I teach in the same department as Edward Feser, who among other things, was a graduate student of my late father at UCSB. Unlike my dear Dad, Ed is a very conservative Catholic (something I had not realized until recently). He’s also recently published a book which I’ve just ordered. (Evangelical Richard Mouw was also my Dad’s graduate student. What gives? My dear, sweet, gently atheist and — even more gently, socialist — father ends up having all of these famous conservatives Christians among his former proteges. Of course, my father was close to Karl Popper for many years, but rejected that mentor’s views almost entirely. And so it goes. Cripes, I’m such a name-dropper.)
Anyhow, thanks to Jonah Goldberg, of all people, I just learned I am not the only blogger in the Social Sciences Division at Pasadena City College! How ignorant I have been! Here’s Ed’s blog.
Ed, writing from a very right-wing perspective, offers his answer to the question (independently) I posed several weeks ago: why did so many Americans vote to protect abortion rights, while simultaneously voting to deny marriage equality to gays and lesbians? (Here in California, Proposition 4, which would have required parental notification for abortion, failed by almost the same margin that Proposition 8, which banned gay marriage, passed.)
Ed, who is an absolutely delightful colleague with absolutely appalling views, offers three possibilities, the last of which is this:
Some heterosexuals who have at least a grudging respect for traditional sexual morality are more keen to see it respected by others than to practice it themselves. (Think e.g. of the secularized Beltway conservative think-tank or journalist type who heartily endorses pragmatic Burkean arguments for the social utility of stigmas against fornication and the like, but who nevertheless lives with his girlfriend.) Hence, while it costs such people little or nothing personally to vote against “same-sex marriage,†limitations on abortion might put a crimp on their own lifestyle should their less-than-conservative personal sexual behavior “punish them with a baby.â€
Ed may be right. We both lament the inconsistency of the electorate, but we do so from two radically different perspectives.
Perhaps an intra-departmental debate is in order.
I think that as a society we are one of the most hyper-judgmental people on this planet. I suppose I’m being judgmental in saying that, but nevertheless I think it’s true. It explains a lot of voting behavior. Those on the left can be judgmental about the country ignoring the poor and oppressed, and those on the right can be judgmental about licentiousness and promiscuity. If I were a political consultant, I would advise my client to tap into the judgmentalism of the electorate in my district. What can they most effectively get whipped up into a frenzy about? Any injustices out there? No matter if the issue directly affects you; if there’s someone to judge, we’ve got us a wedge!
I suppose that a person who voted strictly on his own tangible interests would have to be one apolitical son of a bitch. We don’t get those types around these parts anymore. Everybody’s got a cause. Perhaps the opiate of the masses is not religion per se, but rather a sense of moral superiority. It makes such masses easy to manipulate, especially when an election is drawing near.
John Dias, amen to your observation, if not its consequences.
One of the small irritations that I have had over the whole same-sex marriage imbroglio from the beginning is the concessions that it forces advocates of same-sex marriage to make both to one specific and narrow conception of acceptable personal relationship structures as well as generally to the mores of “the squares” on this and other issues. I’m not questioning, per se, the wisdom of such concessions from a purely political standpoint. But too much of the time, it seems like an effort to win some sort of “enclave” of acceptance while leaving other forms of intolerance generally untouched, for example in the logic the California Supreme Court used in the In re Marriage Cases case that strict scrutiny would be applied on a “suspect classification” theory. It’s dismaying that not too many these days would stand for the general principle that people ought not stick their noses in other people’s business that doesn’t concern them. Heaven forbid that anyone would ever take a stand that might later interfere with any of their own little pet tyrannies!
I think it’s quite possibly correct as well. It’s a much better theory than his option #1, which blathers on about “sodomy” and “natural law”. If he thinks voters are voting en masse against gay marriage because they recognize sodomy as a violation of “natural law” he’s blissfully unaware of the sexual practices of most heterosexuals.
I agree with John’s observation…
Tom, people stick their noses in people’s business all the time. Doesn’t matter if they are liberal or conservative. And the extremes of both contingents are vying for the moderates to join in the frenzy. When someone is sticking their nose in your business it pisses you off. If you are behaving that way to them, then some rationalization “for the cause” and which cause is better than the other is always offered. People are far more liberal when it comes to what interests them than what they are when it comes to other people and that goes for flaws and deficiencies too.
Wow. Just went to his blog: that is some *fierce* homophobia there. Felt a bit like reading Lester Maddox’s old columns. Although I’m sure Professor Feser will simply see this as proof that I haven’t properly assimilated Aristotle.
Anyway, a word to the wise: saying it’s “very right wing” doesn’t convey the emotional tenor of it.
Hugo, I’ll be interested in what you make of his book. I looked around, briefly, for some reviews, but since it just came out, all I saw were reviews from ideological lock-step sites. (I’d be interested in a review from another philosopher, if any are around.) So I hope you’ll post about it.
It’s dismaying that not too many these days would stand for the general principle that people ought not stick their noses in other people’s business that doesn’t concern them.
If it didn’t concern anyone else, I doubt it would get .01% of the energy it does. That’s true on ALL the sexual-political issues.
Because it’s NOT just “leave us alone” that homosexual rights activists are demanding. It’s anti-discrimination protection, and health benefits, and recognition as morally right. It’s like the Lincoln quote which I remember badly to the effect that the slave states would never be satisfied to be left alone–they wanted not to be disagreed with.
Ugh – Hugo, why’d you send me over there to read that?!? Now I have a headache!
“Butchery” – “Sodomy” – for the love of the Flying Spaghetti Monster, take pity! The man hasn’t a clue…
djw said it all: “he’s blissfully unaware of the sexual practices of most heterosexuals.” AND homosexuals for that matter if he thinks “sodomy” encompasses the entire scope of their sexual ouvre. [Guess he thinks all homos are male, eh?]
In fact, by some old legal and natural law definitions, “sodomy” could include oral as well as anal sex, by which definition about 90% of the heterosexual population are sodomites, and many straight folks absolutely consider sodomy “the stuff of romance or tender wedding night fantasies.” I think he’s projecting with his option #1, and not at all representing the actual sexual attitudes of the average straight person (or even the average straight person who voted No on 8).
Lynn Gazis-Sax,
I think his option #1 is rather strange and bizarre- how can abortion be less against natural law, even apparently, than sodomy? You can make a case (to my mind, convincingly) that gay relationships fall short of Christian marriage because they frustrate the procreative nature of marriage and break down essential gender differences. But it’s hard to have a more thorough rejection of essential gender differences than by breaking the tie between mother and child; and it’s hard to have a more explicitly anti-procreative act than destroying the charmingly titled ‘products of conception’. In a natural-law framework, every reason that sodomy is wrong is also applicable with much more force to abortion. if you think that sodomy is distasteful, how much more distasteful is a partial birth abortion??
It’s true that there are many societies and people who consider sodomy a bigger sin than abortion. They are, simply put, wrong, and whatever they believe it isn’t either natural law or genuine Christian teaching. (That isn’t to say that it isn’t a sin, but it certainly isn’t one of the worst sins).
That’s fairly typical of people with his worldview. They don’t really think of women as fully human, and so when they think of groups of people, they naturally picture such groups as male.
Hector, your arguments against same-sex marriage are, to my mind, arguments for same-sex marriage. Christian marriage, as Paul clearly says, is not about rigid gender roles; it’s about people who can’t keep their pants on finding an appropriate outlet for their inability to remain celibate.
But I suppose you think that my husband and I should divorce the second our children are grown, since we’re not procreating any more.
Mythago,
Right, that’s it. I thought it was because some of us realize that male lust (on the _average_) is a more rapacious and destructive force than female equivalent, and therefore needs more rules to keep it in line, hence the near-total lack of mention of lesbianism in Scripture. But I guess you must be right, it’s all about not thinking women are people.
There are reasons why many societies have had to pass laws against polygyny specifically, while polyandry has rarely even come up (outside Tibet and apparently some tribes in India). Societies don’t pass laws against things that few people want to do.
Christian theorizing about marriage didn’t stop with Paul, it continued down the centuries, and as it has developed (in both the Catholic and traditionally Anglican confessions) it is meant to be in large part related to procreation. read the Anglican marriage service in the BCP, what’s the first of the three purposes for which marriage was ordained?
I’m very interested in your theory that polyandry has been de facto ‘legal’ because it simply never occurred to women to want more than one husband or to want sex with more than one man. Perhaps you understand the difference between “illegal” and “unrecognized” marriage? As well as the fact that, historically, women did not have the same rights as men within marriage?
(As Hugo has pointed out repeatedly, the argument that women need to be caged in order to hold back the Rampaging Penis is an old and ugly one. Sorry, ladies, we can’t let you have the freedom we do because we can’t keep our pants zipped! Handily, that creates a situation where women are responsible for men’s behavior and men aren’t.)
Scripture, by which I assume you mean the New Testament, refers to lesbianism obliquely as one of many perversions, at least that’s what Christians have always taught me. As for the Commandments, it’s pretty obvious that they are assumed to be addressed to men; there’s no other possible interpretation of the commandment about lying with a man, unless you think Adonai specifically told women to be lesbians.