Marriage Penalty.

• Author: Lynch, Michael W.
• Position: Brief Article

In which our man in Washington learns about conservative sex, Thomas Jefferson's HMO woes, and back-alley bookies

Date: 1/21/2000 4:20:37 PM

From: mLynch@reasondc.org

Subj: Marital Bliss

"Nothing in the view of marriage and sexual morality that I am sketching excludes various forms of playful and affectionate foreplay to marital intercourse. Nor does the traditional view have any implications whatsoever for who, if anybody, should be on top of whom in the marital embrace. It carries no brief for the missionary position." So explained Princeton political philosophy professor Robert P. George to a packed house at the American Enterprise Institute.

George was about 30 minutes into his Bradley Lecture, "What's Sex Got to Do with It: Marriage, Morality, and Rationality." It is considered a revealed truth among conservatives that marriage is threatened from many forces, especially gays who want to marry. And gays who don't. Then there's the straights who shack up instead of walking down the aisle. And don't even get them started on married people who want divorces.

Citing an earlier lecture by James Q. Wilson, George explained that it all went bad when individuals, not families, started to choose marital partners. Then came the "tradition-trumping rationalist impulse" of the Enlightenment and pretty soon marriage was a "mere contract," and "sex outside the bond of marriage" was "understood [as] some sort of Constitutional right." A Constitutional right? What country is he from?

George is really bothered by folks who view marriage as "merely an instrumental human good." That is, he's upset with people who look at marriage as a means to an end, the end being something that makes them happy: a family, companionship, a robust sex life. If you agree with David Hume that there are no such things as intrinsic goods, says George, such a view makes sense. But Hume's all wrong, insists the Princeton prof, who prefers Aristotle and St. Thomas Aquinas. If one adopts their philosophy, then marriage turns out to be something else altogether.

Curiously, that something else seems to be mostly about sex. At times George sounded like Larry Flynt under the spell of Eastern mysticism. Marriage, he said, needs to be recognized as "a one-flesh communion of persons that is consummated and actualized by acts that are reproductive in type, if not in effect or even desire to conceive a child." For George, such a "one-flesh communion" is an "intrinsic human good." When it...