CHAPTER
5: TELLING WITH PRIDE
Chapter 5 text John W. Boushka
E-commerce links for
hardcopy of book containing this chapter (DADT 1997).
Narrative summary link
for this chapter
See Consolidated footnotes, including notes added since original publication
See Section_01:
GLIL
See Section_02:
Government Shouldn't Legislate Morality
See Section_03:
Family Values and Individual "Lifestyle" Choices
See Section_04:
Let's Build a Fair and Prosperous Workplace
See Section_05:
"Equal Rights for Gays" Is a Special Case of Human Rights
GLIL
During certain Tuesday happy hours, on an upstairs gay
bar balcony that becomes a sauna from the forced-air heat in winter, some
jocose, generally well-dressed men gather for a monthly “social,” to gab about
“our world” of progressive, “market liberal” thought and cultural change.
Except for a rare formal business meeting, the “social,” with draft beers and
tortilla chips, is the way
I began to
go to the socials in 1993, after “disillusionment” on the way Congress had
trashed our attempts to lift the ban (well, not completely). My dissatisfaction
with the totality of each major party (especially now the Democrats), and even
disappointment with Perot’s baby whininess in the 1992 campaign (as well as his
silly position on trade), had driven me more into the direction of eliminating
the prerogatives of government as much as possible. In the 1980’s, in response
to some letters I had published in the
We
consider ourselves technically “non-partisan.” Our newsletter states that we
are “an organization of classical liberals, market liberals, limited-government
libertarians, anarcho-capitalists, and objectivists
organized to promote the political philosophy of individual liberty, both
generally and as it affects lesbians, gay men, and bisexual persons” (and
transgender persons).[2]
There is
some confusion over the terms associated with a limited-government philosophy.
The most general term may be “libertarian.”
At the 1996 Gay PrideFest in Washington, D.C.,
one of GLIL’s officers, appropriately prepared by
having his chest waxed and buffed, handed out tiny cards containing the
“World’s Smallest Political Quiz,” published by Advocates for Self-Government,
in Atlanta; the rest of us posted the quiz results (several hundred partygoers
took it in heavy rain) on an easel showing a square grid (called the
“Self-Government Compass” or “Nolan Chart”) which plots personal opinions[3]
on personal self-government against
economic self-government. The chart shows a continuum of political persuasions
as corners of a square: Authoritarian (bottom),
Liberal (left), Libertarian (top), and Conservative (right), with
“Centrism” at the fulcrum.[4] Many people who take this quiz have not
previously recognized the difference between “liberal” and “libertarian,” or
that conservatism on economic issues (that is, economic self-governance) can
fit well with “liberalism” on personal issues. Proponents of personal freedom
(often called classical “liberals”) are forced to develop a consistency with
their positions on economic freedom (often “conservatives”). Modern
“liberalism” of the political left has collectivized the personal liberty ideal
and applied it mainly to putatively disadvantaged or disenfranchised groups. Social conservatives are forced to
realize their own motive, that their call for getting “government off our
backs” really applies only for conventional families with children. Educational
devices such as these should help sell the idea of strengthening the right to
privacy.
But “libertarian” has come to be associated
with some rather radical proposals floated in the platform of the Libertarian
Party, founded in 1971 and still competing with Perot’s Reform Party to be the
third largest party in the
So said Harry Browne, 1996 Libertarian Party (LP) presidential
candidate, as I enjoyed lunch with him at the Virginia LP Convention in May.
At the national convention two months later, he would articulate his upbeat
message repeatedly on videotapes, “Government Doesn’t Work.”[5] I heard this litany constantly as I cruised
the book bazaar. His suggestion, that we give up our favorite government
programs to keep what we earn, makes sense.
Then we can give to the causes we choose on our own (such as AIDS
research). We could carry his ideas forward and market them, with certain
rhetorical simplicity, beyond the intellectual think-tanks. We could tell
grandparents that if they give up some government entitlements that they may
not really need, then they can, while still working, have more money for their
own children, and then they will enjoy the satisfaction of seeing their
children live better lives than they did.
All this
time, I have led a double life, associating with “liberal Republicans.” I would attend Log Cabin meetings when they
had interesting debates and speakers (such as homosexuality and biology) rather
than the getting-out-the-vote, as for Carol Schwarz in the D.C. Mayor’s race in
1995. Log Cabin had always expressed a conveniently backdoor purpose: to teach
tolerance within the Republican party and conservative movement.[6]
Log Cabin, in popular terms, promotes “social liberalism” in combination with
“economic conservatism,” and this of course blends into “libertarianism.” I
would be invited to speak at a toastmaster’s Republican breakfast club in
In
libertarian schemes, political writing proposes “perfect world” mechanisms to
disarm government redistribution schemes, which seem to violate the equal
protection clause (although today no court would hold that). Individuals will
be better off and psychologically freer once they fend for themselves, and
arguably so will we all prosper collectively.
Businesses will compete freely in goods and services rather than for
corporate welfare doled out as political favors.
People ask
me why I still call myself a “conservative.” After all, libertarianism would advocate the
use of the established political power structure to deconstruct itself, an idea
that some people find contradictory.[9]
When at their best, conservatives advocate government’s interfering with
individual’s personal and economic decisions (even when applied to grown-up
members of the Armed Forces) as little as possible, yet conservatives realize
that the survival (as an “adaptive” concern in Rosenfels’s
ideas of creativity) of ordered liberty can’t be taken for granted. Certainly,
my writings up to this point reflect both concerns. A real free market
generally promotes social justice and, through the growth of economic
arrangements that often arise on an informal, cooperative and self-regulated or spontaneously ordered basis,[10]
encourages people to operate within the expressive limitations implied by their
own intimate commitments. The market, by rewarding individual initiative, thus
promotes one’s “personal best.” I could
probably call myself a “market liberal” and a “neo-conservative” or “modern conservative” simultaneously.
One colleague calls me just plain “limited!”
The best
way to develop an agenda promoting cultural entrepreneurialism is to look at
our basic moral values, and see how they get put into practice when government
steps out. Afterwards, this leads to a focus on additional constitutional
privacy protection, in the last chapter.
Government Shouldn’t Legislate Morality
In the
mid-1980’s, I attended a few Andrew R. Cecil lectures on moral values at the
This all
sounded pretty harmless and benign. Who could quarrel with that?
True,
every time I went on vacation I would go through an elaborate ritual of marking
my belongings and locking up, because there are too many people out there who
don’t care about “right from wrong.”
Government can teach that, because such a standard of morality is
clear-cut; somebody (me) gets harmed by wrongdoing.
But, from
my own history and relationships, I knew that morality meant a lot more.
Morality speaks not only to acts but
also to underlying values which
apparently give people incentive not just to “do no harm” but also to make real
commitments to others. All kinds of expressions, from pornography and
entertainment violence to Wall Street materialism, seemed to denigrate basic
civil virtues; so they were "bad for you."
---
Government,
I maintain, will be driven out of the business of adjudicating morality -
telling people what psychological values they must believe in. Values reinforce
self-concept, and ultimately belong to the individual.
But wait!
Didn’t we learn in civics that representative democracy urges the people,
through the ballot, to make collective moral choices, about how people of a
community must manage finite resources largely by accepting and carrying out
mutual obligations? Through democratic
process, people will define which individual behaviors, and even inclinations
or desires, are morally wrong (or, at least, “practically” unacceptable, say,
among unit-owners in a condo association). Less controversial now (but not so
thirty years ago), democracy will also decide how larger institutions,
especially businesses, may “morally” treat people based on the actual or
perceived associations with vulnerable “groups,” defined by race, religion, or
sexual orientation - both immutable traits and associated behaviors. Democracy
also takes it upon itself to redistribute wealth according to “moral values,” a
notion justifying a government-forced confiscation of earned wealth that
strikes me as morally offensive (even though I do pay my taxes). The “moral
issues” that democracy manipulates have generally grown out of collective
adaptive needs, which start with the premise that survival of an ordered
society, whether Egyptian, Mayan, or our own, cannot be taken for granted. But
individual morality is what gets our attention first. Quickly, majoritarian “moral judgments” merge with prejudice and
psychological lazyboy-ness. People find succor in
insularity; most executives have no understanding of issues from my off-center
street perspective, and I likewise don’t really grasp what it’s like to stay in
the ghetto.
Rubbing
like sandpaper at the grain of moral consensus is the classically liberal notion
of “self-ownership,” as well described by Boaz[12]
as an intrinsic, “natural right” experienced largely through the associated
vehicle of “property rights,” which confer the opportunity to operate as one
wishes with some specific asset (home, land, tool, intellectual creation) over
which one has immediate control and possession. All moral calculations, as a
matter of abstract principle, are to be done from the assumption that an
individual will not violate another individual’s intrinsic and corresponding
property rights. Property rights are carried out by the freedom to
contract. The understanding that
government will limit itself to maintaining this non-aggression between humans
(but forcing people to keep contracts they make with one another) may be seen
as the essence of “libertarianism,” regardless of the various interpretations
of all the various “isms.” “Natural
rights” formulations tend to break down in emergencies, says Henze’s opera The
Raft of the Medusa; societal attitudes towards gender roles, drugs, and,
say, the draft, have been intended to dodge these “disaster movies.” The practicalities of a complex and
(recently) psychologically individualistic society, along with the tendency of
political bureaucracy to entrench itself, leads one to reinvent these rights
the way a baseball hitter fights off a pitch and then drives it from the inside
out. Natural inalienable rights seem a uniquely American concept, from the
Declaration of Independence through the Bill of Rights. The English Bill of Rights
(1689), on the other hand, had seen rights as inherited through families.[13] My concern has been that we must not take
simple principles about human rights for granted but must instead look, in
detail, at the complexities of a real world in which more people discover these
rights for themselves.
In a
complicated, practical world, conservatives like Judge Robert Bork have
condemned the idea that an autonomous individual belongs to the self, apart
from finding a real place in the community.[14]
Bork’s best point is that when society
comprises individuals with no commitments to any family or communities outside
their own myopic vision, these individuals become prey to insidious
manipulation by an impersonal state. Michael Lerner works the same problem from
a liberal perspective, first criticizing the excess of “selfishness” but
calling for public measures to restore a balance of priorities in our
corporations and other major institutions.[15] Bork toys with the paradox of our cultural
emphasis on egalitarianism simultaneous with our selfish individualism. He sees
obsession with “equality of outcomes” as a byproduct of envy; I think it is
more subtle. If government can make everybody “equal” -- loosely, that means,
if government can get rid of poverty - then none of us have to feel guilty
about our own privileged lives or, more important, have to deal directly with
people who make us squirm; we can remain “separate but equal.” In the Vietnam
days, I had already seen how some “privileged” men protested the war, not so
much out of genuine (if misconceived) concern for Vietnamese women and
children, but as a way to rationalize their sitting it out. I had also seen how
the radical left tended to be populated by talented young adults whose own
lives had already gone astray and become unproductive. The point of one’s
personhood¾and freedom ¾ comes into question. Oliver North reads his
favorite quote to open his talk show: “Life is mostly about meeting obligations
to others, with occasional moderate self-indulgence.”[16]
Bork
appeals to the simplicity of having the same absolute rules of right and wrong
(no physics-test-style “part-credit”) for everybody. You live up to your
obligations as a man, and you change into someone else¾David Lynch style¾if you have to! We used to believe in
compulsory military service for young men as a moral absolute, until government
itself whittled that away with deferments. Now, we sense that a “moral” consent
to “different strokes for different folks” really produces a freer and fairer
community, once the individuals have grown up enough. Eventually, we even build
a different collective moral compass, perhaps now viewing conscription as
slavery, and valuing diversity in gender identity.
Abortion
provides perhaps the thorniest example of moral relativism. We weigh the moral
values of a woman’s control over her own pregnancy and of the unborn’s penultimate right to live. Abortion goes beyond an
abstract lower bound on respect for human life.[17] It brings up the issue of our willingness to
really care about people who may be much less than perfect. It also invokes our
process for realizing a person is fully human; today, many people would not
consider a human zygote the day after conception as a person, but today some
people don’t want to recognize African Americans as persons either (less so
than when we had slavery and then segregation).
The recent, however incomplete, information connecting homosexuality
(especially in men) to genetics raises the ethical issue of using abortion (or,
in the future, cloning) to regulate the occurrence of sexual orientation (like
gender) in a population or even eventually of genetic surgery to limit the
pluralism of nature. In ratifying “moral
values” in reproductive rights (and a woman’s control over her own body), the
democratic process would be making double-edged choices indeed. Arguments
against elective abortion to “screen” for genetic “defects” also raise the
moral objection to insisting on always having total personal control over whom
one will care about; accepting the genetic lottery of child-bearing and
parenting sounds like an obligation of life.
A related issue is the “right-to-die,” which would seem to fit liberal
notions of individual rights, until we realize how easily we could slip into
the expectation that people will die once they become “burdens.”[18]
When
morality remains “absolute,” voters might even decide what kind of (adult)
sexual behaviors are acceptable, or even mentionable in “decent” speech. Their
overriding concern would be the continuity and stability of the community,
which is putatively harmed by the covert actions or benign neglect of
individuals, who may not always recognize the ultimate multiplicative
consequences of their actions and values.
Morality,
in authoritarian parlance, is a collectively or democratically decided list of
propositions about right and wrong, derived from communal perceptions of our
underlying natures and limits as human beings. Syndicated columnist Murchison
writes, “The commonness of [our] nature is what makes morality common. It’s not
yours, not mine, but ours corporately.”[19] Allegedly, morality is achieved throughout a
community, as something greater than the sum of the parts contributed (or
subtracted) by individuals’ behaviors. A society that stakes out and follows
morality will achieve better results, a more stable liberty and social justice,[20]
but it has to know and separate right from wrong first. When citizens believe
this, their priorities in public policy become profoundly affected, emphasizing
community good first and a collectivized sense of fairness.
A person’s
actions and expressed values have impact on others far beyond immediate,
visible results. A behavior may be immoral because, if everyone did it our
society couldn’t “work”; we used to feel this way about the draft-dodging,[21]
and still do about income tax evasion. Without codification by the state,
intended to reinforce the church and corporate community, however, such majoritarian moral penumbras¾accepted definitions of
“right and wrong”¾quickly melt away. Morality becomes localized within the values
of the individual. Law is seen as
responsible for protecting weaker (or disadvantaged) people from their own temptations,
or from becoming confused by examples set by the (otherwise immediately
harmless) “self-indulgence” of the more fortunate.
For many
people, religious faith is the ultimate and facile authority for moral
values. The record of politicians in “Christian”
countries in the past may not support this view! Some issues, such as those
which infer community meanings to sexuality, should, in this view, never remain
the province of the individual, because (according to the fundamentalist) the
individual’s judgment is corrupted by his own sin. Indeed, the “original sin,” the desire to
know “good and evil,” to reduce notions of rightness to utilitarian rationalism
and consequentialism, is seen as the ultimate conceit
that drives people into their demises. (We can apparently justify both
libertarianism and social conservatism from “utilitarian” perspectives, based
on our own points of view, which are always truncated by immediate
self-interest.) Both sex and the denial
of sex can become destructive “wrongs” in this view of self-servedness.
Homosexuality (even if not acted upon) gets portrayed (as by Roy Varghese from Campus Crusade for Christ
when he had supper with me once in Dallas) as an “intrinsic moral evil” or by
the Catholic Church (in 1986) as an “objective disorder,” because its
apparently narcissistic values seem to contradict the requirement to put one’s
substance (that is sexuality) to the primary service of others and “God.” The
Since the
time of
My own
urge to moralize invokes a primal fear: without some deep “moral” grounding, I
simply won’t care for other people until I have something tangible (if psychic)
to gain from them.
Gradually,
we began to distinguish between
self-indulgence or gratification,
and self-actualization. Uncontrolled
self-indulgence and execution of urges or “reversible” temptations, of course,
amounts to sociopathy.
Moral sense has to start with regard for one’s effects on others. One grows
into wanting a positive influence on others that is one’s own. Life, even constricted to one small planet,
could be seen as an experience of creativity, lived for its own purposes and
not just for procreation or adaptive concerns. Homosexuality, in this culture,
would become a pivotal experiment in this process. In the 1970’s, Paul Rosenfels
had already taught his students that personal growth always requires
sensitivity or awareness of the real needs of others. Paul’s partner, Dean Hannotte, would write
“truth is one, and what’s objective truth, once attained, becomes the
property of all men.”[22] Personal self-expression, when carried out in
a moral fashion, would always serve others.
My own parents, following their usual fibs about Santa Claus, the Easter
Bunny, and “the stork,” had taught me that they would never punish me if I told
“the truth.” Truth in personal affairs
(unlike salesmanship), to my parents, was always a yes-or-no, no part-credit
matter. Joe Steffan would propose a similar
dichotomy. First, borrowing from the tradition of “natural rights” and (I suppose)
from writers like Channing,[23]
he kicks off with “What can be better than allowing people to live their lives as they
choose,...craft an existence that is uniquely theirs?”[24] I have known the feeling of a personal
“manifest destiny,” a virtual seed[25]
or spiritual gift in my own blood since high school. My own father had once
talked of “mental punishment” in the spirit of denial of personal expressive
choice; young children, around the “terrible twos” go through a process of
discovering what makes them distinct from everyone else and wanting constant
recognition for who they are. Maybe (in grown-ups) this “unique existence” will
become a dangerous (to others) “self-centered” morality. But then, to explain
his self-identification as a homosexual to
These
writers, taken together, have proposed a paradigm which normalizes (to borrow
from relational database terminology) the way individuals can safely set their
own moral directions in a less formally structured world. The Honor and Integrity Principle is a good
foundation for answering Bork’s charges about excess in individualism. It would
extend to the expectation not that one adhere to social conventions and
expectations (with its false veneer of “altruistic” competitiveness) but that one care about others as one cares
about oneself. Ultimately, it would also
invoke the importance of making and keeping real commitments to others, and
respecting the limitations of self-promotion these commitments imply. If enough people adapt their behavior to
these standards, society would no longer have to design its laws to protect its
most helpless members. We could trust human self-interest enough to let people
decide what they want to do with their own property and own bodies, and not let
government set limits for them.
Despite
the international and urban crises of the 1970’s and the frightening
implication of the AIDS epidemic emerging in the 1980’s, people began to
believe that government should not define morality (except perhaps in
collective areas such as discrimination); rather, it should facilitate a stable
society where people will learn morality
on their own.[30] Could we afford not to have the state tell
individuals that unsafe sex is morally wrong, or tell companies that closing
plants shipping jobs overseas to use child labor is unacceptable?
The
intellect of Judge Bork (not on the Court) certainly put some brakes on the
race for moral “liberation.” Our “moral” sensibilities today (expressed in
civil rights laws) would not let a person open a restaurant on his own property
and then serve or hire only Whites or even only Christians. Why? It sets an
example which encourages others to discriminate unfairly against a minority,
and inflames racial tensions. Then, why can we not prevent two men from
enjoying consensual sex in their own homes, if we find that public knowledge
(through “ordinary understanding”) undermines less well-situated men to perform
their roles in society as men and get married and hold doors for ladies? The
“liberal” analyzes this by appealing to fairness and by calculating who gets
hurt by the resultant discrimination. The liberal and conservative positions
both presume a cap on the achievement of personal accountability. The
libertarian invokes privacy and property, and denies government the prerogative
to umpire with such divisive “collective” moral calls, which amount to
“legalized” theft.
This
leaves “liberal opinion” the task of narrowing the acceptable range of
“democratically” defined group morality.
Chai Feldblum
presents the interesting admission that the state may indeed rightfully
legislate morality; but, according to the “Devlin paradigm,” the state may only
proscribe behaviors which make the majority “uncomfortable” when the persons
affected are not harmed. She compares
the prohibition of nudism to the less justifiable ban on sodomy.[31]
The problem will be reliability distinguishing “discomfort” from real harm, and
in assessing the capacity of people to answer just for themselves (which Feldblum proposes to be done by pods of hypothetical juries by a Mutual
Agreement process).
Hopefully,
sensible citizens would see that gay men and lesbians are really harmed by
sodomy laws, once they understand that homosexuality is more than sex. If not, the case for enhancing constitutional
privacy protections (next chapter) gets even stronger.
---
“Moral”
arguments may seem more persuasive in prohibiting “vice” behaviors other than consensual sex, and
enforcement may not be as intrusive.
With the “drug wars” (as previously with
Prohibition) we may indeed be creating rather than preventing our drug problem.[32] Modern liberal opinion sees drug use as far
less “fundamental” to a person’s self-expression than sexuality; in fact, it
may interfere with “self.” That bifurcation
is supposed to give “liberals” a way to “morally” differentiate private sexual
behavior from drug use; libertarians find such distinction a bit unprincipled.
Now, I don’t see what drugs could possibly do for me; I hate the drowsiness and
fluttering heartbeat I get from allergy medications. Nevertheless, some drug
users have told me (even recently) that “getting high” on whatever substance is
how they “discover” themselves and transcend their own causative realities; so,
for them, chemical euphoria amounts to more than immediate gratification. Some substances really do fracture a person’s
reality to the extent he does not know what he does. However, with drugs like
pot the arguments seem to be merely moral ones again, that the drugs provide
easy short-circuits to “highs” and interfere with productivity (just as some
people see homosexuality); furthermore, upper class “yuppies” who buy cocaine
are criticized as subsidizing the blight of the urban ghettos.[33] “Soft” drugs supposedly lead to hard ones
(like crack cocaine) for some people, and these stronger drugs cause personal
character to disintegrate. Does crime
come from this drug-induced loss of “morals” or from the fact drugs stay
underground? This certainly is an openly
collectivistic argument.
Maybe, drug laws can be enforced (particularly
in public places where purchasers could be trapped) with less intrusion than can sodomy laws;
their abuse yields to reliable medical tests, and enforcement could be limited
to public-space transactions. Maybe, for middle class kids, illegality is a
deterrent to use, as it was for me. For the underclass, the “war on drugs”
certainly increases crimes (against everyone) and may well increase, rather
than prevent, the temptation to “try it.”
The “economics” of drug enforcement has made it “pay” to catch marijuana
growers and users rather than persons moving cocaine or hallucinogens.[34] Short of a full libertarian solution of total
legalization, a sensible compromise seems to be to decriminalize mere
possession of substances in the privacy of the home (and legalization of the
distribution of sterile needles by voluntary efforts) but to punish the sale,
trafficking, and public conveyance of “hard” drugs. The Drug Enforcement Administration’s efforts
to catch farmers and even homeowners growing marijuana on their own property
seem cruel and cynical; many people have turned to marijuana growing when
legitimate farming business or regular corporate employment fails (while the
government, despite anti-smoking litigation, subsidizes tobacco). In 1996,
California and Arizona voters quite sensibly authorized physicians to prescribe
marijuana for medical uses, and Federal authorities arrogantly threatened to
arrest any physicians who follow suit; government articulates a domino theory,
that any loosening of the “zero tolerance”[35]
law on drugs will let otherwise undisciplined people in on the notion that some
drugs may be acceptable in private after all. Asset forfeitures[36]
(of drug sellers or customers caught in public) should occur only as part of a
criminal sentence or after full due process of civil trial; today, they are
sometimes an easy ruse for corrupt policemen to extort money out of innocent
citizens who fit certain “profiles.”
Talk show host Joe Madison goes against mainstream media, and accuses
rogue members of the
Perhaps,
in today’s more permissive and tempting world, legalization would be taken as
endorsement of use, until private interests learned how to appeal to personal
pride (it can work with tobacco). However, calls from Harry Browne, William F.
Buckley,[37]
and Peter McWilliams to end the war on drugs need to be considered
carefully. Early in this century, most
substances were legal, and there was no “drug problem.” Of course, there was
not the same rapid distribution system, or the same concentration of vulnerable,
impoverished and family-poor populations in the inner cities that set up an
easy audience for dealers to capture; nor was society as vulnerable to
“mistakes” made by operators of a technological infrastructure. It strikes me
that, a decade or so after Virginia and other southern colonies were founded in
the early 1600’s, their main industry was legal “drug dealing,” of tobacco (the
“spice” of the New World, in science fiction author Frank Herbert’s terms).[38] Government is now trying all kinds of
measures to drive the tobacco industry out of business (or, arguably, to tax
smokers for the harm they do to themselves and pass on to “society”);[39]
however, since the tobacco industry intentionally misled the public, some
libertarians might support the current anti-smoking efforts - I do.
With
issues like pornography, prostitution and gambling, perhaps the think-through
is simpler.[40] When should government protect people from
themselves?[41] This observation does not apply to child
pornography, since it cannot be produced without abusing a child who cannot
give consent.[42]
Government,
in the modern world of enhanced privacy rights, is expected to restrict its
implementation of moral notions to the narrowest construction. “Morality,” for
political caucuses, is to be limited to preventing one person from visibly and
immediately transgressing another person’s will. The state will punish people
(even juveniles) with certainty when they harm, endanger or cheat others, and
when they fail to keep their promises - and that is all. Government will not decide whether or not one
kind of questionable conduct is legally acceptable based on the political
strength of the persons affected or even on their inborn or “immutable”
inclinations or on the behavior’s symbolic influence; only the results of acts
on others is to be considered. When
government does anything more to protect people from their own human natures,
personal freedoms are always lost.
The latter
may be no small order. This concedes (despite “natural rights” arguments
mentioned earlier) a utilitarian notion for the role of law, apparently
required for my proposed Privacy Amendment to be reasonable. The “public”
consequences depend on how such an approach is implemented. One place to start
is to hold individuals strictly accountable for their own choices. (Of course, this does mean literally that one
may be “irresponsible” for oneself and be left alone as long as one doesn’t
harm others.) If you have a kid, you
will support him. It you buy a house, you will honor your responsibility for
the mortgage, even if the pad, like a trailer or used car, goes down in value
(even if someone else assumes the note without qualifying - I got caught on
that one).[43] If you commit a crime against another person
or property, you are, when convicted, punished with certainty but without
regard to the identity (including sexual orientation or race) of the victim -
we don’t need hate crimes laws. If you
drink and cause a serious accident, you will pay for the rest of your life. If
you get sick because of your own behavior (whether sex, diet, “drugs” or
tobacco), you will at be expected to pay for a substantial part of your own
care, at least according to your income. You will save regularly for your own
retirement. If possible, you will purchase at least some catastrophic coverage
for your own health care while you are eligible for insurance without
pre-existing conditions requirements. You will not expect the government to
shield you from private “discrimination” because of the anticipated
consequences of your own behavior, or shelter you from your own past neglect
with “entitlements.” You will not live
on a flood plain, and if you build in an earthquake prone area, you will build
to modern safety codes. You do not play
the “blame game.” Finally, you will care for others as yourself, more than
yourself if your historical or family obligations require. All of this is just
fair play if the “taxpayer” is to sell off interest in your private life.
Sounds like a perfect world, doesn’t it!
Of course, such a drawdown in the use of government as a buffer to
absorb our own petty indulgences would have to be accomplished gradually.
The shift
from defining individual liberty relative to general community welfare to the
“liberal” notion that the individual comes first, becomes workable if enough
people sign on to a voluntary “honor system.” A code like this will only work,
perhaps, if the public can gradually come to embrace a personal honor system.
The moral claim to be one’s own boss is secured by one’s honor, courage, civility,
and citizenship, and by the recognition of personal limits and precedent
obligations to others. These values, the basis of character, need to be explored and debated fully in private
cultural and religious spheres, ever more as government withdraws. In fact, when government defines morality,
people may feel less responsible for developing a sense of moral compass on
their own. The full experience of personal responsibility requires that a
person fully understand, in her own words, the basis for her moral beliefs,
especially as they relate to that person’s boundaries, what is hers to have. By
confusing personal accountability with “communal” or “collectivized” morality
and by romanticizing the rather adaptive commitments of family life, the
socially conservative “right” gets away with denying many individuals the
incentive to comprehend their own personal senses of ethics. On the other hand, when people haven’t
internalized moral values of commitment and meeting the needs of others, they
may seek to gain attention and recognition in destructive, violent ways. The focus in debating moral ideas surely must
shift from seeing morality as a collective experience to assigning it to
individuals to carry out on their own volition. Libertarianism facilitates this
growth of moral sense among individuals, but it does not define what these
morals are beyond simple ideas of non-harm and keeping promises.
Libertarianism, as a political system, by no means gives license for unfettered
cultural individualism. [Libertarianism
doesn’t prevent a localized communalism and associated loyalty sinks from
developing, where people bind together into various religious and cultural
communities and agree to pay tribute to their leadership and their “privately”
adopted rules for these communities. The Mormon Church can still exert its
moralizing influence.]
A simple
formulation of individualized morality is the Golden Rule: “Do unto others, as
you would have them do unto you.” Actually, the Biblical text, “love others as
you love yourself.” is a bit more challenging.
Morality,
seen this way, emphasizes self-empowerment as congruent, not contradictive, to
helping others. The moral imperative to give away all possible wealth to the
poor (an extrapolation from the Rich Young Ruler parable) articulated by
leftist writers like Unger[44]
comes across a copout for people who can’t make commitments to others. Perhaps,
in the absence of something like marital commitment, a less selective “service”
to others is appropriate, if it is part of a growth process in building on the
ability to love and motivate others.
Therapists
- clinical psychologists rather than psychiatrists - are supposed to make their
livings by helping people decide how to recognize their own accountabilities
and limits. To have character, an individual needs to know what is his to have.
He knows , for example, that he has done wrong by compulsively or under
temptation dropping a rock off a highway
overpass even if the rock doesn’t cause a wreck. But other moral matters
really do seem ambiguous, when we become are own pilots. We learn to discern
poverty from martyrdom and loyalty from honor, to keep caring about a loved one
who falls to earth, to renounce both jealousy and aloofness.
People
don’t come into the world as mature adults. How would I have turned out if my
parents hadn’t sheltered me from the violence immodestly growing in our culture
even in the 50’s. I was made to be afraid of “bad words,” so that Rhett’s
famous epithet at the end of the movie
Gone with the Wind came across as a real jolt. I couldn’t even see House of Wax as had my boyhood playmates. Maybe that’s the point,
my parents took responsibility for me! Perhaps it won’t be as easy to explain
to the kids when something is “wrong” when it is no longer “against the law.”
They really will need to grow up in good families, if they are to become like
the role models fighting “the Ban.”.
Family Values, Marriage and Individual
“Lifestyle” Choice
In 1994,
Virginia Governor George Allen actually sent me a form letter insinuating the
Commonwealth’s “Crimes against Nature” law is necessary to protect the social
model of “the traditional family.” What people do in their own beds does matter
if others “know” or even suspect.
Allen’s
letter highlights more bluntly than usual our common perception of “family
values.” Individual self-fulfillment -
personal expression often dressing up sexual or romantic explorations - has
allegedly budded out of American (and Western) family life and gutted it,
leaving children (supposedly intended to derive automatically the greater
material wealth and freedom of their parents ) neglected and rowdy men untamed
and adrift. Family, though good enough at
one time in that western men and women get to choose their spouses[45]
rather than having marriages arranged, seemed to box in one’s ambitions. Family
has, until relatively recently, defined the granularity of individuality. As a
singleton, I am part of the problem because I can focus resources on myself and
not on spouse and children whose needs would always come first. In the past,
the Left would have seen me as an undeserving beneficiary of privileged “class”
which enriches itself at the expense of poor families; today the Right sees me
as having cheated on a moral responsibility to father the optimal family.
Should society recognize the commitments and “sacrifice” required for family
(both economic and psychological) at the expense of unattached (and
particularly childless) individuals? A related debate is, should government
lead such an effort, or does it just get in the way? The very recent push for
recognition of same-sex marriage seems like an homage to family as the “right”
way to live.
I accept,
almost as an article of faith, that the nuclear family does partly explain the
explosion of living standards during this century. In earlier times, single,
self-constructed and “autonomous” lifestyles were publicly unknown. Before
World War II, urban young men were encouraged to live in rooming houses under
“Christian” influence (as my father had lived in a YMCA until he married), and
single female teachers often were forbidden by contract to live alone. Sometimes, lifestyles were collectivized way
beyond the family, both on the American pioneering wagon trains, and in modern
kibbutzim in
There’s no
question, more of our kids today grow up in single-parent homes (often headed
by mothers who never wed the papas) and they turn out badly. Freedom for the next generation will depend upon
enough of our children learning character. Does today’s high divorce rate and
incidence of single-parenthood occur because we have too much freedom, or is it
because government gets in the way of genuine family activity?
Families
today complain that government interferes with their privacy with higher
relative taxation (especially the “marriage penalty”) and intrusive government
(most of all, the
“Family values” has become a tangled issue
with the sudden credibility of the “same-sex marriage” debate; like a slice of
a relational database, the concept looks very different according to one’s
“view.” Only recently have pundits claimed “procreation” as the main purpose of
the family. Indeed, “marriage” provides
other social benefits beyond (obviously) rearing children. These gains include
the taming of men, stability, and a safety net.
Governor
Allen’s superficial connection between putatively immoral behavior (homosexual
sodomy) and elevating the traditional family underscores a fundamental confusion
in conservative thought. Why is it necessary to punish variation from accepted
gender roles (and sometimes outrightly persecute
effeminate men, “butch” women and trans-gendered persons) to strengthen the
family? Allen, Bork, and other conservatives are right in maintaining we do
need to look closely at what is bothering marriage, and debate honestly what
should be done about it. Perhaps the problem does have to do with shallow
notions of individual freedom, without the appropriate commitment and responsibility.
It’s more than gender roles. There is no reason why strong families can’t
accept rotating household chores for husband and wife, and recognize different
ideas about manliness and femininity. Gender hang-ups are a more personal
thing. I judge men favorably, for my own
erotic purposes, on whether they are indeed “real men.” In my own most private
life, I do discriminate.
The debate
over family values brings up three questions of priority. How important are the
legal institution of marriage and the social, psychological and legal props
underneath it?[48]
Has the raising of children lost credibility in our society as a personally
fulfilling obligation? Does the lack of
faithfulness in relationships (traditional marriages) indicate a shallowness of
sexuality and character with the substitution of fantasy and visual stimulation
for real emotion? The combination of these constitutes the essence of the
“family values” debate: should society deliberately not just relieve burdens
but also increase the differential privileges for traditional families with
children?
These three problems intersect as we look at
four overviews of the “family values” problem.
This simplest paradigm holds government should
simply hold people accountable for raising and supporting the kids they choose
to have, and do nothing to undermine the formation and stability of families
the children clearly need. Family
breakdown yields to principled and relatively uncomplicated solutions.
Government should not reward mothers for having babies out of wedlock. Parents
with young or even teen-age children should think twice about no-fault divorce
(not an option in earlier days when women - except during World War II - were
usually more economically dependent on men), but they don’t need to have
government order them to hesitate. Parents should take their own reasonable
measures to control their children’s access to the media, especially now the
Internet.
The second
view holds that a combination of today’s darwinian
workplace and economy, “hedonistic” lifestyles, inflation, and taxes puts
families with children at a grave disadvantage when compared to singles, or
even childless (including gay) couples.
Families feel economic pressure for both spouses to work, and motherhood
is something less than a real “occupation”; gone are the good old days of housewife-oriented
television syndications such as “Homemaker’s Exchange.”[49]
Since 1970, the number of single households has increased (one-person
households now make up 25% or the total); the number of children per household
and the percentage in legally married, two-parent families has gone down.[50] The demands of many employers for long hours
tend to keep couples apart and away from their children, and sometimes
increases the likelihood of divorce.
Single moms may have an especially difficult time attending to their
jobs and children simultaneously. My own experience is that of someone with
only himself to care for most of the time. A male acquaintance who home-schools
his kids tells me he wants to move his family farther into the suburbs, where
there will be more children and stay-at-home moms (nationally, occurring in
about one quarter of two-parent families) in the neighborhood![51]
Focus on the Family communicates in “private” emails absurd statistics on the
affluence and education of gays relative to “normal” straights. However, other
studies have shown that married male heads of one-earner households, at least
at executive levels, tend to earn more, since they fight harder for promotions
to provide for their families. In many companies, there may be relatively few
gays in upper management because gays may (on their own) feel a conflict
between organizational loyalty and personal lifestyle.[52]
A recent NIH study gives reassurance that children (other than infants) placed
in professional, stimulating (and often expensive) day-care may indeed develop
well, and provides some vindicating for couples where both parents work outside
the home.[53]
I may have
trivialized this point. Raising a child, especially a difficult or disabled
child, consumes a parent’s life and reverses most of a parent’s own priorities.
I can see how much my parents gave of themselves just for me. If parents accept
from government or other institutions certain special privileges at the expense
of everyone else, then parents really are admitting they can’t raise their kids
entirely on their own. This gets into Hillary Clinton’s “it takes a village”
problem, and it may be OK for the village to be involved if government keeps
out. But having gays, lesbians, and singles
around complicates things for parents who don’t want to be reminded they need
and take help. It would be easier if we would go away, to our own ascetic
priesthoods.
Conservatives
correctly point to today’s larger tax bite (including social security and
Medicare taxes) as a major cause of relatively more distress to families.
Originally, the income tax code (which used to be much more progressive) was
designed to guarantee parents could keep enough to provide for their kids
before they paid out anything. The simplest remedy is a per-child tax credit,
but that perpetuates dependence on tax policy to deliberately and prospectively
motivate personal behavior.[54] Conservatives also complain that civil rights
laws often prevent landlords and mortgage companies from discriminating in
favor of legally married couples, but neglect to mention that fifteen years ago
apartment complexes often refused to rent to families with children, forcing
them to rent or buy homes before they were financially prepared. Today, private
interests (more than government) often give preferences to families with many
children, such as when foundations subsidize student loans.
Recent
research into child brain development,[55]
its dependence on parental stimulation and its clear association with all of
our human capacities, underscores this point. Can a child who cannot grow
normally because of parental inattention (and drug abuse) really become
responsible for himself as an adult, in the spirit of my arguments? The demands
of the competitive workplace need to be balanced with the opportunity for
parents (fathers included) to spend ample time with their children.
The third chamber questions our seeing
ourselves as almost “too good” to need marriage. A child ready to “understand
things” wants to trust his parents’ motives.
“Papa loved Mama, so they got married and had babies”[56]
- raised Dick, Jane, and Baby Sally.
Daytime television in the 1950’s used to glorify the “blessed event.”
Until Vietnam-Stonewall-Moonwalk, we tended to believe in an old-fashioned
ideal for life cycles: you hold off until you get married, you consummate on
your wedding night, the wife takes the husband’s name and has children, the
husband can provide for the wife and children with one income. The husband is
tamed, becomes a new person; his masculinity is dissolved and reprecipitated. He
identifies his new self with bequeathing to his children a better life than he
had, and maybe than his neighbors’ kids will have. If something happens to him,
on the battlefield or fighting crime in the streets, he is honored because he
has a wife and children. Finally, he can still pretend to himself he is a
“tough” and as much a “real man” as ever; he has proven he can perform.
There is
now a confusing, bewildering multiplicity of ways to self-enlightenment. The
old expectation, that most “normal people” get legally married to one spouse in
a lifetime and raise children, as their first priority and as a pre-requisite
to all other self-actualizations, is now
just another lifestyle choice. Then this ideal is nothing, because it becomes a
burden, or at least an obligation. Family
doesn’t seem to generate enough of its own rewards to pay for itself. It
surrenders some of its allure to the reflexive narcissism (“loving” only
someone whom one wants to “be like”) and “self-centered” morality of same-sex
attraction visible next door, or to the X-movie house a few blocks away. Men,
if they think in utilitarian terms about what they can “get” from their
partners or from their separate lives, no longer “need” the strong marital
bonds prerequisite to successful parenting. After all, most (heterosexual) men,
approaching sexuality from their biological drives, need to learn to value fatherhood and family,
mainly from women, for whom childbearing and subsequent caring come naturally. Knowledge of alternatives, according to some
conservatives, wrecks the whole process, for “masculine” but insensitive and
superficial young men. The options can be more subtle; unmarried X-Files role models Mulder
and Scully come across as having outgrown sexuality altogether. There are
separate cultural distractions which proclaim that both marriage and children
are burdens, even though some infertile couples will spend all of their savings
on bearing a first child. “Don’t tell” means keep sexual (and psychological)
options out of sight from everyone.
Married
people really do have more sex than singles, according to many studies. But the
“sexual revolution” has indeed reduced the allure of penetrative, procreative
sexual intercourse, particularly the consummation on wedding night, as a peak
experience, around which the rest of life can be disciplined. In my own
live-at-home college days, straight chums would say, sexual intercourse (on
dates) made them feel “close” to their
girlfriends; but then they would rationalize the double-standard for men and
women as a way to keep themselves interested
An attitude that regards sex as another “recreation” is like
experiencing church communion as “refreshment” rather than a sacrament, like
marriage. “No sexual intercourse outside
of marriage” used to mean, effectively, no meaningful life without the “deep
sexuality” that is supposed to grow around marital intercourse only. (Of
course, this aphorism also meant ,”no homosexuality.”) Today eroticism, with reasonable precautions,
can be “safe” - from both disease and pregnancy; one can, at least, stay within
masturbation. The obligations of male performance and the prudery of female
virginity are sometimes seen as adaptive “hang-ups”; we have said, “get off
it,”¾there are more important (“creative”) things
to experience in life than intercourse anyway.
This is a curious circle indeed. But if sex just isn’t so important any
more, how can family life remain stable?
We are
rediscovering the notion that sexual interest itself needs to be “protected.”
Laws against public nudity, after all, protect heterosexuals from
desensitization, as if people could become immune to their own sexuality. In 1986, I picked up at the Los Angeles
airport a tract which directly criticized soft-core pornography for causing men
to lose sexual interest in aging wives (sometimes right after childbirth).
Arguably, pornography focuses so much attention on sexual attractiveness that
homely people have a hard time finding spouses. When you become a man, you give
up childish things - adultery, of course, but even the sexual fantasies of
missed perfection, of younger and still nubile women or white-hot men. This
protection of healthy, “natural” sexuality (as Aquinas saw it) does invoke an
odd “moral” paradox; early Catholic teachings (Augustine) had seen a person’s
sexual part as “shameful” and marriage (motivated by procreation) as a moral
compromise.
The church
figures into the delicacy of sexual ukase; the Catholic church has always
provided a “special” priesthood for men frankly disinclined toward active
sexual performance with women and immune to aggressive or accumulative
behavior; Protestant churches do not do so, as if to imply that marriage and
fatherhood must remain a fundamental obligation for all normal men. The
“celibacy” and perhaps “poverty” experience may, for some, provide an effective
way to renounce false loyalties and competitiveness, even if the church (or
some other authoritarian entity) still demands a simple and self-effacing
faith.
Supposedly,
the erosion of marriage and parenting as the expected conduit into adult life,
makes it difficult for people, especially men, to conceive of spending a whole
intimate life with just one other person.
Even in
earlier times, some couples, as my parents put it, “just couldn’t get along”,[57] but, since people think of themselves first,
a bad marriage today is more likely to result in divorce.[58]
In earlier times, a disgruntled wife could suppress or separate her own
expression to keep a marriage together.[59] Laura Schlessinger
often reports that children who go through divorce and remarriage (and there
really is a remarriage “boom” these days) do worse than kids who go through
divorce and wind up with single parents, and neither do as well as kids of
two-parent families. True, in the past, bad families with abusive relationships
did stay together for the kids, and rural parents sometimes looked upon kids as
much as economic asset as psychological obligation. Sometimes splitting up is
the only way to stop or prevent violence.[60] But kids really need the comfort of knowing
that “family” (that is, the children themselves) is more important to their
parents than any dilettante challenge or distraction.
Families
are more likely to stay together when the parents did not live together before
becoming legally married, and, even better, did not experience sexual
intercourse until the wedding night consummation. Then, in at least a numerical
sense, people maintain more stable families (for the benefit of their children)
when the state, the church, and other large instrumentalities of society have
given formal recognition to their sexual relationships. In keeping both
individual liberty and family values, this is the tough nut to crack, to behave
well without the motivation of social approbation.
Societal
support for “family” raises an interesting paradox, especially for women. If
one gets his whole sense of self from family roles, then is one really one’s
own self, really able to account for one’s own choices? This was a pertinent
question for women in the past when they were discouraged from making
“economic” and even political choices for themselves.
Restoration
of the special place for traditional marriage, as a bedrock both for adult
living and raising children, cannot be achieved without expecting unmarried and
perhaps childless people (most gays and lesbians) to sacrifice and chip in. In
short, this pedestal requires “heterosexism.”[61]
This is simple mathematics, it’s like balancing equations on chemistry quizzes.
The
devaluation of traditional “family” has exaggerated differences in living
standards between the West and the Third World. The birthrate (especially among
Caucasians) has dropped in some communities, possibly below replacement levels
as many men and women both come to view children is competition for individual
accomplishment rather than their own unique progeny.[62]
A fourth problem is, do we really want to put our kids first? That used to be how “normal” men, without intellectual introspection, validated themselves, by providing better futures for their children than the lives they had led. Walking to the Pentagon Metro on Gay Pride day, I saw nature’s paradigm: two “married” mockingbirds ferociously chased a crow who had wandered too close to their nest. They would sacrifice anything for their young. Today, I hear a suburban woman, writing and getting approved a $200 grocery check, say in the non-express line, “you know me by the number of child-seats in my van.” A systems programmer in a