Light On Dark Water

I’m Not Surprised, But I’m A Little Disappointed

Image magazine comes out in favor of the same-sex marriage.

I'm really less surprised by the writer's opinion than by his admiration for Justice Kennedy's prose. I wouldn't go as far as the person who said the ruling sounded like something a 17-year-old would post on Facebook, but on the basis of this sample (I haven't read the whole thing) I'd call it pretty ordinary stuff. There's a distinctly pompous note there, never mind the jarring dissonance of his application of the term  "marital union." Surely Kennedy, like most judges who have opined on this subject, is hearing in his mind's ear the praise which he expects future historians to lavish on his edicts. And notice the "I have spoken" tone of that last sentence. A majority of the justices, and a majority of liberals, now seem to think of the Supreme Court as a council of elders with the power to make decisions for the whole tribe on the basis of their own unaided wisdom.

Perhaps the jarring dissonance is only a result of my conditioning, my prejudices, my inability to change. I can see already that it's going to be a bit of a struggle at times to hold out against this soothing spell. One may have to be willing to stick one's foot into the fire, like Puddleglum in The Silver Chair.

NB: I realize the Image piece is just a post at the magazine's blog, but I see no reason to think the editors would disagree. 

Maclin Horton
,

28 responses to “I’m Not Surprised, But I’m A Little Disappointed”

  1. Janet

    A majority of the justices, and a majority of liberals, now seem to think of the Supreme Court as a council of elders with the power to make decisions for the whole tribe on the basis of their own unaided wisdom.
    But only the majority is wise, of course. I guess it’s sort of like the wise and foolish virgins. Some get locked out in the night.
    AMDG

    Reply
  2. Janet

    So, Image has lost the true vision of Marriage. Could you call it The Discarded Image..
    AMDG

    Reply
  3. Art Deco

    What gets you is the gratuitousness of it all. It’s a frigging art journal. What’s the point of a post on matrimonial law? The other thing that gets you is that the editor was published repeatedly in First Things from 1992 to 2005. One does get the impression that the ‘Christian intelligentsia’ has long been analogous to a tooth that’s now telling you you need a root canal. Everything just rotting away underneath that filling you got in 1987.

    Reply
  4. Art Deco

    It’s worse. The editor’s an old guy (56) with four kids, a graduate of Hillsdale College, and spent three years on the faculty of Christendom College. Image is issued by a subsidiary of Seattle Pacific University, which is a subsidiary of a small Methodist sect.
    It’s like something dreamed up by Ionesco.

    Reply
  5. Art Deco

    The author of this insipid mess is a blogger for the ‘evangelical channel’ of Patheos.

    Reply
  6. Mac

    That’s an instance of what we were talking about earlier–the problems of the evangelical world. Protestantism in general has a really difficult time finding a place to stand between fundamentalism and liberalism, and I get the impression that this fellow is not atypical of the younger ones, though maybe better educated.
    As for Image–well, I have a little personal knowledge of that situation, and I think Greg Wolfe is a good guy. He seems to be still in some degree of reaction against his right-wing zealot youth. His Beauty Will Save the World is worth reading. But from the beginning the magazine has gone further in accommodating liberalism (by which I mean the religion of liberalism) than I liked. I subscribed for some years, twenty years ago. As I recall one reason I let my subscription lapse was a story about the first woman pope. It seemed of negligible literary merit to me, and I could not think of any reason why it should have been published except to needle the orthodox. Well, either that or as a favor to someone.

    Reply
  7. Mac

    I guess, Janet, you could say I discarded Image.
    And as for the Supreme Court majority: they’re counted wise as long as they uphold the faith. If the decision had gone the other way you’d be hearing the same cries of tyranny that you now hear from the right.

    Reply
  8. Craig

    What strikes me about Kennedy’s peroration is how well-suited it is to be cited by the Court when it eventually gets around to legalizing polyamory. Only one word needs to change; otherwise it seems tailor-made for the purpose.

    Reply
  9. Mac

    I’m looking forward to that. I would suppose that ssm proponents would be embarrassed to raise any objection, but it will be entertaining if they do. If you’ve removed gender from the definition, what logical objection could you possibly come up with for removing number? And for that matter why is there a presumption that “marriage” has anything to do with the genital organs at all? If any number of people want to declare themselves married in order to procure some government benefit, what argument could there be against it? That they aren’t rubbing their genitals together? Whose business is that? I thought we didn’t want the government in the bedroom.
    And on and on. As I and many others keep pointing out, this essential makes “marriage” meaningless.

    Reply
  10. Mac

    By the way, re Image: as far as I know neither the mag nor any of its associated institutions and programs have ever represented themselves as being Catholic, though I assume the Wolfes still are. Their current description is more or less what they’ve always said: “…founded in 1989 to demonstrate the continued vitality and diversity of contemporary art and literature that engage with the religious traditions of Western culture.”
    So there’s really nothing inconsistent about the Methodist affiliation etc. as such.

    Reply
  11. Rob G

    The logic of the piece, if you want to call it that, is inane. The left wasn’t ready to buy into marriage until the institution itself, culturally speaking, had been watered down to the point of near-meaninglessness.
    The notion that trads should be happy that the left has come around to seeing marriage their way is utter nonsense. What has happened, rather, is that American marriage has become such a sorry, piss-poor thing that even anti-traditional lefties can accept it.
    It is true that the elites see and accept the stability-providing side of marriage (divorce rates are fairly low among the upper middle and upper classes, apparently), but even so, it’s still at root a consumerist choice to them, one rooted not in tradition but in pragmatism.

    Reply
  12. Mac

    It seems not so very long ago that marriage was “just a piece of paper” and “we don’t need it to show our commitment.” In fact I would be surprised if you couldn’t turn up a celebrity or two who have said such things quite recently. Now suddenly it’s, like, sacred ‘n’ stuff. I don’t suppose this new respect will extend toward making divorce more difficult, though.
    “until the institution itself, culturally speaking, had been watered down”
    More specifically, until the connection between marriage and procreation had been severed in the minds of enough people.

    Reply
  13. Rob G

    “More specifically, until the connection between marriage and procreation had been severed in the minds of enough people”
    Yep, that’s what got the ball rolling. The rest flowed from that. Of course, going back even further, it comes from an erroneous view of autonomy.

    Reply
  14. Art Deco

    Yep, that’s what got the ball rolling.
    Nope.

    Reply
  15. Rob G

    “Nope.”
    Please, then, enlighten us all.

    Reply
  16. Louise

    “Everything just rotting away underneath that filling you got in 1987.”
    That might account for why I couldn’t read much of it.
    “Now suddenly it’s, like, sacred ‘n’ stuff.”
    Grimly funny. It reminds me of two friends – both men -who wanted to “marry” so they could do some thing or receive some benefit and then they were howled down by the gay activists for making a mockery of marriage.

    Reply
  17. Art Deco

    Oh, this was about 9 months ago:
    http://www.hillsdale.edu/news-events/greg-wolfe-event

    Reply
  18. Mac

    So he hasn’t completely divorced himself from conservatism, I guess. I didn’t watch the lecture video. Too long for my internet-addled attention span.

    Reply
  19. FrAncesca Aran Murphy

    Glad I did not renew my subscription. It’s an insufferably pompous magazine

    Reply
  20. Mac

    That’s harsh! I haven’t read it for a long time, but I must say it’s very attractive visually (as is the web site).

    Reply
  21. Art Deco

    So he hasn’t completely divorced himself from conservatism, I guess.
    Like Rob Portman and various and sundry evangelical nitwits profiled on Religion News Service, he needs the work.

    Reply
  22. Rob G

    Art, I would still like to hear your theory on what got the downfall of marriage going, if it wasn’t the “contraceptive mentality.”

    Reply
  23. Art Deco

    Art, I would still like to hear your theory on what got the downfall of marriage going, if it wasn’t the “contraceptive mentality.”
    I actually do not undertake amateur historical sociology on request. You can start any place you like in the last couple of centuries and evaluate the evolution of the family as an economy, technological developments, cultural or ‘ideational’ aspects. One thing I would not do is select one factor and declare it categorically the causal factor when you’ve got 85 years of history and a mess of confounding variable there.

    Reply
  24. Rob G

    Bah. If you don’t want to be asked, then you probably shouldn’t toss around easy, unsubstantiated “nope’s.”

    Reply
  25. Art Deco

    you probably shouldn’t toss around easy, unsubstantiated “nope’s.”
    I’d be fascinated to know, when you look in the mirror, just who you see.

    Reply
  26. Rob G

    Whoa. Deep, man, deep.

    Reply
  27. Robert Gotcher

    Gentlemen. Decorum!

    Reply
  28. Rob G

    Sorry — I’ll avoid engaging AD’s comments in the future.

    Reply

Leave a comment

Instagram / TikTok / X

Designed with WordPress