I will start by saying that I am a devoted Christ follower. I believe that all sins are equal, and that ALL sex outside of marriage is a sin. To me, an unmarried heterosexual couple engaging in sex is just as wrong as a homosexual couple engaging in sex… Our job is not to place degrees of value on sin, but to preach the Gospel, the Good News, that Christ can free us from sin. Now, while I agree with your article in relation to polygamy, I don’t believe that you make your case in relation to a homosexual marriage. If a homosexual marriage is indeed monogamous, then it is unfair to say that “equal dignity” is not present in their relationship. Lastly, unless homosexuality is something that a person struggles with, despite his or her heterosexual marriage, which would then be adlultery… I don’t believe that another person’s homosexuality is going to the “destruction of marriage.”
Holy Days Home Front Homework Insider Marriage Party Planners Playroom Spirituality Season What's Cooking
Freedom From the Old Ball & Chain
September/October 2008 Issue | Posted by Rebecca Teti in Faith&Culture
By Rebecca Ryskind Teti
Most of us practice the traditional American virtue of minding our own business. But in the defense of marriage against those who want to redefine it — whether they be polygamists in Texas or homosexual activists in California — we should make an exception.
After all, one-man, one-woman mo nogamous marriage is more than an anomaly of religion. It is the foundation of the political principle that all men are created equal. Let me explain.
The Church has long taught that the family is the building block of society, but this isn’t divine revelation, it’s a historically observable fact. We humans extrapolate our government arrangements from our domestic ones. That’s why anyone who’s ever wanted to understand — or radically change — a political culture has always started from the family. Plato and Aristotle started there. So did Rousseau and Marx.
No polygamous society has ever had any notion of the equal dignity of each human person, because the dynamic of polygamy is like that of a pride of lions. With multiple “wives” available, no man ever goes off the market. He sees all women as his potential lovers and all men as his sexual rivals. A winner-take-all atmosphere prevails, with weaker men (and teenage sons) driven off, much as an alpha lion drives off other males, keeping the harem to himself.
The wives in such an arrangement are supremely vulnerable because they’re interchangeable and replaceable. Disappoint me, Woman, and I’ll favor another “wife.”
Doubt this? Find a photo of the women from that polygamous compound in Texas. They were all “bent to the contour of apology,” to paraphrase a favorite novelist.
Monogamous marriage stabilizes sexual competition, making the mutual trust on which civic life is built possible.
Heterosexual marriage also extends the principle of equality to women.
Behind the apparently arbitrary “rule” that a man must marry a woman before bedding her lies the deeper message that a woman is precious. She is a person worth a lifetime commitment of love and service, not an object to be used. A young woman hearing that she must “save herself” for one man learns simultaneously that a man is a person whose heart isn’t to be toyed with.
The lived experience of marriage teaches each spouse — and the children who grow up in their home — in a practical way to respect the gifts and talents of the other sex. In an unspoken way, the interior logic of traditional marriage transmits to its children a set of powerfully embedded assumptions: that all persons have equal dignity, that both sexes have unique gifts to be treasured, and that individuals often must sacrifice their own desires for the common good. Marriage’s bottom line: “We are each precious. We don’t treat people like anything less.”
This is the culture created by marriage. It happens to be the only one strong enough on which to build a republic — one where the people govern themselves. And it’s strong enough to absorb exceptions from the norm (those who never marry, widows, even the pregnant out of wedlock and sexual rebels), so long as the norm persists.
Does it seem hysterical to suggest that the erosion of marriage will eventually erode the respect for individual liberty that makes self-government possible? History is laden with free peoples who became so corrupt that tyranny became the only means of restoring order.
The effects of the destruction of marriage may not be immediate. A healthy culture can withstand upheavals when they’re short-lived, but we permanently change the interior logic of marriage at our peril.
If marriage is nothing more than an expression of desire and affection, then people are not persons, but objects of desire. Go ahead and treat them as you like. Which, pursued to its utmost, is another way of saying, “Might makes right.”
The equal dignity of each human person is the internal logic of heterosexual, monogamous marriage. It’s a pre-condition for self-government, and no society has ever been free without it.
Who are we to judge what marriage is? Free people who intend to remain so.
Rebecca Ryskind Teti is
Faith & Family’s contributing editor.
What We’re Watching
The Fighting Sullivans : The family that captured the hearts of America during World War II.
Oklahoma! : Real men protect their purity, with song and dance numbers.
Comments (7) |
Filed under church, faith, family, marriage
Print Article 
Email a Friend
Comments
Wow! What food for thought. Thank you
Retrouvaille is a program (kind of like marriage encounter) for couples that are seriously hurting and/or contemplating divorce. Their website is http://www.retrouvaille.org. The word retrouvaille is French for re-discovery.
Thank you - God certainly works in wonderful ways. I just made a 3 day novena to Our Lady and she has pointed me in this direction. Thank you. I would take this path when the opportunity prevails itself.
Thanks to all for reading and taking the time to comment.
Mrs. Sarge, to clarify, I am not arguing that persons in a same-sex relationship might not treat each other as equals.
I am arguing that a culture that elevates the status of such unions will end by devaluing women.
If kids don’t need mothers and there is nothing important or sacred about the physiology of women --well then, who needs ‘em?
That’s the sense in which I hold that same-sex unions undermine the equal dignity of human persons. I do not believe that any society can hold both the legitimacy of same-sex “marriage” and the equal dignity of women simultaneously. Not for long; they’re logically opposed.
I just came across this article and I don’t know whether you are still reading comments on it. But after reading this and your two recent Christmas articles, I am now a Rebecca Teti fan. I think this one should be expanded into a book, or at least a longer article. You are so great at talking about classical ideas in an arresting way. It would be wonderful if you could amplify what you are saying about the right understanding of freedom. Almost everyone thinks of love and marriage as purely private matters with no bearing on the public sphere. (I guess that’s what got us to the sorry state we are in, with people accepting the idea of same-sex “marriage.") Since the principles you are working from are so alien to most people, they need to be explained more, or what you are saying will be too baffling.
Sally, how kind of you: thanks! I have about a dozen books I’m longing to write, but I think they’ll have to wait until my kids are a little older.
In the meanwhile, an excellent volume on this specific topic is George Gilder’s Men & Marriage.
Post a Comment
By submitting this form, you give Faith And Family Magazine permission to publish this comment. Comments will be published at our discretion, and may be edited for clarity and length. For best formatting, please limit your response to one paragraph and don't hit "enter" to force line breaks.
