Don't rain on my gay parade: Equality and the future of marriage

First Amendment freedoms are most in danger when the government seeks to control thought or to justify its laws for that impermissible end. The right to think is the beginning of freedom, and speech must be protected from the government because speech is the beginning of thought. --Justice Anthony M. Kennedy
     President Obama's recent statement - his personal support of same-sex marriage and rejection of civil unions, putting him in stark contrast with Mr Romney - has given everyone a lot to think about. While I am not ignorant of the campaigning dynamic going on in such an unambiguous admission, neither am I interested in it. Rather, I am interested in the question it raises for the future of American society. Should we, like the President, embrace homosexuality as equal under the law in all respects? Or should we, like the soon-to-be Republican candidate, embrace the preservation of traditional, monogamous, heterosexual marriage?
     First, a preliminary philosophical observation. Always and in every society there is an Other (a group generally viewed as outside the accepted circle of good, God-approved individuals) who is denied social equality and legitimacy. We see a long list of Others in our society's history. Women, visible minorities, religious minorities, disabled persons, subcultures, and so on.

     Some societies perpetuate these prejudices and preserve social and legal inequality. This is done by squelching the voice of the Other and preventing it from being heard as a valid point of view. In some societies prejudices increase because of economic rivalry, a historical wrong or sociocultural resentment. However, as a democratic society evolves, these prejudices have generally been eroded by other more enduring values and principles.
     In a democratic society it is inevitable that, once they are considered persons and citizens with the right to vote, the voice of the Other will be heard. That voice will complain of the prejudices endured and their manifestation as gross legal inequalities. It is always in the legal arena that any issue in inequality will first come to a head.
     A democratic society will invariably increase legal equality of non-destructive preferences and behaviors, whatever these may be, and regulate or ban preferences and behaviors that hurt those besides their practitioners. John Stuart Mill, On Liberty, 1859. This ranges from sexual self-determination to the use of narcotics to ethnic background to religious belief/practice to protesting to riding a bicycle without using a helmet. Our legal courts are charged with seeing the basic trajectory of our country and, when it is time, creating or altering laws to increase equality and decrease destructive acts.
     Legislation in a democratic society cannot be coterminous with morality. In the United States we expect to enjoy personal freedoms, even if we do not always follow the status quo. We are allowed to live in peace with differing views and practices on many subjects. We understand the difference between morality and law - no wonder that so many moral people break laws on a regular basis without a single pang of guilt.

     You don't see pornography or other sexually explicit entertainment outlawed, do you? People who see homosexuality as immoral almost certainly view these other practices as immoral - and many others, too. However, it doesn't matter how many people believe watching porn is wrong. Laws are not written based on what the majority believe is moral or immoral. Laws have to do, as I said already, with stopping people from hurting others, and granting equality to groups disenfranchised in older generations. It is unethical to write a law stopping someone from doing something just because you think they shouldn't. That's called bigotry.
     Therefore, there is no basis whatsoever to outlaw minority practices unless they are destructive to others. I have the right to believe an act to be immoral but I do not have the right to impose my view on others. I have the right to believe an act to be moral but I do not have the right to require others to do it, or to see things the same way. A democratic society believes in free thought, which stands and falls on free speech, which stands and falls on free action - so long as my free action does not impinge on the rights of someone else.
     Only if gay marriage is destructive to others, therefore, can there be any basis for outlawing it. Otherwise it's simply a clear-cut example of an oppressed minority finally having an opportunity to receive equal treatment under the law - the constitutional right of the GLBT community as much as it is mine or any heterosexual person.
     So, does gay marriage hurt others? I don't think that it has ever hurt me. No gay or lesbian has ever hurt me by simply being the way they are, much less hurting me by committing themselves to each other in monogamous, life-long union. I can't see how that could ever hurt me. Am I missing something here?
Here are some possible arguments of how homosexuality and gay marriage could be destructive to others:

1. God will punish the entire society for its immoral conduct. The biblical story of the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah is the chief example supporting this argument. However, if you read the story carefully, you'll note that Abraham only has to find ten righteous people in the whole city to save it. As long as heterosexual marriage is resolutely preserved, then, I can't see why even the most superstitious person would worry about being turned into a gigantic salt shaker. 
2. Homosexuality will be approved by society so it will harder to convince our children that it is wrong. Exposure to a different idea or way of life is not the same as actual harm. If it was, we could not stop until we had a morally homogeneous society, and this conception runs contrary to every fiber in my democratic body.
3. Gay marriage will lead to gay adoption. Let's assume it does, or will, eventually, given the view of democratic society I outlined above. I've never heard of a study showing that a child raised by a gay couple is more likely to have some serious psychological trauma, or be abused, or anything else. Again, it's pretty clear that the horror of the idea of kids being "raised gay" is a result of moral prejudice. Such prejudice is the right of anyone, but by no means can it determine the direction of new legislation.
4. Gay marriage will lessen the validity of heterosexual marriage and lead to the destruction of the institution of marriage, raise divorce rates, corrupt society because the family unit no longer passes on valuable moral teachings to children, etc. I say, there's some truth in that. But the bigger truth is that Western society lost that battle almost one hundred years ago with the legalization of birth control methods as part of the early feminist movement and the liberation of women to be more than baby factories.

     The fact of the matter is that marriage isn't primarily about babies anymore. Society has changed, for better or for worse, and there's no going back. To try to salvage an obsolete notion of marriage is hopeless. In fifty years no one outside of extremely conservative religious groups will even bother. I can visualize the Catholic church continuing to maintain strict policies against both contraceptives and gay marriage for maybe that long, but not much longer. American society, meanwhile, will continue to develop and update its laws to reflect its nature - assuming the political scene is fixed sometime before the Union of States utterly dissolves. If you want a society that considers marriage to be primarily about progeny, you'll have to go to some other part of the world (not Europe). But I predict as their populations stabilize and the middle class becomes wealthier, as health care quality and availability increases and infant death mortality drops, the urge to define marriage in terms of procreation will weaken and ultimately fade.
     Folks, it's a brave new world out there, and we need to go and be part of it. Instead of pining for a lost era where black was black and white was white, we need to figure out how to make society work as best as it can.

Sex at school

     The other day I told my Creative Writing students, "Your job is to make your topic interesting. The only subject that's interesting by default is sex. No other topic is interesting until you make it interesting."
     The point I was making was valid, but I almost regret putting it that way, because simply mentioning sex in class gets them thinking about sex, rather than about writing. Case in point, right? It's such a powerful part of human existence. Those who treat sex casually are at war with the bulk of human societies and civilizations since the dawn of time.
     (I suppose I just enjoy being unpredictable. How often does a high school teacher mention sex? It's nice to be absolutely sure now and then that your students are actually listening to you.)

     Today I started the most ambitious instructional unit of my career -- sexual ethics. It's coming at the tail-end of a semester of ethics, starting with ethical issues relating specifically to young people, then environment, education, war and politics. It's been a great class. However, our school district has failed our students insofar as it does not require each of them to take a course on sex, sexuality and gender. This is my chance to fix that grievous error.
     Unfortunately I've only left myself two weeks to cover the material, so we'll have to move fairly quickly through some of the most controversial issues that will be raised this year. Homosexuality. Premarital sex. Age of consent. And once again, I think I will be able to hold my students' attention without too much difficulty.
     Of course, the challenge of an ethics course is to let the students arrive at their own conclusions instead of being told what to believe. Not only is it the ethical way to go about instruction -- as opposed to taking advantage of your position of authority and trust to preach your personal viewpoints -- but it will also result in a far more lasting impact on the way the students think.
     This is basically what distinguishes a teacher from a parental figure. Parents are keen to pass on their values and beliefs to their children. I, however, cannot adopt one hundred teenagers for 180 days, and repeat the process from scratch every year. For one, I'd probably kill myself. But the larger issue is the fact that they are not little mes, in any sense. Some might respect me and some might hate me, some will idolize me and others filled with disdain and scorn. Yet their background is not mine, their home life is not mine, their past is not mine, and although I can impact their future, it is not irrevocably tied to my own.

     Sex and sexuality is sort of like religion and tradition. It's hard to break away from your roots. Students learn math, English, history and science at school, but when it comes to sex, they come with a set of presuppositions, sometimes hardened by specific theological premises. In the United States, anyway. In more secular countries  -- Britain comes to mind -- would have many parents who tell their kids, "Think about it, and go with what makes sense." Americans are more dogmatic. And by extension, whereas in Britain a teacher could have a full curriculum about sex, that's not true in Oklahoma. It's safer to skirt the most important questions, lest an instructor call down some serious parental wrath.
     Still, I don't deny that I have an agenda. My devious plan is to get them to reflect on their own assumptions, the traditions they've inherited, the biases the embrace as part of their subconscious endeavor to be accepted by their peers. Strong opinions in controversial matters are part of the adolescent experience and the search for one's personal identity. I get that. But they can't stay teenagers forever.
     When I was a high school student, like them, I had strong opinions about many hot topics. Then I grew up. At university I experienced the process of letting go of my purported wisdom, and much to my dismay, I was wrong on pretty much everything. Is it egotistical to want my students to similarly reject the simplicity of their youth? Do I claim that a phase of intellectual rebellion is necessary to internalize one's values and thus ensure that one is not merely a creature of habit but an empowered individual?
     I suppose so. And frankly, if a teacher can get a kid to rethink what she thinks she knows about sex, then pretty much everything is up for grabs.

Tess of the D'Urbervilles

Man is a Religious Animal. He is the only Religious Animal. He is the only animal that has the True Religion—several of them. He is the only animal that loves his neighbor as himself and cuts his throat if his theology isn’t straight. -Mark Twain
The full text free: legal download.
Further thematic reflections on the novel.
Sparknotes summary and analysis.
Caution: spoilers.
     Many students of great literature will come across Tom Hardy's magnum opus of the Victorian woman and have a hard time seeing beyond the protagonist's suffering, and, more troubling still, her apparently stubborn refusal to reject the system that belittles and hurts her, poor and female as she is. However, there is more to Tess than meets the eye. She is not so blind or foolish as it would seem. Moreover, Hardy writes her brutal story not to celebrate her misery but to show its philosophical moorings and effectively to unharness it. This he does with much success.
     First, we note that Tess does not believe that she is treated fairly - rather she is quite aware that her station in life is ugly. Her conversation with her younger brother, Abraham, reveals her awareness of the injustice of social inequality. It could be written off as a Victorian sensitivity toward sin, but the universal tone of the subject at hand (other worlds) suggests otherwise.
     "Did you say the stars were worlds, Tess?"
     "Yes."
     "All like ours?"
     "I don't know, but I think so. They sometimes seem to be like the apples on our stubbard-tree. Most of them splendid and sound - a few blighted."
     "Which do we live on - a splendid one or a blighted one?"
     "A blighted one." (p.26)

     This being at the beginning of the narrative, I see Tess as being aware of class inequality but entirely ignorant of gender inequality. She maintains a staunchly Victorian attitude toward her sex, namely, that God intends her to be chaste, demure, delicate, subservient to men, and religiously devout. Throughout the entire story she never shirks this God-given identity, and this is her mantle of honor.
     The reader cannot question her integrity - and this is precisely what makes the story so compelling. Unlike The Jungle, which I read in December, the awful and horrific series of events the protagonist endures does not result in moral corruption here. While her naïveté disappears, the strength of her will never falters.
     This vignette concludes a couple pages later, when Tess falls asleep and Prince, the horse pulling her and her brother's wagon, is killed when he runs into a mail-carriage.
     " 'Tis all my doing - all mine!" the girl cried, gazing at the spectacle. "No excuse for me - none. What will mother and Father live one now? Aby, Aby!" She shook the child, who had slept soundly through the whole disaster. "We can't go on with our load - Prince is killed!"
     When Abraham realized all, the furrows of fifty years were extemporized on his young face.
     "Why, I danced and laughed only yesterday!" she went on to herself. "To think that I was such a fool!"
     " 'Tis because we be on a blighted star, and not a sound one, isn't it, Tess?" murmured Abraham through his tears.

     The self-reproach that Tess endures for the consequences of slight errors (due to her naivete - this is her only vice) is harsh, to say the least. And this is entirely consistent with the Victorian model of the ideal woman.
     It's discouraging to read about such a noble and selfless character so little rewarded for her virtues. Tess is certainly a Christ-like figure. Look at her end. She is hung for murdering an evil man, the pretty boy who wooed her and stole her virginity. Hardy makes several religious allusions (e.g. the Two Apostles painting) to tie her death to the crucifixion and suggests her death was inevitable, the expression of the blind justice created by a society that successfully exploits the working class every day.
     "Justice" was done, and the President of the Immortals... had ended his sport with Tess... The two speechless gazers bent themselves down to the earth, as if in prayer, and remained thus a long time, absolutely motionless; the flag continued to wave silently. As soon as they had strength, they arose, joined hands again, and went on.
     Morally, Tess is as pure and spotless as Christ himself. However, she is woman - without power and the scourge of her society, guilty of all human sin solely because of her sex - and she is not divine - she has no great omniscience or omnipotence to tide her over until God can justify her. She can work no miracles to prove her virtue, and when walking through the wooded regions of southern England, she believes - falsely - that she is out of sync with God himself:
     A wet day was the expression of irremediable grief at her weakness in the mind of some vague ethical being whom she could not class definitely as the God of her childhood and could not comprehend as any other.
     But this encompassment of her own characterization.... was a sorry and mistaken creation of Tess's fancy - a cloud of moral hobgoblins by which she was terrified without reason. It was they that were out of harmony with the actual world, not she. Walking among the sleeping birds in the hedges, watching the skipping rabbits on a moonlit warren, or standing under a pheasant-laden bough, she looked upon herself as a figure of Guilt intruding into the haunts of Innocence. But all the while, she was making a distinction where there was no difference... She had been made to break an accepted social law, but no law known to the environment in which she fancied herself such an anomaly. (p. 85)

     The same language surfaces when Tess's bastard child dies and she asks the vicar for a Christian burial. Social convention makes such a request impossible. The vicar, sympathetic to Tess's dignity and tenderness, brings about an internal battle "between the man and the ecclesiastic," or rather, between his instinctive human impulse and the mechanical social function called propriety.
     He refuses. Tess begs, reasons, threatens, abases herself, and ultimately the vicar tells her that a Christian burial is "just the same" as being thrown into the earth. Convention be damned! And the narrator vindicates the truth in his word, not his mind:
     In spite of the untoward surroundings... Tess bravely made a little cross of two laths and a piece of string, and having bound it with flowers, she stuck it up at the head of the grave one evening when she could enter the churchyard without being seen, putting at the foot also a bunch of the same flowers in a little jar of water to keep them alive. What matter was it that on the outside of the jar the eye of mere observation noted the words "Keelwell's Marmalade"? The eye of maternal affection did not see them in its vision of higher things.
     Tess's persistent self-doubt continues to plague her. Leaving home in an attempt to make a new life for herself and lift the burden of her presence - the consumption of three squares a day, and the loss of her virginity, the Victorian working woman's only prized possession - she sings some ballads to herself, some psalms, but stops suddenly "and murmured, 'But perhaps I don't quite know the Lord as yet.' " (p. 104)
     It is this self-doubt that cripples her one chance at self-preservation at the key moment when, after telling her husband, Clare, of her past inglories, he utterly rejects her.
     There was, it is true, underneath, a back current of sympathy through which a woman of the world might have conquered him. But Tess did not think of this; she took everything as her deserts and hardly opened her mouth... She might just now have been Apostolic Charity herself returned to a self-seeking modern world. (p. 242-43)
     Clare, too, is no less bound to convention than his wife:
     No prophet had told him, and he was not prophet enough to tell himself, that essentially this young wife of his was as deserving of the praise of King Lemuel as any other woman endowed with the same dislike of evil, her moral value having to be reckoned not by achievement but by tendency. (p. 267)
     In other words, morality is not a question of perfection but of intention. Because Tess is incessantly victimized as a woman, her intentions far exceed her degree of perfection; contrast this with an upper-class male of the same era, who only fails to achieve perfection as a result of his own moral determinations.
     Especially revolting is how Alec d'Urberville (the man who deflowered her, thus ruining her life) repeatedly castigates Tess for his own moral imperfections - a practice that still continues in many socially conservative communities today:
     He stepped up to the pillar. "This was once a Holy Cross. Relics are not in my creed, but I fear you at moments - far more than you need fear me at present; and to lessen my fear, put your hand upon that stone hand and swear that you will never tempt me - by your charms or ways..."
     Tess, half frightened, gave way to his importunity, placed her hand upon the stone, and swore. (p. 315)

     And Tess, named the temptress of the garden and the witch of Babylon, continues steadfastly to defend her husband of his innocence.
     Tess is repeatedly accused by d'Urberville to have rejected or recanted the true faith. Angel Clare, her husband, having studied theology and having readied himself to serve as clergy, ultimately chose a path closer to nature, with less deceit and hypocrisy on the way. While he and Tess were close, he imparted to her his more liberal understanding of matters theological. Later she hears d'Urberville expostulating a fundamentalist vision of salvation - he had turned preacher during their years apart - and she has a brief occasion to pass on what her husband told her, which to her instincts rang true, since (I suggest) it gave priority to morality over dogma.
     D'Urberville ceases to be a preacher as quickly as he became one, telling Tess her words instantly eroded his religious conviction. As soon as he saw her, he says, he instantly realized his conversion had been a lie, because he knew he would trade it all to possess her again. He admits to the thinness of traditional Christianity but cannot see how morality can exist without it:
     [Tess] tried to argue and tell [d'Urberville] that he had mixed in his dull brain two matters, theology and morals, which in the primitive days of mankind had been quite distinct. But owing to Angel Clare's reticence, to her absolute want of training, and to her being a vessel of emotions rather than reasons, she could not get on. (pp.334-35)
     Is Hardy offering a critique of the Victorian philosophy of the sexes, or a statement about the nature of religion generally? I'm inclined to find both in this classic work.
     On the one hand, we see a clear indictment of the nineteenth-century model of womanhood. It takes a woman comfortable in the diverse avenues of social manipulation - thus betraying the very ideal she pretends to achieve - to play the desired role convincingly. For the high-minded, working-class woman, however, such niceties are impossible, for if you truly buy in to the model, you cannot maneuver your way out of the social sins you will surely commit. The ideal is fundamentally flawed in its conception and demands a hypocrisy to operate - and this very inconsistency is what destroys its spirit.
     On the other hand, Tess's religion is true and her intentions pure. Through her character Hardy espouses a religion of morals rather than of propositions. Clare rejects the religion of his father - the very same religion that Alec embraces, but to no avail for his spirit - suggesting that traditional Christianity is vanity, perhaps even destructive (but I am not sure if Hardy takes it this far).
     All three main characters - Tess, Clare and Alec - come into contact with natural religion - primarily moral and wonderfully simple in nature. Tess embraces it from the start, and at most the thicket shrouding the truth in darkness is hacked away. Clare experiences a true battle between the two - his mind embraces natural religion, but when confronted with social law returns to the ungodly propriety taught falsely as religion. In the end he realizes the error of his ways and turns around - too late, alas, to save his wife. The damage had been done and nothing could undo it.
     Last, Alec was Tess's opposite, in that he was fundamentally irreligious or immoral. For a while religion hid his true nature, but never had the power to change it. He pondered both propositional religion and moral religion, could never understand the latter, and in the end rejected the former as being equally incomprehensible.
     Ultimately all three characters are true to their inner identity, and no professing or pondering will change it. What a different story it would have been if Tess had given up her religion (and if anyone had just cause to do so, it was her), or if Alec had converted his heart to the religion of grace, or if Alec had never grasped Tess's true quality and rejected her finally.
     Much like Dostoevsky's Brothers Karamozov, Hardy's Tess of the D'Urbervilles can be read as a guide to the three kinds of people in the world: those who embrace moral (true) religion, those who embrace propositional (false) religion, and those who live in confusion and contradiction by attempting to use the rules of the latter to grasp the former. It is only when you finally let go of your need to understand everything that you can experience true morality.
     Romantic? Absolutely. Simple? In theory, yes. But the book displays age-old wisdom beautifully and that's what's most important.