Santorum blames gay marriage for bad economy

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

I love, incidentally, how far enough gone we are that Goldwater is named along with Eisenhower, Nixon, and Rockefeller in the list of sane, easily-worked-with Republican presidentabili past.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

Wait a minute: Nixon is sane!?!

Good point.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

You must be logged in to read this quote.

Well, as it's been shown in Canada, something like 1 percent of gay folks choose to get married. Which means that gay marriage is pointless. Why bother? There's no demand for it.

I'm really going to need a citation on that. Who is measuring it? Everybody I know who is gay and in a long-term relationship either wants to get married or already is. Even if this statistic is legit, is it possible that the very low rate of gay marriage might have something to do with the relative difficulty of finding a marriageable partner who is attracted to the same sex as opposed to one who is attracted to the other in the first place? Also, how does this compare to marriage rates in Canada in general?

You must be logged in to read this quote.

But that's not what I'm talking about here. If you recognise all different types of relationships as 'marriage', then you are rewarding people for choosing other options. If you want to see a specific type of behavior, reward single moms for being single with plenty of goodies.

And this is what we are seeing. People who love each other are seeing that Marriage - really doesn't symbolize the extent of their love so they are doing other things. This is a consequence of 'changing the definition'.

If 10 percent of people choose not to get married whom otherwise would, that's a very significant and long-term effect on the overall wellbeing. [/quote]

Certainly, but I think that other things than gay marriage contribute to that. For instance, I think that it's to an extent an effect of the social and cultural atomization caused by the concept of the nuclear family itself. This sets 'marriage' apart as 'the way to found a family', and undercuts it when people realize that families can be and often are founded in other ways. This is why I don't support nuclear families but extended families, in which even if people do choose to eschew marriage for whatever reason there is an inbuilt system of social support and the same sort of social microcosm that the 'nuclear' family entails, except (in my view) considerably better. Incidentally, if the extended family or at least some parts of it are accepting of a member's homosexuality, that member could, one imagines, get gay-married and be involved in the upbringing of biologically related children with much more ease than in the atomized family structure we've been experimenting with for the past sixty-five-odd years.

You must be logged in to read this quote.

It's relevant to everyone. You're separating, "marriage" from "having children" and there are negative economic consequences associated with that too.[/quote]

I agree with this, but I'm not of the opinion that gay people having children is to be discouraged, again, particularly if there's a big lovely cornucopia of extended relatives to go around as potential childrearers and role models of whatever gender one might feel is necessary.

You must be logged in to read this quote.

I agree with you that marriage is institutionally broken. I view gay marriage as a way to salvage something of value from that brokenness. As with all else there were problems with the way marriage was done from the beginning, and just because it's worse than it used to be in a lot of ways doesn't mean there aren't still ways in which it can be made better.

I also really don't see how extending the marriage franchise in this manner is necessarily of a piece with subsidizing unmarried cohabitation. In fact it seems to me rather the opposite. I'd like to see serious campaigns towards getting gay couples to marry in jurisdictions where gay marriage is legal.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

Ben, do you maybe mean that it was 1% of the marriages in Canada that were gay, rather than 1% of the gays who were married? The statistics that I'm looking at give us 12,438 same-sex marriages in Canada between June 2003 and October 2006 (with same-sex marriage still not being legal in much of Canada for a lot of this time span), and 147,391 marriages of any kind in 2003, a rate which at that time (the website that I'm looking at for this particular number is from 2007) was said to be more or less stable. So if there are ~140,000-150,000 marriages a year, and 3,731.4 of those were gay on an average between a little over three years during all of which gay marriage wasn't legal throughout Canada...uh, that doesn't gel with what you were saying. My on-the-fly statistics don't even support the 1% of marriages being gay figure. At least in this period (which granted might have seen higher rates than subsequently for obvious reasons) it was more like 2.5%.

Here, links.

Same-sex marriage rate
General marriage rate

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

...Ben, marriage rate in one year is not the same as the percentage of a population that is married.

'Nuclear family' by definition refers to a 'family group consisting of a pair of adults and their children'. Yes, there is a reason why it cannot include other members of the in the family group. It's called the definition of the phrase.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

I'm just going to put this out there again:

A marriage rate in a population over the course of one year is NOT the same as overall proportion of that population which is married. That's like claiming that just because a country's death rate in a given year is, say, 3%, only 3% of that country's population throughout history has ever died.

Also, Ben, I do understand and appreciate your firmness and consistency on this matter, and I share your concerns about the fraying of the family, but when you get down to it no system can keep asserting itself and avoiding dealing with its structural problems by bearing down on the backs of people who it wants to exclude from its vaunted hallows, not least because that doesn't work. Whether or not gay marriage has done anything to fix any perceived problems with straight marriage, resisting gay marriage has accomplished nothing of use for anyone.

Also, I'm going to double down on the necessity of sending the atomized, discrete, two-generation 'nuclear family' right into the abyss. It's a cauldron for all sorts of perverse incentives and prurient obsessions.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

You must be logged in to read this quote.

Then why are they attacking those who say that they are sinning? If it's not about converting those who oppose them, why not simply leave them be?

I'll field this one.

Because the preponderance of such opposition is prejudicing them in the conduct of their lives.

And what exactly is this field in which you can't seek employment due to your religion?

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

Then don't be surprised if your policy fails to reap the expected gains.

I promise not to if you won't be surprised if your policy fails to reap them either.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

You must be logged in to read this quote.

Ok, and? You've made this argument many times now. Race is not relevant to marriage. Sex is. Marriage is about sex, no?

...no. At least, not always.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

To respond to Ben's question about love up above, there is certainly something of the erotic about romantic love, but the erotic need not necessarily be sexual. It's a general flavor of loving somebody that does not have to include any kind of particular acts or even desire for particular acts. I am a person who does not experience sexual desire, and I have fallen head over heels in love. I have somebody I'm still in love with, even though she's dead (I'd rather not talk about it).

Certainly we need to have social discussions about any incidental restrictions on this idea of marriage we might need to impose on the basis of things like sketchy power dynamics (incest/intergenerational stuff), but for this, even for the maintenance of family life once it's entered into however that may be, people happening to be the same biological sex, which doesn't necessarily correlate to any germane feature of a person's actual existence, doesn't strike me as particularly important.

I understand the concerns about procreation in terms of sexual morality (I don't necessarily share them but I do understand them) but it's the idea that sex has to be involved for a good romantic or conjugal or family life to be established that I don't like, partially because I agree entirely in principle with TJ that there can indeed be some very good things to be said for ignoring the wants of concupiscence, whatever one might have in the way of concupiscence. Even if you care about the maintenance of biological relations, which to a certain extent I think is a perfectly valid concern, those can get pretty diffuse and still be meaningful. The term 'social construct' is thrown around a lot these days but parenthood as inherently connected to biology is one of them.

The reason why it's best that marriage and family life remain based around pairs of adults rather than larger groups is that in a pair there's a certain at least theoretical symmetry in the relationality. Again, I don't think this has to involve what sex the pair are any more, even if there were periods in social history where that was important (which I am not necessarily denying). The family, rather than being valuable for its own sake, is to be valued as a way of constructing the ground level of society that is a microcosm of the kinds of loves and relationalities we're vouchsafed of the community of the righteous.

Some things will change; some things never change. The process of change certainly can seem fickle but there remain things that we can and definitely should conserve, even if we are people who are on my side on this particular issue. I hope you'll find me as an ally in defending the importance of these kinds of storge relationalities, even as due to the specifics of my own existence and experience I can't really couch connecting them necessarily to particular gender dynamics. Family as a conceptual structure and monogamy as an instance of committed and devoted Love remain among the most important things in the whole world.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

Well, see...I think you're misunderstanding me. It's a type of eros without sex that I think is possible, because I feel it as possible in my own life. When you think I am referring to agape in my first paragraph I actually am referring to (what I perceive and feel as distinctly) eros, which...to be honest is incredibly hard to explain, so the onus is entirely on me if I'm not doing it well. In any case that's something that feels possible for me, and since I am probably more a knight of infinity than a knight of faith, at least so far in my life, I am inclined to trust my judgment of the world on this point. It's probably not possible in most people's lives but it's not something that's inherently possible for humans. God could have afflicted you thisaway but He did not. God could have afflicted me youraway but He did not.

TJ is entirely correct that I don't feel that the sacramental character of marriage requires sex, though I do think that the sacramental character of sex calls for that of marriage. I'm not fond of the idea of sex outside of marriage--I would agree with most Catholics that it's piss-poor sacramental theology--but as you can see I view marriage if anything somewhat less restrictively than sex.

I'm avoiding getting into discussions of whether or not gay sex is or has to be sinful because that's been beaten to death many times over and we're discussing the character of marriage as it relates to the family. Ben is incorrect in presuming that I don't want marriage or a family, if he is presuming that (I'm not sure if he's doing that or just saying that the admitted strangeness of might outlook might put off other people if it became more general to the way marriage and family were constructed). I'm also using the word 'conjugal' in its generalized sense, which is tautological since in that sense it's essentially just the adjectival form of 'marriage'. As indeed it is somewhat tautological to define 'conjugal' as 'pertaining to husband in wife' in a debate over how marriage is to be defined.

Again, there are points I'm deliberately not arguing here because I feel that the idea that a by and large asexual marriage and family life is possible for those of us who are by basic inclination asexual is important to get across here, since the discussion had turned to the question of sex as necessary for eros and hence marriage. I'm perfectly aware that both my definition of eros and my experience of it are profoundly odd but I'm not asking anybody else to share them. (Full disclosure: I also feel a religious vocation but, again, as an Anglican this isn't construed as mutually exclusive to my feeling called to start or enter into a family unit.)

As to the symmetry/affinity I mentioned, you can technically get symmetry with even numbers but once there is a >2 number of people involved in any relationship the power dynamics become such that it's inherently irreconcilable with the sort of dialectic that should go on within a marriage. Could we at least agree on this point, even if we arrive at it differently?

I apologize for any incidental lack of clarity or diffuseness of what I'm saying here. I just finished midterms and I've been awake for sixteen hours on a previous four hours of sleep.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

I'm honestly not sure whether or not I feel comfortable or capable, having a family. I know I want one, very much so, but wanting one isn't the same as being called to having one, and the love that I mentioned a couple of posts ago is actually the BEST any of my attempts at becoming close to people I like that way so far have ended, so...I mean, add to that my views on extended versus nuclear family structures, and it's entirely possible I'll end up unmarried and childless myself, ordained a priest of the Episcopal Church, living as a member of a family in the role of cousin or uncle or something of the type. That isn't my ideal future but at this moment it seems most likely unless I meet somebody who absolutely sweeps me off my feet again. In that case I'll have a wife and kids (adopted or consenting to sex out of love for my wife, who knows) and holy orders. You presumably won't consider my holy orders valid but that's schism for you!

I do indeed feel more at home, to be honest, with a particular part of the High Middle Ages when there were good harvests and some theorized easing of Church attitudes towards benign gender-role variance (which a historian named John Boswell did some work on, work that you and I would probably both find highly hit-and-miss for almost entirely opposite reasons) than with most of what's come since then. What you see from me is often a fundamentally non-modern viewpoint--not necessarily any specific kind of premodern, but definitively not modern--translated into a life that experiences eros without sex, a very strange genderedness, a group of close friends most of whom are lesbians, and academic work on the language and literature of a country that's 98% non-Christian. I have to make uncomfortable choices, sometimes, about which aspects of my beliefs and experiences I want to prioritize, if that makes sense.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

You must be logged in to read this quote.

Up to a point. Hypermodern in the sense that you adopt many of the same viewpoints expressed in the Episcopal church. They aren't exactly rare these days especially among the educated folks.

Well, that's the experiences and personality traits that influence the non-modern substructure of my worldview that I was talking about. At a basic level, the way I see the world is based on other things. I, as an Episcopalian, will of course align myself with the part of the Episcopal Church coming closest to my views, but I'm actually often made uncomfortable by the modern 'any consensual sex is okay' view and again, there's a relatively narrow scope of things at hand that are what make me align myself with the more liberal elements. I'd dearly like to align myself as a more traditional Anglo-Catholic within the Communion some day. It's not that I'm comfortable with the modern expression of these matters; I'm just more uncomfortable with the common alternatives that I've seen.

You must be logged in to read this quote.

Oh, I'm aware of all this history; I was just joking with you. I'm concerned about the Episcopal Church's future as well. To be quite honest there are a lot of days when I agree with you, and it scares me; in that case I'd enter into a desert exile without the desert. Schism might actually reinvigorate its own products, but that leads to a whole other scary dimension--we've prided ourselves as Anglicans on our internal broadness of worship and philosophy within the points of the Instruments of Unity and the Chicago-Lambeth Quadrilateral (which historically always has accommodated very conservative as well as very liberal standpoints). That was supposed to be our 'concrete path', it's why I am an Anglican, and I'm actually very afraid of losing it. The Archbishop of Canterbury, who is a member of my general faction and speaks my language, announced his resignation this morning, and I'm really concerned about the future.

You must be logged in to read this quote.

I agree entirely. Much like with TJ, it's been easier for me to talk to you and find common points of reference than with a lot of the liberals on here.

You must be logged in to read this quote.

And you.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

You must be logged in to read this quote.

The door is always open.

Going to Rome is one of the alternatives that I'm more uncomfortable with as things stand now, but I appreciate the offer of welcome, and--maybe, someday.