{"id":52,"date":"2010-08-09T17:44:52","date_gmt":"2010-08-09T17:44:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/religionandpubliclife\/2010\/08\/ross-douthats-defense-of-traditional-marriage-column-in.html"},"modified":"2010-08-09T17:44:52","modified_gmt":"2010-08-09T17:44:52","slug":"ross-douthats-defense-of-traditional-marriage-column-in","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/2010\/08\/ross-douthats-defense-of-traditional-marriage-column-in.html","title":{"rendered":"Same-sex Marriage: Douthat v. Natural Law"},"content":{"rendered":"

Ross Douthat’s defense<\/a> of Lifelong Heterosexual Monogamy (LHM) in today’s New York Times <\/i>is judged<\/a> by Andrew Sullivan to be “Ross is at his most Catholic.” I’d say just the opposite–if “most Catholic” has anything to do with the church’s embrace of natural law argumentation. For the latter holds that one-man-one-woman marriage is written into human nature, and Douthat denies it.<\/p>\n

What we think of as “traditional marriage” is not universal. The
\ndefault family arrangement in many cultures, modern as well as ancient,
\nhas been polygamy, not monogamy. The default mode of child-rearing is
\noften communal, rather than two parents nurturing their biological
\nchildren.
\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Nor is lifelong heterosexual monogamy obviously natural in the way that
\nmost Americans understand the term. If “natural” is defined to mean
\n“congruent with our biological instincts,” it’s arguably one of the more
\nunnatural arrangements imaginable. <\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Douthat’s view is that, to the contrary, LHM “is a particularly Western understanding, derived from Jewish and Christian
\nbeliefs about the order of creation, and supplemented by later ideas
\nabout romantic love, the rights of children, and the equality of the
\nsexes.” One might also add “heritability of property” to the mix but never mind, the point is that, according to Douthat, it’s a culturally constructed social institution that is, if anything, at odds with human nature.<\/p>\n


\n
Douthat doesn’t want to get rid of the sucker. He thinks it’s
\n“one of the great ideas of Western civilization.” I think it’s a pretty
\ngood idea too–I just don’t believe the yoking of two spouses has got to be connected to their
\ntheoretical ability to make a baby. I happened to
\nhear the news of Judge Walker’s decision while celebrating the marriage
\nof Larry and Scott in an old barn in Cooperstown, NY. There were three
\nUnited Church of Christ ministers on hand to preside and a large crowd
\nof pretty sober Connecticut Congregationalists, most of them
\nheterosexual by the looks of the pairings. The music–straight from the
\nGlimmerglass Opera House–featured selections from Handel and
\nMendelssohn. Jesus’ name was invoked. To see this union as some kind of
\nrejection of Judeo-Christian values would have struck a
\nnon-Judeo-Christian as bizarre.<\/p>\n

But OK, Douthat is entitled to think that LHM<\/p>\n

is still worth honoring, and still worth striving to preserve. And
\npreserving it ultimately requires some public acknowledgment that
\nheterosexual unions and gay relationships are different: similar in
\nemotional commitment, but distinct both in their challenges and their
\npotential fruit.\t\t<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\n

\nBut based on Judge Walker’s logic–which suggests that any such
\ndistinction is bigoted and un-American–I don’t think a society that
\ndeclares gay marriage to be a fundamental right will be capable of even
\nentertaining this idea.\n<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

The place to do the honors, publicly enough, is in Douthat’s own Catholic
\nchurch, and in such other religious institutions as choose to preserve
\nprocreative LHM as the good old culturally constructed institution it
\nis–including by proscribing divorce and contraceptive technology to their members. In society at large, marriage (like divorce and birth
\ncontrol) will be a fundamental right (that’s marriage, Ross, not gay
\nmarriage), to be enjoyed by all would-be adult spouses, regardless of how the
\ngenders are paired. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Ross Douthat’s defense of Lifelong Heterosexual Monogamy (LHM) in today’s New York Times is judged by Andrew Sullivan to be “Ross is at his most Catholic.” I’d say just the opposite–if “most Catholic” has anything to do with the church’s embrace of natural law argumentation. For the latter holds that one-man-one-woman marriage is written into…<\/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-52","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry"],"yoast_head":"\nSame-sex Marriage: Douthat v. 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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\/52","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=52"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/52\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=52"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=52"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=52"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}