So I don\u2019t know if you noticed, but that Pixar\/gay marriage post<\/a> was really two posts awkwardly yoked together by a cartoon about singing volcanoes. And some of the latter half of the post, especially, made Christian marriage sound like a social-improvement project: Live in mutual self-gift, mirroring the love of Christ and His Bride the Church, because it will lead to a stable bourgeois society. I have these studies showing that surrender of self-will is good for child educational outcomes\u2026.<\/p>\n That approach is misleading in a lot of ways. On the other hand, I don\u2019t want to completely ditch it: It\u2019s important that marriage\u2013its norms and expectations, more than its explicit legal benefits\u2013is one powerful cultural response to the fruitful\/destructive volcanic force of eros, and especially heterosexual eros. It\u2019s important that out of the many [ETA: current!] cultural institutions that try to channel the lava, marriage is typically one of the gentlest.<\/p>\n [EDITED: I kept editing and rethinking the bit that used to be here and decided I was just wrong, so I have posted a retraction here<\/a>. On with the rest of the post!]<\/p>\n But so, let me offer a series of counterthoughts, which I\u2019ll pose against my earlier post without retracting it. These are I think the more important set of points, at least for Christians.<\/p>\n * A lot of different paths could lead a person to support gay marriage. I focused on Justice Kennedy\u2019s rescue-from-loneliness passage because it did fit so well with the Pixar short; and it clearly speaks to something real in our culture. I\u2019ve already seen one person say she\u2019d like to use it in her own wedding vows.<\/p>\n But by moving so quickly to \u201cmarriage as constraint for eros\u201d I made it sound like gay marriage would be an example of unconstraint, when of course sexual restraint for gay people has been one of the arguments in favor of gay marriage. The concept of gay marriage has many fathers; and many of those fathers died of AIDS. I think the biggest way that the AIDS epidemic fostered the gay-marriage movement was by teaching both straight society and gay people ourselves that we were capable of the most sacrificial and tender care for one another, in the face of total societal rejection. Care for the dying was its own argument. But there\u2019s also of course an element of reaction against the \u201970s gay-liberation culture of hedonistic sex.<\/p>\n Can I say that it\u2019s especially weird that I kept saying \u201cour\u201d at the end when I meant \u201cheterosexuals\u201d? Carried away by rhetoric, at best; and because of that, I missed a chance to honor some of the elements of gay culture and the gay-marriage movement that deserve honoring.<\/p>\n And actual gay people\u2019s actual gay marriages are generally the result of their longing for greater<\/em> constraint. We long for the ties that bind. That unslakable human longing for sacrifice and constraint may not always be an accurate guide to moral action, but it is always sublime.<\/p>\n * Ross Douthat has written<\/a> about the weird confluence of the Supreme Court\u2019s exalted paean to marriage as the sole haven in a heartless world, and a culture which has retreated from marriage. But these two things go together. When fewer people marry, it makes sense that our view of marriage would become more idealistic.<\/p>\n After all, the more marriages you see, the more marital problems you see. If none of your peers are married, and none of your peers\u2019 parents are (still) married, you might imagine marriage as a refuge from the rampant human jackassery you see all around you. You might, and this I think is the stronger analysis of Americans nowadays, think marriage is only for people who have already outgrown their jackassery<\/a> (as if we ever do). And you will simply have no opportunity to learn just how lonely marriage can be.<\/p>\n Right now most Americans want to get married. But our image of marriage is sort of like the reverse of that old saw, \u201cThe church is a hospital for sinners, not a museum for saints.\u201d We think marriage is so important and exalted that we aren\u2019t ready for it\u2013and the horizon of \u201cready for it\u201d can shift based on your class background, so it stays tantalizingly out of reach.<\/p>\n * If you get married \u201ctoo early,\u201d in lots of big swathes of America\u2013not all, there\u2019s definitely a ring-by-spring culture of relatively early and often unsuccessful wedlock as well\u2013everybody will scold you. This is the other thing, that we\u2019re not a hedonistic culture at all. We\u2019re an intensely sexually moralistic culture. There are rules<\/a>, the rules exist because people believe they will lead to economic and familial stability, and the fact that many of the rules have very limited contact with reality doesn\u2019t keep us from enforcing them with shame and fearmongering. (\u201cIf you don\u2019t live together before marriage you\u2019re just stupid and setting yourself up for divorce.\u201d <- say what you like about sociology, but at least sociological studies haven\u2019t come up with this<\/em> one.)<\/p>\n We are trying hard to constrain heterosexual eros. We have basically two ways to do that: the purity culture, with its used-chewing-gum sex ed; and the moralistic pressure for premarital sex, cohabitation, and marriage as reward rather than foundation. And both of these distorted sexual cultures are enforced through shame and judgment.<\/p>\n Catholic school kids should read Kristin Lavransdatter<\/em><\/a> in sex ed, is what I\u2019m saying.<\/p>\n * Some of the rules probably do lead to economic and personal stability, though. I\u2019ve seen studies suggesting that having lots of children is correlated with various negative outcome measures<\/em> for the kids. Ditto stuff like staying in your poor neighborhood even when you make enough money to move out. The more a globalized, capitalist society structures itself around the expectations of delayed marriage, long stretches of credentialing education, constant availability (whether that means just-in-time scheduling or willingness to move across the country), dual-income households, and small family sizes, the harder it is to maintain extended-family bonds and form lasting, exuberantly fertile marriages. Which leads me to my next point\u2026.<\/p>\n * It\u2019s a little weird that intra-Christian discussions of marriage usually assume that Christian marriage will lead to middle-class stability. Does Christian practice usually<\/em> stabilize secular cultural institutions? We need to avoid the left-wing sociologists\u2019 trap<\/a> of defining moral virtue as \u201cthe behaviors which lead to economic and social well-being.\u201d Who do we think is doing more to stabilize society: the unemployed couple having their sixth child, or the diligently-contracepting neighbor who thinks maybe she\u2019ll have a child once she finishes her nursing degree? The answer is, \u201cThat\u2019s the wrong question.\u201d<\/p>\n Marriages that burden society may still be the site of sanctification for the participants. Christian marriage is not for the competent. If your lava is just flowing all over the place like crazy, congratulations<\/a>, you are the target audience of the Christian faith. Go to church lol.<\/p>\n It\u2019s not that it\u2019s \u201cokay\u201d if your marriage doesn\u2019t actually constrain your sexual desire. Unconstrained eros is not healthy for children or other living things. But it\u2019s okay if you\u2019re not okay. Your marriage can be a channel of grace for you and your spouse even if you never stop jackassing it up.<\/p>\n