Open Letters, Etc.
1) I knew I’d like that guy who threw punches in the Washington Post newsroom! (Also, if you’ve never read Gene Weingarten before, marvel at this.
2) I’ve written an open letter to Jonah Goldberg.
3) Reihan deserves better than to be juxtaposed next to nonsensical Facebook commenters.
4) Thanks to Maine voters, gay people in the state will be legally prohibited from making state sanctioned commitments to lifetime monogamy. This is billed as a conservative victory.
Conor, you’re blurring the line between blogging and “tweeting” lately.
— Sanjay · Nov 4, 02:53 PM · #
“Thanks to Maine voters, gay people in the state will be legally prohibited from making state sanctioned commitments to lifetime monogamy. This is billed as a conservative victory.”
Well, conservatives believe in less government. So in general they’re happy to have less state sanctioned relationships, and only think we should have state sanctioned relationships if they serve some very important purpose, like the reproduction of a just society.
Conservatives also believe, as a matter of principle, that it is really dangerous to muck around with ancient institutions that aren’t broken. Like marriage and family.
Conservatives also believe, on empirical grounds, that the institutions of marriage and the family have been significantly weakened and that further weakening them may have disastrous effects. See, for example, McArdle’s excellent essay .
As well as Akerlof’s seminal papers on marriage and the family. The academic papers are shielded (as far as I know) but here is a popular piece .
Any number of current pieces on population decline would also be relevant. (Looks like this is the front page story of the current Economist, but I haven’t had a chance to look at it yet.)
— John 4 · Nov 4, 03:24 PM · #
Thanks to Maine voters, the definition of marriage, designed to support the formation and stability of families for raising children, will not be redefined to include couples that intrinsically and manifestly cannot procreate.
This is billed by some commentators as a conservative defeat.
— JohnMcG · Nov 4, 03:29 PM · #
“Conservatives also believe, as a matter of principle, that it is really dangerous to muck around with ancient institutions that aren’t broken. Like marriage and family.”
There are myriad ways that state marriage in the United States is drastically different from marriage as understood by the ancients. To claim otherwise is significantly overplaying your hand.
“…conservatives believe in less government. So in general they’re happy to have less state sanctioned relationships, and only think we should have state sanctioned relationships if they serve some very important purpose, like the reproduction of a just society.”
It seems to me that enhancing monogamy, financial stability, emotional well being, and family formation among gay people ought to qualify as “very important purposes” for conservatives who are quite happy to tout the importance of those things for non-gays. Yet the very conservatives who most heavily favored state sponsored faith based initiatives are most likely to oppose same sex marriage.
— Conor Friedersdorf · Nov 4, 04:04 PM · #
John and Conor’s formulations are pretty indicative of why SSM shouldn’t be seen as a left/right issue. It’s more complicated than that.
In terms of its implementation, though, I think there are substantial issues that break along the traditional political spectrum: gay marriage proponents insist on imposing SSM on electorates that don’t want it. In cases of extreme injustice — such as those articulated by the Civil Rights movement — that kind of substantial, top-down societal change is warranted. In all other cases — including gay marriage — it’s a bad and un-conservative idea; not just because it’s undemocratic, but also because it’s unlikely to work.
Even as someone who favors gay marriage, I confess that our side will continue to lose (and deserve it) on this issue so long as we insist on imposing it from on high like this.
— Tom Meyer · Nov 4, 04:09 PM · #
The real fight should be to prevent the state from interfering in any contractual arrangement between individuals that don’t violate the rights of anyone else.
The idea of “state sanctioned committments” is abhorable.
— mike farmer · Nov 4, 04:20 PM · #
I’ll believe that conservatives are worried about the “weakening” of the institutions of marriage and family when the most popular conservative voice is no longer a guy who’s burned his way through three marriages and got caught going to the Dominican Republic WITH Viagra and WITHOUT a woman.
Mike
— MBunge · Nov 4, 04:42 PM · #
Can anyone explain to me why wanting to create more families is anti-family? I haz a confoozed, as our local LOLCommenter might say.
— Erik Vanderhoff · Nov 4, 05:49 PM · #
@Erik,
If I want to call myself a president, and act as such, is that, on net, an act for or against the presidency?
— JohnMcG · Nov 4, 06:36 PM · #
Conor, your open letter was terrific. Really terrific. I’m a fairly far to the left old guy and I miss the Repubs who actually cared about governing the country more than being the farthest Right or purist Christian or most persecuted by liberals or most deeply outraged or whatever. We’d all be better off with a GOP like you wish for. But….big but….why on earth did you send it to a jerk like Mr Goldberg? Sort of a dead letter office for serious thought over there at their little Corner of the world.
— JohnMcC · Nov 4, 06:43 PM · #
“It seems to me that enhancing monogamy, financial stability, emotional well being, and family formation among gay people ought to qualify as “very important purposes” for conservatives who are quite happy to tout the importance of those things for non-gays. Yet the very conservatives who most heavily favored state sponsored faith based initiatives are most likely to oppose same sex marriage.”
Those things are important, but they’re not the point of marriage. The point of marriages and families is the reproduction of a just society. The financial benefits of marriage are not a cultural universal – that isn’t why there are marriages in every culture. Friendships are really good for people to be in, but the government doesn’t legally recognize and encourage friendships. That’s because friendship, while important, is not necessary to the preservation of society in the way that families would appear to be. And yeah, there are lots of “non-traditional families”: in many cases, a grandparent or grandparents will take on the role of a father or mother. But that doesn’t mean we should allow the grandparents to marry their daughter (say). Right?
Look, the decisions about what to reward and what to discourage made by government and society cannot be anything but coarse grained. It just isn’t a possible policy to only reward and encourage “good families”. So we simply encourage heterosexual marriage, which more often than not leads to families, many of which are “good” and result in the reproduction of our society. The fact that there are other possible arrangements for reproducing society isn’t an argument that we should encourage, socially and legally, those arrangements. Most importantly, this is because those other arrangements do not exhibit anything close to the correlation exhibited by heterosexual marriage to the reproduction of society.
— John 4 · Nov 4, 06:48 PM · #
@ John McG: I’ll be generous and assume it’s my fault, but, “WTF does that even mean?”
— Erik Vanderhoff · Nov 4, 06:59 PM · #
I am saying that adding more people to set X is not necessarily a pro-X action.
Me calling myself president, or Supreme Court Justice, or whatever undermines those institutions, because we have well-defined ways of becoming president and recognizing those who are.
But same sex couples are families! Well, that is the matter being debated. You are assuming a conclusion in your favor.
— JohnMcG · Nov 4, 08:10 PM · #
I completely and utterly fail to see how any other conclusion can be reached.
— Erik Vanderhoff · Nov 4, 08:31 PM · #
“The point of marriages and families is the reproduction of a just society.”
No. The point of marriages and families is the promotion of stability. Period. End of sentence. Does “reproduction of a just society” mean there were no marriages or families in Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union or Communist China?
Mike
— MBunge · Nov 4, 08:38 PM · #
Excellent open letter, Conor. I agree with your general diagnosis of the situation and the role played by people like Tom Delay, etc…. And yes the quest for ideological purity and calls for the purging of RHINOs is very misguided. [Never understood that term -shouldn’t it be CINO?] However, clearly a lot of people (including non Republicans) are horrified at government spending and expansion that predated and grew under Bush. [For me, the root of the probelm is the concept that “debt doesn’t matter” to paraphrase the late Jack Kemp.] I agree with the concern about the growth of government and want to see the GOP represent me on this issue. Pro-market and fiscal sanity sound like winners to me – with the right candidate. So how do they do this? How do they re-establish credibilty? I have no idea. I differ on one significant point: the mass of non-pundit, non-politican conservatives — their conservativism is not in crisis. The great ideological shift is mostly in the minds of pundits. But the average conservative doesn’t write op-eds or get on cable shout fests. And they don’t care about or have emotional attachment to the GOP since they generally don’t like politicans. How to reach them, while brining in moderates, is the key.
— JC38 · Nov 4, 09:18 PM · #
“The point of marriages and families is the promotion of stability. Period. End of sentence.”
Really? Do you have an argument for that claim? Because there have been many societies that did not/do not seem to care too much about stability, and they all had/ have marriages and families. And surely reproducing itself – and, importantly, just producing younger members to take care of the older ones – is a very important societal goal. If the promotion of marriage and the family isn’t a response to that, what, pray tell, are we doing in order to insure the reproduction of a just society?
I’m sorry if that is a little snarky, but it is hard for me to believe you really think that the institutions of marriage/the family aren’t for the purpose of reproduction. Marriages in a vast number (all?) societies need to be consummated in order to be valid. Marriages in virtually all societies (now and past) are required to be between men and women. I think these facts lend a lot of support to my position, and are difficult to make sense of given yours.
— John 4 · Nov 4, 10:35 PM · #
“Because there have been many societies that did not/do not seem to care too much about stability, and they all had/ have marriages and families.”
Name me these societies where social order and stability weren’t considered important.
“I’m sorry if that is a little snarky, but it is hard for me to believe you really think that the institutions of marriage/the family aren’t for the purpose of reproduction.”
You don’t have to apologize for being snarky, just for being retarded. Considering the amount of reproduction that has and does go on in the absence of either marriage or family, your position makes no sense at all.
Mike
— MBunge · Nov 4, 10:42 PM · #
“You don’t have to apologize for being snarky, just for being retarded. Considering the amount of reproduction that has and does go on in the absence of either marriage or family, your position makes no sense at all.”
What you’re saying isn’t retarded, but it is pretty clearly empirically false. Reproduction isn’t just something that happens magically. Especially with the kind of birth control technology we have now. There are several societies that are not reproducing themselves. Reproduction doesn’t just have to occur, it has to occur at a certain rate, or a society will perish. It seems intuitive that, inevitably, people will get it on enough for society to get on. But, surprisingly, that’s false.
“Name me these societies where social order and stability weren’t considered important.”
I don’t know where social order came into things. What do you mean by this phrase? And, just to avoid needless back and forth, it would be easier if you specified what you meant by “stability” before I give examples. I’m not trying to be difficult, I just don’t want to misunderstand you and get called retarded (again).
— John 4 · Nov 4, 11:09 PM · #
“What you’re saying isn’t retarded, but it is pretty clearly empirically false.”
If you’re going to continue to reference marriage as though it were a biological prerequisite to reproduction, I’m going to have to ask your mommy to take the computer away from you.
“it would be easier if you specified what you meant by “stability” before I give examples.”
You seemed to know exactly what I meant when you said there were many societies that did not care about stability. Name them.
Mike
— MBunge · Nov 4, 11:16 PM · #
“The point of marriages and families is the promotion of stability. Period. End of sentence.”
I thought the point of marriage was to enrich divorce lawyers.
— mike farmer · Nov 5, 12:58 AM · #
However we decide to define marriage, that’s the way it’s always been, that’s the only thing it’s ever been, and it must not be redefined! (Except for ten minutes from now, when we’ll redefine it again to keep the gays out.)
— Chet · Nov 5, 02:00 AM · #
conor,
thanks for pointer on the great Zucchini. amazing piece. blew me away today.
you see the friars kicked the snot out of the eagles? good times
— paddy · Nov 5, 05:39 AM · #
(Obviously really late to the game here, but for what it’s worth:)
The problem with John4’s argument is that he cannot demonstrate a connection between SSM and the deterioration of the institution of marriage. I think we can all agree that the institution of marriage is doing a fantastic of deteriorating all on it’s own. Domestic violence is a real problem. Divorce rates topped 50% some time ago. Single-parent households are exactly rare these days either. So who’s to say that allowing same sex couples to will erode marriage any further? Who’s to say that gay couples wouldn’t be just as good at raising families as your average married couple (adoption is worth encouraging, after all)?
I have yet to see a good response to any of these questions from SSM opponents (and to think I used to be one). This “erosion of the institution…” argument relies on the premise that somehow gays will be worse at raising families. I’ve found that the further you deconstruct that argument, the closer it gets to outright bigotry.
— GC in Virginia · Nov 5, 05:43 AM · #
“The problem with John4’s argument is that he cannot demonstrate a connection between SSM and the deterioration of the institution of marriage.”
1) Demonstation is obviously too high a standard.
2) I certainly don’t think SSM is what has been deteriorating marriage, since we (for the most part) don’t have SSM. I just think it will deteriorate it further.
“I think we can all agree that the institution of marriage is doing a fantastic of deteriorating all on it’s own.”
3) I can agree about this, and I’m worried about it, so that makes me especially concerned about enacting changes that may deteriorate it further. This is not unreasonable.
“So who’s to say that allowing same sex couples to will erode marriage any further?”
4) I don’t know “who is to say that”, but I believe it for a couple of different reasons. First, by extending the social and legal incentives now offered to heterosexual couples to SS couples, you reduce the incentive to marry someone of the opposite sex. (And many (but not all) people attracted to other people of the SS are also attracted to people of the other sex.) Second, you further alienate the concept of marriage from the concept of child-rearing. And that’s bad.
An aside: what do you think the purpose of committing yourself for life to someone is? What sense would that make outside of the context of child rearing? Marriages almost always take a tremendous amount of effort to make work. What would be the point of it if it isn’t for the kids? Is there some intrinsic value in being with one person for your whole life? Maybe there is – but that idea comports better with socially conservative conceptions of love, marriage, and the family than with socially liberal ones.
“Who’s to say that gay couples wouldn’t be just as good at raising families as your average married couple (adoption is worth encouraging, after all)?”
5) I’m certainly not denying this. That is not the point. The point is that there won’t be enough “average married couples” once the (relative) social and legal incentives to enter heterosexual marriage are reduced. (By enough, I mean such that the average woman has 2.1 kids, which is (I think) the number we need for population stability.) I think we’re much closer to slipping under that number than many people realize.
So just to be clear, the worry isn’t that “gays” will be worse at raising families. This is actually pretty unlikely, since gay people will be parents only if the decide that is what they want to do, and (in general, given the current social climate) they’ll feel like they have something to prove, etc. And heterosexuals are just not that great at raising kids, so it’s pretty easy to match or surpass them in this regard. I do think that it is extremely helpful to have seen one’s “role” enacted by a parent growing up, and that is a big negative for SSM families – I don’t see how this can be denied if you’re familiar with the research – but that is a problem for heterosexuals too. But we discourage – socially and legally – divorce and to some extent having children out of wedlock.
There are lots of ways of raising kids, many of which work as well as the average heterosexual family – since the average heterosexual family (these days) isn’t so hot. But we still don’t provide social and legal incentives for these arrangements – kids being raised by their grandparents, or their older siblings, or a parent and a grandparent, or… – since they are not the ideal. We encourage the ideal and discourage the forms that are less than ideal. There is nothing bigoted about it.
Finally – sorry this is so long! – it is worth noting that, of course, many people who oppose SSM are bigots. But that doesn’t mean that there aren’t good reasons to oppose it. Many people who are working to advance SSM explicitly admit that they want to destroy the whole notion of the family. (A much smaller percentage than the earlier “many”, I admit.) The only thing that should matter are the arguments on both sides, not the characters of the people who take those sides.
— John 4 · Nov 5, 03:47 PM · #
“I thought the point of marriage was to enrich divorce lawyers.”
Don’t forget marriage counselors. And bail bondsmen.
Mike
— MBunge · Nov 5, 04:31 PM · #
I don’t understand how you can say this:
and then say this:
If you believe that it’s likely that gay parents will be just as good or better parents as straight ones, in what sense does same-sex marriage decouple marriage from child-rearing any more than it’s decoupled, now? Gay couples want to get married, often, because they want to child-rear. Because they want the stability and legal privileges that help with that. Gay marriage seems to only reinforce the normative “couple with children” model, not weaken it. You seem to grasp that in your post after you’ve said the exact opposite.
— Chet · Nov 6, 07:15 AM · #
“First, by extending the social and legal incentives now offered to heterosexual couples to SS couples, you reduce the incentive to marry someone of the opposite sex. (And many (but not all) people attracted to other people of the SS are also attracted to people of the other sex.)”
I’d like to ask John 4 a couple questions, too, if I may:
Do marriage incentives actually work? Do the legal / financial “carrots” you refer to actually increase the marriage rate and/or reduce the divorce rate in this country? Can you point to data?
The second question has to do with your statement that many homosexuals (those who are attracted to SS [the Same Sex]) can also be attracted to the opposite sex, and that this can lead some gay people to deny their true feelings and marry a person of the opposite sex… because of the financial incentives. Is that correct?
I find that scenario very very hard to believe. And I say that as someone who has had a quite a bit of experience with gay people as friends, co-workers, etc. I also say that as a scientist that studies sexual orientation from a neurological perspective. Homosexual orientation, particularly in males, is not fluid at all. It may be more so in women, but if gay men occupy at least 50% of the gay population, that is a significant number that will not (in this day and age) bend to their pocketbook, reject their sexual orientation and get hitched… just for the money.— Bradley Cooke · Nov 8, 07:21 AM · #
I don’t know how serious you two were about wanting my answers, but here they are. Sorry about the delay.
“If you believe that it’s likely that gay parents will be just as good or better parents as straight ones, in what sense does same-sex marriage decouple marriage from child-rearing any more than it’s decoupled, now? Gay couples want to get married, often, because they want to child-rear.”
All I meant to say above was that since SS relationships are not the type of relationship that could produce children, allowing SS couples to marry makes marriage (seem) less conceptually related to reproduction than only allowing HS couples to marry. If it were true that a higher percentage of SS married couples had children than HS couples, there would be a powerful countervailing non-conceptual influence bringing the concepts of marriage and reproduction closer together. I don’t know what the percentage of SS couples with children is, so I don’t know if there is such a force. I also am not sure that this would cancel the conceptual effect, but I’m not sure how to profitably debate about that. Do you know the percentage of SS couples who would be married if they could that would also have children if they could? I recognize this is hard to estimate, but I’d be interested in any somewhat reliable numbers you had.
“Do marriage incentives actually work? Do the legal / financial “carrots” you refer to actually increase the marriage rate and/or reduce the divorce rate in this country? Can you point to data?”
I actually am kind of lukewarm on legal/financial incentives for libertarian reasons. But since I think the reproduction of society is a fundamental good, I’m not all that opposed, In any case, if they’re moot, then one of the main arguments in favor of SS marriage is also moot: the legal/financial incentives. I think that the informal social support for marriage is much more important than the formal legal financial stuff. I think the influence has lessened tremendously in the last 50 years, but it is still strong. Since advocates of SS marriage also use this in their arguments, it seems silly to debate about whether it were true. If there were no social or legal or financial benefits to being married, then agitating over whether to allow SS marriage would be pretty silly.
“The second question has to do with your statement that many homosexuals (those who are attracted to SS [the Same Sex]) can also be attracted to the opposite sex, and that this can lead some gay people to deny their true feelings and marry a person of the opposite sex… because of the financial incentives. Is that correct?”
Not just for the money. There are a whole variety of ways in which our society encourages HS lifelong (or not) relationships. A big one is “respecting” marriages. I don’t know what the data are – perhaps (understandable) rebelliousness makes bi-sexual people choose a life-parter that isn’t the one society encourages. But it seems difficult to imagine that this doesn’t play a significant role in the life choices that many people make. Most of the people I know who got married not under duress thought carefully about what their life would be like if they married X, and if they didn’t marry X (maybe because they married Y, or maybe because they married some unknown person Z – which meant speculating on what Z was likely to be like). I confess that none of the bi-sexual people I know (people that I know are bi-sexual at least) are married, so I don’t know how a bi-sexual person would think about who to marry. But I assume it would be fundamentally similar to the way HS people do.
“Homosexual orientation, particularly in males, is not fluid at all.”
Just to be clear, I just mean people who are bi-sexual. A pretty sizable of the LGBT community identifies this way. (Right? Maybe I’m misinformed…I don’t intend to be generalizing off my own personal experiences, but I don’t know where I learned the statistic I think I know.) I don’t meant to imply that everyone who is attracted to members of the SS can choose to be attracted to members of the OS, and indeed I think that is false.
— John 4 · Nov 9, 07:09 PM · #
I think the number of truly bisexual men is quite low. Many gay men say that they’re bi- as a way of seeming less deviant. The number of bisexual women is substantially higher. Keep in mind that gay people occupy ~ 3-4% of the U.S. population. And I sincerely doubt that one could choose a HS marriage over one’s true nature because of either financial/legal incentives or nebulous feelings about “respect”. I imagine one would have to find a fairly repressive society to find any % of gays that denied their orientation from pressure.
You wrote, “Since advocates of SS marriage also use this in their arguments, it seems silly to debate about whether it were true”. This is spoken as someone who is not in the minority. Suppose you were gay and wanted to get married. Don’t you think that you would make as many arguments as you possibly can? I’m not gay but I’m pretty sure that gay people want to get married for the same reasons HS people do, and financial / legal reasons are pretty low on the list.
“I think we can all agree that the institution of marriage is doing a fantastic of deteriorating all on it’s own.”
The “institution” of marriage is just that, an institution. Institutions change, right? They’re not handed down by Dog, they’re human inventions and not set in stone. Ever heard of the institution of slavery? I’m sure there were many who decried the deterioration of that institution too, but that was ultimately a good thing, right?
— Bradley Cooke · Nov 11, 07:13 AM · #
Bradley, thanks for the helpful reply. A couple of clarifications:
“And I sincerely doubt that one could choose a HS marriage over one’s true nature because of either financial/legal incentives or nebulous feelings about “respect”.”
I agree. The point I was making was only about bi-sexual men and women.
“I’m not gay but I’m pretty sure that gay people want to get married for the same reasons HS people do, and financial / legal reasons are pretty low on the list.”
Again, I think that the social credit matters much, much, more than the legal financial stuff. But I see all of it as part of a package of society, formally and informally, encouraging certain kinds of relationships – a kind that is necessary for the preservation of society. (Or at least arguably necessary.) Which brings us to
“Ever heard of the institution of slavery? I’m sure there were many who decried the deterioration of that institution too, but that was ultimately a good thing, right?”
Yes, some institutions are evil. I think the institution of marriage, however, is good. Some gay activists explicitly say that their real goal is the destruction of the institution of marriage. I think and hope it is only a small percentage of such activists who think that, but in any case, I think marriage is unlike slavery – it is a good and necessary social institution.
— John 4 · Nov 12, 07:24 PM · #