A lot has already been written about Joseph Bottum’s essay, “The Things We Share,” and it’s worth the attention it’s received from all sides. I won’t try to intuit Bottum’s intent, or explicate his reasoning. The piece speaks for itself, and has a lot to say.
One thread of his thought in particular sticks with me. He takes time that many people do not to consider the “perceived offense” lesbians and gay men take to the arguments in favor of heterosexual-only marriage, and mentions Bruce Bawer and David Boaz among many who have taken umbrage at things he has written. The essay was prompted by the deteriorated relationship he had with a gay friend.
Bottum is troubled by this unintended response. He does not mean to give offense, and I see little reason to doubt that. He will never be a champion of same-sex marriage, but he doesn’t seem to have a homophobic bone in his body.
So is the offense strictly on us? Are we being overly sensitive?
I think this question marks the primary disconnect between those who genuinely dislike or fear homosexuality and those who are struggling in good faith with a hard social and moral issue.
And I’d pose the answer as a further question: When it comes to marriage, how could we not take our exclusion personally? What kind of human beings would we have to be to not experience some level of offense?
You don’t have to have read Jonathan Rauch’s “Denial: My 25 Years Without a Soul” (though you should) to understand how important this is. Lesbians and gay men are, first of all, human, with all that entails. Our sexual orientation is fully bound up in our humanity. When we are treated – or treat ourselves – as if we are heterosexual, one of the most fundamental parts of our entire humanity is distorted, and the corrosive effects compound from that.
If you reduce sex to a biological minimum, then gender is all, and an orientation toward one gender or another is surplussage. That is the premise upon which our notions of sexual morality have proceeded. From that foundation, philosophers and theologians have built a structure that assumes a rationale for sex – reproduction – and works backward. Marriage is not, itself, biological, something we know from observing animals who generally lack our sophisticated rituals and relationships, but have been able to reproduce successfully for all of recorded time.
Animals are not moral creatures, though. The beneficial effects of biological parents raising their own children are undeniable. But even the most charitable view of parent-child relationships through history shows that this biological-marital ideal has been erratic and unconstant. At the very least it has always admitted exceptions.
A morality that does not allow for human inconsistency is no morality at all, it is a command. The debate over same-sex marriage has often tortured morality into the worst kind of science, where exceptions cannot be tolerated.
This is the moral universe lesbians and gay men find ourselves inhabiting. Opponents who are the least thoughtful assume that we are heterosexuals gone wrong, are violating a dictate of nature either to be attracted only to members of the opposite sex, or at least to act that way.
Bottum seems to accept that some people truly are homosexual in orientation, a profoundly important position the Catholic Church acknowledges. And the dilemma he faces is that the only choices offered to us in the current moral map that the church navigates from are ones no heterosexual would find tolerable: a lifetime of chastity, or marriage to someone who holds no sexual attraction.
So what kind of humans would we be if we did not, at a minimum, say that this view of morality is incomplete? It is a moral vision designed for only one group, assigning homosexuals to a lifetime of immorality by definition, or without any possibility of intimacy, connection, love. Is this the way morality, or any kind of god, should work?
If we are human at all, of course we would object, even take offense when these are the only options we are offered. But more to the point, as Americans, our moral universe is also shaped by our nation’s ideals. The promise of equality is no small part of the things we take for granted – a fact borne out by the strong support of American Catholics who, at a healthy 54%, are among the most accepting of all religious groups of same-sex marriage.
Bottum ultimately accepts that same-sex marriage is succeeding in the public mind (and not just in the U.S.), and worries about the damage the church’s increasingly hostile arguments about civil marriage are doing to its reputation. That is certainly a matter between him and his church’s leaders. All I can add, as one of the many who left the church of my birth over exactly this issue, is that I would be less human, and less Catholic if I did not object – sometimes strenuously – to their moral vision of a world that has no place in it for both me and my soul.
23 Comments for “Taking it personally”
posted by Jorge on
And I’d pose the answer as a further question: When it comes to marriage, how could we not take our exclusion personally?
……..
Eliminate the exclusion and make it something else.
When marriages were arranged (political, etc.), there was no exclusion of gays from marriage. Maybe your preferred form of adultery was different, but there were certain things that were expected of you.
Thus, society left gays behind when it changed the nature of marriage. If we are serious about social reform, should not society meet the needs of all people?
Re-integrate gays into society. There is no need for society to limit the way it meets the need of gays for social command and meaning to sanctioning gay marriage. There are many other possible paths to take. Let them eat cake, as Marie Antionette said. It is just that it is rather late for most of us to consider the ideas of people who have been silent for so long. When the Catholic Church and other major religions come up with another way, it will be of help to the very orthodox and the very homophobic, and that is terribly important. But not to many others.
posted by Houndentenor on
Good points. The ignorance of history shows in these debates over marriage are surprising. Almost all marriages were arranged until very recently. Yes, there is literature in which couples fall in love outside those arrangements (Tristan and Iseult, Romeo and Juliet, etc.) and they pretty much all end in tragedy. Such love is punished, not rewarded. This idea that you would fall in love and choose your own mate is a rather recent one. Marriage was something else entirely when our religious texts were written, so the idea that “this is how marriage has always been” is hogwash especially since many of the Biblical patriarchs practiced polygamy.
posted by Doug on
“Eliminate the exclusion and make it something else.” When you make it ‘something else’ you are saying our marriage is ‘different’. I submit that same sex marriage is no different that straight marriage. Marriage is a social contract to love and care for another human being nothing more and nothing less.
I for one will not settle to be ‘different’.
posted by Jorge on
What is the relevance of being the same or even equal compared to inclusion?
posted by Tom Scharbach on
What is the relevance of being the same or even equal compared to inclusion?
Whether we are perceived as “same” or “not same” is irrelevant, despite the long and sometimes contentious arguments among LGBT theorists about whether or not we should try to assimilate into hetero-normative culture.
However, there is a vast difference between being included and being treated equally. Children, for example, are included in our laws and our culture, but are not treated on an equal footing with adults.
posted by Houndentenor on
I will assimilate or not in whatever ways I choose to (or not to, as the case may be). It is no more for activists to make those choices for me than it is for religious extremists to do so.
posted by Tom Scharbach on
Bottum ultimately accepts that same-sex marriage is succeeding in the public mind (and not just in the U.S.), and worries about the damage the church’s increasingly hostile arguments about civil marriage are doing to its reputation.
You’ve correctly identified, I think, the crux of Bottum’s argument. Bottum does not support marriage equality so much he accepts that marriage equality is becoming a fact on the ground, and the American Church’s vehement rhetoric and overt meddling in the affairs of state with respect to civil marriage equality (which it has not done with respect to civil divorce and and civil remarriage) will damage the Church.
I’m not sure that Bottum understands “equal means equal”. If he did, he would not dismiss our bitter experience with a lifetime of legal discrimination as a “perceived offense”, that is, an offense that is felt but not real.
Lesbians and gay men are, first of all, human, with all that entails. Our sexual orientation is fully bound up in our humanity. When we are treated – or treat ourselves – as if we are heterosexual, one of the most fundamental parts of our entire humanity is distorted, and the corrosive effects compound from that.
Exactly.
posted by Houndentenor on
Bottum doesn’t want to understand the nature of his offense because that might require acknowledging that anyone who disagrees with him might have a valid point of view. I’ll say no more about his religious nonsense for that would surely be offensive to someone.
posted by Tom Scharbach on
Bottum doesn’t want to understand the nature of his offense because that might require acknowledging that anyone who disagrees with him might have a valid point of view.
I never heard of Bottum until last week, and I have no idea about his personal traits. That’s not to say I’m doubting you, but I just don’t have any information on which to judge.
After I heard of him last week, I read a number of his essays on marriage. It was revealing.
I think that Bottum misses the fact that the offense is actual, rather than perceived, because he is caught up in the Clockwork Orange logic of Scholasticism, missing entirely the nature and extent of the nature of the offense.
David, I think, has caught the to critical aspects of nature and essence of Bottum’s offense:
(1) Bottum’s position denies our humanity by insisting that our homosexuality, closely bound to who we are, mediating our experience of life, and integrated into every aspect of our lives, can be separated out from our “human nature” and dismissed. At some level, accordingly, he refuses to accept us as fully human.
All of us have tried, often for long periods of our lives, to live as if we were heterosexual with a twist, and we found it a half-existence. We experienced our full humanity only after we accept that our homosexuality was essential to who we are and integrated our sexuality into our lives.
(2) Bottum’s position denies us our self-identification as full partners in the American ideal, because he dismisses the importance of our own equality to our self-conception of what it means to be an American. Without equality, we enjoy citizenship with an asterisk, at best, and are denied the experience of being fully American. As is the case with most Americans, our lives, our hopes and our dreams are caught up in the American dream, and our identification as “American” is part and parcel of who we are. Bottum’s position denies us our full citizenship. That is the essence of the offense of denying “equal means equal” in our case, an even greater offense that the legal discrimination attendant to it.
Having said all that, I’m not sure that Bottum, personally, is worth all the ink. He may have influence, of sorts, among the First Things crowd, but that bunch is a subset of a subset a subset of the American population, small in number, living in its own querulous and largely self-contained world, and of limited influence even within the universe it attempts to influence. I’m not at all sure that Bottum’s “change of heart” (more accurately, “surrender to reality”) makes a whit of difference.
I live outside the conservative think-tank and conservative Christian universes, so I may well be missing the importance of Bottum’s (as it seems to me, anyway) grudging acceptance of reality. I leave that determination to those of you who do live in that universe.
posted by Jorge on
I’m not sure that Bottum understands “equal means equal”.
A conservative Catholic? Fat chance of that.
Catholic theology holds that men are equal to women, priests are equal to lay people, and that the worst criminals are equal to the most upstanding citizens (the latter belief being common to most Christian denomenations). It also holds that only men can enter the priesthood, priests are ordained in a holy sacrament, and that those in the lowest social classes are often those who are closest to God. I think it’s much more likely he rejects “equal means equal” outright.
My Catholic school years taught me that the Chuch is very comfortable rejecting certain arguments about morality and ethics that it considers to be often used as excuses to practice evil. If a certain train of thought leads to the conclusion that gay marriage should not be clearly and emphatically opposed, the Catholic Church isn’t merely going to say the legal inequiality is a “perceived” offense. It is going to argue that the perception does not come from that which is holy, but from that which is, to put it diplomatically, human.
And the Catholic Church’s response to human needs has ever been to deny them, sometimes with a stone face, sometimes with a quick glance the other way, sometimes only temporarily while it offers something better.
The only possible options are to convince the Church that gay marriage is simply one of many things it has to “suffer” through, or that gay marriage really isn’t a sin. The latter is a non-starter. Live with the former and let live.
posted by Tom Scharbach on
I think it’s much more likely he rejects “equal means equal” outright.
If Bottum rejects civil law meaning “equal means equal” — the foundational American concept that all citizens are entitled to equal treatment under the law — then Bottum rejects the heart and soul of the American social compact.
posted by Jorge on
If Bottum rejects civil law meaning “equal means equal” — the foundational American concept that all citizens are entitled to equal treatment under the law…
Those are two very different things! The premise that all citizens are entitled to equal treatment under the law ostensibly creates a merit-based trial system in which your outcomes under the law are determined by your actions alone. Implicitly, so far as this country’s Constitution is concerned, it means that inequalities (e.g., guilt or innocence) should be distributed through a means that is objective and fair, rather than something subjective and capricious.
The ends–the law–can be almost as subjective as you can imagine.
“Equal means equal” turns “equal treatment under the law” on its head by demanding a specific result under the law without a merit-based inquiry on the facts of any one controversy. Hence religiously objecting wedding photographers and marriage clerks are treated exactly the same as employers and social servants who act out of ill will. There is no right to a trial based on the merits of one’s actions. Guilt or innocence has already been determined with a broad brush.
posted by Tom Scharbach on
“Equal means equal” turns “equal treatment under the law” on its head by demanding a specific result under the law without a merit-based inquiry on the facts of any one controversy.
Oh, nonsense, Jorge. Equal treatment under the law is not limited to operation of the legal system, trials or otherwise. Equal treatment under the law means that all citizens should bear the burdens of citizenship, and enjoy the benefits of citizenship, on an equal basis unless the government has a necessary, objective and rational basis to make a distinction between citizens, imposing special burdens or denying particular rights to one group of citizens as opposed to another.
posted by Mike in Houston on
A couple of points:
Religion is a chosen behavior – sexual orientation is not… the Catholic Church acknowledges this implicitly if not explicitly.
I don’t give a whit what any particular religious persuasion has to say about my civil rights unless it is affirming of secular human rights.
Nothing in the LGBT civil rights movement has ever called for any religion to change its doctrine to be inclusive of LGBT people -merely to abide behaviorally by our civil compact with regards to the public square.
The only people arguing for special rights are religious zealots and their apologists like Stephen on this blog who want to have secular discrimination protected under the rubric of a ‘religious freedom’ that has never existed outside of Jim Crow.
posted by Jorge on
Nothing in the LGBT civil rights movement has ever called for any religion to change its doctrine to be inclusive of LGBT people -merely to abide behaviorally by our civil compact with regards to the public square.
Since the civil compact has been changing constantly, this strikes me as a distinction without a difference.
posted by Dale of the Desert on
Bottums’ lengthy essay, often ponderously circumlocutory and sometimes elegantly precise, begins, meanders around, and ends within the framework of his presumably lost relationship with a gay friend. His perspective on that story seems to me to parallel and reflect the general perspective of the Catholic hierarchy toward gay people, namely that he presumes to explain what, how, and why his friend thinks and feels without ever asking his friend for the truth. Too much lecturing and not enough learning.
The essay also displays a weakness I’ve occasionally (albeit rarely!) noticed in myself, to wit, the less I understand what I’m talking about, the longer it takes me to explain it.
posted by JohnInCA on
I’d be more impressed that he spent time thinking about this if he didn’t, multiple times, argue that marriage equality wasn’t about gay people at all, but about being anti-Catholic.
posted by Fritz Keppler on
Why not reserve the term holy matrimony for religious binding of couples as a subset of marriage, which is basically a civil action? A church can reserve and limit holy matrimony any way it wants, after the couple gets a civil marriage license.
posted by Tom Scharbach on
Rather than force religions to rename religious marriage, why not simply do what Minnesota has done, and relabel “marriage” as “civil marriage” in the statutes?
Religious marriage is legal irrelevant to civil law (ask any of my dozen or so friends bound in valid religious marriages under Jewish law that are not valid marriages under civil law), and civil law marriage is irrelevant to religious law (ask any of your friends who are divorced and remarried under civil law, but adulterers in the theology of most Christian churches).
So why muck around with religion, forcing religious organizations to abandon the term “marriage” for religious purposes, and worse yet, relabel religious marriage as “holy matrimony” (a Christian term for marriage, a term which those of us in non-Christian religions are likely to find yet another example of trying to share a bed with the Christian elephant), when the equivalent result can be obtained by a simple language change for civil marriage in the statute books?
posted by Dale in the Desert on
There is a problem in that clergy in the United States are licensed by the states to perform “civil” marriage simultaneously with religious ones (hence the ceremonial declaration, “By the authority vested in me by the state of Wherever, I pronounce you X&X”). We need, instead, to follow the practice of European countries such as France, where a civil ceremony is required for legal purposes, and an additional religious cerremony is optional. In other words the state needs to stop licensing clergy to act with state authority.
posted by Tom Scharbach on
I believe in accommodating religion, but it seems to me that clergy should just get over themselves.
Nobody is asking any clergy to perform marriages, civil or religious, that are anathema to their theology. That’s true for same-sex marriages, that’s true for inter-religious marriages, and that’s true for remarriages that Christians consider state-sanctioned adultery. Not once, to my knowledge, has anyone sued a clergy member for refusing to perform a marriage that violates their religious theology.
So what is the fuss all about, anyway?
It is about going to ridiculous lengths to accommodate clergy who are so bloated with their own sense of self-importance as moral arbiters that they are determined to conform civil marriage law to the dictates of their religion.
It is time to say, “Enough already!”
posted by JohnInCA on
I was married by a nice lady that was a volunteer marriage officiator at the county recorder office. In no way is my matrimonial state “holy”. So I’m not sure what distinction you think you’re asking for that isn’t already granted.
posted by Don on
There is no easy out for the Catholic Church on this one. The US is an aberration for them. Mostly, they are the dominant if not only religion where they operate. I’ve seen Mormon temples in Colombia, but they are more like freak occurrences. They are used to be a strong if not dominating force in most of the cultures where they operate. You can’t just abdicate that position around the world where you are a minority in one jurisdiction (albeit a big one).
They wield enormous clout in those countries to shape the legal framework where their adherents live. To suddenly announce withdrawal from the secular sphere would be crazy talk. Remember, they were able to keep divorce illegal in Ireland until the late 1990s. It was only a few years before that where condoms were only available with a doctor’s prescription. This may seem laughable to many, but this is the power they held. Now, condoms were everywhere and the Irish separated from their former spouses, lived as a married couple with new “spouses” and remained legally tied to their original spouse because there was no way to dissolve the contract. Yep, it was that crazy. Yet the Church would not budge.
How do you convince a group to give up that kind of power? Even if they were only winning pyrrhic victories, they were showing politicians “don’t mess with us. we can tie up your whole process to the point of absurdity and the people will stand for it.”
The Church suffers from human frailty, as do we all, and you can’t walk away from that kind of power easily. As in the case of Ireland, it will have to be ripped from them. And, as in the case of Ireland, it will be.