What marriage is

Public Interest, Summer, 2004 by Michael Novak

COMMON sense suggests it is better for homosexually oriented persons to settle into permanent relationships than to have multiple partners. But can such relationships become marriages? I do not believe that they can. Jonathan Rauch makes the affirmative case, and puts forth the best argument I've seen in its favor. But even granting the scientific and philosophical assumptions that undergird his recent book on the subject, the argument cannot stand. His key assumptions--that homosexuals have a fixed nature that inclines them toward same-sex relationships; that this nature is involuntary and unchangeable; that it prevents homosexuals from being other than homosexual; and that it is the same sort of nature as what makes heterosexuals the way they are--rest on unsettled scientific and philosophical foundations. However, I am willing to grant them for the sake of brevity. The key problems in Rauch's case have less to do with such matters, and more to do with his underlying philosophy of secular humanism.

I speak as a long-standing conversant with Rauch on the subject. Let me begin by allowing the author to describe my position, as I voiced it to him one evening recounted in his book:

   Not long ago I had dinner with a friend who is a devout Christian.
   He ... knows and likes gay people, and has warmed to the idea of
   civil unions. But when I asked him about gay marriage, he replied
   with a firm no. I asked if he imagined there was anything I could
   say that might budge him. He thought for a moment and then said no
   again. Why? Because, he said, male-female marriage is a sacrament
   from God. It predates the Constitution and every other law of man.
   We could not, in that sense, change it even if we wanted to. I asked
   if it might alter his conclusion to reflect that legal marriage is a
   secular institution, that the separation of church and state requires
   us to distinguish God's law from civil law, and that we must refrain
   from using law to impose one group's religious precepts on the rest
   of society. He shook his head. No, he said. This is bigger than that.

     I felt he had not answered my argument. His God is not mine, and in
   a secular country, law can and should be influenced by religious
   teachings but must not enforce them. Yet really it was I who had not
   answered his argument, in some deeper way. Precisely because legal
   marriage is a secular institution, I have had little to say in this
   book about the role of religion in validating marriage. To many
   readers, that must seem odd.

THE nature of the religions Rauch and I each profess differ, as he rightly notes above, and this is where the problem lies. He would define his as a kind of secular humanism. In this book, he tries to present it not as religion but as a secular view, as secular as the law. The case of marriage shows that this cannot be so, for his view of marriage is not based upon empirical observations or scientific inquiry, as he himself admits on that very page, but is heavily premised on certain beliefs about human history and destiny. There are enough steps beyond mere reason--that is, "reason" in the narrow sense of scientific inquiry about empirical data--for the Supreme Court to hold such a humanism to be in fact an alternative religion.

In the real world--I mean the real world of the United States--most reasonable persons do not argue from the premises of secular humanism. They reject those premises. Their horizon is formed by a different set of beliefs and narratives about human destiny. Their set of beliefs is not "scientific" in the reductive sense, but it is no less rational--many are prepared to argue that it is more rational, in fact--than the set of beliefs constituting the ideology of secular humanism. Indeed, Rauch expressly recognizes that for most of our fellow citizens reason is informed by religion--that is to say, by a very long narrative, with a rich symbolic treasury, a very complex discursive history, a tradition, many centuries-long arguments, and a respect for the boundaries of the ineffable. To be more direct, most of us are Christians and Jews, of various traditions in each lineage, and we think we have fuller and more reasonable views of many human matters than secular humanists provide.

That is a serious problem for Rauch's project. He wishes to conduct his argument on the basis of secular modern premises. But most of us do not accept these premises, at least not in totality, and Rauch cannot reasonably say that we are irrational or unreasonable in rejecting them. To be sure, the case against secular humanism cannot be "proven" by the application of scientific methods. But neither can such methods prove the affirmative case that undergirds Rauch's arguments. Religious believers are conscious of the ancient narrative structures that long informed the common law, the tacit traditions of Anglo-American peoples, and the originating conceptual content and background images of our most basic and well-worn ethical terms. These narratives and traditions grew up intertwined with Jewish and Christian materials over many long centuries, long before Blackstone and others tried to distill them into legal definitions, rules, and precedents. Marriage, as Rauch well notes, was not invented by modern secular philosophy. Marriage was not invented by contemporary science. It certainly was not invented by four supreme court justices in Massachusetts.