SHANKERY: I need a brief break from same-sex marriage stuff, so will not be posting on it again until tonight at the earliest or Saturday at the latest. I will reply to stuff people have said, though, and I will give you the promised “mechanism” post, again, by Saturday at the latest. For the moment, you can see responses to my posts at Amptoons (scroll around–and be sure to check out his post on Hiroshima while you’re there) and riting on the wall. More soon.

EDITED TO ADD: Lawrence Krubner also has some posts up in response.

The last blog I watched from Maudlin Street

So he drove me home in the van

Saying, “Women only like me for my mind”…

AfricaPundit: Meet Liberia’s new boss, almost the same as the old boss?

The Cranky Professor: Possible blockbuster scholarly study of the Koran. From the man who brought you 72 white raisins. Weird-osity.

Disputations: Reeves and Booster return! (Starts here, but second installment funnier.) More ecclesiastical Wodehouse-pastiche… fun stuff. Also, help a young woman become a Nashville Dominican sister!

Gideon’s Blog: Same-sex marriage. Big post with lots of good points, somewhat obscured by problematic language. I strongly take issue with Millman’s belief that to sustain marriage as a norm, society has to view people who don’t end up following that norm as “in some sense less than whole people.” Emily Dickinson was certainly not normal, but she wasn’t subnormal either; nor are the many people who end up single as either vocation (consecrated virgins etc.) or just the way the Kaiser rolls. Maybe I’m defensive about this, as I’m neither married nor dating, but… “less than whole people”?! Maggie Gallagher has a basic, tart column here about the problems of reinforcing norms through stigma.

And I think in Millman’s conclusion he seriously overstates the differences between “gays” and “straights.” While the differences between men and women strongly shape the lives of men-attracted-to-men vs. men-attracted-to-women and women-attracted-etc., I don’t think it’s accurate or helpful to reify the concept of “the homosexual” or “the heterosexual.” People are weirder than that.

But, that said, there are several important insights in this post (on marriage and aging, marriage and gender, the importance of making marriage a norm, and the difficulty of both marriage and masculinity) and you should definitely check it out.

The Old Oligarch: Feast of the Transfiguration!

Amy Welborn has moved and changed her blogname.

The Onion’s horoscopes are in fine form again this week. Via The Rat.

And: Nice job, jerk. “Federal authorities said on Monday they had suspended a U.S. immigration judge after a newspaper reported he referred to himself as Tarzan during court proceedings for an African political asylum seeker named Jane. …Jane, who is still in the United States, is described by doctors as a former political prisoner in Uganda who was beaten, raped and tortured, the Herald reported.” Via Cacciaguida.

BOOK RECOMMENDATION: If you’re following the same-sex marriage stuff, you should read Denis de Rougemont’s Love in the Western World, a history of the idea of romantic love. You should read it anyway–it’s brilliant, provocative, and a real rollercoaster read–but it’s especially relevant now.

OTHER HOMOPOSTAL STUFF: So I don’t think the same-sex marriage debate needs to be about homosexuality itself. But for those interested, I figured I’d point out some of my past posts on queer stuff. The easiest thing to do is to start here and scroll down. After the first post linked there, it gets relentlessly Andrew Sullivan-and-the-Church-focused, which I know isn’t everybody’s thing, but I don’t write about this subject super often.

Again, I think this followed by this should give you my best previous posts on same-sex marriage. And, as always, MarriageDebate.com is your one-stop shop.

CIVIL UNIONS: So now, what do I think about civil unions, which confer lots of the practical benefits of marriage without the name? My thoughts on this are kind of confused, so instead of laying out a solid position I’m going to talk about the concerns I have, the things I’m trying to weigh and juggle.

1) Many, though certainly not all, of the practical benefits of marriage can already be cobbled together through things like medical power of attorney. It’s not the easiest or most convenient process, but it does exist. For those benefits (like, I believe, Social Security, and, often, health insurance) where you really have very little choice about who you name as the secondary beneficiary, I have no problem with making it possible or easier to name someone else–be it your boyfriend, your sister, or your parakeet’s former owner.

2) Caveat: I would prefer, though, that this not become “marriage lite”–I don’t want it to be assumed that your secondary beneficiary is your sexual partner. I would rather this really be something you can confer on family or friends. Hence I’d prefer the most bureaucratic language possible–“secondary beneficiary” or some such rather than “domestic partner.” I’d like there to be a much greater separation in the public mind than there currently is between marriage and non-marital-but-important relationships.

I talk below about the need to recover a robust understanding of friendship; but in doing that, we absolutely should not undermine a robust understanding of marriage. We’ve already got a craptaculous sense of what marriage is and why it matters (it’s just a piece of paper, right?)–we don’t need any more confusion or blurring of lines between marriage and not-marriage. So yes, we should honor friendship more than we do, but we should not blur it with marriage.

3) One of the reasons we shouldn’t do that is that we make it too easy to drift too deep into a relationship. Contemporary sexual mores help to conceal the steps by which a couple becomes entangled; that makes it harder for them to decide whether they really want to be entangled after all. As the couple starts having sex (thus often, especially for the woman, forming a much stronger emotional bond), moves in together, begins merging their finances, but doesn’t commit to marriage, it’s incredibly easy for several bad things to happen:

a) One person thinks the relationship is sturdier than it is. Usually she (it’s usually she…) finds out the true state of things when she gets pregnant. Suddenly the couple is way too entangled way too fast.

b) The relationship ought to end, but the couple procrastinates because getting out of the relationship would be too complex (it would entail finding a new place to live!) and the sexual bond can conceal some of the cracks in the relationship.

c) The couple starts to think they already know what marriage would be like–ignoring the fact that the promise-making element of marriage transforms the relationship. The couple’s view of marriage as just a piece of paper + hugely expensive wedding is reinforced.

So where does that leave me? Not totally sure, as I said. I do want to make it easier for people to care for those they love, and something like a civil union or domestic partnership might be a good way to do that, though, as I said, I really don’t want the assumption that the partnership is a sexual one.

MINORITY REPORTS: One of the questions you hear a lot in the same-sex marriage debate is, “How can such a small minority of people actually affect the vast majority of marriages?” There are at least three reasons to think it could.

1) American culture has always been strongly affected by minorities. I wrote about black culture’s impact on the broader culture here. Andrew Sullivan recently wrote, “And, as with most developments in gay culture, they [= ‘bears’] could well influence straight culture as well”; Michael Bronski, a radical queer theorist, makes the same point in his Pleasure Principle. I don’t think it’s disputable that the most prominent Catholic voice on same-sex marriage is Andrew Sullivan’s (closely followed by Rick Santorum, I suppose…). Minorities have an impact on us.

2) The push for same-sex marriage in many ways represents a minority seizing on and promoting some of the mistakes of the majority–thus reinforcing the majority’s worse tendencies. In pushing for an ad hoc, “do it yourself,” atomistic-adults-making-contracts view of marriage, gay activists are just picking up a thread of argument and policy that was initially begun by and for heterosexual couples. “Marriage is society’s way of honoring adults’ sexual and romantic desires”: That isn’t something new. It’s just the divorce culture again. So given that this all started in the majority, I don’t see why we should expect the majority to remain pristinely sealed away from it now.

3) Finally, same-sex marriage would represent a change in the ideal of marriage. The rise of unilateral no-fault divorce is generally discussed not as an ideal but as an often tragic response to marriage failure. We can debate that, but it’s very different from changing what the ideal marriage is. (I’ll talk more about why the ideal matters in the “mechanism” post tomorrow.)

QUESTION IN THREE ACTS: So here’s a place to start with the spate of same-sex marriage posts. (Some of this language will probably be repeated from previous posts, but I’m hoping that by getting it all together in somewhat more coherent form I’ll make my position clearer. This turned out a lot longer than I expected, so I’m splitting it into three posts: question, my answer, and friendship.)

Why is marriage honored in our society and in our law?

It may seem like an odd question (to those not enamored of “privatizing” marriage). But there are all kinds of beneficial relationships, loving relationships, that don’t have the special status we give marriage. The easy ones include best friend (how many women would say this is the most important chosen relationship in their lives?), sibling, uncle or aunt; you might add beloved teacher or mentor as well. Other societies have had formal recognitions for some of these relationships–master/apprentice, for example. Robin Darling Young writes about a ceremony blessing a friendship, which is still used in some Orthodox churches, and which sounds beautiful–I would love to see this brought (back) into the Catholic church.

But friendship, though it often sustains us when our romantic relationships throw us into turmoil, does not receive the legal or social honors we give marriage; nor does pretty much anyone argue that it should. Why not? and are homosexual partnerships more like marriage, or more like (at best–I’m trying to bracket the morality of homosexual conduct as much as possible) these other relationships?

I think that’s one of the central questions in the same-sex marriage debate.