CULTURE WARS: A Disarming Commentary
During an era of progressing secularity it is inevitable that certain long held and religiously enforced taboos will become the subject of tumultuous debate. Once this questioning occurs its effects are often irreversible; for what has been seen can never be unseen, what has been heard can never be unheard, and what has been judicially struck down can never be un-struck. Or can it? In 2000, Californians voted 69% to 39% against legalizing homosexual marriage. To their surprise the California Supreme Court, in a 4-3 decision, struck down that initiative on the grounds that it is unconstitutional to deny marriage to someone because of their sexuality – doing so violates the constitution’s equal protection guarantee. Writing for the majority, Justice Ron George wrote, “An individual’s sexual orientation — like a person’s race or gender — does not constitute a legitimate basis upon which to deny or withhold legal rights.” Homosexuals, he concluded, have the fundamental right to marry.
And so our nation continues to make itself in the imago Illuminatio, the image of Enlightenment. It persists to walk down the path of liberation blazed by the early revolutionary Jacobins who vigilantly advocated for their newborn republic to remain steadfast in the ideals of the French Revolution, a revolution which was at once both a cultural and political revolution in thought and praxis, holding the values inimical to a democratic republic above the oppressive traditions handed down by religion and monarchy.
But not so fast Justice George. “La Garde meurt, mais ne se rend pas.” (“The Guards die but do not surrender,” so said Napoleon’s General, Pierre Cambronne). There are always those ready to “stand athwart history yelling ‘Stop!’” And this large group of voters, steadfast in their belief that marriage can only denote a union between a “man and woman”, cling with a death-grip to that lofty phrase coined by conservative demigod Bill Buckley Jr..
These traditionalists — largely residing in the over-groomed suburban monstrosities of Southern California where they dutifully attend their purpose-driven-über-churches and charitably hire Illegals to do their dirty work so they can selflessly rotate with their neighbors the task of driving each other’s video-gaming kids to soccer practice as they gossip with their social equals via Bluetooth (all this, of course, in service to the highly revered traditional values of family, religion, philanthropy, and volunteerism) — have wasted no time in proposing a new ballot initiative (Propostion 8) attempting to amend the California constitution itself. This proposed amendment states that the institution of marriage is only between a man and a woman.
But should this counter current strike anyone with surprise? Even the Jacobins found themselves facing opposition from the Anti-Jacobin counter-revolution whose self-appointed job it was, in the words of their founder, George Canning, “to be full of sound reasoning, good principles, and good jokes and to set the mind of the people right upon every subject.” These men admitted to being unabashedly “prejudiced in favor of [France’s] Establishments, civil and religious.” One can assume they would have imagined themselves as carrying out their newborn public relations campaign in a manner considered by all to be ”fair and balanced.”
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Discussing the more recent matters taking place in California was, on local public radio, Karen England, a lawyer of the Protect Marriage Coalition in favor of the proposed amendment against homosexual marriage. Poised to contradict her was Geoffrey Kors, Executive Director of Equality California, a non-profit fighting to defend the equality and dignity of homosexual and transgendered people. Kors tried his best but was taken off guard by the ternary offensive unleashed by his opponent. Sadly, this battle for the public mind was rather one-sided, so I intend here to launch my own counter-offensive once I recount the particulars.
Miss England began the conversation by stating that her coalition not only disagrees with gay marriage but also has a problem with four California Supreme Court judges “legislating from the bench” and overturning the will of the people. Thus she and her coalition of malediction are out to ”reaffirm the traditional definition of marriage”. She claimed, “This is about whether or not the people of California have the right to define ‘marriage’.” Speaking to Mr. Kors she then asked, “Is it okay for two men and one woman, or two women and one man to be married? Why are you limiting it to two people? Why can’t we open the doors to love and commitment between three people?” She later stated, “I am for equality, but I don’t want them stealing the word marriage,” adding that she is not against equal rights for gays, but that “marriage is marriage and this traditionally means one man and one woman.”
As you can see, Miss England put forth many assertions. She began by asserting that this issue is about the legal rights of Californian voters, then followed with the assertion that this issue is about her political group’s moral beliefs, and ended with the assertion that her group’s take on our cultural tradition is the one we ought to be upholding.
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Tradition. Morality. Legality. This is the epistemic trifecta racing beneath the rhetoric espoused by the most vocal zealots raging against homosexual marriage. In recent weeks these three distinct ways of knowing have been drawn upon and exploited to no end by various public interest groups so as to unleash emotions and circumvent rational discourse (not only the Capitol Resource Group represented by Karen England, but also cultural forces such as Focus on the Family, Concerned Women for America and conservative talk-show hosts). Groups such as these are dedicated to reasserting their collective will at the state level and will spare no tactic in doing so. Allow me to take Karen England as the quintessential religious conservative so that I may briefly outline the troublesome claims frequently adopted by such groups in their venture to out maneuver opponents with value-laden rhetoric and illogical jive.
Notice first that Miss England is really battling for one particular traditional meaning of marriage among many. Her bowdlerized reading of our cultural and legal tradition is comical in its daring assertion that the definition of marriage favored by her and her like-minded political brethren stands as the single authoritative version. She fails to point out that our tradition has also defined marriage as a bond only between members of the same race. This traditional definition was the one upheld by California’s anti-miscegenation laws which were only declared unconstitutional as recently as 1948. From ‘48 to ‘78 the definition for marriage became a “contract between two people.” Only since 2000 has it been explicitly defined as between a “man and a woman.” The point is that Miss England’s tradition is not the tradition, but only a tradition that just so happens to be her tradition. This of course severely undermines her overall argument that outside this tradition society is left without a means of adequately defining the boundaries of marriage (e.g. her claim that we are headed for polygamy).
The implicit assertion put forth by Miss England that we must strictly delineate the scope of marriage to traditional heterosexual unions or our state will inevitably slip further down a slope that ends with legalized polygamy, sounds, on the face of it, rather convincing. I have even heard an acquaintance of mine, a well-read and nimble-minded Aerospace engineer, take up the same slippery-slope position — except he one-upped Miss England and added to the list of forthcoming unions that of human/beast and that of adult/child. Besides the problematic act of cherry-picking history to come up with one’s own version of tradition,this argument, being of the slippery-slope variety, has a logical flaw as well; and just in case anyone out there hasn’t taken a course in Introductory Logic, I must risk condescension to point out that slippery-slope arguments are logical fallacies. Of course that doesn’t stop them from motivating the masses to action, and one suspects that the law-schooled Miss England is aware of this fallacy but intentionally continues to use it to her advantage.
But what I found to be the most profane part of Miss England’s performance was her uncivilized and tasteless grand-strategy. When speaking about the legality of gay marriage Miss England imports the loaded and irrelevant rhetoric of morality instead of dealing at length with more germane legal notions like equality, liberty or discrimination. Asking if it’s “okay” for three people to be married is supremely ambiguous wordage to employ while in the throes of a supposed legal debate. Nonetheless, asking such a question and insinuating that the opposition should answer it in moral categories is Miss England’s covert way of disorienting both the opposition and the radio listener through conflating moral notions with legal ones and bringing into the discussion widely held negative emotions over the morality of polygamy and associating them with the legal debate over homosexual marriage. Had she resisted this malevolent urge to crudely manipulate our moral sentiments, Miss England might have instead asked her question more clearly: “Is it morally okay for polygamy to take place?” But in doing so the question would have appeared as a blatant non-sequitur, having no relevancy to the legal issue at hand. The same could be said if she had exchanged the word morally for the word legally.
After such an irredeemable performance one suspects that Miss England took her ruse over to one of those conservative talk-shows where she carried on the logic of her argument claiming that Muslims should not be allowed to marry because marriage has traditionally been between a Christian man and woman; that the 14th Amendment to the U.S. constitution should be repealed because in giving citizenship to blacks it redefined the traditional meaning of the word citizen; and that though she is for religious equality, she is against giving other faiths equal protection under the law because if every non-Christian sect is allowed to call themselves a religion then what’s to say every non-Christian group, such as the Skin Heads or the KKK, wont soon be able to call themselves a religion and therefore receive equal protection under the law? “No, we must draw the line somewhere,” she might say, adding, “and why shouldn’t it be with the teachings of our God?” Then, brimming with Anti-Jacobin fervor, she would add, “We must not let them steal our words. God help us! We must not allow the ungodly to flourish in the land of the Righteous!”
Which is, of course, what this is all about.
