! I fear that we are going the way of ALL the other great Civilizations of the past, the Greeks, Romans, Egyptians, Incas, Maya, just to name a few. They too came apart from the inside out & were taken over by a greater outside force/s. When do our so called leaders start declaring themselves above the law, their protection security staff will start wearing purple so we will know who their are, & we cal tell them apart from the rest of the so called internal security forces. We already have to pay tribute at least once a year to them who live apart from us peasants. And let us NOT forget what is taken from us when we purchase anything that we need for our daily lives.
Then we grew up learning that our causes would be heard in the fair & UNbiased courts, & that the so called judges would listen to both sides & also a jury of our peers our listen in and make their decisions heard before all. But the “Will of the People” was the most important & the last word on any subject. But now all it takes is 1 black robed priest [term from the days of old when they were the judges for the elite] to tell us on how the king/s & emperors want us to live.
The Country that I swore an oath to protect from all enemies both forgin & domestic NO longer stands! And it is every person for themselves [or with their family] It is ok to rape, rob, burn, or destroy anything you want all in the name of something, anything you want. As long as you can say that you were oppressed in some way.
So now I am calling for the implementation of Paragraph 2 of the Declaration of Independence;
“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.—That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, —That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.—Such has been the patient sufferance of these Colonies; and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their former Systems of Government. The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States”
And that we hang every person who has helped cause these problems! Because tempers are short & memories are long. There will be NO appeal or reprieve, or pardon or parole, the judgment will be final! The ship of state is about to be righted & probably be the Veterans who will be the ones who right it, because we can NO longer trust those who make the laws or enforce them!
Will I be branded a traitor to the current regime? I know I will be. Will I be ridiculed, tormented, laughed at, mocked, more than likely. But to those of you who held make this mess of our country, I damn you ALL to the lowest reaches of the ancient Greek hells!
There will be a day of reckoning & you are not gonna like what you are going to get, whether in this life or the next! This I swear, before All Mighty GOD in Heaven.
...the reason why we have seen so much power behind redefining marriage is not because it serves 1.8 percent of the population. It is because it serves Leviathan — the Hobbesian vision of an absolutely sovereign state with ever-expansive control over every aspect of our lives.
I have a US Flag on the wall in my garage. Today I’m going to take it down.
I’m no longer proud of being an American.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.