{"id":149,"date":"2011-01-09T11:45:30","date_gmt":"2011-01-09T11:45:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/religionandpubliclife\/2011\/01\/prof-george-conjugates-with-coitus.html"},"modified":"2011-01-09T11:45:30","modified_gmt":"2011-01-09T11:45:30","slug":"prof-george-conjugates-with-coitus","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/2011\/01\/prof-george-conjugates-with-coitus.html","title":{"rendered":"Prof. George conjugates with coitus"},"content":{"rendered":"

While I’ve been on break, I’ve had a chance to read Robby George’s latest
\nbrief<\/a> against same-sex marriage, this one written with a couple of younger
\ncolleagues in the current issue of the Harvard Journal of Law & Public
\nPolicy<\/i>. It’s a notably Platonic exercise.<\/p>\n

\n
\nThe authors believe that there is a Platonic form of marriage that is independent
\nof any social or legal circumstances, consisting of the union of one man and
\none woman, sexually exclusive and long-lasting if not eternal. This is a species of
\nnatural law myth-making, less entertaining but scarcely more plausible than the tale<\/a> of primordially conjoined male-male, female-female, and male-female creatures that Plato puts into Aristophanes’ mouth in the Symposium<\/i>.
\nThat famous myth imagines a world of heterosexuals, gay men, and lesbians, each
\nseeking its original other half. <\/p>\n

George & Co. see Nature as authenticating only heterosexual unions. They
\nground this belief in body parts and functions: Because only one man and woman
\ncan engage in coitus at one time, and coitus is the only (natural) way of
\nproducing offspring to continue the human race, then “real marriage”
\ncan only consist in a male-female duo. Any other marital arrangement is not the
\nreal thing.<\/p>\n

But why should the number of coital partners at one time be determinative? Gorillas
\nand ibexes can no more copulate with more than one partner at a time than humans
\ncan. Does that make their family units (one alpha male, several female
\npartners) unnatural? If science is to be taken seriously, then the relevant
\nnatural law has to be sociobiological: what’s natural is whatever arrangement
\nmaximizes the individual’s opportunity to pass on his (or her) genetic
\nmaterial. <\/p>\n

Among humans, this would seem to open the door to polygyny.
\nWhy should a man have to wait more than nine months to sire another child,
\nespecially if he can provide that child with all that is necessary to get on in
\nthe world? The readiness of human societies to organize themselves polygynously
\nsuggests that human nature is not averse to the sociobiological
\nimperative. <\/p>\n

No doubt, the patriarch Jacob would be distressed
\nto learn
\nthat George & Co. do not regard his relationship with his beloved
\nRachel as a
\nreal marriage. Likewise the many Mormons who trace their ancestry to
\npolygamous
\nforbears. This is not to claim that polygamy is necessarily a good
\nthing, only that
\nthere is something bizarre about imagining that one can, by intellectual
\nfiat, rule it out of the history of legitimate marital relations. <\/p>\n

Societies
\nmake their rules according to their own evolving values–based on
\nnature,
\ncustom, religious teaching, calculations of social utility, individual
\nrights
\nclaims, and the politics involved in sorting out all of the above.
\nWhatever merits the Georgian “conjugal view” of marriage may possess,
\nnothing qualifies it as a timeless truth.
<\/b><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

While I’ve been on break, I’ve had a chance to read Robby George’s latest brief against same-sex marriage, this one written with a couple of younger colleagues in the current issue of the Harvard Journal of Law & Public Policy. It’s a notably Platonic exercise. The authors believe that there is a Platonic form of…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":222,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-149","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry"],"yoast_head":"\nProf. George conjugates with coitus - Religion & Public Life With Mark Silk<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/2011\/01\/prof-george-conjugates-with-coitus.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Prof. George conjugates with coitus - Religion & Public Life With Mark Silk\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"While I’ve been on break, I’ve had a chance to read Robby George’s latest brief against same-sex marriage, this one written with a couple of younger colleagues in the current issue of the Harvard Journal of Law & Public Policy. It’s a notably Platonic exercise. 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After teaching at Harvard in the Department of History and Literature for three years, he became editor of the Boston Review. In 1987 he joined the staff of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, where he worked variously as a reporter, editorial writer and columnist. In 1996 he became the founding director of the Leonard E. Greenberg Center for the Study of Religion in Public Life at Trinity College and in 1998 founding editor of Religion in the News, a magazine published by the Center that examines how the news media handle religious subject matter. In 2005, he was named director of the Trinity College Program on Public Values, comprising both the Greenberg Center and a new Institute for the Study of Secularism in Society and Culture directed by Barry Kosmin. In 2007, he became Professor of Religion in Public Life at the College. Professor Silk is the author of Spiritual Politics: Religion and America Since World War II and Unsecular Media: Making News of Religion in America. He is co-editor of Religion by Region, an eight-volume series on religion and public life in the United States, and co-author of The American Establishment, Making Capitalism Work, and One Nation Divisible: How Regional Religious Differences Shape American Politics. In 2007 he inaugurated Spiritual Politics, a blog on religion and American political culture.","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/author\/msilk"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/149","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/222"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=149"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/149\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=149"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=149"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=149"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}