Post-Humanity.

Marriage exists because it fits a need of most people, a need that stems from the brute biological fact that men can impregnate women and pregnant women can bear children.  That biology informs everything else, the rules of engagement between the sexes, age of consent, rules of virginity and chastity, rules about alimony and child support.

For pairings that are essentially alienated from child-production, those rules make no sense whatsoever.

//In a 2009 piece in The Weekly Standard, Sam Schulman argues that gay marriage replicates “a very limited, very modern, and very culture-bound version of marriage. Gay advocates have chosen wisely in this. They are replicating what we might call the ‘romantic marriage,' a kind of marriage that is chosen, determined, and defined by the couple that enters into it.”

This isn't what marriage has been through most of human history. Instead, marriage has taken the particular shape it has because it is part of a larger network, the kinship system.

One of the things marriage has done is to force men to respect the chastity of women until sex becomes socially acceptable within marriage. Schulman thinks that “it is a scandal that homosexual intercourse should ever have been illegal,” but adds that now that it is legal “there remains no extra sanction—the kind which fathers with shotguns enforce upon heterosexual lovers.” He comments sardonically, “I am not aware of any gay marriage activist who suggests that gay men and women should create a new category of disapproval for their own sexual relationships, after so recently having been freed from the onerous and bigoted legal blight on homosexual acts. . . . [D]eclaring gay marriage legal will not produce the habit of saving oneself for marriage or create a culture which places a value on virginity or chastity (concepts that are frequently mocked in gay culture precisely because they are so irrelevant to gay romantic life).”

Because gay marriage doesn't bear the burdens of virginity and chastity, it doesn't bear the burdens of real marriage which, Schulman argues, even today are “honored in spirit if not in letter, creating for women (women as modern as Beyoncé) the right to demand a tangible sacrifice from the men who would adore them.”

Because gay marriage detached marriage from the kinship system, incest prohibitions have no weight: “If Tommy marries Bill, and they divorce, and Bill later marries a woman and has a daughter, no incest prohibition prevents Bill's daughter from marrying Tommy. The relationship between Bill and Tommy is a romantic fact, but it can't be fitted into the kinship system.”

In sum, “in gay marriage there are no virgins (actual or honorary), no incest, no illicit or licit sex, no merging of families, no creation of a new lineage. There's just my honey and me, and (in a rapidly increasing number of U.S. states) baby makes three.”Schulman doesn't think the experiment will last: “When, in spite of current enthusiasm, gay marriage turns out to disappoint or bore the couples now so eager for its creation, its failure will be utterly irrelevant for gay people. The happiness of gay relationships up to now has had nothing to do with being married or unmarried; nor will they in the future.”

The losers will be everyone else, everyone who benefits from the various restrictions, obligations, and sacrifices that marriage imposes: “As kinship fails to be relevant to gays, it will become fashionable to discredit it for everyone. The irrelevance of marriage to gay people will create a series of perfectly reasonable, perfectly unanswerable questions: If gays can aim at marriage, yet do without it equally well, who are we to demand it of one another? Who are women to demand it of men? Who are parents to demand it of their children's lovers—or to prohibit their children from taking lovers until parents decide arbitrarily they are ‘mature' or ‘ready'? By what right can government demand that citizens obey arbitrary and culturally specific kinship rules—rules about incest and the age of consent, rules that limit marriage to twosomes? Mediocre lawyers can create a fiction called gay marriage, but their idealism can't compel gay lovers to find it useful. But talented lawyers will be very efficient at challenging the complicated, incoherent, culturally relative survival from our most primitive social organization we call kinship. The whole set of fundamental, irrational assumptions that make marriage such a burden and such a civilizing force can easily be undone.”

This is a powerful argument, but doesn't give sufficient weight to a point that Schulman acknowledges early on: The fact that “romantic marriage” was invented by heterosexuals, and the detachment of sex from marriage and marriage from kinship was accomplished long before anyone began seriously proposing gay marriage. Gay marriage may further damage marriage; but heterosexuals damaged marriage nearly beyond recognition all on our own.//

As I get older this seems more and more true...

...but I'm not sure if I'm changing or my country is changing.

Peter Leithart writes:

Alasdair MacIntyre’s comment is often quoted, and exaggerated in a curmudgeonly way, but it gets at so much of the truth of modern politics that it’s worth another citation:

“The modern nation state, in whatever guise, is a dangerous and unmanageable institution, presenting itself on the one hand as a bureaucratic supplier of goods and services, which is always about it, but never actually does, give its clients value for money, and on the other as a repository of sacred values, which from time to time invites one to lay down one’s life on its behalf . . . . It is like being asked to die for the telephone company.”

That little “invites” is the killer.

Peter Leithart Contra Munde

As Peter Leithart points out in his “Defending Constantine: the Twilight of an Empire and the Dawn of Christianity,” Emperor Constantine has often been made into the bête noire of those who have some particular grievance against the world they live in. Constantine is a particular target for those who dislike the institutionalized Christian church, the role of Catholicism in history or the existence of what they consider to be an intolerant, patriarchal or otherwise wrong-headed form of Christianity.


Leithart’s self-described “polemical” purpose is to re-examine Constantine in light of the state of Christianity as Constantine found it at the beginning of the Fourth Century, shorn of the usual retrojection of current ideology. Leithart’s particular target is late Mennonite, pacifist theologian John Howard Yoder, whose theology developed the idea of “Constaninianism,” whereby, in Yoder’s view, Christianity went horribly off the rails when the church formed an alliance with the state.

Leithart’s book is well worth reading for its fresh look at Constantine and its common sense critique of critics of Constantine. For example, Leithart marshals a persuasive rebuttal to the contemporary view of Constantine as a pagan or a cynic who exploited religion for political purposes. Leithart finds substantial evidence in Constantine’s life that point to a true believer in Christianity, such as legislation by Constantine that began the process of eliminating gladiatorial games, infant exposure and sacrifices to the pagan gods. These laws seem to have been aspirational, but they point to Constantine’s adherence to a Christian value system. Likewise, Constantine considered himself a missionary and would give sermons to his court.

For myself, I was forced to re-evaluate my previous view – engendered by the typical works on Constantine – that Constantine was uninterested in, and ignorant of, the fine points of Christian theology. Constantine may not have been a theologian, but in Leithart’s description, Constantine comes off as far more theologically sophisticate. For example, Leithart quotes Constantine’s “Letter to Arius” as follows, “I know that the plenitude of the Father’s and the Son’s pre-eminence and all-pervading power is one substance.” Likewise, Leithart offers an explanation for the death of Constantine’s wife and son, which partially exonerates Constantine. Given that even my 12 year old daughter has learned that Constantine was a unquestionably murderer, suggesting some uncertainty in an ancient mystery might have the effect of moving the zeitgeist away from a knee-jerk anti-Constantinian default position.

Leithart also examines the world of the early Christians. Christianity had been subjected to intense persecution under Diocletian, immediately prior to Constantine’s reign. Christians had also experienced persecutions under prior emperors. During those persecutions, Christians had prayed for deliverance, and for such Christians, a Christian emperor looked exactly like what they had been praying for. Contemporary critics of Constantine and the Christian assumption of power in the Roman Empire should really answer the question, what were Christian supposed to do? Remain a persecuted minority? People who think that Christians should never have assumed political power have a highly romanticized view of persecution and suffering.

In the last part of the book, Leithart tackles Yoder’s critique of “Constantinianism.” Yoder and his supporters assume a primeval Christianity that disdained any role in the state and uniformly embraced pacifism. Leithart demonstrated that no such uniform position ever existed. Christians, for example, joined the military with the acquiescence of their bishops from the earliest moments of Christianity. Hence, Yoder’s pacifism represents a strain of Christianity, but Constantine hardly represents a betrayal of “true Christianity.”

I suspect that there are subtexts in the dispute over Yoder’s “Constantinianism” which are lost on those of us who are not immersed in religious traditions that adhere to a “Two Kingdoms” theology. For example, I’m not clear why Yoder’s work, largely a product, it would seem of the peace movement of the ‘70s, would require such a strong critique in 2010. I had the feeling of being ringside to a scholarly infight without having a real sense of the players and the positions. Nonetheless, any good grudge match sharpens the issues in dispute and heightens audience interest, which may be one reason why this book was a thoroughly engaging read.