One Small Victory For Representative Democracy
Just a very quick note (I’m on vacation) about this week’s news out of Albany. I’m gratified by the result, which I support. I’m pleased that Senators of both parties were permitted by their leadership to vote their consciences. But I’m particularly pleased that New York will be one of the few states to decide this matter in the proper democratic fashion.
The history so far of same-sex marriage in the United States consists mostly (though not exclusively) of courts ordering legislatures to pass equal marriage rights for same-sex couples, and plebiscites decreeing that no such rights shall be extended. Neither is the way representative democracy is supposed to work, because neither the courts nor the people themselves adequately combine deliberation with accountability.
So I am especially gratified that legislators in my home state were manly enough to do their job and secure for New York’s citizens the equal rights and privileges they concluded the citizenry deserved, rather than punt to the courts or to the people themselves.
I’ll probably have more to say when I return from vacation. But for now, I’m kind of proud to be a New Yorker.
If you subscribe to the view that there’s no such thing as a constitutional right that cannot be abridged by democratic vote, then this view makes some sense albeit one I disagree with. However I actually do not believe you subscribe to that view. Rather I assume you believe that there’s no right for a gay person to marry someone of the same sex, that courts have erroneously ruled as such, and that these courts have engaged in an abrogation of the democratic will.
So this leads to a few questions. Can you imagine what it would be like if our culture and law treated your marriage like it treats gay peoples relationships? How would you feel if you had to ask others if you could pretty please have the legal right to marry your wife with the foreknowledge that more often than not they’ll say no because your relationship is a threat to their own? Would you be any less married if a court said it was allowed instead of those bigoted people and why in the world would you care ? Finally how exactly does this theory of “gay relationships must be validated at the ballot box” work with a senate that requires a super majority to pass legislation?
— Joseph · Jun 26, 03:52 PM · #
We should take care to remember that in Connecticut, during the 2008 election there was a public referendum on whether to hold a state constitutional convention— a convention which would have had the exclusive purpose of defining marriage as between a man and a woman. That measure was soundly defeated, and that counts as democratic support for same sex measure. I would have liked a straight up and down vote on gay marriage, for no other reason than that we would have had the same outcome with a clearer mandate, but Connecticut voters knew what they were doing when they voted.
— Freddie · Jun 26, 04:37 PM · #
“If you subscribe to the view that there’s no such thing as a constitutional right that cannot be abridged by democratic vote, then this view makes some sense albeit one I disagree with.”
An interesting point, although I typically think of the problems of representative democracy through a conservative natural law lens — should we give people the power to kill unborn babies, enslave others, or redefine marriage? I think all are unjust and immoral but all have been legal or are currently legal in parts of the U.S. Assuming for a moment that they were all properly constitutional (which abortion is obviously not), this poses a dilemma for representative democracy…I guess the question is whether we can expect any other form of government to do better.
Mencius is a big fan of monarchy…
— Fake Herzog · Jun 27, 01:12 PM · #
A proper conservative believes in the right and power of people to define their own marriages, which is what the legislation in New York does, properly understood.
There is no obstacle to residents of New York continuing to construe marriage as “between a man and a woman” if they desire to construe it that way.
— Ch3t · Jun 27, 05:43 PM · #
There is no obstacle to residents of New York continuing to construe marriage as “between a man and a woman” if they desire to construe it that way.
That’s true for extremely individualistic definitions of marriage, but most people mean it in a more communitarian sense. And I am not aware of any way a “proper conservative,” whatever that means, would believe in the right and power of people to define their own marriages.
— The Reticulator · Jun 27, 07:30 PM · #
Thanks Reticulator for the assist. Ch3t seems to be confused between “libertarian” and “conservative”.
As usual, Vox Day is at his best commenting on the fiasco in New York:
http://voxday.blogspot.com/2011/06/call-it-what-you-want.html
— Fake Herzog · Jun 27, 08:11 PM · #
A) rome fell after it adopted christianity
B) if your quibble is grammatical, then you’ve already lost any conceivable political or moral argument
— Console · Jun 28, 02:05 AM · #
If you think you’re Edward Gibbon, then you’ve already lost any conceivable political or moral argument. You’ve probably lost any loose change in your pocket, too.
— The Reticulator · Jun 28, 01:16 PM · #
On the subject of having “more to say”, I’d love to get your response to what Robert George argues in this interview:
http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/270662/sex-and-empire-state-interview
A couple of liberals have already tried to answer George’s article and failed — let’s read a Scene take on the master.
— Fake Herzog · Jun 28, 06:55 PM · #
Re: A proper conservative believes in the right and power of people to define their own marriages, which is what the legislation in New York does, properly understood.
That’s quite an odd definition of ‘conservative’ you’re using there. I’d say that a true conservative would believe that marriage should be defined according to history and tradition, and that allowing people to define it for themselves would be a very, very bad idea.
While I’m not a conservative in most political senses of the word, I do (in theory) accept conservative arguments about marriage, and I certainly wouldn’t want my church performing gay marriages. That being said, the horse is out of the barn already in terms of the broader society. We accept divorce and remarriage, voluntarily childless marriages, open marriages and all the rest of it. I’m not happy about that, but given that it’s the case, I suppose that allowing gays to marry can do no harm.
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The proper conservative position is anything that preserves privilege and hierarchy. Usually this falls under authoritarian measures, but if conservatives in America can get away with using cultural mores to preserve a certain way of life, then they’ll wrap up their rhetoric in freedom language. Authoritarian measures would be something like a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage. The freedom part would be something like being against estate taxes.
The libertarian right tends to fall for this hook line and sinker… which is always amusing.
But to sum up, there’s nothing unconservative or even hypocritical about being against a democratic outcome. At least not inherently. It’s the other baggage american conservatives bring to the party, like pretending they are anti-authoritarian that makes them hypocritical.
— Console · Jun 30, 06:43 PM · #
Oh, I see. So, what you mean to say is that the effort by social conservatives to ban gay marriage, pursue amendments to constitutions, etc. is an effort by a minority to redefine marriage for the rest of us.
Well, it’s good to have that out in the open. Funny thing, though – I thought I was hearing conservatives protest “minorities redefining marriage for the rest of us” just a few weeks ago…
— Ch3t · Jul 3, 02:30 AM · #
You could say that, but you would be wrong: a true conservative would understand that history and tradition are more powerful than government and always have been; thus, it’s purposeless to produce legislation meant to affirm history, tradition, and sound social practice. It’s as purposeless as a law that orders the sun to rise in the west or the tides to come and go. The sun will rise, the tides will ebb and flow, and history and tradition will continue with or without the arrogant presumption of heads of state.
That’s conservativism. The social bedroom-invasion nonsense that Reticulator and Fake Herzog regularly spout is authoritarianism.
Well, that’s fair. But maybe the gay people in your church want to have them performed? Is there some reason your opinion is better than theirs?
— Ch3t · Jul 3, 02:36 AM · #
There’s no point in putting more into the conservative position than merely “gay marriage is inferior to heterosexual marriage and thus should not be given equal consideration.” Actual governing principles don’t truly arise from conservatism automatically. They’ll pay lipservice to whatever tradition allows them to preserve privilege for the privileged. The conservative base in america is straight white christian men for a reason. And it’s not because they’re freedom loving supporters of democracy.
— Console · Jul 3, 02:36 AM · #
Well, yes.
— Ch3t · Jul 3, 03:39 PM · #
Let me attempt a first cut at a secular economic analysis of Gay rights and the extension of marriage to include same-sex couples.
In 1936, a brilliant mathematician named Alan Turing laid the mathematical groundwork for what would develop into the modern electronic computer. Three years later, he put this research to work in the Second World War, when he build a series of increasingly sophisticated computers for cryptanalysis; these played a critical role in breaking the German Enigma cipher and giving the Allies a decisive edge.
Alan Turing was gay. When this fact emerged in 1952, Turing was chemically castrated and prevented from working. He died two years later, whether by suicide or accident remains unclear. During his last years and after his death, the initiative in the development of computer systems passed quite decisively to the Americans. Although nobody can say precisely what role the persecution of Turing played, we know this: that despite the participation of many brilliant British computer scientists, by the end of the 1970s, the state of Britain’s computer industry led many academics to express acute embarrassment about their facilities, and overall, surrendering the lead in computer development has cost the British economy opportunities worth many trillions of pounds.
Of course, the economic cost to Britain only makes up part of the story; we also have to reckon with to the human cost to Alan Turing, whose achievements, to say nothing of his pivotal role in defeating the Nazis, probably merited something better than castration, humiliation, and early death. Confronted with all of these costs, the moralists had no remotely compelling argument. Public support ebbed for sanctions against homosexuality not because opinion leaders fell for the blandishments of Margaret Sanger, Alfred Kinsey and Hugh Hefner, but because economic leaders grew to understand the economic costs of repression, and moralists could not justify the human costs of it, even if they had wanted to. C. S. Lewis’s published letters on this question reveal the impossible position conventional moralists found themselves in: Lewis had as strong a belief in conventional morality as anyone in the last century, but his writings make clear he could never have brought himself to argue that a man like Alan Turing deserved what he got.
In practise, that meant a confused evolution in which Gay men and Lesbians enjoyed increasing freedom, and in many respects far greater sexual license than their straight counterparts, but at a steep price: they had the status of sacred outcasts, enjoying the freedom of the temple prostitute but suffering the stigma. In terms of behaviour, this often meant a tolerance, even a celebration of Gay promiscuity, both in and out of the Gay and Lesbian community. Whether Gay and Lesbian culture could have sustained this we will never know: HIV brought both Gay culture and the larger culture it forms a part of sharply back to reality.
So in purely secular terms, we find ourselves accepting same-sex marriage because we have no practical alternative. Our culture, operating in a competitive economic environment, simply cannot afford to persecute an Alan Turing, or to persecute the far larger number of Gays and Lesbians with lesser talents but with an enormous amount to contribute. Trying to fit them in as sacred outcasts, kept outside family structures and free from responsibility failed disastrously.
— John Spragge · Jul 4, 03:46 AM · #
Oh, I see. So, what you mean to say is that the effort by social conservatives to ban gay marriage, pursue amendments to constitutions, etc. is an effort by a minority to redefine marriage for the rest of us.
Uh, that hardly follows. You were having a bad brain day, perhaps?
— The Reticulator · Jul 4, 01:53 PM · #
It’s pretty clearly a completely accurate restatement of your position, Reticulator, as much as you’d like to backpedal from it. I know it probably strains your brain to point out Example #158 of conservatives accusing liberals of their own crimes, but there it is.
— Ch3t · Jul 4, 10:18 PM · #
It’s pretty clearly a completely accurate restatement of your position, Reticulator, as much as you’d like to backpedal from it.
Clearly, indeed. RME.
— The Reticulator · Jul 5, 04:24 AM · #
Looking up the “Fake Herzog” link, I found the discussion on What’s wrong with the world, and I have to say that if I held traditionalist beliefs on this subject, it would have left me depressed. A high proportion of the comments included a more or less correct analysis of what had happened: Republican business conservatives had supported the measure. But none of them seemed to have any idea why they had done so; why did the leaders of Wall Street 2011 support a same-sex marriage measure, and not, say the heads of New York banks in the 1890s or the 1770s. “Fake Herzog” links to an interview with Robert George making the perennial and risible complaint that Margaret Sanger, Alfred Kinsey and Hugh Hefner somehow corrupted Western Civilization, but that just begs the question: why did their efforts lead to same-sex marriage, while the works of other famous libertines, from Petronius Arbiter to the Marquis de Sade did not.
Obviously, the removal of gatekeepers had a tremendous effect: sixty years ago, the public never heard that the British police had hounded one of the greatest minds, and greatest contributors of the twentieth century to his death for the grave offence of trying to find love. Back then it only took a few editors, and possibly some local magistrates, to shut the information channels to Gay men and Lesbians who tried to tell their stories. Today, everyone with Internet access has a chance for a hearing.
But that doesn’t really answer the question: why do we find the arguments of Gay men and Lesbians compelling in a way many people apparently did not when E. M. Forster wrote Maurice, or when Radclyffe Hall wrote The Well of Loneliness.
I suggest that, at least partly, society has changed because technology has. An agrarian or early industrial society requires masses of labour, which gives the majority a lot of power to demand conformity. In a late industrial or information age, collaboration takes place at more of a distance; society can tolerate more difference, and talented individuals have much greater bargaining power. Societies twigged to the self-evident reality that we cannot afford to throw away the talents of an Alan Turing, or even of members of the so-called creative class with lesser talents. And so we began to change our outlook, and the impetus to accept people without expecting conformity, or even a pretense at conformity, grew from an ideal to a social mandate.
— John Spragge · Jul 7, 01:53 AM · #