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Marital Simulacrae and Commodification

Rod Dreher has been posting a veritable cornucopia of resigned commentaries, tinged perhaps with a measure of despair, on the apparently inexorable societal death march towards the dissolution of marriage since the California Supreme Court's issuance of its egalitarian diktat. In the most recent of these commentaries, each of which has broached numerous substantive issues meriting further comment, and relied upon the MacIntyrean judgment that moral disagreements in late modernity are incommensurable (late modern 'ethics' being essentially emotivist, its valorized ideals of selfhood, autonomy, and desire regarded by classical and Christian ethics as the collective fons et origo of those problems moral theory is supposed to solve), Dreher references Margaret Liu McConnell's recent essay on marriage in the American Conservative, en route to a citation of Scalia's typically prescient dissent in Lawrence v. Texas, averring that he found her argument wanting:



But we must recognize that insisting that traditional marriage is best for raising children is not effective. A better approach is to emphasize that traditional marriage promotes the ideal that no parent should abandon his child. Who would argue against that? It’s consistent with other governmental policies in the area of child welfare. It’s in accord with human nature. But making the argument requires the courage, honesty, and humility to say that some ways of procreating are not as good for the general welfare as others, whether the parents are of the same sex or are married heterosexuals.

Adoptive parents do God’s work when they provide homes to children, and those homes can be as loving and stable as the home of any natural mother and father. But adoption is a humane response to what is already a tragedy in a child’s life, the loss of a parent. Those adorable adoptees from China, for example, are the byproduct of a cruel policy of child restriction that has lead to the deaths of thousands of children.

Reproductive technology, like adoption, without doubt can produce children who are loved by their new parents in homes as stable as those of any biological parents. But the various techniques, when employed by same-sex couples, always require that at least one of the child’s natural parents give up the child. This tempting world of sperm banks and egg brokers is the domain of the affluent and easily verges toward eugenics.

Adoption and reproductive technology as methods of forming our next generation are no foundation for a stable society. Social order doesn’t depend on parents being forced to give up their children for adoption because of poverty, illness, supposed unfitness, or the brutal policies of a foreign country—nor on parents giving up their children in advance of birth in sterile, scientific transactions. Those historical Supreme Court cases declaring marriage a fundamental right lauded the stability-promoting aspects of marriage, emphasizing the good that radiates throughout the broader society from the promise the man and woman make on their wedding day: “Marriage … creat[es] the most important relation in life … having more to do with the morals and civilization of a people than any other institution.” “Upon it society may be said to be built, and out of its fruits spring social relations and social obligations and duties.” The promise of the married couple to keep and care for one another and for their children engenders a respect for unconditional responsibility that serves us all.

Extending marriage to same-sex couples would leave no other institution to promote the ideal that every parent promises to care for his child. It’s easier for fathers to walk away from their responsibilities when society no longer promotes the simple norm that a child belongs to both parents equally, and each has a duty to care for the child—the norm encompassed in traditional marriage. As the NAACP, La Raza Centro Legal, and the National Association of Social Workers know, the pain and deprivation caused by the erosion of this norm fall hardest on the poor.



Now, I suppose that one ought to distinguish between two senses of persuasion: will such an argument be, in actuality, persuasive to our juristocracy, steeped as it is in the doctrine that each individual is entitled to define for himself the meaning of life and the universe? and should such an argument carry persuasive rational force for those concerned for the ontological integrity of the involved states, categories, and classes? As regards the former question, it cannot be gainsaid that our legal caste will not find the argument persuasive, not in the least measure. A series of legal precedents have bestowed upon the sovereign individual the right to conjure from the nothingness of his passions some fictive meaning of the universe, and, pursuant thereto, decreed that discrimination between such fictions is invidious, motivated solely by animus. The Court has already adjudged that there obtains no rational basis for such discrimination, and any argument concerning the status of children will be regarded as an attempt to clothe in the garb of rationality more of the same old irrational prejudices.

Nonetheless, aside from the hackneyed conceits of late modernity and its increasingly strident nominalism, such an argument ought to be persuasive, though the matter is considerably more grave than McConnell expresses. It is not merely that emotivist-nominalist marriage, extended to homosexuals, will enshrine in law the principle that some parents must abandon their children for the sake of the rights-regime, but that such a marital regime entails the commodification of children. Children, in Christian thought, are a supervenient grace; upon the intrinsic good of the conjugal, self-giving love of husband and wife, the gift of new life supervenes, both ratifying and expanding the good of marital love. More than this, a marriage open to children instantiates the great cosmo-theological principle that through self-giving, self-sacrifice, and abnegation (marriage is regarded as both loving and martyric), the world is reborn; by dying to ourselves, we instead receive life more abundantly. Such an order also renders our origins concrete and particular; we are rooted in particular histories and places and lineages. The deformation of marriage to accommodate homosexuals* will definitively ratify and cement in place a contrary principle, once children are factored into the 'marital' equation: children, desired by many such couples, will become objects of felt entitlement, and claim-rights upon their 'inclusion' in such marital units will be asserted; but because such unions are intrinsically infecund, the claim will thus be that adoption and reproductive technologies be enshrined as rights, so that all can claim their 'rights' to produce or possess a child. The child will no longer be a gift, a living symbol of a love which precedes him and envelopes him, but something something acquired or created, to the end that someone might 'fulfill himself' or realize his private conception of the meaning of the universe; this will entail the apotheosis of the consumerist mentality of us moderns: as we consume - according to the logic of advertising & etc. - in order to create our very selves, the things we acquire being instrumentalized towards the satisfaction of transient desire, so even children, sundered from natural biological origins, will be instruments of lifestyle preference-satisfaction. This is the gateway to the final frontier of commodification. When once we admit into law and culture the idea that some persons exist, or may be brought under the discipline of existing, so as to complete the world-images of others, conjured from the nothingness of their desires, a fathomless abyss of evils will lie before us.

* If any are inclined to argue that, with the emergence of the contraceptive/divorce culture, those horses bolted the barn, I won't argue. The only distinction I am at pains to draw is that, while heterosexuals long ago nailed the theses of ontological rebellion to the door of civilization, gay marriage and the aftermath will be the cuius regio, eius religio phase of our decadence; passion is our king, and all reality its slave, and now dissenters, and society itself, will be coerced into making the confession of faith. And the nothingness will negate us.

Concluding Unscientific Postscript: If anyone should dispute my plural form of the singular simulacrum, which I have also seen as simulacra and the inelegant simulacrums, I'll be delighted to entertain correction.

Comments (25)

Woe to the child killed. But woe also for the child brought into the world for the exact same reason that his parent(s) might have otherwise killed or refused him existence, viz., their own personal actualization.

"Simulacrae" sounds fine to me.

I have no idea on the Latin. I'd have to look it up. I assume it has an ordinary Latin plural, though that mightn't be the same as its English plural as a loan word. I have a good friend who insists that "syllabi" is not a word, because "syllabus" is now an English word which therefore has an English plural, "syllabuses."

Few things have depressed me more than the inclusion of children in the equation of homosexual couples. When a lesbian becomes pregnant by artificial insemination this is spoken of now in the media as "their first child." How insane can we get? One woman is the child's biological mother and the other is no relation of the child's whatsoever. Nor, I might add, will there be any adoption needed for legal purposes if the couple's "union" has legal recognition. Even in states which have only civil unions thus far, the child is treated automatically legally as belonging to both "mothers." Note that the ancient common law custom that lies behind this, whereby a child born to a married woman was automatically legally her husband's child, arose from the fact that the child could, for all the court could tell without unsavory investigation, really _be_ the husband's biological child. To port over this legal presumption to a relationship where the biological rationale that lies behind it is physically impossible is...obscene.

"...and now dissenters, and society itself, will be coerced into making the confession of faith. And the nothingness will negate us."

We're simply entering the next logical phase of our trials, and such rhetoric will only weaken one's desire to suffer the grace of "white martyrdom". Let us loudly mock the false idols of our age, bear joyful witness and avoid anything that emits the odor of defeat. Stiffen your spine, lad. I'd hate to hear you threw in with Mordor.

When Dick Cheney's daughter decided to have a child, a turkey baster baby, with her lesbian partner, the liberals waited with baited breath for her rejection from the Republican/Conservative fold.

It never came, of course, and I'm fairly certain mom and dad never sat daughter down and explained that she would be doing deliberate harm to her child to deprive him or her of a father, and that they couldn't approve because it was not only wrong, but grossly immoral.

How could they do that? Daughter was a good Republican. Had worked on dad's campaigns. Helped him and the Prez win election.

How do you say no to such an otherwise exemplary person (if you looked the other way about the sleeping with a girl business out of wedlock)?

No one in public life has the courage anymore to keep moral standards and say no. Bush's daughter offers Ellen the ranch for her lesbian wedding.

Polygamy is legal because the doers don't bother to take out extra marriage licenses. They simply cohabitate in a state of second or more marriages.

The Muslims have a problem when they go to the mosque to get another marriage on the books, but they'll learn, too.

Once the courts declared laws against cohabitation unconstitutional, that war against immorality was lost, too.

People, America is over. Buy guns. Practice shooting. Think about moving and starting businesses in remote places with like minded folks. Turn your ploughshares into swords. If you want to be free again, that is.

Buy guns... Think about moving and starting businesses in remote places with like minded folks.

Ruby Ridge or Bust!

The singular is simulacrum, so the plural is simulacra.

Otherwise, though, I agree, and as to your last point re the contraceptive/divorce culture, I think the shift towards encouraging/accepting those intrusions into marriage weakened the institution so as to more easily allow the growing acceptance of homosexual "unions." Now it's just so very cool to be "gay friendly", and the lifestyle has been accepted so entirely by so many that homosexuality is being used to justify contraception and divorce. For example, in _Getting Off_ by Robert Jensen (the good: it's anti-porn; the bad: it's anti-porn for almost all the wrong reasons), Jensen poses the questions, "What is sex for?" and rejects the idea that it might be for procreation because that would exclude homosexual sex. (his final conclusion-- that sex is "to create light rather than heat,"-- sounds just as foolish even in context and is a great example of what little one is left with when one separates sex from gender, marriage, and even procreation)

Bethany

A couple of questions for Maximos.

You say, "It is not merely that emotivist-nominalist marriage, extended to homosexuals, will enshrine in law the principle that some parents must abandon their children for the sake of the rights-regime, but that such a marital regime entails the commodification of children."

I'm confused by what you mean by "some parents must abandon their children for the sake of the rights-regime". How is it that gay marriage will FORCE anyone to abandon their children...for gay couples who want kids aren't they going to either adopt children already abandoned (in the case of two men) or obtain sperm from a voluntary donor (in the case of two women).

Then you go on to say, "The child will no longer be a gift, a living symbol of a love which precedes him and envelopes him, but something something acquired or created, to the end that someone might 'fulfill himself' or realize his private conception of the meaning of the universe; this will entail the apotheosis of the consumerist mentality of us moderns: as we consume - according to the logic of advertising & etc. - in order to create our very selves, the things we acquire being instrumentalized towards the satisfaction of transient desire, so even children, sundered from natural biological origins, will be instruments of lifestyle preference-satisfaction."

This makes some sense, but it seems to me to suggest that gay couples are somehow particularly shallow and don't appreciate or understand the forebearance and sacrifice involved in raising a child. One could argue just the opposite -- a gay couple, never having to worry about birth control, would be especially free from the worries and responsibilities of children and must therefore undertake a very serious decision to alter their "lifestyle" to take on the responsibilities of children. As you acknowledge at the end of your post, everything you say about gay couples (and their attempts to satisfy their "transient desire") applies equally (if not more so) to straight couples. Once you have birth control, then every couple that uses it is in some way satisfying their "transient desire" (although why the desire has to be transient is unclear). Especially those couples that choose to never have children.

...or obtain sperm from a voluntary donor (in the case of two women).

Obviously in that case the sperm donor is abandoning his child.

Yes, at least one of the parents will, of necessity, relinquish a child bound to him or her biologically, all so that homosexuals can enjoy an obscene fantasy-parody of families. Consent cannot legitimate the institutionalization of this essentially gnostic, a-biological, a-familial conception of child-rearing.

Certainly some homosexual couples will appreciate the tremendous sacrifices entailed by parenting; that isn't in question. Nevertheless, the means by which they will procure the children essentially commodify the children, reduce them to lifestyle accoutrements, artifacts of will and desire. Of course, an identical judgment can be rendered against heterosexuals who contracept; the difference, however, is between the perversion of a natural act and the relationship of which the act is an expression, and a wholly unnatural relationship, which will be given the superficial sheen of normalcy by fundamentally anti-human techniques of conception. It is the difference between a form of corruption, and the formal ratification of that corruption as the new normal, the new virtue. Where once we were able to discuss the ways in which the divorce culture victimized children, reducing them to props of parental selfishness, now we will (increasingly) be compelled to regard children as lifestyle props; when the problem was confined to heterosexuals behaving badly, we could still talk about it in terms of a failure to honour obligations that were more than a matter of individual consent; with homosexuals, we cannot discuss the problem in such terms, as children are utterly excluded from the nature of the relationship in the first instance, meaning that the 'obligation' is purely consensual, purely nominal. Ergo, societally, the ethos will be - proving that law both emerges from and reshapes culture - that the obligation to care for children is not natural, ontological, but contractual, simply. There is no natural duty to care for a commodity. It will be - is - a form of violence against nature: moral and ontological violence.

But what about adoption? Presumably, some children would be otherwise doomed to group homes and/or foster care, having already been abandoned by their parents. In this case, two gay men might adopt the child and provide a loving home. Is the home ideal? Of course not. But is it worse than the alternative?

Finally, what is interesting to me about the whole debate around gay marriage is why no one proposes to allow two gay individuals (men or women) to marry but prevent them from raising children. If the primary concern is over the proper way to nuture future generations and encourage healthy homes for children, just ban gay folks from having kids.

"If the primary concern is over the proper way to nuture future generations and encourage healthy homes for children, just ban gay folks from having kids."

On what grounds? Marriage has been torn from it's sacramental nature, social mission and anthropological roots. Your proposal is merely an odd contradiction within a de-natured rendering of the family.

It's the logic of nominalism: if we reduce marriage to a mere nomen, then why not the next thing, parenting, and the thing after that? We are under a compulsion to extend parenting rights to homosexuals, just as we will extend them marriage rights, because we know, deep down, that marriage is about children. If marriage isn't grounded in human nature, then why parenting?

You can't ban a lesbian woman from becoming pregnant. She could even have natural intercourse one time (presumably, without enjoying it) with a male and become pregnant in the normal course of events, in which case she would just be the child's biological mother without even the use of sperm banks. So even banning sperm banks would not make it impossible for a lesbian woman with all her organs intact to have a child.

But it doesn't follow that her lesbian partner, who is no relation of the child's whatsoever, should be regarded as the child's "other mother" or that there should be any legal fiction whatsoever according to which "they" are "having" the child.

However, if you treat them as married legally, then in law it does not seem possible not to regard the child as "theirs," crazy though that is. Regarding a child as born in the marriage as a child of the marriage and as held in joint custody by both spouses is one of the perks of marriage, and the whole point of giving marriage licenses to homosexual couples is, precisely, to give them all the legal perks of marriage. Which is one of many, many reasons why their sexual relationship should not be given that special, government-recognized status we call marriage.

One day I'm going to write a post called "Why Libertarians should oppose gay marriage." I believe I'm not the first person to make that point, though.

"Why Libertarians should oppose gay marriage."

I look forward to that article, Lydia. But is not asking libertarians to oppose gay "marriage" tantamount to asking them to not be libertarians?

Lydia,

Although Megan McArdle doesn't in the end totally oppose gay marriage, this famous post of hers is one of the best libertarian pieces I've ever read on the subject:

http://www.janegalt.net/blog/archives/005244.html

I think you might find it useful for your own piece.

"...is not asking libertarians to oppose gay "marriage" tantamount to asking them to not be libertarians?"

I guess it depends on how you define 'libertarian'. After all, marriage is a form of government recognition. It's hard to see how the more simple formulations of libertarian principle could require some given form of government recognition for a particular type of sexual relationship.

Not Ruby Ridge, but evangelicals will find a Jeremiah or Ezra and sober minded people like the Mormons did, and create a "saving remnant" in the "wilds" somewhere.

It takes a certain fierce dogmatism combined with sensible behavior, and planning for a future (having a vision) and ordering a small, but growing society to that end.

There's no fixing this country within its present structure. We have to stop crying about the corpse and start planning for the future - what do we do now that we know that no election or Party can restore the Constitution and the rights of the people.

Either we sit back and simply let Caesar come when he will, or people can try and build the foundations of a new disciplined, serious, and moral America.

"Why Libertarians should oppose gay marriage."

Amusing theme, no doubt, but the predictable capitalist response seems to be this;
"First comes love. Then comes marriage. And now it's a milestone every couple in California can celebrate," - a Macy's ad for its gift registry in today's NYT."
http://www.postmodernconservative.com/

Interesting article, Jeff. I think she's right, though it's rather amusing that she isn't willing to come right out and say, "Okay, we shouldn't have gay marriage, because maybe the conservatives are right about the consequences." I mean, she's just made an excellent inductive argument that conservatives often do see the point of various institutions better than "reformers" and often do predict better than the "reformers" the consequences of weakening these institutions or of creating perverse incentives. And indeed libertarians should be experts on the subject of perverse incentives. It's one of their themes in the area of government programs. I hadn't seen that piece before, but I have seen one that I seem to recall Ed Feser cited (I think) on Right Reason making a different argument from a more or less libertarian perspective and one that, coincidentally, I had thought of for some time myself. Since the Right Reason archives are no longer available, I should write to Ed and ask him who and where it was.

"And indeed libertarians should be experts on the subject of perverse incentives."

No truer words.

After all, marriage is a form of government recognition. It's hard to see how the more simple formulations of libertarian principle could require some given form of government recognition for a particular type of sexual relationship.

Well, I'll absolutely not accept that marriage is (i.e., identical to) "a form of government recognition", but I s'pose in the current debate, all we're really talking about is whether a government legally recognizes, e.g., by bestowing rights and privileges upon, a thing that people call "marriage", whatever they might happen to mean by it. But yeah, that was pretty much my point: The Doctrinaire Libertarian(tm) position would be that marriage is a private contract. Period. Ergo, the guvmt would have no say-so about marriage, gay "marriage", or any other crazy thing two (or more) people (or ??) wanted to call "marriage". Ergo, the Doctrinaire Libertarians, while they may be personally opposed to gay marriage, are not in favor of the government's interference in the "choices" of others. Ergo, the libertarians would favor gay marriage in the same way Mario Cuomo favored abortion. Of course, they shouldn't favor gay marriage, but then they couldn't very well be Doctrinaire Libertarians.

Libertarians should be opposed to gay marriage until no one is required to enter into a contractual relationship with any married couple whose marriage one does not recognize. As long as the government compels us to follow its morality: that only three forms of marriage exist: mm, mf, ff, instead the broader universe of possible marriages; libertarians should oppose gay marriage.

As soon as offering marriage benefits becomes someone's free choice, then it no longer matters who is married. Governments cannot stand freedom. Their purpose is to compel obedience. And the people who favor gay marriage want obedience.

Sorry, Steve, let me be clearer: I didn't mean that marriage _just_ is a form of government recognition. What I meant is that when we are talking about civil marriage, we are talking about, _among other things_, a relationship that has a form of government recognition. I hope that is clearer. In public contexts when we talk about whether someone supports or opposes "gay marriage," we are talking about whether someone supports or opposes bestowing the legal status of civil marriage on homosexual couples. Everyone knows that--hence the media pictures of homosexuals coming for their marriage licenses and so forth.

Now, this isn't just a matter of "allowing" people to do something. I think it's very confusing in discussions of this issue to allow the proponents of homosexual "marriage" to cast it in terms of "allowing gays to marry." Because everyone knows quite well that what we're actually talking about is requiring justices of the peace (or whatever they are) to give marriage licenses to homosexual couples, requiring that the state give _special legal recognition_ to this particular sexual relationship. Which isn't a question per se of "allowing" the homosexuals to do one thing or another. Without a marriage license, for example, they could still say vow-like things to each other and engage in sexual activity.

So if a doctrinaire libertarian as you describe him opposes all civil marriage, then on _that_ view he should oppose homosexual civil "marriage" among other things. In which case, he actually opposes what is meant in ordinary discourse by "homosexual marriage" rather than supporting it. Of course, he also opposes heterosexual civil marriage, which is a problem in itself.

But in point of fact, my guess is that most of the libertine/libertarian types don't actually oppose all civil marriage. They just use pseudo-libertarian arguments to support extending it to homosexuals.

Not Ruby Ridge, but evangelicals will find a Jeremiah or Ezra and sober minded people like the Mormons did, and create a "saving remnant" in the "wilds" somewhere.

Yes, and perhaps you could built this evangelical Utopia somewhere in the Colorado mountains, and conceal it with a giant holographic reflector screen of some sort. Won't work though. We corrupt and worldly Catholics will track you down, move in, and build a cathedral smack dab in the middle of town.

"...conceal it with a giant holographic reflector screen of some sort..."

Been reading Rand again, I see. :-)

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