Britney Spears: The Anti-Marriage
Crooked Timber’s Harry has a good post…
…regarding the anti-same-sex-marriage papers he chose for discussion in a class he was teaching. He reports being disappointed in the strength of the arguments against, and also that none of his students would dare to speak against it, even given considerable encouragement.
When Canada first passed same-sex-marriage legislation, I had the good luck to be in a work camp with a strong contingent of intellectual Christians, so I had access to some interesting counter arguments. That said, I wasn’t overwhelmed with the strength of those arguments either. Most of them seemed to have more to do with the importance of marriage — which is far more threatened by the normalization of divorce if it is threatened at all — than the badness of same-sex marriage. In any case, I knew we going to win long before that, when I read an editorial by Andrew Coyne in the National Post advocating for gay marriage as an enticement for the immigration of creative-industry professionals from the US. When you have the Star and the National Post on your side, you control the high ground and the low ground, and the battle is yours.
Although the Crooked Timber argument is interesting generally, the best part for me is this passage:
“She might respond that her purpose, though not the only legitimate purpose, is the primary and most important purpose of marriage, and that allowing people who manifestly eschew that purpose to marry will prevent it from fulfilling that purpose. She doesn’t directly make this, causal, claim, which could only be a conjecture at best. Knowing what we know about institutions there’s no reason to make that conjecture. There’s no real reason to suppose that the behavior of ultra-left opponents of marriage who participate in it to subvert it – think of Britney Spears – has any real impact on the institution itself.”
Britney Spears as undercover anti-marriage saboteur is as surreal as it is entertaining.