THE NEW MORAL PARADIGM
The battle over same-sex marriage is really a skirmish that is part of the larger culture war, of course, and in this battle are opposed the religious, moral values and ethical traditions that hold societies together against forces that would effectively pull them apart.
While the issues of homosexuality and gay marriage have often been portrayed as opposing religious traditions to secular values, these practices belong to no enduring tradition or moral and philosophical system, and their acceptance has occasionally been imposed by courts recently upon the basis of legal rights rather than moral rightness. Homosexual behavior is no longer illegal, as gay-rights advocates so often point out. But what moral paradigm would the acceptance of homosexual behavior and same-sex marriage in particular imply?
While a great many people still view it as wrong, homosexuality in modern Western societies has been tolerated so long as it had remained a privacy issue of individual liberty that did not engage public sanction. Any legalization of same-sex marriage, however, would no longer let it remain simply a question of privacy and personal liberty, but would effectively engage the public.
This creates then, an inevitable conflict in many. How can something that is not right be legal?
The Public Morality
The dominant world view held by Western civilization throughout the last 1500 years had been shaped primarily by Christian moral philosophy. Lately, this view is being challenged. The acceptance into the law of abortion, for example, continues to be a serious blow to the moral assumptions made about American society by a great many of its citizens.1 Likewise, the death penalty in the U.S. has called into question the moral assumptions that are the foundation of this nation's legal system.
With same-sex marriage, rationalizing the moral rightness of homosexual behavior with Christian ethics will prove to be nearly insurmountable given the long history of its condemnation. One could just as well attempt to demonstrate the moral compatibility of ritual infant sacrifice with Christian ethical principles for all the good it would do to help many of the Christian faithful accept this. For the religious fundamentalists it is the establishment in the law of a moral paradigm that is squarely opposed to Christian morality.
This underscores the fact that the fundamental laws of democratic societies are the public expression of the privately held moral convictions of the majority of their citizens, which are conditioned, of course, by their religious and philosophical beliefs. As Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. so poignantly put it:
The U.S. system of governance seeks to keep government neutral and impartial as it concerns the religious and philosophical beliefs of its citizens. The freedom of speech, of association and religious belief, coupled with the non-establishment clause, guarantee personal rights that are inscribed in the U.S. Constitution. Concerning constitutional issues, the courts arbitrate the terms of the contract that are the citizen's constitutional rights between them and their government without pronouncing necessarily on the moral rightness of these terms. Because of this rigor, discriminatory racial laws, as one example, had remained on the books for far longer than they should have.
The Back Door to Deconstruction?
Because the government must be neutral as it concerns religious belief and matters of conscience, this is often interpreted as not only an obligation to neutrality as it concerns what is largely the purview of religion, but also, by a peculiar interpretation of the doctrine of the separation of church and state, may suggest to some that morality that has religious tradition as its source is impermissible in the public place of secular societies. According to this view, morality is entirely an indivdual, private affair, and at best only a secularly based system of morality might be permitted, though secular philosophical systems have never even succeeded as much in justifying any more convincingly than religion the authority of their moral pronouncements.
Legalizing same-sex marriage under the pretext of upholding individual, constitutional rights — or under any pretext at all — would pose the problem then, of also publicly sanctioning and enshrining into the law the doctrine of individualistic morality to the detriment of any known moral system with universal ambitions in the face of what a great many consider to be wrongful behavior. This effectively undermines the entire notion of public morality, and quite likely the notion of society itself, by confining morality exclusively to the individual for his appreciation only.
Everyone individualistically following his own idea of right and wrong leads away from the very idea of society.
If religiously based moral values, from which much of our sense of right and wrong derives, must be discounted under this particular interpretation of the doctrine of the separation of church and state, and may not have public expression through the law, then upon what standard of right and wrong — and by whose moral authority — might a legal system be based?
Only the Letter of the law.....
This cleavage of legal rights from moral rightness effectively renders the law amoral, then, where only internal logical consistency and political influence and manipulation would prevail over the moral sensibilities of religious citizens, and where the public expression through the law of their collectively held moral convictions must be forever censored. Thus, a hollow, alternate "morality" must arise ad hoc in its place, where the respect for rights are asserted as the highest good, but where the rightness of the exercise of these rights is never addressed. It would be a purely formal system of legalisms never relating its inherent principles to the intent of its principles, a sort of consequences-be-damned approach in its affirmation of individual rights.3. In this way, something that is not right could be perfectly legal.
This would represent a clear departure from the moral assumptions upon which American civilization, as well as Western civilization in general, have been founded, and would put in its place a soulless non-system of legalisms and individual rights based upon, what is in fact, no moral system at all.
The battle against gay marriage is part of the larger battle that has at stake for the present, the preservation or deconstruction of Western civilization with its underlying values, and the supplantation of these by one based upon a "non-cohesive", individualistic "morality" of certainly dubious authority. If Western civilization and its founding values are worth defending, as I believe they are, then undermining these values the way promoting gay marriage and abortion do, must certainly be resisted.
Footnotes:
1 This issue had been rationalized somewhat because of the uncertainty over whether a fetus was, in fact, a human person with the entitlement to legal rights. Fetuses, like black slaves in their day, occupy that doubtful gray area of moral uncertainty.return
2 The guarantee of personal, legal rights in constitutional democracies, however, is an important check on any abuse of this process. return
3 The example of slavery in the United States is one of the best examples illustrating this point. The legality of owning slaves was, for too long, upheld as consistent with the U.S. Constitution, as the role of the courts are constrained to address the legality of a situation, or in the case of the SCOTUS, its constitutionality, and not its morality. It was necessary to fight a civil war to assert the correct moral view, which was almost entirely founded upon Christian moral values.
Pornography is a more current example where the legal right to produce and view it is protected under the First Amendment Freedom of Speech clause, in spite of its moral offensiveness to so many. A legalistic, formal application of this constitutional principle would have failed to distinguish between the right of advocacy and the free expression of differing of points of view from the many different forms of expression by which these may be expressed, and thus, has led to the incrustation of pornographic material into the habits of society.return
The battle over same-sex marriage is really a skirmish that is part of the larger culture war, of course, and in this battle are opposed the religious, moral values and ethical traditions that hold societies together against forces that would effectively pull them apart.
While the issues of homosexuality and gay marriage have often been portrayed as opposing religious traditions to secular values, these practices belong to no enduring tradition or moral and philosophical system, and their acceptance has occasionally been imposed by courts recently upon the basis of legal rights rather than moral rightness. Homosexual behavior is no longer illegal, as gay-rights advocates so often point out. But what moral paradigm would the acceptance of homosexual behavior and same-sex marriage in particular imply?
While a great many people still view it as wrong, homosexuality in modern Western societies has been tolerated so long as it had remained a privacy issue of individual liberty that did not engage public sanction. Any legalization of same-sex marriage, however, would no longer let it remain simply a question of privacy and personal liberty, but would effectively engage the public.
This creates then, an inevitable conflict in many. How can something that is not right be legal?
The Public Morality
The dominant world view held by Western civilization throughout the last 1500 years had been shaped primarily by Christian moral philosophy. Lately, this view is being challenged. The acceptance into the law of abortion, for example, continues to be a serious blow to the moral assumptions made about American society by a great many of its citizens.1 Likewise, the death penalty in the U.S. has called into question the moral assumptions that are the foundation of this nation's legal system.
With same-sex marriage, rationalizing the moral rightness of homosexual behavior with Christian ethics will prove to be nearly insurmountable given the long history of its condemnation. One could just as well attempt to demonstrate the moral compatibility of ritual infant sacrifice with Christian ethical principles for all the good it would do to help many of the Christian faithful accept this. For the religious fundamentalists it is the establishment in the law of a moral paradigm that is squarely opposed to Christian morality.
This underscores the fact that the fundamental laws of democratic societies are the public expression of the privately held moral convictions of the majority of their citizens, which are conditioned, of course, by their religious and philosophical beliefs. As Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. so poignantly put it:
"The law is the witness and external deposit of our moral life. Its history is the history of the moral development of the race."When expressed as the law, the collective private morality of individuals acquires the status of public morality, enjoying governmental sanction, and is presumed to be the general consensus of society. By this process, laws and public policies are made.2
The U.S. system of governance seeks to keep government neutral and impartial as it concerns the religious and philosophical beliefs of its citizens. The freedom of speech, of association and religious belief, coupled with the non-establishment clause, guarantee personal rights that are inscribed in the U.S. Constitution. Concerning constitutional issues, the courts arbitrate the terms of the contract that are the citizen's constitutional rights between them and their government without pronouncing necessarily on the moral rightness of these terms. Because of this rigor, discriminatory racial laws, as one example, had remained on the books for far longer than they should have.
The Back Door to Deconstruction?
Because the government must be neutral as it concerns religious belief and matters of conscience, this is often interpreted as not only an obligation to neutrality as it concerns what is largely the purview of religion, but also, by a peculiar interpretation of the doctrine of the separation of church and state, may suggest to some that morality that has religious tradition as its source is impermissible in the public place of secular societies. According to this view, morality is entirely an indivdual, private affair, and at best only a secularly based system of morality might be permitted, though secular philosophical systems have never even succeeded as much in justifying any more convincingly than religion the authority of their moral pronouncements.
Legalizing same-sex marriage under the pretext of upholding individual, constitutional rights — or under any pretext at all — would pose the problem then, of also publicly sanctioning and enshrining into the law the doctrine of individualistic morality to the detriment of any known moral system with universal ambitions in the face of what a great many consider to be wrongful behavior. This effectively undermines the entire notion of public morality, and quite likely the notion of society itself, by confining morality exclusively to the individual for his appreciation only.
Everyone individualistically following his own idea of right and wrong leads away from the very idea of society.
If religiously based moral values, from which much of our sense of right and wrong derives, must be discounted under this particular interpretation of the doctrine of the separation of church and state, and may not have public expression through the law, then upon what standard of right and wrong — and by whose moral authority — might a legal system be based?
Only the Letter of the law.....
This cleavage of legal rights from moral rightness effectively renders the law amoral, then, where only internal logical consistency and political influence and manipulation would prevail over the moral sensibilities of religious citizens, and where the public expression through the law of their collectively held moral convictions must be forever censored. Thus, a hollow, alternate "morality" must arise ad hoc in its place, where the respect for rights are asserted as the highest good, but where the rightness of the exercise of these rights is never addressed. It would be a purely formal system of legalisms never relating its inherent principles to the intent of its principles, a sort of consequences-be-damned approach in its affirmation of individual rights.3. In this way, something that is not right could be perfectly legal.
This would represent a clear departure from the moral assumptions upon which American civilization, as well as Western civilization in general, have been founded, and would put in its place a soulless non-system of legalisms and individual rights based upon, what is in fact, no moral system at all.
The battle against gay marriage is part of the larger battle that has at stake for the present, the preservation or deconstruction of Western civilization with its underlying values, and the supplantation of these by one based upon a "non-cohesive", individualistic "morality" of certainly dubious authority. If Western civilization and its founding values are worth defending, as I believe they are, then undermining these values the way promoting gay marriage and abortion do, must certainly be resisted.
Footnotes:
1 This issue had been rationalized somewhat because of the uncertainty over whether a fetus was, in fact, a human person with the entitlement to legal rights. Fetuses, like black slaves in their day, occupy that doubtful gray area of moral uncertainty.return
2 The guarantee of personal, legal rights in constitutional democracies, however, is an important check on any abuse of this process. return
3 The example of slavery in the United States is one of the best examples illustrating this point. The legality of owning slaves was, for too long, upheld as consistent with the U.S. Constitution, as the role of the courts are constrained to address the legality of a situation, or in the case of the SCOTUS, its constitutionality, and not its morality. It was necessary to fight a civil war to assert the correct moral view, which was almost entirely founded upon Christian moral values.
Pornography is a more current example where the legal right to produce and view it is protected under the First Amendment Freedom of Speech clause, in spite of its moral offensiveness to so many. A legalistic, formal application of this constitutional principle would have failed to distinguish between the right of advocacy and the free expression of differing of points of view from the many different forms of expression by which these may be expressed, and thus, has led to the incrustation of pornographic material into the habits of society.return
posted by A Voice in the Wilderness at 2:45 PM
2 Comments:
Wow. Great article.
Have you read much from Bill Whittle? I think you'd find it interesting considering what you've written here. He's a adamant secularist (maybe even atheist) that has written quite a bit on the founding and sustaining of civilization. Its enemy, as he and Christian from Opine have noted, is cultural nihilism. I think the case can be made that cultural nihilism is amorality, and amorality is cultural nihilism.
But what is interesting is that you, Christian and Mr Whittle are coming at this from entirely different angles. Mr Whittle is talking about, well, I would sum it up as patriotism. Christian is talking about marriage as a fundamental unit of civilization. Fundamental because it is so designed and optimized for the human species, they are Dependant on each other. And your take is morality, which I personally find the most rooted in civilization.
Here's why.
I've seen people misunderstand morality all too often. They feel it is an artificial set of guidelines put upon them. Perhaps some concepts are put across as morality and warrant that rebuke. But that is now what I have found morality to be.
Morality is a condition. It is like prosperity is to the economy, it is the culmination of our ability to cultivate and abide by rules that we discover. Economic principles of frugality, savings, investment, and business sense increase not only their state of prosperity but those around them.
We can look at our lives and know that we are prosperous. We can also look at our lives and know of our morality because of our general happiness and sense of civilization, happily living together as communities.
Since last night I have heard on the radio about gangs that essentially rule whole communities with bloody terror -- in the USA. I've heard stories of a film about child molestation, a man pretending to be 12 years old living with older men (who were having sexual relations with him) and attending jr high school where he assaulted a girl. I heard of a baby being left in a bag in the trunk of a car.
But I also heard the condolences towards a 5 year old girl who lost her father. How her community was pulling together to help that family and her. I saw fathers enjoying the preschool surroundings with their children, each very supportive. My own situation involves my parents who have stepped in to help raise my children while my wife continues treatment.
One of those paragraphs show examples of morality, and the other shows lack of morality. Its a measurable, tangible thing. Not some elusive word of dictation from dusty texts given us by small councils of elders. It is something that we can all know and experience.
The reason I am married is that it was the most moral thing to do. Promiscuity, even monogamous committed relationships was not enough. Homosexuality would never give what I've been able to obtain. I've often said, if homosexuals really knew what marriage was they'd crawl across the desert to find someone of the opposite sex who found it just as important. And they wouldn't attempt to neuter it any more. Because at its core, morality is our common happiness. And what is more valuable than that?
Great article
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