Another Pro Same-Sex Marriage Argument

I think that you and the “defenders” are using the word “traditional” in somewhat different senses. You seem to mean something along the lines of “an attitude widely-held in the past”, whereas they mean something more along the lines of “in accord with the teaching of (some particular branch of) Christianity.”

Thus, in your formulation, racism (or, if one were willing to go back far enough, affirmative support for the institution of slavery) is a “traditional value”, whereas they would assert that it is incompatible with a true understanding of Christian teachings — and hence not “traditional” at all.

Now, if it were only true that there were Christian teachings directed against same-sex marriage, independent of any animus against homosexuality per se, then (in this instance) the “defenders” would have a case.

Alas, there’s not much evidence of that, in Christian, Jewish, or Muslim tradition.

The modern concept of marriage is based, predominantly, on relatively recent notions of romantic love and spousal companionship. The traditional one, mostly on fertility and childbearing.

The “traditional” concept of marriage, if we’re going back as far as this, depended on class. For the ruling class, it was about controlling the succession of property, and about political alliance; for the peasantry and artisan class, it was about creating and ensuring a labour force to work your smallholding and/or looms; for the mass working class in the very early days of industrialisation, it was profoundly broken; the aspiration to single income households with a fundamental division between domestic and wage earning labour was closely bound up with the rise of the trades union movement.

Pick whichever one you want, but show your working.

In other news, Holbo is right on this one.

We may be underestimating the importance of rootless cosmopolitans to human progress, and sabotaging the future in the pursuit of happiness.

As a highly assimilated member of the group to which, I believe, “rootless cosmopolitans” was applied, I would rather we not go there. I enjoy having equal rights right here in the U.S.

“We can hardly maintain that anti-homosexual attitudes 50 years ago, 100 years ago, 1000 years ago, were always already scrubbed free of bigotry to the high standards of “Will and Grace”. ”

If I take this argument seriously, you’ll only say that you’re being whimsical and etc etc. But it’s really got problems. There were not “anti-homosexual” attitudes going back that far. People didn’t even have a concept of homosexuality, as an orientation; they had a concept of sodomy, as an act. Homosexuality appeared as a concept probably in the 1880s. What people are talking about if they’re talking about Christian opposition to something that goes back before that is opposition to sodomy. And yes, there they do have a sort of argument of this kind, because ideally for them it was viewed as a sin, not as a characteristic of the sinner. (If you were male, that is; women were pretty much invisible.)

Condemnation “without bigotry” is really pretty much just as bad. But your argument that if it’s not bigoted it has to be new is dropping all the actual history involved.

Maybe you shouldn’t go with “50, 100, or 1000” if you’re aware that the 1000 part is anachronistic. But yes, I think that your basic argument fails because you aren’t accounting for this distinction. You write about the would-like-to-think-of-themselves-as-not-bigoted opponents of gay marriage that they would like to think of themselves as “They are tolerant of homosexuality, and the rights of homosexuals, etc. etc.” But you’re not really looking at what they say. Here’s Catholic Answers, for instance, which gives the utterly typical (for “non-bigoted” Christianity) answer that homosexual behavior, i.e. sodomy, is a sin, but homosexual desires, i.e. orientation, aren’t. They are supposedly perfectly willing to tolerate homosexuals as long as they aren’t having sex. Gay marriage, though, pretty much implies that they’re having sex.

You might well say that “the rights of homosexuals” includes the right to have sex, and of course I agree with that. But bigotry is directed at persons, not at acts. They have an argument that you’re not really representing in its own terms.

“But I think arguing today on the basis of a circa AD 1000 conception of those who engage in homosexual acts”

Huh? It’s official present-day doctrine — that Catholic Answers site is not a history book. And you know, if you’re talking about formative events in Christianity, you still have to go a bit further back than that, so clearly people making traditional arguments from Christianity are not afraid to go back that far.

You write: “Grant, for argument’s sake, that contemporary arguments against same-sex marriage have been scrubbed free of bigotry. Doesn’t it follow that these arguments must not be traditional but, somehow, quite new?” No, they aren’t. The distinction between act and desire has been around since the start, and is decidedly not new. Christians should, by this argument, be accepting of a version of weird version of gay marriage that is chaste, and that sounds very strange but actually, it’s official doctrine as far as I know that it’s OK for a Catholic priest to be a homosexual if they’re chaste.

“Lucky for you that you have that option.”

Someone doesn’t have the option of not caring about fine details of the genesis of anti-gay-marriage attitudes? Unlucky indeed.

Huh? It’s official present-day doctrine — that Catholic Answers site is not a history book.

Indeed. Or, for that matter, you could take a look at Scalia’s dissent in Lawrence v. Texas.

John, you seem to be making far too much out of the fact that lots and lots of homophobes out there are papering over their bigotry with “I’ve got nothing against gay people,” who 20 years ago wouldn’t have bothered with that qualification. Just as over recent decades we’ve witnessed lots and lots of racists gradually shift from “I hate black people” to “I’ve got nothing against black people, but…”

The mystery is why you would want to take either group at their word.

Yesterday, a Democracy Now! broadcast about the Supreme Court and gay marriage included this snippet of Justice Scalia being his usual smug self:

JUSTICE ANTONIN SCALIA: You’ve led me right into a question I was going to ask. The California Supreme Court decides what the law is. That’s what we decide, right? We don’t prescribe law for the future. We decide what the law is. I’m curious: When did—when did it become unconstitutional to exclude homosexual couples from marriage? 1791? 1868, when the 14th Amendment was adopted? Sometimes—sometime after Baker, where we said it didn’t even raise a substantial federal question? When—

THEODORE OLSON: When—

JUSTICE ANTONIN SCALIA:</b? When did the law become this?

THEODORE OLSON: May I answer this in the form of a rhetorical question? When did it become unconstitutional to prohibit interracial marriages? When did it become unconstitutional to assign children to separate schools?

Whenever some widely-held opinion, custom, or practice is on the cusp of losing its hegemony over us, honest people are likely to be unsure of where they are headed. If someone with power decides to be an obscurantist asshole and take advantage of their uncertainty, as Justice Scalia does here, there are any number of tools available for the purpose. Some are more transparent than others, at least at the outset, but all are vulnerable to a closer scrutiny than our media usually give them.

In short, I’m an optimist. Scalia didn’t get away with his usual jovial sophistry here, and in the long run, well before we’re all dead, his underlying argument will be swept away. There’s no need here to argue about which way the moral arc of the universe is bending; gay marriage is at this point pretty clearly an idea whose time has come.

For a nice display of bigotry, you only have to go back to the passage of DOMA in the 90’s. After all, the name of the Act is ‘Defense of Marriage’. From what, exactly? Or, more precisely, from who?

Asking whether the traditional, heteronormative ideal of marriage has a rational basis seems to me to concede the bases upon which *current* heteronormative laws deserve heightened scrutiny.

When someone says, “throughout history procreation required a man and a woman, therefore we’re promoting heterosexual marriage,” it seems to me that they’re saying that there’s a compelling interest in classifying people along gender lines. The idea here is not that procreation is so obviously compelling that we should ignore the fact that they’re making a gender classification. Instead, we should acknowledge the gender classification, evaluate the interest in procreation, then analyze whether the proponents of the heteronormative marriage ideal are really out for procreation or just some idea of fidelity that mindlessly abhors intracervical insemination.

Incidentally, I never thought the gender-classification view would get much pub outside a few legal academics, but when Kennedy raised it at oral argument on Tuesday, it seemed to me a modest victory for conceptual clarity.

It just occurred to me that Uncle Kvetch might be arguing that, since they obviously actually are bigots, even though they say they are not, they might be traditionalists after all, even though their argument requires them to say something that implies otherwise.

I don’t think it’s their argument that requires them to say that…I think that it’s just a question of the increasing social unacceptability of overt, non-coded expressions of homophobia (as with racism before that). Otherwise, yeah, that’s pretty much what I was getting at.

Isn’t it fairly clear that in the traditional Protestant America of 1850-1940 same sex marriage, at least among women, was part of the culture? And that women in these relationships played a leading role in cultural and public life while women in heterosexual marriages lacked the time to do so because of commitments to husbands and in some cases children?

Not hard to multiply examples from New England high culture, but it also corresponds with what my mother told me about growing up in Viola Illinois, a town so small that the last time I was there it still didn’t have sidewalks, in the 1920’s.

Whether this was true in the South I have no idea; I suspect it was quite true in the Old West.

Re: Yes, but that was – used to be, but not anymore – a major one.

Speak for yourself. Some of us actually do hold to traditional ideals of marriage, and think fertility, childrearing and economic status are the core of what marriage is supposed to be about.

Bruce Wilder writes so well!

This isn’t quite the traditional argument presented in the blog post, but I think it’s a nearby argument.

1 The traditional view of marriage forbids SSM.
2 We do better, in thinking about X, to respect the traditional view about X, except when there are compelling reasons not to respect the traditional view about X.
3 There is no compelling reason not to respect the traditional view of marriage.
C1 We should not endorse SSM.

(Something like) John Holbo’s new pro-SSM argument challenges that version of the traditional argument by denying (3) in this way:

4 The traditional view of marriage either is or is not based on animus.
5 If a view about X is based on animus, there is a compelling reason not to respect it.
6 If a view about X does not have any basis, there is a compelling reason not to respect it.
7 If the traditional view of marriage is based on animus, there is a compelling reason not to respect it.
8 If the traditional view of marriage is not based on animus, it is not based on anything.
9 If the traditional view of marriage is not based on anything, there is a compelling reason not to respect it.
C2 There is a compelling reason not to respect the traditional view of marriage.
C3 (3) is false.

But I wonder whether the traditional argument can be refashioned to avoid this sort of objection. The different thought, roughly, is that you can’t defend bits of the tradition in isolation from the rest of it. Either you take the whole thing as a package deal, or you reject it all. Asking about the basis of individual doctrines in the tradition misunderstands the sort of thing a tradition is. Forbidding SSM doesn’t have any independent basis: what supports it is its coherence with the rest of the tradition.

So this reply would amend the traditional argument like this:

1 The traditional view of marriage forbids SSM.
2′ We do better, in thinking about X, to respect the traditional view about X, except when there are compelling reasons not to respect the tradition as a whole.
3′ There is no compelling reason not to respect the tradition as a whole.
C1 We should not endorse SSM.

Maybe 2′ is an even less promising way for people to advance the traditional argument, but I guess I’m curious if it seems so to others.

“My point is that being inclined to protest against being called a homophobe is a very untraditional attitude.”

Christians who oppose SSM still have their traditional attitudes about sexual acts. If you accused them of being red-head-phobes they’d indignantly deny that too. That doesn’t mean that if red-head-phobia suddenly became a thing that they’d prove they were thinking in some new way by denying it.

@38 “Maybe 2′ is an even less promising way for people to advance the traditional argument, but I guess I’m curious if it seems so to others.”

Yes. Traditions are based on real concerns, but as the environment changes they outlive their usefulness. Procreation used to be an important social function, but it worked too well, and now, in the overpopulated (arguably? nah) world, these (procreation-related) traditions have become harmful. They need to go away.

Hector may be interested in the fact that Paul VI, very much the villain of the piece, made the argument in defense of Humanae Vitae that married couples were free to refrain from sexual activity (a long standing tradition in the Catholic church) if they didn’t want to have children. So much for fertility and child bearing; I guess economic status can stay.

The only person I’ve ever heard of outside of hagiography and legend who is supposed to have had that kind of a marriage is Cole Porter, but on further examination of the evidence that turns out not to be true.

Ack! Passionate friendships aren’t *uncommon*! There’s a Trollope novel that’s quite affectionate towards a Boston marriage, for instance (unlike James’ novel which is fairly sneering, but I think he’d worked out that they might actually be having sex).

Hi,

Why should government be in the business of sanctioning and regulating interpersonal relationships of ANY kind, and then discriminating in favor of those who have them, and against those who don’t? Marriage was originally a religious “sacrament”, and that is where it should both start and end. Governments and laws should be entirely OUT of it in every way.

Yes, government has a legitimate interest in, and concern for the well-being of children and other dependent people, and the responsibilities of their parents, guardians, and care-takers. But the existence or absence of any marriage should not be a factor in those government interests and concerns. The marital status of people who share those responsibilities should be irrelevant to the state.

Have a nice day,
Antti

Re: People in 1000 AD punished sinners in all sorts of way that they don’t now, sure. In fact, Christianity as a whole is now much less accepting of all sorts of civil punishment for all kinds of sins. But they’re still considered to be sins.

I think I have to argue with that. I’m sure there was plenty of extrajudicial killing, mob violence, and other sorts of violence against gay people in the Middle Ages, but I certainly don’t think it was always punished as a crime by the state. Or even regarded as a particularly serious sin. St. Anselm, one of the most influential churchmen of his era, famously argued against a proposal to impose ecclesiastical punishment for h*mos*x (sorry to be using that term, but ‘sodomy’ sounds offensive and ‘gay’ sounds anachronistic). His argument was something to the effect of ‘it’s a sin, but it’s also super common, no use trying to prevent it’. There were particular eras where h*mos*x was punished as a crime, like Victorian England, but the reason we note those eras as particularly puritanical is precisely because they stood out, and because it wasn’t *always* punished that way. Savonarola’s Florence is somewhat famous for imposing the death penalty for h*mos*x, but it’s worth nothing that, I think, about half a dozen executions were actually carried out under his tenure, and his regime was noted as fanatically puritanical even in his own time.

And, as Harold notes, then there’s Dante.

Re: may be interested in the fact that Paul VI, very much the villain of the piece, made the argument in defense of Humanae Vitae that married couples were free to refrain from sexual activity (a long standing tradition in the Catholic church) if they didn’t want to have children.

They’re also free to use natural family planning, of course. But that aside. The Catholic Church requires, as a condition of marriage, that you be open to procreation. It’s a foundational purpose of marriage, in their view, and if you refuse to have any children, that’s considered an abuse of marriage, and will disqualify you from a Christian marriage. The Orthodox (as well as *some* conservative Anglicans, like Bishop Nazir-Ali, famously) also stress that procreation is supposed to be a basic purpose of marriage, not an optional extra, and if you choose not to have any children you’re not really living out a Christian marriage.

It’s perfectly correct that our *laws*, at this late date, don’t give a d*mn about procreation. But it is not true that all of us have bought into the modern, ‘procreation is an optional extra’ model of marriage. I don’t, personally, see why anyone would get married who doesn’t want to have children, and I reserve the right to disapprove of those marriages.

Hector, if procreation were the main justification of marriage, then older people, especially women past the age of menopause would have to be debarred from marrying. Or men who had had the mumps, and so on. Why on earth should anyone be prevented from pledging life-long love and loyalty to someone they love? For those capable of doing it, it is a beautiful thing.

I wonder, though, at the fetishization of marriage. I myself find the whole idea of weddings off-putting and see no point at all in religious marriage. But then I am not inclined to be religious.

But I can see why people want to resort to ‘tradition’ as a justification — because it is such a complex topic, too complex to defend easily. And besides, people love ritual and ceremonies — which, as soon as performed become ‘tradition’.

I can also see that children can be used to justify marriage — not because marriage should be for procreation, but because, from a child’s point of view, when it goes well, all things being equal, monogamy tends to be better for them in the long run, if only in having less potential pitfalls than the alternative. Children, including adult children, would wish their parents to be together and treat each other well. though real life being what it is, there are no guarantees that things will go well.

I’ll make another lame attempt to concoct a modern, non-bigoted rationale for opposition to gay marriage. We’re now far more accommodating of people with disabilities than we were in the past, and we can certainly claim quite sincerely that we aren’t prejudiced against cripples, but would any of us want our children to be crippled?

The idea that homosexuality is a choice, that the allure of the gay lifestyle is irresistible, is not at all uncommon. Under that assumption, anything which does not discourage that choice is a threat to the status quo. Take down the warning signs, and kids are going to play on the railroad tracks.

Although this strikes us as ridiculous, given our current understanding of sexuality, it may not be so simple. Obligate homosexuality is like 2-3% of the population, but bisexuality might be 10% or so depending on the study (somebody with real numbers might weigh in here), so changing the pattern of social disapprobation might possibly shift behavior … actually we tried that back in the 60’s and 70’s (and probably later but by then I wasn’t paying attention) when gender and sexual ambiguity were fitfully cool, without perceptible result.

Do infants enjoy infancy as much as adults enjoy adultery? Same-sex marriage affords hitherto unexplored pathways to sin. One might covet both one’s neighbor and his husband, or both her and her wife. Some would think this expansion of options a bad thing.

They are a collective wisdom of previous generations, a product of endless trials and errors. Of course the conditions change, some old taboos and mores become meaningless or harmful, but like David 39 said, you’ll probably do better respecting them, unless there are compelling reasons not to.

If conditions change, then new trial and error is required to determine which traditions are worthwhile and which are harmful. That, in itself, is a compelling reason not merely to disregard tradition but to actively push against it–because learning is more useful than faith. Considering the state of the world and the direction we’re moving in, if everyone just keeps doing what they’re doing, we’re all doomed. Tradition will not save us, but it might destroy us.

Cue Corey Robin on Burke… I think that it’s adequately demonstrated that anti-SSM can be “arguing from tradition” within Christianity, and I think that John’s argument that since SSM didn’t exist until recently then anti-SSM must not draw on traditional beliefs is basically kind of silly. The separation, especially, between unthinking bigotry and “principled” authoritarianism within Christianity is long-standing, and an argument that one implies the other seems to me to fail. But if we are talking about actual bigotry, then most people have no real idea what their tradition is, beyond how things were when they grew up. It isn’t the “collective wisdom of generations”, it’s generally just a response to whatever cultural and technological conditions obtained 50 years ago. And that changes much more rapidly than people seem to think.

Re: Thank you, Hector, for telling me what the Catholic church teaches about marriage (a view with which I am in some respects in sympathy). I guess all the priests I’ve known and worked with over the years just forgot to let me know.

I’m not sure if you’re being sarcastic or what, but it’s common knowledge that individual clergy, in all denominations, sometimes say things that aren’t actually the official teaching of that denomination. The Catholic Church holds that a marriage in which the possibility of procreation is intentionally excluded, is not a valid marriage. You can pretty easily look up what their normative, authoritative teaching on the matter is. (The Orthodox agree, for what it’s worth).

Re: The change from what we would have been faced with, probably by the same priest, in 1954, only twenty years before, is about as great as the addition of same sex marriage.

Do you really think the Catholic Church is ever going to conduct same-sex marriages?

The Episcopal Church might try, but if they do, they’re going to be faced with a mass exodus of parishioners to neo-Anglican churches that don’t recognize same-sex marriages.

Do you really think the Catholic Church is ever going to conduct same-sex marriages?

Fortunately it matters less and less, as with birth control. There are other churches or no churches. In my area the church relies on immigrants from Catholic nations for attendance and support: gradually their children will abandon it for other institutions that speak to their needs.

I don’t think it confuses anything. Traditional marriage was a heterosexual institution created at a time when homosexuality didn’t exist. Heterosexual sex is embedded in the legal structure of the institution. Much of that’s either being finessed (like ideas around consummation) or repurposed (such as the presumption of legitimacy shifting from being a rough and ready way of IDing biological ties, to being used to create explicitly social ties) or binned (like marital rape). But that’s not to say that stuff wasn’t there.

“Far from subverting marriage, gay marriage normalizes and regularizes what had previously been deviancy, making conventional what had previously been rebellion. It’s the basic conservatism of the change, which turns arguments from tradition on their head.”

@68: No kidding. I’ve been impressed by the encomiums to the superiority of the married state for the sake of the children and a wholesome monagamous life with the kiddies and a labrador in a house with a white picket fence, coming from some rather unexpected quarters. I think some conservatives with a sense of humor should try to enlist these new allies in a renewed fight against “easy” divorce …..

mcj: . . . ritual . . . not important enough to create a controversy

Boy, have you live a sheltered life! ;-)

You’re right. Traditions turn bad. They may, and do, fail to adapt fast enough. And then the society may collapse, or come close to it. Some authoritarian remedies, like ‘the one-child policy’, complete with forced abortions, are introduced, to counter them, to avoid an imminent collapse. But what I’m suggesting, really, is that perhaps they shouldn’t be just dismissed as simple bigotry and stupidity; they had developed for a reason. In other words, when someone asks “we’ve lived this way for centuries, why should we change now?”, it’s better to have an answer that doesn’t sound like “you’re a nasty bastard and idiot”.

JH in #5: “a Swiss Army knife is ‘mostly’ a knife.”
Actually the original model of “extended knife” has been overtaken by the more robust “multitool”- the Leatherman is the paradigm, but Victorinox make a nice Swiss one. The core structure of these is a pair of pliers. This is a useful analogy to the evolution of marriage. It’s always been a customisable multitool, but the backbone has changed.

Re: Now, suppose someone says: this tradition is bad. Or: this authority figure is mistaken. It’s no good to fire back ‘the tradition must be adaptive’. Or: ‘authorities must be wise and just.’

The question is really, whether you think authority figures are more likely to be wise and just than *you* are. Or, similarly, whether medieval Christian tradition is more likely to be correct about questions of morality than modern late-capitalist American moral reasoning.

Those of us who place a high value on Christian tradition, do so at least in part because we think that tradition was founded by men of a higher moral and intellectual caliber than most American political/social thinkers today.

“If the Enchanter [i.e., Sir Walter Scott] has represented the twelfth century too brightly for one, and too darkly for the other of you, I should say, as an impartial man, he has represented it fairly.” — Peacock

Marriage = (like Christianity itself) in many ways a relative advance for women when first invented

. . . when first invented . . .

When was that? And, what about the second, third, fourth, . . . inventions? Were they an advance in each case?

OK., for first invented, read “adopted”. Christianity arguably an improvement for slaves and women over Roman paganism, for example. Ironically, the reason it was an improvement was because it provided roles and identity for *unmarried* women. For slaves, it permitted them to marry, and so on.

Do you really think the Catholic Church is ever going to conduct same-sex marriages?

The Episcopal Church might try, but if they do, they’re going to be faced with a mass exodus of parishioners to neo-Anglican churches that don’t recognize same-sex marriages.

This seems almost exactly backwards. It won’t be long before *opposing* SSM is going to make it difficult to keep people in pews, if it isn’t having that effect already. The Church could be faced with a schism over this.

Or maybe people will just ignore official doctrine in their private lives, like they already do on birth control, but the desire of some same-sex couples to have their own priest perform their marriage without leaving the Church is likely to force the issue into the foreground. Repeatedly, and with many a parish priest awkwardly caught between doctrine and sincere feeling toward his parishioners.

Some of the parade-of-horribles type arguments about how SSM will break down traditional marriage or undermine society will be disproved by secular societies that do not in fact break down; arguably this has already started, although not in places where the Church has heavy influence over the local state.

This will get worse (from a certain point of view) if individual parish priests start following their own consciences and are not struck down by the wrath of God. Excommunicating them for following their own consciences is not likely to go over well, especially if they then show up in another, more liberal, church still obviously being good people who care about their community. I bet there are already denominations who wouldn’t hesitate to accept and reordain such an ex-priest, and if there aren’t now, there will be in a generation.

Marriage = (like Christianity itself) in many ways a relative advance for women when first invented

I would say “as opposed to outright slavery”, except when it was first invented it pretty much WAS outright slavery, wasn’t it? Although I suppose you could argue we don’t really know much about when it was *first* invented, because it’s so deep into prehistory. But then we can’t know with any certainty whether it was monogamous or heterosexual-only, can we? Clearly there are historical societies that haven’t enforced monogamy as part of their marriage traditions; I don’t know if there’s also proof that some haven’t enforced heterosexuality, but it wouldn’t really surprise me.

The first part of an argument from tradition is choosing your tradition carefully so that it actually supports your argument. Otherwise, like the old joke about standards, there are too many to choose from.

Slavery, BTW, is another good example of a tradition that was effective enough at maintaining the stability of society to be preserved for centuries. That doesn’t necessarily have much bearing on whether it should be respected and maintained in the present day.

Andrew #86: But I might start by asking: Was same sex marriage a “live possibility” at the time laws of marriage were passed? That is, 200 years ago (or 500, or whatever), was the possibility seriously considered that marriage could be between a woman and a woman, or a man and a man?

ISTM that as late as 500 years ago, people would have to have been well aware that some people weren’t happy with heterosexuality and preferred to do something different, and society had to make a choice between “an it harm none, do what thou wilt” (a tradition that is rarely invoked by the anti-SSM side, for obvious reasons) and something a little more authoritarian, or if you prefer, Procrustean.

But, as Bujold wrote in a different context, “The most interesting question of history is always, What were these people thinking? But I’m afraid it’s often also the most elusive.” I’m not sure we even can know, unless there are contemporary records of legislative deliberations or something (and even then, it could only be conclusive in one direction; absence of evidence that such a thing was contemplated wouldn’t be evidence that it wasn’t).

Re: arguments from tradition.

There this treatise:

http://www.amazon.com/EPZ-Truth-Method-Continuum-Impacts/dp/082647697X

Before you dismiss “tradition” as a mere fallacy of appeal to authority, you might ask yourself: what is the basis of authority? And then if you appeal to “reason” against authority and tradition, aren’t then you appealing to some quite specific tradition (and conception) of “reason”?

Bottom line: there is no meaningful or intelligible phenomenon that is not circumscribed within a tradition, that is not a cultural inheritance or transmission, that is not bound up with a prior nexus of precedents. The mistake in identifying “tradition” automatically with bads or bad faith is to conceive of tradition as singular, “solid”, and static. (The other mistake is to forget or repress that quite traditional distinction between theoretical and practical reason, to think that the former can completely substitute for the sorts of reasons and competencies involved in the latter).

It won’t be long before *opposing* SSM is going to make it difficult to keep people in pews, if it isn’t having that effect already.

Surely it’s too late for couples who lost patience years ago, when their rector described patiently to them why s/he couldn’t officiate at their wedding.

Also, c.f. Plato’s Symposium.

And then if you appeal to “reason” against authority and tradition, aren’t then you appealing to some quite specific tradition (and conception) of “reason”?

Our reason may be a tradition, but that doesn’t mean that one uses it because it’s traditional. In any event, if reason is itself a tradition, that leaves us with even less cause to ignore reason in favor of some other tradition–if we must adopt a tradition, why not the tradition of reason?

(The other mistake is to forget or repress that quite traditional distinction between theoretical and practical reason, to think that the former can completely substitute for the sorts of reasons and competencies involved in the latter).

Tradition is opposed to practical knowledge. (Especially if that tradition is Catholic theology, which tends towards theory and abstraction). Both practical and theoretical knowledge are gained by experimentation. Tradition opposes experimentation.

More concretely, a gay couple deciding to get married is likely to have a better understanding–both theoretical and practical–of the implications of this marriage than a religious thinker writing almost two millennia ago.