Douglas Wilson’s Letter From Moscow

Some of That Magic Constitution Dust

Posted on Tuesday, December 17, 2013  

By Douglas Wilson

Blog and Mablog

A number of months ago, I debated Andrew Sullivan on the subject of same sex marriage, and one of the points I sought to make was a point that he just couldn’t get his head around.

To review, the point was this: a society that doesn’t know what marriage is in situation x cannot suddenly and miraculously come up with an understanding of what marriage is for situation y. Once same-sex mirage is established, or even semi-established, you can count on it, said I — polygamists will start lining up, and they will ask for a judge to sprinkle some of that magic constitution dust on their lusts too.

At the time, Sullivan was most indignant with my idea that the trajectory of marriage law in this country was going to blow right past the arbitrary and capricious restriction of two people per marriage. And since that federal judge in Utah struck down their anti-polygamy law as placing an undue burden on the horniness of the men of Utah, as if they didn’t have enough troubles, I have been waiting by the phone for Andrew Sullivan to call. Given his behavior in the debate, I must assume that this is because he is busy rallying all his same-sex homies, mobilizing them to fight for traditional marriage. You know, the kind with two and only two persons in it. The kind of marriage that we haters insist on.

The judge didn’t legalize legal polygamy quite yet, but he did strike down the illegalization of informal polygamy, and that huge moving sidewalk taking us all into the marital madhouse has lurched into motion again — not that it ever really stopped. But now that it is obviously moving again, that means we can turn our corporate attention once more to the pressing duty of accusing people of hate crimes whenever somebody asks “is this sidewalk moving?”

Gives us something to do.

Gentile Madness

Nothing is Sacred; Anything Goes

Let’s consider the following piece from The Guardian, and make applications to and draw implications for New Zealand, and for the West as a whole.

Firstly, the article:

‘Why three in a bed isn’t a crowd’ – the polyamorous trio

When Sylvia’s husband said he wanted to become a woman, she stayed with him. But then Zoe, formerly a married man, joined the relationship

Patrick Barkham
The Guardian, Saturday 20 April 2013  

Zoe O’Connell, left, Sarah Brown, centre, and Sylvia Knight, who live together in a polyamorous relationship. Photograph: Sarah Lee for the Guardian

 

Like many students, the shy boy who studied computer science got drunk in the college bar with a girl from the year below. They snogged and – sharing a love of photography, computers and cups of tea – fell in love. Six years later, they married. A few years on, however, and this everyday story turned in an unexpected direction when the young man’s hair began to thin.

“That was the point I was no longer able to be in denial – time was catching up, testosterone was catching up. I had visions of myself as an old man sitting in a nursing home waiting to die, crying all the time and nobody understanding why. I thought, this is intolerable, it cannot go on – I’ve got to do something.”  The young man became Sarah, now a chatty, self-assured city councillor who lives in Cambridge.

Only a small minority of marriages survive one partner changing sex and Sarah is no longer married to Sylvia, the woman she fell in love with when they were students. But this is only because the law forbids two women to be married. When Sarah completed her transition with gender-reassignment surgery in January 2007, she and Sylvia were compelled to divorce, despite the fact that they were very much together. So they are now civil partners instead, with a wedding album and a divorce certificate stowed away in a drawer in their house.

Sylvia, who works in computing in Cambridge, is remarkably phlegmatic about her partner’s change of sex, and describes herself as “heterosexual by default” before Sarah’s transition. “I never really considered dating women before, but when I look back, the relationship Sarah and I had when she was presenting male was a bit lesbian,” she says. “The dynamics were a lot more like two women living together when compared with other opposite-sex relationships. I had no objections when Sarah wanted to transition. I knew it would be difficult and I worried about whether both of us would experience discrimination and whether it would be scary, but I didn’t see a problem adapting to the fact that someone I loved was going to have differently arranged genitals. No biggie.” . . . .

For Sylvia, the toughest part of Sarah’s transition was being forced to replace their marriage with a civil partnership. “I thought it wouldn’t make a difference,” says Sylvia. “I’m a scientist, I’m rational. It’s just a bit of paper, but it made us cry.” In contrast to the poetry of the wedding vows, they found the language of the civil partnership ceremony like a business arrangement.  Sylvia and Sarah hope to remarry when the marriage (same-sex couples) bill becomes law, but their original marriage can never be restored in the eyes of the law. “When the registrar pronounced us civil partners it felt like the state was kicking us in the teeth,” adds Sarah.

The transformation of their relationship did not end there, however. When Sarah was transitioning, she struck up conversation online with Zoe O’Connell, a computer network manager who is also in the Territorial Army. Zoe was seeking a good place for laser hair removal in East Anglia and Sarah was able to recommend one, so they met for a cup of tea. Bonding over their shared experience of transition, they became good friends.
While Sarah’s path to gender reassignment surgery had been gradual, Zoe had a lightbulb moment. Like Sarah, she had entered into a heterosexual marriage; unlike Sarah, Zoe had three children with her wife. And it was not until the marriage broke down eight years ago that she began to question her gender.

“Splitting up, I tried to prove that I was a bloke and failed spectacularly. I had my hair cut short and joined the army,” Zoe remembers. When she saw a photograph of herself with a shaven head she realised: “That’s so not me.”  She began to explore trans issues. “I was chatting to someone who I knew was trans online and it was a sudden dawning – ‘Oh right, this isn’t normal, I’m a girl. Shit.'” 

When Sarah had surgery at a hospital in Brighton, Zoe accompanied Sylvia and they fretted in a pub. Zoe spent a period “part-time” before going “full-time” four months after Sarah. “It got ridiculous,” remembers Zoe. “At one point I ended up flip-flopping between boy-mode and girl-mode seven times in a day.” Zoe was treated at the same hospital as Sarah. 

Some months later, Sarah and Zoe went to Brighton again to support a mutual friend’s surgery and this time shared a twin-bedded hotel room. “There was sexual tension in the room,” remembers Sarah, laughing. Sarah and Zoe were falling in love.  Feeling increasingly stressed about their feelings, Sarah, Zoe and Sylvia sat down to talk and, together, they “renegotiated the bounds of the existing relationship,” as Sarah puts it.  Soon afterwards, Zoe moved into Sarah and Sylvia’s house. At first, they tried sleeping together in a big bed but the person in the middle was always very uncomfortable. Now Zoe has her own room and often sleeps there, although the three all move between bedrooms.

Many people might assume that Sylvia would struggle to cope with her husband becoming her same-sex partner. For her to then accept the transformation of a monogamous relationship into a polyamorous one must be an enormous strain. But the striking thing when I meet Sylvia, Sarah and Zoe at their home is the absence of strain: their unconventional domestic arrangements – they also have five snakes – soon seem completely normal, perhaps because they are all so at ease with each other. . . .

Sarah, Sylvia and Zoe are not “poly-evangelists” but simply say it works for them. “Some people are quite jealous or need that level of commitment from one person that you can’t get in a poly relationship so it doesn’t suit everyone,” says Zoe. . . .

All three women feel liberated by their different experiences of transition and they know quite a few trans people now living polyamorous lives. “Gender transition is one of the most sexually taboo things you can do, and you do it and you realise the world doesn’t end. Then you start thinking, what other things have I always taken for granted that are just wrong?” says Sarah. “In some ways I resent being born trans because it’s been a lot of pain, a lot of hassle, and it has dominated my life. But at other times I almost feel grateful because it has given me an attitude that almost nothing is sacred and I don’t have to be a prisoner to this very English ‘mustn’t make a fuss, mustn’t challenge things’ life of quiet desperation.”

The first observation to make is, “Behold the madness of the Gentiles.”  

Secondly, we assert that this madness is now implicitly endorsed and encouraged throughout virtually all the West.  This past week the New Zealand parliament overwhelmingly voted in favour of homosexual “marriage”.  The predominant justification was that it was wrong to deny a couple’s love for one another.  That love was not only genuine, but sacred.  It had to be sacralised in a “marriage” recognized in law, otherwise that love would be discriminated against and denied.  So ran the line.  The Gentiles and more than a few ignorant and poorly taught Christians in the parliament went along with the emotive pablum. 

How would these parliamentarians respond to the three people profiled above, in their loving polyamorous relationship?  Note that the individuals in question want their relationship to be sacralised in marriage.  If any one of those ignorant parliamentarians were put to the question and asked, Why oughtn’t these three peoples’ relationship be recognised as marriage? the answer doubtless would come back, “Because marriage is a relationship between two people.”  And were we to ask, “Why ought that be so?” they would have no answer.  They, if they were honest and rational and non-hypocritical, would have to concede that by their lights there can be no objection to the relationship of these three being recognised as marriage.  Any such objection would be discriminatory, prejudicial, and harmful. 

Thirdly, this madness is not just implicitly endorsed, it is where we are actively heading in the West.  The arguments have already been made, the principles already enunciated and agreed.  It’s just that our pollies are either too dumb to see it or too sly to acknowledge it.  Most of them are not dumb.  It is far more likely that most of them are sly.  They self-consciously know where this is going to go and they relish it–relish the revolution, the madness, the nihilism of it all. They are amidst a “flood of debauchery”.

When one of Britain’s most celebrated newspapers carries an article profiling and implicitly promoting such madness the softening-up process is well underway.  “Expand your minds, people.  Push those tolerance barriers out a bit further.  Sure these people are not like you.  But they love each other.  They have rights.  They deserve their crack at self-fulfilment and happiness.” 

For the time that is past suffices for doing what the Gentiles want to do, living in sensuality, passions, drunkenness, orgies, drinking parties, and lawless idolatry.  With respect to this they are surprised when you do not join them in the same flood of debauchery, and they malign you; but they will give account to him who is ready the judge the living and the dead.  (I Peter 4: 3-5)

Behold the madness of the Gentiles.  Behold first their surprise that Christians will not go along, then their malignity toward us.  But at such times the Lord is always near. 

Homosexual "Marriage"

The Light Can Shine More Brightly

Homosexual “marriage” is now on the cusp of becoming lawful–an institution recognized in secular law as a genuine bona fide marriage.  This outcome is not surprising.  It has both positive and negative aspects to it.

On the positive side, this piece of political theatre serves clearly to reflect the spiritual state of our society.  Not that we needed any revision.  All faithful Christians know that New Zealand was never a Christian country to begin with and it has long since committed itself to erasing adumbrations of the historical Christian faith.  In the names of modernity, progress, evolution, and freedom the vast majority of our Parliamentarians have decided that the testimony of Scripture on the matter of homosexuality and marriage is simply wrong, if not offensive.  No surprises there.

But it may be helpful to Christians who yet cling to the hope they can reason together with Unbelievers on some kind of common ground in order to get agreement and respect.
  On such fundamental matters there will never be any agreement.  The more Christians try to use the arguments of Unbelief to progress their case, the more tactically inconsistent and ineffectual their position becomes.  The fundamental issue here, as in all such matters, is authority and the ground of one’s infallibility.  Both sides rest on such fundamental ground.  Those advocating homosexual “marriage”  draw upon an implicit claim to infallibility lying within the creature.  The infallible creed is: “man is the master of all things; nothing human is foreign to me”.  Since some human beings engage in homosexuality and make homosexuality their identity as human beings, it’s condign to all humans.  It is, therefore, ethical, right, and good.  Read the speeches in Parliament, review the debate–it’s all there.  Homosexual “marriage” advocates and approvers share a fundamentalist, infallible position: Man is autonomous, self-regulating, self-authenticating, self-defining.

Thus the public debate may be helpful to the Church in making her more epistemologically self-conscious.  At least that’s the way it has always worked in God’s Kingdom in the past.  In the end, what has Jerusalem to do with Athens?  The City of God and the City of Man are two different civilizations.  Being reminded of this is useful.

Secondly, it reminds us that to advance God’s Kingdom on earth we must have recourse to our own and we must focus upon the duties and responsibilities God has laid upon us.  The Kingdom of God does not come through the ballot box, nor through the passing of laws.  As the Kingdom comes it will eventually control the ballot box and parliamentary chambers.  But these are effects of the Kingdom, not its cause.  The coming of the Kingdom is primarily God’s work (hence the leading petition in the Lord’s prayer, “Thy Kingdom come”.  But the Kingdom also comes via the means God has appointed–the means of grace: worship, preaching, prayer.

Moreover, the core institutions of the Kingdom are self, family, and the church.  There are also important derived institutions which Christians must build and control.  Amongst these are Christian schools, Christian charities, and Christian hospitals.  Because the state and its organs are now so pagan and anti-Christian, these derived institutions are going to need be more and more financially independent and separate from the secular State.  This means, in turn, that Christians must learn afresh that wealth and prosperity is for the purpose of glorifying God and serving His people, not for indulgent self-gratification.

Further, the homosexual “marriage” institution gives the Church yet greater opportunity to differentiate from the culture of Unbelief.  Christians and Christian churches need to consider carefully their response.  Our strong preference would be for the Christian community to make this deform a teaching and witness bearing opportunity.  It gives another reason and opportunity to show that we, God’s people, march to the beat of a very different Drummer.  It is God we serve, not mammon. 

We now live and operate in a society where Christian marriage has been occluded–swamped by a tsunami of  secular rationalism.  Unbelieving people live together, in serial monogamy with multiple successive spouses, engage in licentiousness and practical polygamy, live in homosexuality as a perversion of the created order–and, oh yes, some still practice monogamous perpetual marriage grounded upon vows of lifelong fidelity.  The State recognises them all.  Ultimately the modern State could not care a fig.  If it’s human, its not foreign.  If it feels good, if it works for you, go to it. 

Christians and churches need to reaffirm amongst themselves, and before the watching world, what marriage actually is and the divine institution that it is.  When folk increasingly come into the Kingdom out of these kinds of relationships and existences, having experienced the train wreck of conversion, the Christian community will need to help in putting lives back together.  It will require exemplary patience, love, care, and faithfulness.  For example, if a woman has had multiple serial sexual partners, and subsequently is converted, to whom is she married?  Which of these relationships ought the church to recognise and why?  At this juncture we must disregard the institutions and laws of the secular world.  The church must be faithful to her Head and lawgiver.

Or consider a man who has had multiple sexual partners and children by them all.  He becomes wonderfully converted and is added to the church.  To whom is he married in God’s sight?  Is he married to one of them and are the others in a relationship of concubinage?  Is he responsible for the care and maintenance of them all?  If yes, on what terms and conditions?  If he is unable to support them all financially, does the church and wider Christian community have a responsibility to assist and help.  If he is married to one of them in God’s sight then a proper Christian marriage covenant needs to be enacted within the Church.  The recognition of the State in such things will be increasingly meaningless.  The recognition and sanction of the Church will become more and more vital and important. 

These are some of the challenges ahead of us.  For our part we relish them.  As we live together in these ways, serving Christ in an ordered manner amidst a world falling apart, the Christian community and the church will increasingly be seen as a place of refuge.  That is as it should be.  The homosexual “marriage” law leads us one step further into realising our emerging duties and responsibilities in this regard.  In that sense, if we were to humble ourselves, and pray and seek God, it will prove a great blessing in disguise. 

The more the kingdom of paganism advances, the more the light of God shines on the hill.  The greater the darkness, the more the light shines.  It only remains for us not to place that light under a bushel of compromise and seeking common cause with our increasingly anti-Christian, pagan culture. 

The World’s Largest Daisy Chain 

Culture and Politics – Sex and Culture
Written by Douglas Wilson
Tuesday, 18 September 2012

There is an argument against homosexual marriage that I have offered from time to time which has been met with a strange sort of incredulity. It came up again the other night during the Q&A after my debate with Clarke Cooper, executive director of the Log Cabin Republicans, and so I thought I should jot down a few additional thoughts about it here.

There are two kinds of “beyond-two plurality” in marriage. One is old school — polygamy — and I have argued that it is not possible to argue for homosexual marriage without all those same arguments being available for use by the polygamists later on. As I said in the debate, if you leave the key under the mat, more people than just you can use it.

But the other kind of plurality in marriage is required by bisexuality, and this argument is the one that results in the incredulity . . . as though I don’t know what bisexuality actually is (which was in fact one of the questions in the Q&A). So to get one thing out of the way right at the top, I don’t believe that it is mandatory for a bisexual man to pursue a guy and a girl at the same time. All that is necessary for my argument is that it could entail this, and whether or not it did would be entirely up to the lusts of the person concerned.

If a man is lusting for something, by what principle can we deny him a marital imprimatur for it? By what standard?  If a bisexual man marries in a state that allows him to marry either a man or a woman, this means that he is being forced by that state to choose which side of his sexual identity will be expressed in marriage. The other side of his sexual identity (the way God made him, forsooth!) is being stifled by the narrow-mindedness of the state in question. It may be actually suppressed, or it might still be expressed by cheating, or by getting a tolerant partner who wants an open marriage. But whatever he does, the state forbids a bisexual sexual expression within the confines of marriage. And what I want to know is, where is the hate coming from, man?

There is another implication to this that I did not bring up at the debate because the math would get too complicated, but it bears mentioning here. Given the principles of our new marital logic, bisexual marriage requires at least three people, but it actually opens us up to a lot more than that. Since the math can get convoluted, let’s make it a story problem.

So logic eventually catches up with us, and we have the first state that allows bisexuals to marry. Our long national nightmare is over. So Bob marries both Suzy and George, and everybody’s happy, right? But are Suzy and George married too? It seems that we should allow it, but the fact that Bob is deeply in love with Suzy, and also in love with George, and vice versa, does not mean at all that George and Suzy need to have the hots for one another. But . . . they too are bisexual. Oh, no! This means that Suzy has Bob, but gets to pick Kimberly for her three-way marriage. Kimberly is also bisexual, and she is married to Henry. In the meantime, George has met Megan, the love of his life, girl-wise. Megan is bi also, and she has Gloria waiting in the wings. Still with me?

Now there are certain legal questions, like whether this is going to be a great big globule marriage, with Kimmberly being married, kinda, to Bob and to George, making it a marital orgy, or whether this is actually going to be a chain of discrete marriages. Some may look at this arrangement and see the world’s largest daisy chain, but I see a cash cow for marriage and family attorneys. Follow the money, man.

In the Q&A after our debate, one person said, with dismay, but “that would be cheating!” And it struck me that something else is going on, at least with some folks.

There are three kinds of responses to this argument. The first swallows the reductio — “yeah, sexual liberty means liberty to do whatever the hell you want.” Sleep with whoever you want, and marry whoever you want. As a few simple thought experiments would show — like the experiment above — this would not broaden marriage, but would rather destroy it. And that, incidentally, is the actual point.

The second would be the homosexual activist who does see the force of the argument, but who has enough PR sense to not want video or audio of anybody swallowing the reductio to get out. Somebody would send a copy to the Family Research Council, and they would post it on their website under the headline “See?” Incrementalism means that you don’t reveal your whole agenda at once. This helps account for some of the “bewilderment” when this is raised. Nobody is proposing this, and nobody will propose it, at least until ten minutes after the previous perversion is codified in law.

The third kind of response — and this was the surprise to me — is that of the sentimentalist homosexual. Such a person has bought into all the propaganda about homosexuality being okay, and so has ditched that particular traditional value, but he still clings to another traditional value with real tenacity. He believes in the happy endings of chick flicks as fervently as anybody ever did. He may be a sodomite, but he is also a sap. Same sex is okay, but the number “two” (being necessary to contours of the “true love story”) is absolutely sacrosanct.

This is woven tightly in with the sexual envy directed at heterosexual couples who are truly happy together. Why should they have the happy endings? This is an emotional attachment that some people still have, but the logic of the sexual revolution will deal with it in due course.

“But traditional love stories have always involved just two . . .”  

“Traditional? Right. Like you guys care about that.”

Follow the logic. Do the math. Don’t be like the guy who shot his parents and pleaded for the court to show mercy because he was an orphan.