Yes, I am in favor of civil gay marriage!

What you can do is argue why a law ought or ought not exist from a secular perspective. If you can convice enough people that you’re right, and if that law does not violate the protections provided by the constitution, then you can indeed legislate your morality.

You need to convince precisely 270 people that a law ought to exist. They don’t need to explain a rationale. You need to convince precisely 5 people that you have compelling enough of a secular purpose to overcome scrutiny. The people who elect all those other people can do so based on whatever the hell criteria they want. There is no full stop restriction on voter motivation, whether it comes from religious or secular morality.

You misunderstand my point. The people can support a law based on absolutely any reason they want. They can elect officials based on any reason they want. Those officials can pass laws without giving any reason. The only place anybody actually checks if the law is “explicitly religious” is SCOTUS. It would be pretty unwieldy if every vote cast had to have a complete, secular theory described which underpins it.

Of course, we can easily find some proof in the pudding when it comes to whether gay marriage laws are “explicitly religious”. Let’s make a wager. Let’s assume both Perry and Windsor are ruled in favor of SSM (no action if they aren’t). I’ll set the over/under for the number of references to Ia in the opinions at 0.5. Of course, I’m not an idiot, so I’ll have to set the under at something like -10000. If you really believe SSM laws are “explicitly religious”, you’d only need to take the over and make a bunch of money. Would you do that? I’m pretty sure you wouldn’t… because you know better.

I agree on your theory of government… but it’s simply not the de facto operation. It is often a difficult task to determine whether a law is “explicitly religious”. If the data clearly indicates it to you, why don’t think that same data will clearly indicate it to the justices? Either the data is not that clear… or the rest of us simply have come to a different conclusion than you have.

Jake, your arrogance is astounding. I can vote my mind and heart and conscience any damn way I want and I am sure you do the very same thing. It is the arrogance of the ‘tolerant’ moral relativist that can’t understand that. They would force their morality on me while telling me that I can’t do that to them. The fact that my moral conscience is formed by my Catholic religion in no way means that I am forcing my RELIGION on anyone else. It truly boggles my mind that so many of you don’t get that.

Personal morality is personal (and protected) regardless of where it comes from. You anti-religion types need to get a grip on your fears long enough to be able to think it through. I am not imposing my religion on anyone by simply exercising my right to vote for laws and candidates that line up with my personal moral views. That is democracy and that IS exactly how this country works and what you would deny me IS exactly what you take for yourself every time you cast a vote.

And if I want to spend my money and exercise my freedom of speech to influence public opinion and law making against SSM then I damn well will do so and I will demand others respect my constitutional RIGHT to do so even if they don’t respect my moral views.

I apologize if I came off as arrogant. For the record, I fully support your right to believe, act, think, and speak in any way you so choose such that it remains within the constraints of law. And I agree that you absolutely have the right to vote your conscience insofar as it does not infringe upon the rights of others or the rules laid out in the Constitution.

Where we seem to disagree is that when you make a prescriptive or proscriptive religious moral claim, and then attempt to enforce it on others via law, I don’t think that counts as excercising your freedom of religion- I think that counts as infringing on the rights of others to excercise their freedom of religion.

There’s a substantive difference between forcing your morality on someone, and refusing to let them force their morality on you. I have nothing whatsoever to say about the way you live your life. I do not seek to enforce my normative moral values on you- you have my permission (as if you needed it!) to be as Catholic as you want. What you do not have is the right to force non-Catholics to live by Catholic morality.

What does what atheists think have to do with the reality of natural reproductive biology?

Oh, nothing whatsoever. Atheists could certainly be wrong. But your claim was that “intercourse is naturally between a male and a female” is knowable without a belief in a higher power. If by “natural” you mean strictly “occuring in nature”, then there are numerous examples of animals engaging in homosexual behavior. If (more likely, I think) by “natural” you meant somethin akin to “good, proper, right, well-ordered”, then the evidence suggests that people who do not believe in God do not agree with you on this point, and therefore you probably do have to believe in a higher power to “know” this fact.

Jake,
I don’t know if you are being willfully obtuse or not but regardless it is pointless to dialogue with you any further

Oho, nicely argued, Jake!

I was not paying close enough attention, as I did not get where you were heading. You have handily backed Oregon into a corner where he has to admit that he cannot vote his conscious, if his conscious relies upon explicitly religious conclusions even if they are not stated as such, and yet he has unconvincing secular arguments, thus he has to respect Church / State separation, which he, himself, has advocated.

It is too much to expect him to be happy about it, though.

Nice.

Jake,
I like you. You argue politely and with nuance. That said, some disagreement:

All the First Amendment seems initially to have called for is disestablishmentarianism, and that only at the federal level–neither Congregationalist Massachusetts, nor . Justice Hugo Black’s 1947 adoption of Jefferson’s “wall of separation” metaphor as the cornerstone of First Amendment jurisprudence in Everson, a decision in which Black, a former Klansman, ruled taxpayer support of school buses to Catholic schools unconstitutional in the course of incorporating the First Amendment’s protections against the states via the Fourteenth Amendment, is a pretty recent, and not uncontested, jurisprudential development. (Yes, there’s a lot of David Barton-esque right-wing crankery around this issue. But the disestablishmentarian point is still true, even if a wingnut pseudo-historian like David Barton happens to make it from time to time, when he’s not busy trying to convince the rubes that Jefferson was a devout tea-vangelical Baptist or something because he used “A.D.” in dating documents.)

However, Black’s Jeffersonian wall is, at present, the law of the land. That conceded, I still think you’re too harsh on religously-motivated legislating. Abolitionism and the Civil Rights movement were both explicitly religious, even revivalist, in the language and imagery of their appeals to the consciences of voters. That’s okay. Looking abroad, the example of Gandhi is instructive: his ideology of nonviolent satyagraha, although uniting Indians of all faiths against the British to a certain extent, still had pretty Hindu roots. Of course, it was also inspired by the nonviolent politics preached in Tolstoy’s tract The Kingdom of God is Within You, and Dr. King, of course, was inspired by both Tolstoy and Gandhi. Religion isn’t some sort of cooties that has to be quarantined from the public square.

I think part of the perplexity here is that you’re feeling like there’s a difference between liberatory invocations of religion (John Brown, MLK) and invocations of religion designed to “impose morality.” However, lots of prohibitory laws have moral/religious components. The ban on prostitution outside a few counties in Nevada, e.g., is pretty religiously motivated, but hardly unconstitutional. Dry counties and blue laws about Sunday liquor sales don’t run afoul of the First Amendment, either, although admittedly the 21st Amendment shields local blue laws to a certain extent, so it’s not the best example, since a First Amendment absolutist could just call it a carve-out, I suppose.

TL;DR: Either be opposed to SSM or embrace it. But make your argument. Don’t just try to banish your opponents’ arguments because religion is supposed to be somehow an illegitimate motivator for policy preferences. That’s a very tendentious reading of the American constitution and of American politics and history.

Perhaps I should back up and explain some of the ideology that leads me to the conclusion that particularly religious claims can’t be legislated.

First and formost, I make a distinction between what is morally right vs. what should be legal.

For example, I’m of the (rather odd) opinion that drinking alcohol is a morally wrong action (for a variety of reasons). Would I prefer a world in which no one drank? Absolutely. Do I think that would be a better world? I do. Is it within my rights to demand that other people stop drinking? Definitely not, for two reasons.

First, because even if I think the choice is wrong, abrogating another human being’s freedom is much more wrong. I hope other people won’t drink, I’ll argue with them that they shouldn’t drink, but it is niether my perogative nor my desire to force them not to drink.

Second, as a descriptive moral relativist (I think it can be demonstrably shown from history, anthropology, religion, literature, etc. that morality _is_ in fact relative, whether we would like it to be so or not), I have a starting assumption that what’s morally right for me is not necessarily morally right for other people. It’s morally right for me because the action of not drinking alcohol will optimize my happiness/wellbeing more than the action of drinking alcohol. This is not so for all people.

Now there are of course exceptions to such a rule- drinking and driving is no longer a question of personal morality, but of public safety. How do I deal with those? I’m glad you asked!

I think other people’s noses (and by extension, Uncle Sam’s shnoz) belong exactly nowhere other than where public health and safety are concerned. Further, “public health and safety” does not mean protecting me from making bad decisions, immoral choices, or having sub-optimal beliefs. It means that the government ought to act IFF I pose a clear, present, and direct danger to other members of society, or to provide a service that cannot reasonably be provided by private institutions (in practice, this still turns out to be a very wide net to cast.)

Now, obviously Catholics will disagree with me here on several points- why should I expect them to vote in such a way that conforms to my ideology? I am free to think them morally obligated to do so, but what gives me the right to make it a legal requirement?

My answer is the Constitution, as I attempted to outline above. My lay understanding of the Constitution supports the notion that if a moral question is religious in nature, and cannot be adequately addressed secularly (or if the secular answer is clear and in opposition to the prevalent religious answer), then legislating that religious answer counts as limitting the free excercise of other people who would seek to make a religious decision counter to that made by the majority.

I sympathize with complaints about shouting down the free speech of others- that was not my intention, though clearly that’s the way I came across to several people, and I truly do apologize for that. However, when someone makes a claim that secular civil society ought to abide by a particular religious view _because religion X says so_, then it is fair game to challenge such thinking as both immoral and unconstitutional. I interpreted (and still do interpret) Oregon Catholic to be making just such a claim.

Since this comment isn’t nearly verbose enough, I had a few points I wanted to respond to directly:

Religion isn’t some sort of cooties that has to be quarantined from the public square

This is most certainly true on a straightforward reading- religion deserves a place in public discussion precisely as large as the place it has in the lives of the populace. In a place like the US, we should not be afraid to discuss religion. We should, however, refuse to legislate it.

The proper lens to look through, I think, is the kind of laws and protections you would want in place if Islam was the dominant religion. Would you want Sharia law enforced? I presume not (though I’ve been surprised by some people’s answers on this in the past).

The point I’m trying to make is that the US is designed to be secular- not in an attempt to eliminate religion, but to be inclusive of all religions, and create an environment where they can coexist.

The ban on prostitution outside a few counties in Nevada, e.g., is pretty religiously motivated, but hardly unconstitutional.

But its very much supportable secularly- you can point to lots of demonstrable bad consequences that come from prostitution. Not so for homosexual marriage (or at least, I’ve never heard any that didn’t involve the words “disordered” and “God”)

Dry counties and blue laws about Sunday liquor sales don’t run afoul of the First Amendment, either, although admittedly the 21st Amendment shields local blue laws to a certain extent, so it’s not the best example, since a First Amendment absolutist could just call it a carve-out, I suppose.

Yeah, I would say those laws are a clear violation of the first amendment. They’re just not important enough that I care (plus, remember I’m not a fan of alcohol :))

Either be opposed to SSM or embrace it. But make your argument. Don’t just try to banish your opponents’ arguments because religion is supposed to be somehow an illegitimate motivator for policy preferences. That’s a very tendentious reading of the American constitution and of American politics and history.

Fair enough. My actual objection to anti-SSM legislation is both moral and legal. I am under no illusion about the Constitution- it is man-made, imperfect, and it’s current application may or may not be close to its intended application. However, the law of the land- which I vehemently support because I think it’s right, rather than because it happens to be the current law of the land- is that laws must be secular and not religious in nature. When someone tries to enforce religious rules for religious reasons, I think it _ought_ to be banished because religion is an illigitimate _basis_ for policy.

Jake,

So, in the course of being at least a wee bit concise and hopefully stimulatingly argumentatively agonistic, I think I’m going to come off pretty snarky below. So please accept a preemptive apology, and a reiteration of my gratitude at being able to dialogue with as thoughtful an interlocutor as you.

First and formost, I make a distinction between what is morally right vs. what should be legal.

Sure. I do, too. I have a post up on my blog this morning about why I think there are good Thomistic reasons for ending narcotics prohibition.

Second, as a descriptive moral relativist (I think it can be demonstrably shown from history, anthropology, religion, literature, etc. that morality _is_ in fact relative, whether we would like it to be so or not), I have a starting assumption that what’s morally right for me is not necessarily morally right for other people.

Yeah, we’re in disagreement there.

Now there are of course exceptions to such a rule- drinking and driving is no longer a question of personal morality, but of public safety. How do I deal with those? I’m glad you asked!

So, are you saying that there is an objective moral need to protect public safety, or what? This is the kind of thing that makes moral relativism self-defeating.

I think other people’s noses (and by extension, Uncle Sam’s shnoz) belong exactly nowhere other than where public health and safety are concerned.

Sounds pretty libertarian. So, are you saying that libertarian assumptions about morally acceptable spheres of state action are objectively true, or that all morality is relative, but you just kinda sorta personally prefer libertarian ways of running the state? Because if it’s just your personal preference, well, there are 300 million of us and you get just the one vote.

Further, “public health and safety” does not mean protecting me from making bad decisions, immoral choices, or having sub-optimal beliefs.

Your personal preference is that public good not be considered to concern moral virtue, but only physical health. Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas, and others have had different preferences. Why does your personal preference determine the meaning of the words? Speaking of meanings of words, why be a “descriptive moral relativist” and yet be a prescriptivist about word meanings? Some sort of descriptivist/nominalist bundle of beliefs about word meanings seems like it would mesh better.

It means that the government ought to act IFF I pose a clear, present, and direct danger to other members of society, or to provide a service that cannot reasonably be provided by private institutions (in practice, this still turns out to be a very wide net to cast.)

This is not an unattractive vision of the role of the state. But “government ought to act”? Whence this “ought”?

Now, obviously Catholics will disagree with me here on several points- why should I expect them to vote in such a way that conforms to my ideology? I am free to think them morally obligated to do so, but what gives me the right to make it a legal requirement?

You’re getting ahead of yourself here. How can you think anybody morally obligated to do anything?

My answer is the Constitution, as I attempted to outline above.

Other than a Burkean desire not to upset established institutions, and the general warm glow surrounding it from American patriotism, I don’t, as a Catholic, have any special reverence for the Constitution. So, even if your interpretation of what the Constitution requires is correct, that doesn’t make it in my mind a source of moral obligation or “right.” It’s just positive law that I am obligated to obey insofar as I may licitly “render unto Caesar” obedience in the temporal sphere wherever Caesar doesn’t ask me to sin. Back when the Constitution countenanced slavery, the abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison (IIRC) denounced it, on objective moral grounds, as “a pact with the devil.” He was, in those antebellum days, literally correct IMHO, since American slavery was diabolical indeed. Where the Constitution has been immoral, a Christian stands toward it as Antigone to Creon: appealing to a higher natural law against the injustice of positive law. Not, of course, a relativist attitude. But how can you hold the Constitution to be binding on anybody without holding that *anything* is binding on anybody? I at least have warrant to obey Caesar wherever he doesn’t mandate sin, and to expect others to do the same. You don’t really have warrant, as a relativist, for enjoining anybody else to obey anything. Anyway, all this assumes that your interpretation of the Constitution is correct, which I dispute below.

My lay understanding of the Constitution supports the notion that if a moral question is religious in nature, and cannot be adequately addressed secularly (or if the secular answer is clear and in opposition to the prevalent religious answer), then legislating that religious answer counts as limitting the free excercise of other people who would seek to make a religious decision counter to that made by the majority.

Yeah, that seems to be a pretty common lay misunderstanding. A lot of my law school classmates seem to have gone into our first year Con Law class thinking something similar. The reality is more nuanced. Under contemporary First Amendment jurisprudence, the state and state-affiliated actors cannot mandate religious observances, endorse religious doctrines or institutions, or ban religious observances, doctrines, or institutions. That’s the main outline of the law. There are other, subsidiary matters (like providing adequate opportunities for religious practice in federal prisons) that aren’t really to the point. But that’s the broad outline.

What the First Amendment does not require is that all legislation be enacted from secular motives. However, increasing numbers of liberal secularist Americans (generally of the “Team Blue” persuasion politically, as I am myself most of the time) seem to think it does, perhaps because they would very much *like* it to be true, perhaps because they’re blurring together their gut feelings about First Amendment law with experiences of arguing about whether there are non-religious reasons to ban abortion–which is an area of the law grounded (wrongly, IMHO) in Fourteenth Amendment Equal Protection / Due Process “privacy” grounds in current jurisprudence, rather than in anything specifically about not mandating religion. To disentangle the concerns, imagine that the government wanted to ban abortion for entirely secular reasons–e.g., maybe the population was declining dramatically, and future deficit hawks are panicked about having enough young workers to pay into Social Security and Medicare. Under current (IMHO, murderous) abortion jurisprudence, banning abortion for such natalist demographic reasons would be an unconstitutional intrusion on women’s privacy right to bodily autonomy and self-determination. The secular motivation for the abortion ban wouldn’t save it.

To return to the First Amendment: President Bush enacted PEPFAR, his African AIDS relief program, largely due to extensive evangelical lobbying. It was a religiously motivated policy. But it didn’t mandate or ban or endorse any religious practices, and was perfectly Constitutional. Now, I readily concede that there are also secular reasons for funding AIDS relief in Africa. But the *motivation* for the policy was, in simple fact, primarily religious. (Except from celebrity PEPFAR advocate Matt Damon, I guess. But definitely for all the evangelicals, and Bush didn’t pass it to please Matt Damon.) That didn’t make PEPFAR unconstitutional.

Also, your distinction between questions that can be adequately answered with only secular reasons and those that are merely religious would be an impossible nightmare for courts to adjudicate. I gave you an example above of an ostensibly secular reason to ban abortion. It’s silly. But a court can’t just say, “these political arguments are smart, but yours are dumb so you lose.” That’s what elections are for, not courts.
Similarly, there are plenty of wholly secular arguments against same sex civil marriage. For example, SSM opponents argue that because children flourish best with a mother and a father (as opposed to two mothers or two fathers), the state ought to valorize marriages between one man and one woman. Now, you might think that’s a poor argument. You might think most of the researchers who produce studies supporting that view are right wing hacks. Doesn’t matter. You, the voter, can make that decision. But a court can’t take an entirely secular argument like that and issue a decision that reads, in essence, “Your ‘kids need a mom and a dad’ argument is stupid, and all your other arguments are religious, so you lose.” Deciding that political arguments are stupid is what voters do when they elect legislators and the executive. Not a judicial function at all. Thus, there’s no scenario where a court rules legislation unconstitutional just because the secular arguments for it are stupid. And there are always secular arguments for laws, except laws specifically about worship/religious observance/etc. which are, in fact, what the First Amendment is about.

So, a law mandating the teaching of Biblical creationism is going to be unconstitutional because it’s a state sponsorship of a religious doctrine. But if a law banning gay marriage is ruled unconstitutional by the Supreme Court this year, it will be on equal protection grounds, *not* because the law has religion cooties. Frankly, from a strictly Con Law (as opposed to Catholic) perspective, I think the pro-SSM equal protection argument has some real merit. However, that argument has zilch to do with religion. It has to do with the idea that current marriage law is allegedly discriminatory, not that current marriage law has or doesn’t have primarily religious justifications. It’s really hard to think usefully about these things if the distinction between equal protection arguments and establishment of religion arguments isn’t kept in mind.

I sympathize with complaints about shouting down the free speech of others- that was not my intention, though clearly that’s the way I came across to several people, and I truly do apologize for that. However, when someone makes a claim that secular civil society ought to abide by a particular religious view _because religion X says so_, then it is fair game to challenge such thinking as both immoral and unconstitutional. I interpreted (and still do interpret) Oregon Catholic to be making just such a claim.

Well, you can’t challenge his thinking as immoral, because you’re a relativist, so he can think whatever he wants and he’s just a diverse little snowflake you can’t criticize in his specialness. As for “unconstitutional,” that is never a description of a thought, as you know. Freedom of speech presupposes freedom of thought.

But the meat of the issue is this. Let’s say that a bunch more LDS folks move to Nevada to join the many Mormons already living in the Harry “I am too timid to properly reform the filibuster” Reid state. Let’s say the new Mormon majority votes for legislators eager to amend the Nevada state constitution to outlaw prostitution and gambling, entirely because they think it’s God’s will. Let’s say Oregon Catholic gets tired of all the “Portlandia” hippies, moves to Nevada, and votes the same way for the same reason. Well, guess what? There is nothing unconstitutional about outlawing prostitution or outlawing gambling. You might favor a harm reduction policy. You might think keeping/making these things illegal has only really dumb secular arguments in support. You might be right! Does. Not. Matter. If the state action in question (e.g., PEPFAR, abortion, heteronormative marriage laws, outlawing prostitution, outlawing gambling) doesn’t happen to be unconstitutional on other grounds (e.g., equal protection in abortion cases, and maybe SSM, too, depending on what Justice Kennedy has for breakfast the day SCOTUS hears oral argument) then the state law is constitutional despite the entirely religious motivations of all the stump speeches, all the voters’ votes, and all the legislators’ votes and the governor’s failure to veto. Religion cooties simply do not make otherwise constitutional state acts unconstitutional.

[Rant: Thinking they do is like the MSNBC equivalent of Faux News global warming denialism: people who know law know (with a few academic exceptions on the left, I presume and preemptively concede) that it’s wrong, and it’s a weariness of the flesh for law-trained folks to keep coming across laypeople who just google the Constitution, read it, and think they can become instant Con Law scholars just because they read English. It’s like when us Catholics come across guys from “Bob’s Bible Shack and School of Agricultural Technology and Football Academy” who think they can do historical criticism of ancient Hebrew and Greek writers because, darn it, they’ve read the King James Bible from cover to cover, so there! Expertise exists. Climatologists, theologians, and lawyers all go to school for a reason. And yes, all three are real areas of knowledge and expertise, not just the science one, Dawkins’ know-nothing, global-warming-denier-idiot-esque “Leprechaunology” cracks about theology notwithstanding.
/Rant.] (Sorry about the rant.)

Since this comment isn’t nearly verbose enough,

Oh, mine is now worse.

This is most certainly true on a straightforward reading- religion deserves a place in public discussion precisely as large as the place it has in the lives of the populace. In a place like the US, we should not be afraid to discuss religion. We should, however, refuse to legislate it.

Sure. No establishment of religion. Uncontroversial. But outlawing, e.g., abortion, SSM, gambling, or prostitution would happen in the context of secular arguments (however dumb you, Jake, think they are) being readily available. Make an equal protection argument or a due process argument. Religion is irrelevant, even if it’s the actual motive for voters and legislators, so long as secular arguments are available. Courts aren’t going to adjudicate whether the secular arguments are too dumb to count.

The proper lens to look through, I think, is the kind of laws and protections you would want in place if Islam was the dominant religion. Would you want Sharia law enforced? I presume not (though I’ve been surprised by some people’s answers on this in the past).

Not sure how a moral relativist gets to mandate the “proper” anything.

As to Sharia: where and when are we talking about? Compared to pagan Arabia, or to corruptly administered and confiscatory Byzantine taxation of the Levantine and Egyptian peasantry, early Islamic jurisprudence was progressive, even-handed, and a huge improvement. (Which is a subsidiary but still real non-conquest reason for the rapid early spread of Islamic rule that we Christians are almost totally oblivious to, for the most part. Which is a shame: it’s an interesting historical period.)

In an imaginary Muslim-majority U.S., the Constitution would be an impediment to the enforcement of Sharia. That wouldn’t be a moral argument against it, though, just a fact on the ground. As to whether I, personally, would want Sharia implemented in the imaginary Muslim-majority U.S. if the Muslims called a new Constitutional Convention or otherwise got themselves a blank slate to write on, my views would be entirely a question of where Sharia mirrors Catholic social teaching, and where it doesn’t. IIRC, Sharia would ban abortion, which I’d favor. I think it might mandate a certain amount of taxation for the relief of the poor. It would probably decimate the investment banks due to its usury ban. I could get behind all of that. However, Sharia also seems to mandate capital punishment and amputation, both of which, as a Catholic, I would oppose. Similarly, given the Vatican II declaration of the human right to freedom of religion in Dignitatis Humanae, I would feel morally justified in objecting to the restrictions placed on my practice of Christianity by dhimmi status. As to being made to pay a jizya tax as a non-Muslim, I’d be unhappy about it, but willing to submit to Caesar on it, as Christians in pagan Rome and the Dar al-Islam have submitted to other not-sinful irritants over the centuries. In other words, it’d be a pretty case by case thing.

On a broader level, I think the First Amendment’s disestablishment of religion has allowed a competitive religious ecology to flourish here in stark contrast to, e.g., the stricken religious monocultures of European countries with state churches, or the reportedly stifling atmosphere of Wahhabi Saudi Arabia and other Salafi states. So my prudential judgment would lead me to prefer the current U.S. system. But that doesn’t make me think that some Muslim guy in Michigan fantasizing about an Islamic U.S. is illegitimately appealing to religion in the entirely secular realm of political preferences. Instead, I think he’s entitled to have religiously motivated preferences, and I’m entitled to have starkly opposed religiously motivated political preferences. Atheists are allowed, of course, to have philosophically/metaphysically motivated political preferences, too, like their preference for the rest of us shutting up about religion in public. I think the Muslim and the atheist are wrong, but so what? Every citizen is a democratic peer.

The point I’m trying to make is that the US is designed to be secular- not in an attempt to eliminate religion, but to be inclusive of all religions, and create an environment where they can coexist.

The U.S. was designed not to have an institution like the Church of England. That’s all. Since then, First Amendment jurisprudence has very recently moved toward a more secular public square in areas like school prayer in the last few decades. The U.S. was not designed to exclude religiously motivated arguments from the public square. The abolitionists, the civil rights movement, and the pro-life movement, have all made religiously motivated arguments in the public square, and all have been in the American mainstream in so doing.

But its very much supportable secularly- you can point to lots of demonstrable bad consequences that come from prostitution. Not so for homosexual marriage (or at least, I’ve never heard any that didn’t involve the words “disordered” and “God”)

Believe me, there are lots of secular arguments against SSM. The fact that you haven’t heard them, or think they’re dumb doesn’t mean a court can rule them dumb. Nonjusticiable.

Yeah, I would say those laws are a clear violation of the first amendment. They’re just not important enough that I care (plus, remember I’m not a fan of alcohol )

The fact that you “would say” those laws are unconstitutional, and yet they have been on the books for decades despite the existence of wealthy liquor distribution firms that would happily pay large law firms to challenge them, may indicate that your hunches about what is and isn’t constitutional are untrustworthy. If your hunches lead you to think that longstanding laws are unconstitutional, then barring a groundbreaking SCOTUS decision (on SSM, e.g.), that just means your hunches are wrong, and you know less about the Constitution than you think.

Fair enough. My actual objection to anti-SSM legislation is both moral and legal.

How can a moral relativist have moral objections?

I am under no illusion about the Constitution- it is man-made, imperfect, and it’s current application may or may not be close to its intended application.

Agreed.

However, the law of the land- which I vehemently support because I think it’s right, rather than because it happens to be the current law of the land- is that laws must be secular and not religious in nature.

Clearly, you and a lot of my secularist teammates on “Team Blue” do think that’s right. But, as I’ve attempted to elucidate above, that’s not what the Constitution has ever said, and it’s not even what the rather secularist jurisprudence of recent decades reads it as having said. It’s not the law of the land. It’s just what you wish it was.

When someone tries to enforce religious rules for religious reasons, I think it _ought_ to be banished because religion is an illigitimate _basis_ for policy.

And I think neo-classical, laissez faire, Mont Pelerin Society, freshwater school, libertarian, Randian economics is an illegitimate basis for policy, because it’s barbaric to the poor, intellectually cramped, and morally bankrupt. But it’s not an unconstitutional motive for policy. It’s just annoying to me personally. Too bad. I have to argue against it. I don’t get to banish it from the public square by fiat.

Similarly, you think religion is an illegitimate basis for public policy. Fine. So go out and register some voters, canvas for your candidates, engage in public discourses like this one, etc. Argue against the religiously motivated policies you dislike. But religious people and our arguments aren’t going anywhere. There are a lot of us, and we vote. Convince us to vote otherwise. That’s how you make change. Telling us to “shut up” because our religion cooties aren’t allowed in America’s awesome secular tree house is not. You’re a good guy, Jake. Thoughtful and thought-provoking. So I think you really know all this already.

Pleasure dialoging with you. Cheers.

Quite agreeable- I shall trundle over sometime tonight to post a response, when I have several hours to devise a cunning and unbeatable rhetorical ploy

A link for those who just can’t get enough constitutional law discussion

Fair point, ACN. However, whether religious arguments are right or wrong, they belong in the public square no less than others. Those of other faiths or none are of course entitled to discount them.

But keep asking “why?” Why should the government get involved in property rights because two people are in committed sexual relationship? Why should the government care who you have sex with? It relates to the establishment and protection of family units, which relates to procreation.

Gay men have much higher rates of anal cancer and other health problems associated with their sexual activities. It’s documented by gay rights orgs.

“A report just out in england says now 1 in 20 gay men has hiv. If that doesn’t worry you what would? Serious question….”

How does that argue for banning gay marriage? Much of sub-Saharan Africa has a similar incidence of HIV among its hetero population. Does that mean they should bar Africans from marrying? There is no sexual practice gay men or women do that is not also carried out, and in vast quantities, by the hetero population. Unsafe practices are not inherently more dangerous based on the gender of the partners involved. HIV achieved the critical mass it did in the gay male community in this country primarily because it landed there first and because gay culture in past decades encouraged patterns of behavior that entrenched the epidemic among that demographic.

Social marginalization of gays had a lot to do with that as well. People rejected completely and viciously by the parent culture don’t feel much of an attachment to that parent culture’s values. These were also generations of men who had no role models for healthy relationships, a shit-train of mental pathology and self-loathing ingrained by our society and no options whatsoever for legally recognized lifelong stable partnerships even for those who were inclined toward that.

So in the same breath you’re griping about gay men’s health issues brought on by promiscuity and anchorless living, you’re also demanding that we withhold their access to the one institution that fosters responsible living and monogamy. This only makes sense if: A) You believe that HIV is God’s special punishment for the “un-naturalness” of gay men (and apparently Africans, but strangely not lesbians), OR if you believe that gay men will just suddenly quit being gay if we stop encouraging their aspirations of marriage…..

Yes but within reason. If Leah comes out and say the RCC should be pro-choice I would relegate her blog to the dissident Catholic channel if one exists or to the CofE or something like that.

My pleasure, thanks for displaying your retarded made up trash about yourself and the church.

The second we include sodomy among acts which may be considered virtuous, the concept of virtue ceases to have any meaning at all.

Well no, it doesn’t. Why would it? I’ve still got a perfectly meaningful virtue concept.

ACN:
Sodomy can include oral activity as well. Either is a vice. Also, you seem to spend an awful lot of time in the comments of this very blog debating this very issue. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.

Edward,

Re 1: the virtuous elements of sodomy are more or less the same as those of other sexual activities. Creation of unity, expression of love, and causation of physical pleasure are all at least pro tanto virtuous elements.

Re 2: Note that the claim that I’m defending that a process containing viceful elements can help lead to virtue, not that it can itself be virtuous. That’s a causal, not a normative, claim, so the issues you raise are irrelevant.

”…And beyond this, sodomy is utterly lacking the principal element that makes human sexuality virtuous–fruitfulness. The marital act, even among those who are sterile, carries the form and nature of the activity necessary for the begetting of children. Sodomy never can and never will…”

And there we have it, the difference between vice and virtue: how good is one’s aim in a darkened room.

Here I was reading into it was that the difference between vice and virtue is the use of a strap-on

A Philosopher,
That sex acts failing to be procreative in kind may still contain the goods of a unitive act no more relieves them of being vicious than the goods of pleasure and nutrition relieve gluttony of being vicious. As C.S. Lewis used to follow medieval tradition in pointing out rather often, sin is usually a disordered, disproportionate craving for or use of some good, not the absence of some good. The presence of the unitive good of sex in disordered acts does not render them rightly ordered, it just means they are disordered precisely in being expressions of the actor’s disordered relationship to that very unitive good. (Which is disordered, of course, because it is decontextualized from the procreative.)

Alan’s a theist? News to me!
(Also, vitriol that makes the Church look bad is a far graver scandal in my eyes than atheists’ antics. If we’re to take part in the New Evangelization, we should, you know, behave.)

Fair enough. Sometimes opportunities for snark are like Hilary and Everest: Why did you have to? “Because it’s there!”

That should say “predilection” before “toward.”
Also, I realize that the Thomist position here is flabbergastingly offensive to lots of readers of this blog. Without withdrawing the substance, I nevertheless apologize for the very understandable offense.

As a Thomist, I hold it to be a matter of simple fact that sodomy is a vice. As a person of largely liberal sensibilities, I wish it weren’t, and hate, hate, hate the pain that the idea causes to so many decent, kind gay people and straight allies. I think the obverse might be, ACN, if you were spending a lot of time in a really wholesome, friendly community with ultra-traditional religious values. You’d sincerely believe that you’d be doing them a favor by telling them how stultifying you believe their values to be on any objective/secular view, but even though you’d know you’re right, you might still feel pained at hurting them by saying so. Or maybe not. Don’t want to assume a lot about your views or how you feel about them. But that’s where I’m at with this. If someone built their whole personal identity on jumping off cliffs, I’d be wrong not to tell them how the law of gravity is going to kill them if they don’t knock it off, but I’d still be less than happy about having to go after someone’s identity like that.

You’re right. Being straight is a position of privilege, and the struggles of gay people are known to me only second hand. OTOH, it would be a lot less unseemly to hold the Catholic position in this area if, by being gay, I had earned it, so to speak. But that’s a moot point. I would welcome your guidance on this:
If you held the Catholic view on this issue, how–if at all–would you express your views in Leah’s threads on SSM?

To review:
1. I concede that my side is wrong to use biological arguments, and that Kenneth is making a valid point. I clarify where I still disagree, and apologize for any offense.
2. Kenneth engages in mockery.

Even in the most conservative Catholic construction of sexuality, it does not have to be directed toward reproduction or limited by that consideration. It has to be open to that possibility, but it doesn’t have to be the sole focus or only legitimate reason for sexual expression. There is not, as far as I know, any prohibition on a young man marrying a post-menopausal woman….

Alan, I am sorry I read it twice and don’t understand your premise. Do you mean hormones in the person desiring or the person being desired?

Of course hormones in the person desiring play a strong role, but lots of men are aroused by graphic images of young women they can gaze upon without being in any proximity to detect hormone levels from that actual person. Sex is absolutely primarily about the recombination of genes and the propagation of those genes. There are certainly many secondary roles in social groups for it (bonding and stress relief) but these are WAY down the list. The reason the drive is soooo strong is that it is about gene propagation. One’s genes are literally trying to force one to pass them on. With exclusive homosexuality this is not the case, and it is puzzling.

With regard to bisexuality, I am no expert, but at the very least, we can understand how that person’s genes still allow for a direct method of propagation. Still strange. Why waste your sexual energy on persons with whom you can not reproduce? Yes, today most people don’t aim to reproduce most of the time they are sexually active, but to understand the drive you need to view it in light of the crucible of evolutionary fitness.

Can I find a single example of a young man marrying a post-menopausal woman? Without working too hard, I should think. I found some 2009 study which showed that about 1.3% of women are marrying men 10 years or more younger than them. Clearly not all of them are in the exact situation you mention, but I’m sure some are. When I was in my 30s, I dated women one side or another of 50, and there are one or two of them I would have married in a heartbeat had I the sense and had they been willing.