The logic of the sexual revolution continues to play itself out in exactly the way defenders of "traditional" marriage and norms of sexual morality saw (and said) that it would. When I and many others noted that the abandonment of the idea of marriage as a conjugal union and its replacement with a conception of "marriage" as sexual-romantic companionship or domestic partnership would swiftly be folowed by the mainstreaming of polyamory and eventually demands for the legal recognition of "poly" parnterships and families, we were accused of "scare mongering" and making illicit "slippery slope" arguments. What we saw--and what anyone should easily have seen--is that the displacement of the conjugal conception of marriage left no ground of principle for supposing that marriage is the union of two and only two persons, as opposed to three or more ("throuples," "triads," "quadrads," etc.) in multiple partner sexual ensembles. With the sole exception of Jonathan Rauch, who at least tried to identify a principled moral basis for monogamy consistent with jettisoning the norm of sexual complementarity (though he failed), no supporter of redefining marriage, so far as I am aware, made a serious effort to address our challenge on this critical point. Today, fewer and fewer people on the liberal side of questions of marriage and sexual ethics are even pretending to have moral objections to polyamorous sexual relationships or their recognition. Increasingly, the pretense is not regarded as politically necessary. "Poly" groups no longer need to be pushed into the closet in order to depict redefining marriage as a "conservative" cause; "polys" are now even welcome to march in pride parades and the like. Polyamory is swiftly becoming one more hue in the multi-colored flag. We now even have the "conservative" argument for polyamory: these are people in "loving, committed multi-partner relationships." They have jobs and homes and mortgages and kids--just like everybody else. Moral objections to their "identity" and the sexual expression of their love is condemned as mere "prejudice." We must, we are told, fight the "bigots" who are stigmatizing them and "harming their children." When you have a script that works, I guess you keep using it.
CNN is about as mainstream as you get, right? Here are some passages from CNN's non-judgmental and, indeed, quite sympathetic treatment of polyamory and polyamorists:
It's not just a fling or a phase for them. It's an identity. They want to show that polyamory can be a viable alternative to monogamy, even for middle-class, suburban families with children, jobs and house notes.
"We're not trying to say that monogamy is bad," said Billy Holder, a 36-year-old carpenter who works at a university in Atlanta. "We're trying to promote the fact that everyone has a right to develop a relationship structure that works for them."
For the Holder-Mullins triad, polyamory is three adults living in the same home about 20 miles south of Atlanta. They share bills, housework and childcare for their 9-year-old daughter. They work at the same place, sharing carpooling duties so someone can see their daughter off to school each day.
Surrounded at the [Atlanta Pride] parade by drag queens from El Gato Negro nightclub, singers from a gospel choir and supporters of the Libertarian Party of Georgia, Billy Holder didn't stand out in his jeans, T-shirt and wide-brimmed, sun-shielding hat. That's sort of the point, he said: to demonstrate that polyamorists, or polys, are just like anybody else.
Read the whole story here: http://www.cnn.com/2013/10/26/living/relationships-polyamory/
Thursday, October 24, 2013
Here is a wonderful story, by my friend John Nagy, in
Notre Dame Magazine, about the wonderful, life-changing, kid-saving work being done through Notre Dame's ACE (Alliance for Catholic Education) program in Tucson (and elsewhere).
After some discussion and reflection, we at MOJ have decided to return to what was our practice for our first several years and to invite readers to correspond with the bloggers directly instead of using the "comments" box. As appropriate, and only with permission, we can then incorporate readers' thoughts and comments into our posts, or simply pass on readers' contributions directly by reposting them. We look forward to hearing from you!
As per usual, the Notre Dame Center for Ethics & Culture's annual Fall Conference is -- thanks to my friend Carter Snead and his team -- shaping up to be
an outstanding event -- one of the best things to happen at Notre Dame each year. This year, the conference takes up issues relating to "the body and human identity." The line-up of speakers is outstanding -- Charles Taylor, Alasdair MacIntyre, John Finnis, and many others. And, as a special bonus . . . a debate / discussion among Joseph Bottum (the author of, among many other things, that article you know about), Ryan Anderson, Sherif Girgis, and Charles Reid). Sign up, come visit, say "hello", and Go Irish!
Wednesday, October 23, 2013
Last week, I attended a very interesting conference about which I’ve written before concerning the “politics” of religious freedom, and the question of what, if anything, might come “after” religious freedom. The conference was particularly instructive for me because most of the participants were not law professors. They were primarily religious studies scholars, anthropologists, historians of religion, and doctoral students in these disciplines. The presence of doctoral students at various stages in their studies was especially welcome from my point of view, as it gave me an admittedly narrow sense of what some new voices in these fields are investigating and what is of interest to them. Any legal academic who thinks about religious freedom–and, more broadly, the relationship of government and law (domestic and international) to religious communities and traditions around the world–would profit from greater exposure to the concerns and debates of those disciplines that study particular religious phenomena. I am grateful to Winni Sullivan, Beth Shakman Hurd, Saba Mahmood, and Peter Danchin for inviting me.
The interdisciplinary quality of the conference provided a nice view of the convergences and divergences in these scholarly worlds. I did come away from the conference believing that there were more divergences than I had at first perceived. Here are some scattered impressions of the differences in aim, method, and perspective between legal scholars and the scholars at the conference. I also have a little reflection at the end of the post on some recent comments by Benjamin Berger, a fellow member of the law professor tribe whom I was delighted to meet at the conference and who offered some thoughtful and penetrating remarks.
- First, a point of sheepishly self-referential comparison: generally when I attend legal academic conferences about law and religion, I find myself arguing for restraint on the part of the liberal state, for the limits of law, and for the importance of highly contextual analysis that does not flatten out conflict in ways that fundamentally misunderstand it. That is because, in the main (and, of course, with many important exceptions), law professors (in my area) subscribe to a fairly muscular liberal political theory of the state. I am therefore cast in the role of cautionary skeptic. By contrast, the scholarly community at the conference was highly critical of the liberal state–critical of it from a distinctive political perspective, to be sure, but critical of it nonetheless. It is probably a contrarian character weakness that had me very much feeling like the liberal state needed a friend. I couldn’t quite muster up the energy to be that friend but I do know more than a few law professors who would have eagerly taken up the mantle.
- I was also struck by how prevalent critical methodology seemed to be. Deconstructing narratives and discourses of various kinds (whether of persecution, of power, of freedom, of religion, or otherwise) was a major concern. I have never attended a critical legal studies conference, in part because it is not a methodological inclination I share, and in part because, in law, CLS peaked and declined long before I entered the legal academy. But here critical method seemed to be broadly embraced.
- Following from this point, one theme of the conference was that “religious freedom” is at best a useless conceptual category and at worst a malign instrument of state power that skews or deforms the natural, organic, local interactions of particular communities–a weapon with which the state can control those communities after a fashion that suits it and under the terms that it dictates.
Continue reading
Tuesday, October 22, 2013
I have an additional, new paper on the liberty of the Church. Here is the abstract:
This article was presented at a conference, and is part of a symposium, on "The Freedom of the Church in the Modern Era." The article argues that the liberty of the Church, libertas Ecclesiae, is not a mere metaphor, pace the views of some other contributions to the conference and symposium and of the mentality mostly prevailing over the last five hundred years. The argument is that the Church and her directly God-given rights are ontologically irreducible in a way that the rights of, say, the state of California or even of the United States are not. Based on a careful reading of, among other sources, the Second Vatican Council's Declaration on Religious Liberty, Dignitatis Humanae (1965), the article articulates and defends the Church's self-understanding as a divine institution possessed of supernatural authority that has rightful consequences for the ordering of society and polity. Catholic doctrine upholds a rich concept of individual freedom of conscience and defends a regime of broad toleration, but it does so respectful of the demands of the common goods, natural and supernatural, both of which the Church serves in the exercise of her liberty. The Church anticipates that her claims on her own behalf will be a scandal to the world.
This article complements and, to a limited extent, overlaps the analysis in my recent article "Resisting the Grand Coalition in Favor of the Status Quo By Giving Full Scope to the Libertas Ecclesiae."
