A Persistent Argument – Gay Marriage and "Non-Biological" Family creation.

There is an argument against the removal of gender from Australia’s’ marriage legislation; changes that would permit same-sex couples to be married. This argument usually uses obscure language like “the grammar of society” to make certain dog-whistle points that you either will agree with or not understand. Still it has considerable currency. For example it was recently published on the ABC Religion and Ethics page. It is possibly the second loudest argument against gay marriage after just quoting religious texts out of context.

I’ve attempted to improve the arguments’ clarity and have identified it as having three steps;

1. Reserving marriage as a rite for heterosexual couples maintains “biological” family creation as normal over other forms,

2. This is a positive effect.

3. Therefore marriage legislation should continue to prevent same-sex couples from being married.

My goal is to lay out what in the real world the argument is actually describing and whether it makes any case for reserving marriage as a rite for heterosexual couples in Australia.

To discuss point one we need to recognize that there are many ways in which an adult can be in the parenting role with a child. A man and a woman can “love each other very much” as we like to tell children and their horizontal dance in bed can summon a stork in the traditional manner. These two people can maintain a relationship together in which they fairly exclusively co-parent the child. In lieu of a better term I’ll call this “biological family creation”.

Foster care and adoption are obvious alternatives to this. Blended families are even more common and can produce situations where a child has more than two adults who play some kind of parenting role, and where clear definitions of what mum and dad means and who holds those roles, don’t hold up. It can be up to the children as they age to say who their “real” parents are based on who does the parenting. They may nominate more than two.

In a much smaller number of cases people enlist IVF technology to assist in reproduction. Some of these technologies through the use of donor sperm mean that one genetic parent is never involved at all in parenting or legally defined as a parent even before conception. There is also the use of surrogate mothers where women bear children for other couples to raise. Sometimes the child is genetically unrelated to the woman who bears them, through artificial insemination, but it is also possible that the woman’s own eggs are fertilized by one of the parents-to-be.

All of these forms of family creation, from the most common of blended families to the least common use of surrogacy, can occur in opposite-sex parent families. However, heterosexual relationships can mimic successfully the mum-dad-stork situation regardless of how they came to parent (foster, IVF, blended families). Outsiders are able to simply assume that the mother of a child born in another woman’s womb, or the father of an adopted child are in fact biological parents. This is not disrupted by single-parent situations either. Biological family creation can be assumed whether or not it has occurred.

Same-sex-parent families are different. They can’t successfully mimic families that are “biologically created”. (Note: I am really disliking this term but struggling to come up with an alternative). It’s obvious that a child with two parents of the same sex is part of a family that has been created through foster care or adoption, or as a blended family or with some form of assisted reproduction. This means that same-sex-parent families oblige schools, other institutions and the general public to recognize non-biological families in a way that all the heterosexual versions never did.

The particular role that gay marriage plays is that it makes same-sex-parent families public and undeniable. The last defense for people who wish to minimize acknowledging families created by non-biological means (after reading heterosexual parents as biological parents regardless) is to simply deny the homosexual family. The mothers’ partner is not accepted as the child’s parent - as their mother - but merely as the mother’s partner. This can be done even despite gay marriage but it’s harder to do with it. Certainly there is some obstacle that has been removed – at an institutional level – when gay parents can use the word marriage in terms of the recognition of their families.

Now that we’ve drawn the long bow between gay marriage and the normalization of non-biological family creation we have to ask the question, is this a bad thing? The answer to this lies partly in separating out two meanings of normalization.

On the one hand normal is a label and a description that justifies certain default privileges. This is generally a sucky situation for anyone who lies outside of the norm. For the children of non-biologically created families being treated as ab-normal is not great.

On this level if extending marriage to same-sex-parents does something to normalize and oblige the celebration of the non-biologically created family it would do a good thing for those families. This will be of benefit to heterosexual parents and their children of non-biologically created families too. Furthermore, the cost for biologically created families will only be the loss of bullying privileges, not an “ab-normalisation” of their own situation. It’s a win – win for the children because normal is being broadened not merely shifted.

On the other hand, normalisation is the establishing of norms – the limits of our usual choices. (Where the first type of normal is descriptive, the second is prescriptive.) Norms can be simply such matters as talking in turn or how much of the human body can be seen in public. We have successfully “normed” breastfeeding in public from a previous norm of huddling in change rooms. People can still make choices outside of norms – it’s just harder to do because you have to confront a tide of expectation and surprise. It also simply doesn’t occur to many people to go against norms. At their strongest norms are internalized and assumed. 

At the moment it is a norm in Australia for people to biologically create their families.  By this I mean that most people assume that to have a family they will have heterosexual sex with someone else and subsequently co-parent with them. Some people anticipate fostering or adoption rather than having their own kids but most don’t. Gay men and lesbians often assume that they will not have kids because this “normal” option is not open to them.

Changing what is considered normal in terms of family creation will potentially change people’s expectations and thus their choices. The increasing normalization of foster care hopefully means more people consider this an option when starting their own families. That’s the explicit intent of the advertising by foster care agencies. Given the terrible shortage of parents prepared to foster compared to kids in need this must be considered a great thing.

But could it go too far? To an extent the stolen generations or the historic forced adoptions placed on unwed mothers in this country are cases of fostering / adoption becoming a greater default than is desirable. However, to a greater extent those tragedies are borne of the racism and lack of consent that polluted them. Still they affect our imagination when we consider what an increased trend towards fostering and adoption as means of family creation might look like.

And what about IVF and surrogacy? Could that become increasingly popular if norms privelaging biological family creation were relaxed? The economic conditions for such a situation are there given that the best age biologically for pregnancy is currently the worst financial time for it. Economically it might make sense if women paid their way through higher education by bearing children for people like themselves with a decade of post graduation income to raise the child with.

Most of us would not be comfortable with these kinds of situations becoming more normal however. Whether a child’s separation from their genetic parents is due to fostering, or IVF or surrogacy we recognize this includes issues for children. This may just be in such a simple matter of access to medical history, but also for some people in terms of identity. Surrogacy raises additional concerns about the commodification of pregnancy and the exploitation of the poor. IVF technology has its own unique bio-ethics concerns.

Fostering and adoption can also move children from poor to rich families when a more just solution would be to address people’s poverty. Given the overlay of class and race in Australia, fostering and adoption can have implications for indigenous self-determination in particular. The national rate of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children in out-of-home care in 2012 was 10 times the rate for non-Indigenous children (AIHW, 2012). This is only partly remedied by a focus on kinship care where children are placed by priority with extended family members.

Whether or not a ballooning in other methods of family creation would eventuate from the de-norming of biological family creation involves huge speculation. What can be said is that the norming of biological family creation may be part of what restricts these kind of scenarios. Of course numerous other restricting norms can be imagined including ones specific to surrogacy for example, or to some fostering situations but not others for example. Overall norming non-biological family creation may be a good thing (making many more kids feel normal), but we can imagine it could have some negative effects we will need to address.

This brings us to the final point. If gay marriage has some correlation (albeit a weak one) to norming non-biological family creation and norming non-biological families might have some negative effects is this sufficient to oppose gay marriage? I think the answer to that is no based not only on the gaps and stretches in the steps taken so far but on the fact that this last step is not a necessary conclusion.

Firstly it is disingenuous, in the context of arguing against gay marriage, to suggest that marriage is only about family creation. Marriage is a public measure of commitment and “seriousness” for any relationship. Marriage, as a commitment to one’s partner for life, has historically legitimised sexual activity and you only have to consider the use of contraception in married relationships to realize that most everybody knows sex is about more than making babies. It should be clear that restricting marriage to heterosexual people is entirely consistent with some group’s expectation of celibacy for homosexual people. This shouldn’t be something that the state gets involved in. Churches can use their own specific marriage rites to legitimize sexuality according to their religion.

Furthermore marriage is a public act which communicates to the wider community your relationship status and thus draws on community support for that relationship. It’s taking yourself and partner off the market by “putting a ring on it.” If same sex relationships, their communities and their children will benefit from greater social support for permanence in relationships then we should enlist marriage as way to provide this.

The reality is that the big drivers for non-biologically created families are not gay and lesbian couples wanting to marry. Denying same-sex marriage because we anticipate some dystopian future in which the problems of non-biologically created families overwhelm us – like something out of Brave New World – strikes me as simply making lesbians and gay men the scapegoats of society’s direction. We have created an economy that requires study and work through ones easiest childbearing years just in order to think about home ownership. We have created the often racially based inter-generational poverty that partly drives kids into fostering and adoption situations. It is heterosexual couples who first sought the technologies of IVF and for whom they have been developed. None of this is affected by withholding a potential benefit to same-sex couples, their families and their communities.

Personally I think we went wrong when we normalized nuclear families and made an idol of parents’ rights. This model of raising kids requires people to have their “own” kids to be in the child-raising game. That’s a tragic loss of the gifts of many people unless they create their own families, non-biologically if necessary. It seems stupid that we have created this forced choice though to be fair we were encouraged by marketers to do so. Nothing consumes like a society in nuclear families.

Ultimately I think gay marriage has become inevitable because too many high profile people have compared same-sex relationships to dog fucking for people to accept anything less. The debate has been almost entirely framed by what people think about homosexual sex, in the nastiest of terms. Now too much “face” is affected by the issue for a continued restriction of marriage to be heard (by either side) as anything other than a win for homophobia.

When we consider the issue from a direction other than a disapproval of homosexuality as this argument tries to do I’m still unconvinced. Although this argument gets a lot of airplay I don’t think it shows that we shouldn’t remove gender from Australia marriage legislation. We should address our concerns about non-biological family creation in other ways. I’m certainly open to the opinion that we should remove all marriage from the state all together –some congregations of different faiths will choose to marry gay people and some wont - but keeping gendered marriage preserved in our legislation and preventing gay marriage is something I hope will soon end. 

Are we evil? - A response to Paul Washer.

 

The above video shows a preacher, Paul Washer, responding to a young mans’ open query about the doctrine of election (transcript here) The doctrine of election is the belief some Christians have that people are chosen solely by God’s free will (from before their birth) to be made able to be true Christians and thus to be spared the fate of the rest of humanity, hell. In fact Paul Washers explanation takes a while to get to election specifically. He is almost entirely focused on describing the complete evil of humanity. That’s his take* on a connected doctrine called total depravity and it’s also what I want to focus on in this post.

When I watched this clip I was fascinated. I was fascinated because there are statements made in this video which are excruciatingly difficult to refute. That isn’t because they are supported by a mountain of evidence or any evidence. Instead they are hard to refute because although the video shows those statements being made and being agreed to they are the sorts of statements I can’t figure out the how of disagreeing or agreeing with them. They are not nonsense but neither are they proper conclusions.

We could call these statements “first principles”; original premises we simply have to accept or not. First principles frame our discussion but they themselves are virtually impossible to actually talk about. An example of a first principle in rationalism might be that “Truth is constant.” If one person accepts that and another doesn’t then their conversation is going to be deeply difficult. It’s the sort of statement that defines the frame of conversation rather than exists within it.

A greater concern than how can two people with different first principles communicate is a question for our selves alone; How can we decide to accept or not “first principles” if we can’t say anything about them?; Are we obliged to just choose randomly between frames of conversation?; Or can we have a means of choosing one over another?

All this philoso-waffle about these statements doesn’t remove from us the responsibility of responding to them. Here they are filmed being received by a young man. I feel a moral responsibility to have something to say to that young man myself. Repeatedly they are being led to confess in this video that humanity is evil. My instinctual desire is to protect this young man from these ideas. To know oneself as evil seems to me to be a very primal harm. At least I want him to know he is not being given clear and obvious “facts”. Can I justify myself?

The claim that humanity is evil is also being received by me in viewing the video. What do I do with it? Is there really no way to test this? If I reject it am I doing so arbitrarily? Where does my disagreement come from?

Is the statement “humanity is evil” actually uncriticisable?

Are we all evil? This is a bit like asking if E.T. is a terrible movie. On the one hand, of course it isn’t. I can’t think of anyone who would say it is all that bad. It’s a bit cheesy but as a kid’s film it’s definitely not Care Bears 2. However what exactly is a terrible movie? Imagine that a perfect children’s film exists in the ideal although it has never been actually made. If my standard of a decent film is that high then even E.T. becomes terrible.

Arguing over whether humans are evil stands on similar shifting sand. If we define evil as incapable of any goodness then it’s hard to say all humans are evil. Fred Hollows comes to mind. If we define evil by some higher standard ie. you are evil if you ever told a lie then probably not even Fred Hollows isn’t evil. If our intent is to say that all humans are evil then we can simply achieve that by claming that an ideal standard exists which is both just a measure of decentness and which no-one has achieved.

Furthermore what if the very nature of our evil is to not think we are evil! What if that pride alone is sufficient to be evil? This would put us in a neat Catch 22 situation; either we think we are evil or we are being evil. My own experience of evangelical Christianity included just such a scenario.

The problem with defining evil by any specific criteria is that evil is a moral word. Moral words don’t translate to IS statements so much as they translate to SHOULD statements. So although some of us might think that Evil is committing murder without remorse, or that Evil is having told a single lie, someone else could just as easily say Evil is not worshipping God or Evil is not thinking you are evil. We are only trading measures not true definitions. The only common definition that we could ever establish for evil is something like evil is what should be condemned and shouldn’t be praised.

What “should” does humanity’s evil refer to? And what that uncovers.

Paul Washer is very specific about the type of should he is talking about with human evil. Paul provides an explanation of humanity as the orcs in The Lord of the Rings. Sauruman makes orcs come out of the ground evil.** Aragon and the others slaughter those orcs “like insects” and this is always to be celebrated because those orcs are always evil. Paul says his listener’s problem with the doctrine of election is because he doesn’t think that people are truly evil. It follows that treating human destruction as anything less celebratory than the destruction of orcs is an error based on that. That’s what human evil means when Paul is talking about it; we should celebrate humanities destruction.

The problem with this definition is that “should” is a word with its own variety of meanings. Usually we use “should” to indicate chains of positive consequences with a moral end. A common moral end is the quality of life for intelligent beings, particularly humans, and even more particularly “innocent” humans.

Eg. You “shouldn’t” drive while drunk. It could lead to hitting a pedestrian. They could end up brain-damaged or dead.

(Note: Killing the pedestrian is given more moral weight than killing yourself who as the drink driver is not innocent. However killing yourself and thus bereaving your child who is innocent has a similar moral weight as it also involves an innocent.)

Paul Washers “evil” employs a very different type of should to the common use above. Firstly in Paul Washers scenario there are no innocents; All people are evil by nature and this makes all peoples welfare an unimportant moral end. Here Paul has conflated a general badness with non-innocence. This is something which we all do.

Eg. You “shouldn’t” drive while drunk past a wanton child abusers house. It could lead to hitting them. They could end up brain-damaged or dead. Actually who cares?

However it is also something which we are wary about doing. The wanton child abuser may be generally evil (as in the orc/human of Paul Washers theology) however they are not specifically responsible for the drink driving so in regard to this crime they are an innocent (ie. just a pedestrian). Maintaining the relevance of specific innocence is a key way to maintain moral actions. Losing that distinction can be the basis for committing terrible acts precisely because people lose their status as moral ends.

Eg. The people in the world trade towers may have shared in a (very) loose collective responsibility for the policies of the United States, also they were possibly consumers of pornography and no doubt late returners of library books. Only the first of those points and even then by a huge stretch could be said to make them non-innocents in regard to any terrorist attack – no matter how “evil” they were.

Paul Washer doesn’t just stop with the erosion of the category of specific innocence however. For Paul it is not even a tally of peoples unrelated crimes that make them deserving of any destruction but their very nature. This means that even people who have yet to earn their destruction, such as children, already warrant it. This is a moral reasoning that goes far beyond that of the terrorists who attacked the World Trade Towers. It is actually more akin to the rationale behind the Holocaust.

None of this necessarily shows us that Paul is wrong. It merely shows us the historical implications of referring to a group of people as “evil” (on the basis of a broad tally of their crimes or worse on the basis of their nature). In Paul Washers defence he is not talking about a Holocaust of Jews only, but of Jews and Germans and all people equally. All we can really say is that Paul Washer is saying that we should delight in the coming holocaust against all humanity by God. And that’s where we were at the beginning.

Although we’ve added very little, if anything, to our understanding, we have uncovered along the way a means of provoking our self to disagree with Paul. That is the reason why even the death of a drink driver in their own accident can’t be celebrated; our children. There were eight children killed on the September 11, 2001 attacks on the World Trade Towers in New York. That’s a surprisingly low number given the total deaths. The youngest was two and a half. In the Holocaust 1.5 million children were killed. The circumstances of some of those deaths are what I would recognize as evil. The children however were not. They were innocents in the truest sense.

Another way of looking at morality.

By focusing on children we can recognize that there are two (amongst many) very different ways of looking at morality. Paul Washers use of “should” is a super-rational approach which imposes right and wrong over our instincts. If all are evil like Suaramon’s orcs then Aragon’s murder of them is to be enjoyed. That enjoyment is something Paul Washer encourages his young listener to identify with even though they are an orc (metaphorically speaking)! After all if something is right then it is right from all perspectives. Or rather if something is from Gods perspective then we should share it.

A very different way of looking at morality would notice that what is key to Tolkiens’ orcs is not that they come out of the ground universally evil but universally adult. There are no children orcs. If there were, then the adult orcs would need to look after them. That would create a dilemma because even if an adult is “evil” and their child is “evil” we would recognize the looking after the child by the adult as good. If we are orcs ourselves then we have such a moral responsibility to our children. This does not change if our children “are” evil in nature by any criteria ie. a propensity to lie or a taste for Hobbit flesh. We should never delight in their destruction. Essentially we should never see our children as evil (meaning that which we should condemn) even if they actually meet some objective measure of evil such as not wanting to worship God. Why? Because we should never condemn our children.

This second way of looking at morality doesn’t imbed it in a universal perspective but a parental perspective. The basis of morality is a tribal love of our children rather than a super structure of absolute truths. This is then universalized to others. Everyone is someone’s child and thus falls under a broadening umbrella of our love based on our sympathy with other parents.

This second way of looking at morality also presents us with a very different way of critiquing immorality. Immorality is not so much a matter of incorrect reasoning but of an incorrect intuitive, emotional and even physical response to a situation – such as a child’s destruction. No matter how sound a string of moral reasoning might be, if it contradicts a loving response to a child then the reasoning is itself immoral.

What I would say to the young man in the video.

I would encourage the young man to realize that what he has been told by Paul Washer should be forgotten if he ever holds a child, especially his own. The only definition of evil that we can all share is that evil is that which ought to be condemned. Paul takes that to mean the celebration of evils destruction. That child however is deserving of not being condemned, especially by their own father, not because of any innate meeting of good or bad criteria, but because of our right role as adults. Quite frankly if you aren’t prepared to feel that way then the rest of us are morally obliged to keep you away from children.

The very basis of morality is not our opinion about the opinions of a supreme being towards us. No matter how adamantly those opinions can be asserted (or how long ago they were written down even) this is clearly a shaky ground to stand on. The very basis of morality is our right response to our children, whether they are orcs or not.

*Paul Washers take on total depravity is not the same as everyone who uses that phrase. Paul Washers spends time on actually legitimising humanities destruction whereas others might merely mean total depravity as the human incapacity to know God or do good for the purposes of salvation. The two are connected but the latter leaves alone any actual justification for judgement. More importantly, Paul Washer is NOT representative of every Christian, many of whom do not even believe in any variation of total depravity.

 **If we take this metaphor to its logical conclusion, then God who supposedly created humans is Sauramon. I suspect that wasn't Paul Washers intent. As I mentioned in this old blog post if we are going to say humans are evil we have the problem of sourcing that evil in humans.