Angry in the Great White North

Over and over again, we hear about why same-sex marriage is about rights. We can't deny them their rights. It's a human rights issue. Rights are rights are rights.

Fine. It's about rights. And that's precisely why same-sex marriage makes no sense. Marriage is not about rights, it's about constraints:

Spontaneous associations like the family institutionalize (in the form of promises, oaths, covenants) a willingness to accept the consequences of your actions - in the case of the family, the act of procreation. The family implicates the older generation in the life of the younger. It counters the tendency, highly developed in humans and especially among human males, to run away from responsibility for the young. The family is culture's answer to the peculiar structure of human biology, to the absence of sexual periodicity which makes it possible for humans to breed with abandon, and to the prolonged dependence of the human young. The combination of these two biological traits would be fatal to the prospects for reproduction and cultural transmission without institutions designed to tie people to their offspring and to constrain both sexes to their care.

Because the monogamous ideal institutionalized in the family runs counter to human biology, it is appropriate to see the family as above all a system of constraints. In our enlightened age, the apparent irrationality of these constraints, of the very idea of constraints, provides much of the energy for the effort to work out "alternative lifestyles" (an effort, however, that is not nearly as widespread as our liberators would like to believe, since it conflicts with a stubborn popular realism in these matters). In the face of this revolt against familial constraints, it is important to stress their value, which lies not only in their negative effect, in making it more difficult than it would be otherwise for men to desert their women and children, but in the encouragement these constraints give to a full understanding of freedom itself, one that goes beyond the equation of freedom with unlimited choice and "nonbinding commitments."

These are the words of Christopher Lasch, the late American historian and social critic.

Note that when he says "family" we can read the word "marriage", since a married couple is the starting point of a family. That is certainly Lasch's point of view, and so we can apply that translation throughout these extracts.

He defines the core of marriage, and the corrollary institution of the family, in terms of spontaneous cooperation and the willingness to make a promise even though it may not always make you happy:

As products of a liberal culture, we find it difficult to understand the importance other political traditions place on spontaneous cooperation and the value of promises. For the Greeks, the capacity to make promises was almost the definition of a political animal. Feudalism rested on a different but equally powerful conception of the importance of binding oaths. The modern conception, on the other hand-which is profoundly apolitical-is that the capacity for rational choice, rational calculation of utility and personal advantage, is what defines the citizen or the consenting adult, as we say. The modern conception gives little support to the binding promises that underlie the family, especially when we add to the ideology of individual rights the widely accepted belief in the universal obligation to be happy. Liberal ideology not only gives little support to the family, it cannot even make sense of the family, an institution that appears irrational in the sense that its members ideally do not think of their own interests and of the rights designed to protect them, and in the further sense that they promise to sustain each other through a lifetime. What folly!

When supporters of same-sex marriage speak of rights, what they really mean, even if they don't know it, is this notion of the "universal obligation to be happy". It is, at its core, a selfish notion, entirely narcissistic. In societies in which the political and social relationships were binding ones (such as feudalism), the idea of family would have seemed entirely normal. It is just another binding oath, another set of responsibilities and expectations, another role required by society of its members.

But today nothing is expected. You don't need to vote. You don't need to serve in the military. You don't need to go to church. All you have to do is pay your taxes, and the rest of the time, you can do anything you want, constrained only by economics, and not by morality or social rules. Even our criminal justice system has essentially redefined crime as either an economic injustice or an attempt to constrain someone else's rights, and not as a way of punishing an individual's personal moral failings. Society doesn't care about your moral strengths or moral failings.

As Lasch points out, this environment "gives little support to the binding promises that underlie the family".

Whenever I hear a proponent of same-sex marriage start in on rights, I tune it out. He or she has no idea whatsoever what he or she is talking about. To form a family, whether it is of two adults, or including children, is the antithesis of free exercise of rights. It is about obligations and promises and commitments and has nothing to do with the pursuit of happiness (though most of us get great pleasure and personal satisfaction when our work with raising a family seems to succeed).

These people could not even conceive of that. You'll never hear a supporter of same-sex marriage stand up and say, "I've got more rights than I can shake a stick at. I don't want more rights. I want more obligations. I want to enter into binding arrangements that curtail my pursuit of personal pleasure, and I want society to punish me severely, both financially and by stigmatizing me socially, if I fail in meeting, or even if I seek to evade, those obligations."

To be fair, most heterosexual marriages today are not based on this notion of obligations either.

In any case, that's not what supporters of same-sex marriage want. Nor will C-38 impose that on them. You might think that Bill C-38 redefines marriage to include same-sex unions.

It does not.

Rather, Bill C-38 will redefine marriages, and subsequently families, to be:

"lifestyle enclaves" (in Robert Bellah's phrase) in which individuals are left free to pursue purely private interests and pleasures

As such, people will be pointing at any accumulation of individuals and calling them marriages and families.

The attempt to redefine the family as a purely voluntary arrangement (one among many “alter-native” living arrangements) grows out of the modern delusion that people can keep all their options open all the time, avoiding any constraints or demands as long as they don’t make any demands of their own or “impose their own values” on others. The left’s redefinition of the family encourages the illusion that it is possible to avoid the “trap” of involuntary association and to enjoy its advantages at the same time.

Next week will probably witness the passage of Bill C-38. For all those who fear what this will do to marriage and family, remember this: