I have no trouble legitimizing homosexuality while denying moral legitimacy to some expressions, as follows.

Sex should not harm, or dehumanize, or objectify -- even if you have your partner's consent. And if you have your partner's consent to harm, dehumanize, or objectify? Go for it; but you're fools at best, and no good can come of it.

This standard, then, takes no notice of sexual orientation. It just asks that people respect and look out for one another, even when desire argues against all that. It's not "anything goes" and yet requires no traditional underpinnings I can see.

I don't think Dreher is talking about individual moral considerations about one's own choices regarding sex. His point seems to be that it is fundamentally nihilistic to construct a society around any idea which does not base its attitudes on sexuality around his particular interpretation of scripture. I think this is his point of view in general - that any moral code that is based around humanistic principles like "doing no harm" are essentially nihilistic. It ought to go without saying that this is a profoundly wrongheaded moral position but here we are.

Condemning any relation based on affection as nihilist is ridiculous.

My father's Catholic parents refused to attend any of their children's weddings. That is an outrage I still can't wrap my mind around, that faith could trump love, not once, not twice, but three times.

Dreher, like man-on-dog Santorum and others who compare homosexuality to incest or pedorasty, are guilty of tunnel vision. But part of the problem is that the LGBT community overuses the mantra "born that way" as if it is a be all and end all argument. There are many communities, particularly rural, where there are virtually no openly gay people. It is specifically in these places where the Dreher argument resonates. It would be helpful if the LGBT community focused more on the emotional need for lifetime companionship and then the undeniable physical attraction aspect of love.

The danger with trying to refute Dreher's points is that it's hard to get close to teh KrazeeStoopid without getting some on you. Some people's points of view need not be overdwelt on. It's just not worth the cells.

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Deep Thought:

If your political guru comes at you with a seriously confusing argument, it's YOU who can't think straight, always YOU.

Once again, a conservative Christian who seems to spend an unusual amount of time and energy obsessing on gay sex.

The state should get out of the marriage business. Leave it to churches, which are free to discriminate or not.

The state has an interest in recognizing civil unions. These contracts should be available to pairs of consenting adults, regardless of gender. The requirement for free and informed consent excludes children and animals. The stipulation against plural civil unions is purely an administrative issue.

Klavan...Drehrer....

Two down. Too many still to go...

If only some state would legalize gay marriage, so that we could see if any of this airy-fairy theoretical shit would come true.

That would be Massachusetts. And nothing bad happened. Of course, we are the marriage experts, what with our low divorce rate and all that. Does this Dreher bozo have any experimental data to back up his drivel?

Conservatives, wrong again.

The arguments against gay marriage are often incoherent, but always beside the point. They are a smoke screen, and if you shoot one down, more smoke will come from a different direction.

Because, with them, it is always about one thing: "Ick!"

I posit that this, and similar, "moral" pronouncements are simply a species of human social tradition, the preservation of which have a strong genetic component. When an individual is raised surrounded by people who believe X and then are confronted with people who believe ~X, and also propose to make X obsolete, the fight to preserve tradition ensues naturally. This is independent of what X might be: 'slavery is right,' 'homophobia is right,' 'God exists,' 'The Yankees are evil.'

Our Pilgrim forefathers of whom right wing Christians are so fond did not believe in church weddings. To them, marriage was strictly a contractual matter and was not a matter for the church. Granted, they were pretty much literal death on homosexuality too, but their view of marriage has always seemed eminently sensible to me. And it’s one reason genealogists can be happy, because that Puritan viewpoint has been maintained throughout U.S. history: Marriage records, because of their basic nature of being considered financial contracts between two families, are easier to find than either death or birth records.

the gay marriage topic discussed as a moral, sexual, religious issue is completely the wrong way to discuss it. It should be discussed only as a government, legal issue:

a) if gay persons are equal to non-gay under the law, and there is no basis whatsoever that they would not be equal, then,

b) the government has no right whatsoever to deny gay people any rights and privileges that it bestows upon non-gay people, ergo,

c) the government absolutely must grant gay people ALL of the legal rights and privileges that it grants non-gay people including all rights and privileges associated with marriage whether or not its called marriage or civil unions, whatever the government chooses to call the rights it bestows on couples.

It is as simple as the being no basis for government to deny gay people rights it bestows on non-gay people. Conflating the gay marriage with religiosity and religious doctrine is a huge distraction with no bearing on the key issues.

I think Brent has it right--many religious conservatives can't fathom the idea of moral norms that are not Biblically-based, because in their view only the Bible is a rock of certainty in an uncertain world.

This is closely tied in with their terror of the slippery slope. Any breach in the wall of certainty, no matter how small, is sure to lead to a total collapse of morality and society. They continue to believe this even after repeated breaches that they formerly predicted would lead to Armageddon (miscegenation, dancing, divorce) actually produce no negative results.

Please, please, please do NOT equate this wanker's view of sex with the Christian view of sex. I'm a devout Christian and I'm in total agreement with YOUR view of sex. Dreher is nothing like a Christian.

All these guidelines about sex, Hilzoy; I thought you were a liberal. If people only had sex with people they thought were their equals on the sexual desirability scale or any of the other scales we rate each other with, then the species would be in danger of extinction. If a person can't handle a few psychic bumps then they better not deal with people in any way. Sometimes sex is just sex, and sex is generally better than no sex. Imvho, this next generation seems to have a more mature, less idealized view of sex. The grand slam, romance novel version of sex is of course the best, but few attain it, it generally doesn't happen on the first 'date' with a partner, and it very seldom lasts a lifetime.

"If homosexuality is legitimized -- as distinct from being tolerated"

Good post. Dreher's logic is muddled. But isn't the deeper problem here the unchallenged assumption that there is a legitimizing power? The only path to a non-totalitarian society is reducing government to the contractual mechanics with mutually recognized benefits and penalties. Moral legitimacy within the framework is not a communal problem.

Establishing and maintaining such a framework is no easy task, although the US founders with their enlightenment roots did a good job. But there is no place for the assumption of a power to enforce non-contractual legitimacy.

I've been doing some reading up on St Paul, referenced here. In my reading, he's nothing but a traitor to the true teachings of Christ. The contradictions are quite breathtaking and apparent.

Christ's vision did not include coddling rich men and militarism- that's Paul's doing, lest mortal men find the new religion "foolish", his word, or "for sissies", my words. Paul was no saint at all, imo. He point of view totally corrupted the teachings of Jesus to make it more palatable to the rich and powerful.

I went through this too, hilzoy. I mean, reading Dreher like you might find something useful in there.

At first you're all like "woah, this might be a conservative with something non-useless to say" and for a while that "crunchy-con" act of his goes over pretty well.

But when you come right down to it he's got nothing to offer; he's hysterical about sex and minorities, and that's about where the content ends.

Give it another couple months; you'll fully awaken to the complete waste of time that any second spent reading him represents.

Becca, I've heard and read the same about Paul many times; even from priests and nuns, although I'm sure the Vatican would have never approved. Paul valued expansion of the organization above all. Jesus,not even his real name, was a mystic, hippie, counter-culture type guy. He wasn't even a hard core family values supporter. They made his death the most important part of his life and ignored what he said.

I don't think Dreher is talking about individual moral considerations about one's own choices regarding sex.

Like most politically-oriented religious conservatives (or, for that matter, religiously-oriented political conservatives), Dreher cannot not conflate others' hypothetical personal morality with public standards. They're convinced that only a heavy societal/religious burden stands between humans and savagery, which kinda negates a lot of what being human's supposedly about... but the religious right was never keen on humanistic development either. So I guess it makes sense, as long as one remembers that these people neither like nor trust other people, and I suppose may only be prevented from unapologetically destructive behaviors themselves by their religious faith.

Excellent post, Hilzoy, and I think Brent's comment above, along with Sullivan's in the piece, are spot on.

Dreher's trying to cover up a deep unease with the idea of homosexuality with a veneer of logic, and to impose a scriptural "morality" that has more to do with historical prejudices than moral precepts on us all.

It's just not convincing, and I think ultimately this is a fight we'll win.

It is to lock in, and, on a legal front, to codify, a purely contractual, nihilistic view of human sexuality.

People being free to determine their sexuality is nihilism? And politicizing sexuality and persecuting minorities for political gain is not nihilism?

And this jerk considers himself to be a Christian? If there are children put at risk by nihilistic and debauched moralities, those children are Dreher's. Let's hope they can overcome the disability of being raised and educated by a sanctimonious twit.

With reference to pluege's comments, it was even more simply put in a photograph widely published from Vermont: a woman holding a sign in the Vermont Statehouse reading, "If We're Equal, Will You Trade Your Marriage for My Civil Union?"

There are two moral choices: extend the term marriage and its secular rights, benefits, and responsibilities to all couples of any gender combination otherwise qualified to marry; or convert the term marriage in federal law to the term "civil union" and apply it to all couples formerly identified as married. The marriage equality movement has chosen the first option.

Jon Stewart was in Vermont last weekend. He was quoted in the local paper as follows: "Here's the gay agenda: they'd like to get married ... and fight in the military, and march in the St. Patrick's Day parade." Real radical, eh?

One more from the Daily Show host: "I can understand being against gay marriage — if they decided to make it mandatory. ... This isn’t a cultural divide: They’re wrong.�

I have to wonder, what is it about Dreher's own issues that leads him to conflate selfish personal desire and homosexuality? It seems like an odd connection to make. It's not like homosexuals didn't exist until the "Me decade". The attraction of same sex couples existed long before "the commercialized, consumerist, individualistic culture" that he condemns.

I'm a man, and I've never really been attracted to sex with other men. It's not something I resist out of morality or a commitment to social norms. It's just not relevant. It would never occur to me that there was anything selfish and individualistic about being gay, so that legalizing gay marriage would somehow be giving in to some kind of solipsistic hedonia. That Dreher seems to equate gay sex and giving in to selfish desire just seems weird to me.

There's a weird knot in Christian morality: invoking the Bible and God seemingly lifts moral questions out of the realm of strict practicality--but when you look at it, Biblical/divine morality is conducted on practical terms. If you don't want to go to Hell and have molten lead poured down your anus, don't have gay sex!
While there are systems that strike a different note--Jews in general don't believe in following the Law because you get punished--you follow the law because it's right. And Buddhism says that doing evil just mucks up your own mind and makes you miserable as a matter of simple cause and effect--Christian belief does not rise above plain practicality.
It's caused a lot of turmoil in Christian history (Justification by faith vs. works, predestination and so on) precisely because it pretends to be exalted and is just cynical. And the problem is that the practicality falls apart when you use the same punishment for morality and for dogma--we're all going to hell for not being believers anyway, so what leverage do Christians have against anything non-believers do?
If a contractual approach is nihilistic, then so is the approach of Chiristian churches. It bollixes up their arguments every time.

"Here's the gay agenda: they'd like to get married ... and fight in the military, and march in the St. Patrick's Day parade."

Astonishing, isn't it, that the gay agenda is pretty much identical to the agenda of my Irish Catholic cousins from the 1940s Bronx....

jprichva: right on! it's all just an elaborate intellectual edifice that hides the simple fact that Dreher and his ilk finds one man sticking his penis in another man's butt gross. If it wasn't utterly vacuous and intellectually indefensible, they'd probably support same-sex marriages for women only (cause, you know, it's kinda hot). Now if they were a little more grown up, they might think "well, I might find it gross but that's no reason to deny other people their human rights". But they're not.

Michael: Jesus weren't no hippie mystic. That's the view of modern hippie mystics who want Jesus to be like themselves. If Jesus was a hippie, he would not have attracted a following nor would the Romans would have any reason to execute him.

He was most likely a typical Jewish Apocalyptic prophet who was predicting the fulfillment of Daniel, or God's impending judgement of the world and installation of the nation of Israel as the head of a theocracy that would be filled with justice.

Why the alleged words of an ancient Hal Lindsey makes people bigoted against gay people today speaks to the craziness of the human condition.

I have lived in a conservative Christian environment my whole life, and I agree with Brent: literalist Christians like Dreher believe that there is no morality apart from the Bible. This is silly for many reasons, including the fact that the Bible has embedded so many different versions of morality.

I believe this would be a profound distortion of what it means to be fully human.

Not heterosexual == not fully human.

Got it thanks, that's all of this religious nutjobbery I needed to read.