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Eve Tushnet

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Last updated on: September 13, 2010 at 3:47 pm by Eve Tushnet

2010-09-13T15:47:00-04:00 Eve Tushnet

LOGO Patheos Explore the world's faith through different perspectives on religion and spirituality! Patheos has the views of the prevalent religions and spiritualities of the world.

UNZIP MY BODY, TAKE MY HEART OUT: I’m still thinking about that conversation on gay marriage between Ross Douthat and Andrew Sullivan, in which my Busted Halo interview played a supporting role. Specifically, I’m still thinking about this John Corvino column written in response to me and Douthat. I’m still not sure how to structure this post or its argument, so I think what I’ll do is put four ideas on the table, and see what happens. The first two are mainly about men and women, and the last two are mainly about the biological connection between parents and children.

1. Some girls are bigger than others. Corvino’s main point seems to be, Yes, men and women are obviously different in ways which are very important in marriage. And therefore gay, lesbian, and heterosexual relationships are going to be different in ways important to marriage as well.

But there are a lot of important differences! A cross-class marriage, for example, will face different challenges from a marriage of two people from similar economic backgrounds. An interfaith marriage faces different challenges from those faced by a Jewish marriage. A marriage of two opposite-sex octogenarians faces different challenges from those faced by two opposite-sex 18-year-olds. And so on.

…And I think that perspective requires one to believe that sex difference is One Difference Among Others, not (I know I always trot out this phrase) la difference. It requires one to believe that sex difference is not iconic, that there is no such thing as what Maggie Gallagher trenchantly calls “bringing the two halves of humanity together,” since humanity does not come in two halves. I’ve written here about why I do believe sex difference is iconic, here about why that belief does not require specific gender roles e.g. boys don’t cry, and here about why that belief is (at least in the Bible, and the Catholic faith!) prior to and distinct from the very obvious and important fact of procreation. I genuinely believe that sex difference is sublime in a way that age difference, for example, is not. Its sublimity stems in part, though I think only in part, from its danger, its potential for horror, and its simultaneous potential for exceptional beauty. Acknowledging the role of sex difference in marriage and sexuality is good and beautiful, whereas acknowledging the role of age difference (for example) is merely necessary.

2. Newsweek/Newspeak. If lots and lots of differences are as important to marriage as sex differences, or sex differences are as unimportant to marriage as lots and lots of differences, it’s exceptionally difficult to understand how marriage could be an institution which regulates sex at all.

I mean, if “love is love is love,” if love makes a family, then surely sexless relationships could be as completely marriage as anything else, no? I don’t even think you need to go to the “why does number of partners matter when sex of partner doesn’t?” place (although you probably could; the typical Jonathan Rauch-type case against polygamy applies the harm principle, understood as “which kinds of marriages tend toward liberal democracy and which tend toward patriarchal authoritarianism,” in a way which invites the government to judge whether e.g. vows to “love, honor, and obey” are anti-American), since there are lots of examples of loving relationships where the harm principle doesn’t seem to do any work at all in distinguishing these relationships from marriage: friendship, for example, or polyamory. (The harms from polyamory can be dismissed as speculative just as easily as the harms from motherless or fatherless gay households, by trotting out children who grew up in these families and did just fine. They do exist.)

I think Corvino’s approach ultimately leads to the really depressing Newsweek “debate” about marriage, in which all parties agree that marriage means whatever you want it to mean–whatever rules you personally believe necessary to fit the specific needs and specific challenges of your relationship, since no differences are intensely and iconically important. Here, marriage is desirable precisely because it promises honor without regulation. I don’t think that’s sustainable. But I also don’t think it’s very admirable.

The obvious comeback at this point is to say that contemporary marriage doesn’t meet the unique needs and challenges of heterosexuals and their children. I think that’s not entirely true–culture and tradition are more powerful than we think, and I don’t think the pro-marriage Newsweek writers will be able to sustain their genderless view of marriage for very long–but it’s importantly true. The biggest problem in the USA, I think, is that marriage is no longer viewed as an institution which should regulate sex before marriage. (Here, have some depressing statistics about religious affiliation, beliefs about sex, and premarital sexual activity.) But the obvious comeback-to-the-comeback is that if you care about marriage, or if you care about the children which intercourse bizarrely continues to produce without our consent, you should be seeking rollback rather than mere containment of the non-regulatory marriage culture.

3. Shadows searching for what cast them. I feel like–and this is an intuition, not the conclusion of a syllogism–John Corvino’s column comes from a worldview which reduces men and women, in their sexual and familial aspect, to functions. If we can figure out the function of a father, we can replace biological fathers with father figures or male role models and no harm done. A fatherless family need not be a family with anything missing.

I think this worldview denigrates the importance of the body. Our physicality–our incarnation–goes far beyond function. That’s why kids who grew up with really amazing, sacrificial stepfathers or father figures or male role models, or adoptive parents, very often express both intense gratitude toward the people who loved and raised them, and intense longing or anger or sorrow toward the biological parents who didn’t, or who loved intermittently and from afar. It’s possible (I know this, because it happens) to both honor non-biological parents and yearn for the connection of DNA, of flesh. Something is missing when parental love is separated from the fleshly, sweaty, physical union which created the child.

4. I am the least resilient person I know. I know that not all adopted children, not all stepparented children, not all children of single parents feel this loss especially keenly! My point is solely that there are two spectra on which we can assess the emotions and coping strategies of children raised without one or more of their biological parents.

One is resilience. Resilience is a good thing in itself. It signals flexibility, a future-oriented worldview, an ability to “make do” or “muddle through” or “eat bitterness” or focus on gratitude for what is there rather than sorrow for what is not.

But the other is what I’m going to call aesthetic sensitivity. I’m calling it that because I think attention to the meaning of the physical is essentially a function of the aesthetic sense. People who feel the loss of the biological parent most keenly are, I think, expressing an insight–not a weakness, not a handicap created by their culture, but an insight into what it is to be human.

These are two separate spectra. Someone can be both intensely sensitive to the loss of the biological parent, and extremely resilient. Someone can be really flailing or self-pitying, and not at all interested in the biological connection. But just as resilience is a good thing in itself, so a deep sense of the importance of physical, fleshly relatedness is a good thing in itself. The “family diversity” movement tends to praise resilience and downplay or even denigrate what I’m calling aesthetic sensitivity. It’s hard to avoid the conclusion that they do this because resilience makes the adults’ lives easier and the other thing does not.

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