What the Right Wing really thinks about marriage

[womzilla]

Laid bare by the bachelors even on their very own bulletin board, the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal:

Today, though, sexual intercourse is delinked from procreation. Since the invention of the Pill some 40 years ago, human beings have for the first time been able to control reproduction with a very high degree of assurance. That led to what our grandparents would have called rampant promiscuity. The causal relationships between sex, pregnancy and marriage were severed in a fundamental way. The impulse toward premarital chastity for women was always the fear of bearing a child alone. The Pill removed this fear. Along with it went the need of men to commit themselves exclusively to one woman in order to enjoy sexual relations at all. Over the past four decades, women have trained men that marriage is no longer necessary for sex. But women have also sadly discovered that they can't reliably gain men's sexual and emotional commitment to them by giving them sex before marriage. Nationwide, the marriage rate has plunged 43% since 1960. Instead of getting married, men and women are just living together, cohabitation having increased tenfold in the same period. According to a University of Chicago study, cohabitation has become the norm. More than half the men and women who do get married have already lived together. The widespread social acceptance of these changes is impelling the move toward homosexual marriage. Men and women living together and having sexual relations "without benefit of clergy," as the old phrasing goes, became not merely an accepted lifestyle, but the dominant lifestyle in the under-30 demographic within the past few years. Because they are able to control their reproductive abilities--that is, have sex without sex's results--the arguments against homosexual consanguinity began to wilt. When society decided--and we have decided, this fight is over--that society would no longer decide the legitimacy of sexual relations between particular men and women, weddings became basically symbolic rather than substantive, and have come for most couples the shortcut way to make the legal compact regarding property rights, inheritance and certain other regulatory benefits. But what weddings do not do any longer is give to a man and a woman society's permission to have sex and procreate.

This awful paragraph--this cry that it's just too bad that people don't need to have permission to have sex anymore--is the heart of the Religious Right's attack on America.

(Thanks to agrumer, who has a longer dissection of the piece over on his journal. The original essay can be found at OpinionJournal, where "Shut Up and Be Ruled" is not just an idea, it's the law.

Comments

[redbird]

I assume it's a man who is here arguing that men are incapable of chastity by their own choice.

[womzilla.livejournal.com]

The name signed to the piece is "Donald Sensing". Make of it what you will.

[rysmiel.livejournal.com]

I make of it a piece of equipment to detect approaching Trumps.

[cakmpls.livejournal.com]

There's so much there that makes me want to beat my head against the computer that I don't know where to start. (I think I'll start by not actually beating my head against the computer, as it is likely not to do my head, the computer, or the book I'm editing any good.)

Just one: But women have also sadly discovered that they can't reliably gain men's sexual and emotional commitment to them by giving them sex before marriage.

And women could reliably gain men's sexual and emotional commitment . . . exactly when and where?

[dougo.livejournal.com]

I guess context is everything. I agree with every sentence in this paragraph, think it's a nice summary of how much better we have it now than 40 years ago, and that it should obviously follow that same-sex marriage ought to be legal now. There really isn't any kind of judgement or opinion in this text, but I'm guessing there's lots of it in the surrounding text? Or is it just because it's in the WSJ that you're imputing a conservative motive?

[rysmiel.livejournal.com]

I have to admit, I agree here. In fact, I can read that text in a celebratory tone of voice and nothing jars. Am I missing context ?

[womzilla.livejournal.com]

I would think this concluding paragraph pretty much nails it:

I believe that this state of affairs is contrary to the will of God. But traditionalists, especially Christian traditionalists (in whose ranks I include myself) need to get a clue about what has really been going on and face the fact that same-sex marriage, if it comes about, will not cause the degeneration of the institution of marriage; it is the result of it.

[dougo.livejournal.com]

OK, I went and read the full essay (turns out Donald Sensing is a pastor, too, so it's pretty clear he regards the change in society as bad). These quotes seem to be the real point of the essay:

...talk in 2004 of "saving marriage" is pretty specious. There's little there left to save. Men and women today who have successful, enduring marriages till death do them part do so in spite of society, not because of it.

If society has abandoned regulating heterosexual conduct of men and women, what right does it have to regulate homosexual conduct, including the regulation of their legal and property relationship with one another to mirror exactly that of hetero, married couples?

It really sounds to me like he's saying that even though same-sex marriage is wrong, so are a lot of other things in society, so we shouldn't have laws against it because laws won't change society. Maybe I'm wrong about that last part, and he'd rather outlaw divorce, birth control, and everything else that caused the degeneration of the institution of marriage, but even so, he seems to be calling those who make a big deal about same-sex marriage in particular are either hypocrites or wasting their time on the wrong issue. And I can't disagree with that.

[dougo.livejournal.com]

The author has a journal (http://www.donaldsensing.com/), which contains some rough drafts for the WSJ editorial, as well as an essay in favor of separating the legal and spiritual aspects of weddings (http://www.donaldsensing.com/2004_02_01_archive.html#107697265143483679). I'm certainly all for that, and he makes many good points. I'm happy to support and promote anyone who advocates the separation of church and state, even if he's on the other side of that separation from me...