If homosexuality is legitimized -- as distinct from being tolerated, which I generally support -- then it represents the culmination of the sexual revolution, the goal of which was to make individual desire the sole legitimate arbiter in defining sexual truth. It is to lock in, and, on a legal front, to codify, a purely contractual, nihilistic view of human sexuality. I believe this would be a profound distortion of what it means to be fully human. And I fully expect to lose this argument in the main, because even most conservatives today don't fully grasp how the logic of what we've already conceded as a result of being modern leads to this end.There are these moments when, even during polite dialouge, you have to concede that you aren't living in the same world as other people. I'm at one of those moments. The idea that two gay cats marrying "would be a profound distortion of what it means to be fully human" leaves me flabbergasted. I thought "Rock Of Love" took care of that. But again we see a social conservatism that defines itself by a stigma of others, by an insistence that it has monopoly on what it means to be human, that the world would be a better place if we had more Ted Haggards, not less.
« Justice Delayed | Main | White Music For Black People » Tell Us How You Really Feel, Rod30 Mar 2009 11:00 am
Hilzoy pulls out this amazing nugget from a Dreher post on homosexuality:
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The idea that two gay cats marrying reflects "would be a profound distortion of what it means to be fully human" leaves me flabbergasted.
I'll have to look at Dreher's piece, but based on what you posted, it doesn't sound to me like Dreher's limiting himself to gay people marrying. It sounds like he's condemning not only social acceptance in the sense that gays might be allowed to become full citizens, but the very idea that they exist publicly and are open about who they are. This is what he says in the paragraph prior to the one you quoted:
That's more than just gay marriage--when he says "the licitness of homosexuality," he's talking about being openly gay, with or without the legal protections of a secular society. Not to mention that he's stupidly off about homosexuality being accepted only in the west.Homos don't even exist anywhere but the West--for example, Iran's got The Gay all knocked out. Ahmadinejad said so.
I have to see this as a "last gasp" for hardcore wingers; they're clinging so tightly to "2000 years of Christian moral tradition" that they're hoping the rest of the world will forget that those 2000 years have been pretty inconsistently moral, and only nominally Christian. They've got nothing else to stand on, and if they can convince even a few people to give in to irrational hatred, they won't have to admit how irrelevant they've become. It's also interesting to see that this guy, and people like him, are sprinting as quickly as they can toward the same backward and oppressive attitudes that they decry in our middle eastern neighbors.
Well, to be fair, they've been decrying the moves we made away from those backward and oppressive attitudes ever since we started moving away from them, so that's not really a surprise. But it does illustrate just how apt the term "American Taliban" is for them, even more than it fit John Walker Lindh.
LOLz...yes, the great Leader...well...it's pretty funny logic...teh gay don't exist in iran...yet people are stoned/hung/whipped for it ever year...
I like to look it like this...if they (christianists) could get away with it...they would institute similar laws...since they can't, they bitch and moan about it all day long...they're marginally more civilized than their middle-eastern far distant cousins. They've only honed more sophisticated/less brutal methods of coersion.
My own genius governor keeps talking about 'one man one woman for human history,' and I keep wanting to have him read that Bible he's apparently taking orders from. Ugh.
Dinesh D'Souza is one right-wing reactionary who has noticed the parallels and pursued them with alarming consistency.
Well yes, Dreher, and not just in this case. Speaking as a Jew, most of us (in most places and times) wouldn't mind at all if 2000 years of Christian "moral" tradition should be obviated without a fuss.
Or maybe it's just me?
In fairness, when Dreher is using "us" in that quote, he's talking about evangelical Christians. I think he just assumes that people outside his personal worldview are going to want to obviate 2000 years of Christian moral tradition, because that's what we wake up in the morning and work toward. It's our morning jog.
Dreher is Orthodox, not evangelical.
I've pretty much decided that the only way I can deal with people like Rod is to forgive them. It is clear that he is unable to the damage his and his allies rigidity causes to real people and to real families.
It would be easier to hate him and his ilk. But I feel fairly certain that at some point he will realize the harm and evilness he's promulgated. And when that happens, he'll need my forgiveness much more that he thinks I need God's.
Yeah, maybe. Meantime I'm keeping my powder dry and and my rifle sighted.
Wow, I *really* shouldn't try to write comments while sitting in a meeting. Let me try again:
I've pretty much decided that the only way I can deal with people like Rod is to forgive them. It is clear that he is unable to see the damage his and his allies' rigidity causes to real people and to real families.
It would be easier to hate him and his ilk. But I feel fairly certain that at some point he will realize the harm and evilness he's promulgated. And when that happens, he'll need my forgiveness much more that he thinks I need God's.
Is Rod Dreher an evangelican Christian? This might be a dumb question but it seems to be to be borderline impossible to be able to hold these views without having your morality completely detached from the real world - some weird Kantianism where there is simply no connection between real life and what you think is right.
It is rather flabbergasting.
Dreher defines himself in the post TNC quoted as "born Protestant, converted to Catholicism, and then to Orthodoxy."
Thought 1: That conversion sequence means Dreher is taking on a tradition more or less while he's writing about it. When you look at a particular sentence or phrase or word and try to figure out how it fits into his bigger picture of the world, don't rule out the possibility that the bigger picture just isn't very well filled in. It's different from the way Sullivan is Catholic and conservative down to his bones.
Thought 2: Protestants are made, not born. If Dreher doesn't reflexively know we're born sinners and saved later, he missed the main point growing up, and isn't evangelical in his bones any more than he's Catholic or Orthodox.
You’re not being fair to Dreher. His complaint is not about homosexuality per se (after all, he wants it to be tolerated), but about a much larger attitude that views individual pleasure as the measure of all things. It’s that attitude, not homosexuality, that - in his view - distorts what it is to be human. You don’t have to share his view – and I don’t – to find it interesting and worth discussing.
Then why doesn't he write articles about the moral problems of eating cheesecake or watching fluff movies? We do all sorts of things just to maximize our individual pleasures.
I don't think it's unfair. The specific sentiment Dreher expresses in this excerpt is that homosexuality by definition puts individual pleasure too high on the priorities list, that it is by definition an embrace of hedonism and selfishness and so, by extension, part of a growing social trend that rejects values like familial and community love, sacrifice, and stability. In other words, homos can only want to have sex, not form a family or contribute positively to the community as one. It's this position that I think Coates objects to as being fundamentally biased in an ignorant way. I think most of us have a hard time thinking of gays as people who form families, myself included - it's only upon examination that I can see there isn't a logical reason to think so.
This is just so much shit.
Do members of persecuted religious minorities get accused of "distorting what it means to be human" because they hold fast to their religious convictions?
Do people with dissenting political views get accused of "distorting what it means to be human" because they hold fast to their political views?
Dreher is nothing less than a demagogue who trades in fear, shame and hate. To suggest that he is being treated unfairly is grotesque.
What Tony said.
I love when bigots try to rationalize their bigotry with faux intellectualism
Then why doesn't Dreher go after pre- or extra-marital sex with the same vigor? He doesn't even mention them in this post, after all, and they would certainly fall into the same category.
And while I disagree with the notion that we're treating Dreher unfairly, even if we are, so what? Dreher is treating a significant portion of the human population as if they are unworthy of full, equal and fair treatment under the law simply because his beliefs about his God suggest that that's okay. That's what's really unfair. Dreher won't suffer one whit because people like me are talking bad about him online, but Dreher's pushing a line that actually harms people.
For that matter, what about childless couples, people who marry after menopause, infertile couples who choose to adopt? What are they doing if not 'putting their pleasure first' in Dreher's eyes?
I think you're giving Dreher WAY to much credit. I find this particular meme disgusting. This is the culture-war marinated in pig-ignorant assumptions about people they clearly do not have any interest in engaging in a honest fashion. His overreaching christianism assumption is laughable to say the least. He's basically equating gayness with pleasure, ruling out every other option because it fits his argument. And what's further, he's not even providing evidence of such a rigid correlation. Fail...he doesn't get a pass for this...
I'm still fuming, and you've hit on why.
Over the last year, my uncle's friend (referred to in the previous post) has had some serious heath problems, and my uncle is has made the three hour trip with him into the city with him for various tests and treatments at least two dozen times.
I'm sure it gave my uncle great pleasure to see his beloved's formerly chisselled physique hollowed out by illness and stress.I'm sure it gave my uncle great pleasure watching his beloved undergo painful treatments. I'm sure it gives my uncle great pleasure to have the chance to worry over his beloved's uncertain prognosis.
At it turns out, just this week the word came down that the last scan looks a like an "all clear." When I got the e-mail I shed tears of joy that my uncle will continue to be able to love someone he has loved so long and so well.
That's lovely.
Vermont Freedom to Marry has a wonderful ad out about a lesbian couple who'd been in a similar situation, and it was so heartbreaking and sweet and wonderful.
Good for you my fiend (trying to sound as non-Mcainian as possible). Hopefully he'll recover from what i can only assume is cancer? How where they treated? Did your uncle have any visiting rights at all? Sorry for prying!
Social conservatism is fundamentally about privileging a particular life arrangement (married, hetrosexual couple raising 2 - 4 children) over all others.
Even Ross, who I have a great deal of respect for, pushes in that direction, using data and paternalism rather than shame and disapproval.
They're willing to tolerate other arrangements at the margin--it's understood that not everyone can fulfill the ideal--but unwilling to validate those arrangements as legitimate in their own right.
I am always amazed at the way Jesus is used as a front for all manner of bigotry. The "fully human" comment is typical of Dreher whose tunnel vision is astounding. The problem for such folks arises when a loved one pops out of the closet; may Mr. Dreher be thus challenged for the better part of the rest of his life. One keeps thinking about the old testament injunction to stone adulterers, and Jesus comment on throwing stones. I don't know about fully human, but I certainly do not consider Mr. Dreher fully Christian.
@ Jim B: I see you where you're going, and I'm sure Dreher would say that is what he is saying. But I still say BS, because it's a deliberate strategy of fending off what IS actually human about all this: love.
The point is not desire being the "sole arbiter legitimate arbiter in defining sexual truth." What is sexual truth? What about love? We're talking about relationships.
So let's say a gay couple actually never has sex and they adopt orphaned/abused children. What does "sexual" truth have to do with that?
Please note I am not saying that there is anything wrong with desire being the arbiter of one's "sexual truth," or should we say more accurately, sexual behavior, as long as one isn't 1) doing something non-consensual and 2) hurting someone else. But when you're talking about people in relationships, and you say "sex" without talking about love, you are being completely dishonest. And there is danger in that dishonesty.
I'd say forcing people away from love is a profound distortion of what it means to be fully human.
And you know what - even if Dreher feels that way about homosexuality, why does he support denying these people their rights? I imagine he's a bit leery of common-law marriage type laws for straight people, too, and that he'd employ a slippery-slope argument against extending those types of legal rights to gays nationwide, given what he seems to believe about that particular sexual orientation. I guess that shows that he leans more towards social conservatism with our laws favoring traditional families, and less towards the old conservative viewpoint that the government is there to afford protection, legal backing of contracts, etc. for all its people. Why should the government's functioning reflect one particular religious view of appropriate lifestyle? Even if you think being gay is wrong, I do not see how you reconcile denying grownups marriage rights with a conservative view of government's role.
My point is that homosexuals pay taxes and they have rights. The government can't just screw them over like that, much less single them out for screwing. It doesn't matter if it makes you feel icky thinking about it, and since it isn't in and of itself wrong, it wouldn't even matter if it DID somehow turn 'normal' kids gay, which is another baseless fear that looms large in the minds of some. I don't see gays/lesbians, and more importantly the rest of us, standing for it much longer. It just doesn't fit with what this country's supposed to be about.
Dreher is what the GOP calls a "Christian" and what Jesus called a "Pharisee."
I think Dreher is addressing liberal Christianity, which likely edges into issues of evangelical beliefs for the younger evangelicals. Liberal Christians believe in Christ but not in the literal take on, say, the nativity, even though it's a lovely and poetic story. And they don't apply sexual rules that worked for a small sheep-centric society in which puberty is at 16 and marriage at 17 to modern people who have puberty at 12 and marry at 30. It's not just gays that are condemned by the pleasure principle as Dreher sees it; everyone who has sex outside of marriage is out, too, as well as gay marriage.
Since the Bible spends a lot more time on mildew than on gay sex, and I have yet to see Evangelicals taking their mildewed shower curtains in, I've never understood the whole "we need to go by what's literally in the bible" tack as it's not taken for mildew.
I was going to comment above with the comment about Dreher's brand of Christianity (Orthodoxy) to say it's not exactly right to say 'Orthodox' and have that mean one single thing. I think the same is true of "liberal Christianity," of which I am one representative. A lot of us are labeled "liberal Christians" solely on the basis of thinking homosexuality is not a sin.
My point being simply we need to be careful in saying that labeling somehow completely defines a group of people. I took a class in seminary with an Orthodox gay man who wrote a marriage service for gay men in an Orthodox style. Not that that's mainstream, but it does exist.
Thanks for introducing Mr. Rod Dreher.
Let's see:
Thinks failing to live by Christian sexual morality contributes to the death of the soul.
Considers it a fact that there can be no compromise on this issue, as it goes to the heart of how believers understand themselves, thier relationship to God, and to the nature of truth.
Thinks the legitimization of homosexuality would be a profound distortion of what it means to be fully human.
Thinks that the fact that only 3.5 percent of his 2009-posts dealt with the issue proves that he has not in any way a "gay fixation"...
Man, if being gay is supposedly the ultimate pleasure trip/indulgence, I wonder why the rest of us don't try it. Is that what will happen when Rod gets a crisis of faith? How could it not? I mean, fuck, I bought an Xbox 360 to indulge my pleasure centers when instead, as the godless nihilist Dreher believes I am, I could have just had gay sex. WTF. Or maybe gay people possibly want more than just sex, being not fully human same as the rest of us.
That's Rod's problem. He is only capable of understanding sex as orgasm, as pure release with no larger context; and he's so profoundly ashamed of his desire for that release that he can only justify his sexual desires against the species' need to procreate; and without that possibility, sex is merely the pursuit of orgasm.
I wonder what Dreher would have to say about this couple. Are they also "distorting what it means to be human"?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pOUqb-oJb-4&feature=channel_page
@ Deborah: Thank you for that mildew tidbit. I will henceforth apply the Mildew Test of Relevance to any injunction I hear to follow the Bible.
I think you-all are missing the big, unspoken issue. The issue is the status of women.
The very existence of same-sex marriage truly does threaten traditional marriage. Traditional marriage is between legally unequal persons: one full, real human being (aka "man"), plus one person with modified or partial legal rights (aka "wife"). But if women are truly legally equal to men, then same-sex marriage becomes an inevitability, because things that are equal to the same thing are equal to each other.
As long as the only egalitarian marriages are ones like mine (between a man and a woman), Rod can pretend that they are all "really" traditional marriages, they don't disturb his worldview. But once Andrew Sullivan and his husband or Ellen Degeneres and her wife are in the picture, the illusion shatters: their marriages do not have the correct penis:person ratio (1:2), and their very existence undermines the idea that every marriage is between a dominant and a submissive, with the penis to tell you who's who. [insert comments about Mr. Dreher's choice of nickname here]
When Dreher says SSM is the culmination of the sexual revolution, he's right: the prime mover of the sexual revolution was reliable contraception for women, which let us have sex without constant, grinding fear. IMHO that's the "individual desire" Dreher is truly afraid of: women's desire, women as sexual agents, doing what (and who) we want -- instead of our duty to men, and by extension to God.
To clarify: by "traditional marriage" I mean "marriage as defined from c. 1919 back as many thousand years as you care to guess".
I'd just like to point out that this should be more like "in Europe, the US and a few other places from maybe 1940 back to somewhere vaguely in the Victorian age." Because in other times an places, plural marriage (one man, one to many wives), and arranged marriage have been the norm. Were Sara and Hagar part of a "traditional marriage"? How about Lot and his wife and daughters? How about Alexander (the great) and Hephaestion (his older lover) and Pliny (his younger, eunuch lover) and Roxanne (his wife, who he took as spoils of combat)?
The champions of "traditional marriage" don't know their history or their bible.
Oh, I agree with you. I meant that all those traditional forms of marriage had in common that the man and woman were unequal parties. Sara and Hagar certainly had traditional marriages -- that is, they both had less power than Abram, but Hagar had *much* less.
And if you look at the story of Jacob's marriages, the whole bride-substitution thing makes it seem as though the legal part of the marriage was between Jacob and *Laban*.
I for one would love to see a distortion of what it currently means to be fully human... and hence godly.
The Church has never and does not accept women as fully equal to real humans e.g. look at higher management of the church but also politics all over the world and in all religions including Buddhism.
Maybe it is asking too much too early to accept gays as fully equal to humans... for fearful males that is. Confident men have nothing to fear by definition. They will not fear to fall for "individual desire to become the sole legitimate arbiter in defining sexual truth". What the fuck does that even mean, "defining sexual truth"?
If God were truly created in the image of man - as biblical texts prove - I hope he evolves into a more confident man... and finds a partner in crime. Me thinks that once we accept women as equal, e.g. female pope or female US president, we will see that female desire is just as bad or good as male desire. Once we accept that women do desire men and other women and beyond mere family instincts but actual sexual instincts... that it does not mean that women will fuck around all their lives and that it does not mean that they will marry their childhood sweetheart and live happily ever after... well once that happens we will see nothing wrong with some men desiring men.
It is clear that it is only a question of time now and I therefore agree with Jay C that we can all start forgiving fools like Dreher.
forgiveness implies remorse...atleast in my book?
hell you reading the wrong book boy. no way you can throw the first stone... I saw you the other night. love your enemy and kiss the other cheek and such.
but i agree - it is tough. here there some sweet gays who long for long-term relationships and even marriage and all they get is that they would threaten straight couples from controlling their short-term sexual desires. i can't even imagine how gays feel about this - it is so bizarre. they want marriage and can't have it because they all just want one-night stands. it can fry one's brain even if you aren't gay. And sorry for the long one.. but...
...I feel some remorse. Once you think about what worldview Dreher is coming from and how imprisoned and fearful he was raised and experiences life - it all hanging on a few words here and there... of course he is protecting The Word. His sexual identity and his security and happiness in relationships depend on it all. My guess is that two gays in a long-term relationship have a more honest and real relationship - based on who they are and how they accept each other - than Mr Dreher legally ever could. We can pity him. His relationship's faithfulness for example sounds to be based on fear of godly punishment and not respect for the human involved. Doesn't sound lovely but of course it needs protection by those involved in it all. I, surprising as it is to me too, can feel remorse for thinking this guy is "stupid" or "evil" etc.
Liberate yourself from mental slavery, a wise man once said. Dreher is simply not there.