THE AMAZING POWER OF CULTURE: Maggie Gallagher

at National Review's blog:

...I do want to explain, in a serious way, for anyone who is seriously interested, what I mean about how and why the public meaning of marriage matters. Call it: the Amazing Power of the Culture.

(part one)

What is culture? Sometimes we use that word as the opposite of economics or law. Here I mean something very specific. Culture, as James Davison Hunter put it, is the power to name reality.

In this sense, law is not the opposite of culture, but a particularly powerful player. What the law names as reality, is (in America at least) probably the single most powerful player in our shared reality.

If you doubt that, think about divorce for a minute. ...

When the law actually endorsed unilateral divorce, it changed the terms of everybody's marriage. Now the happily, romantically married may not notice this in practice. But not only the bad marriages, but the so-so marriages, the good-enough marriages were and are profoundly affected by the law — not only directly, but by the cultural changes in the public understanding of marriage that the law only partly caused and but certainly reinforced and institutionalized.

(part two)

...I can maintain as a Catholic that my marriage is indissoluble. But if I or my husband wants a divorce, the law will consider my views, and even our original marriage agreement, irrelevant. I can maintain that I'm still married to him, even as the law divides my property, redefines his support obligations, gives him a legal right to separate me from my children for designated periods, and gives hearty consent to his right to engage in sex, bearing children, and marriage with someone else.

I know a few Catholics who have tried to maintain and act on in public the sacramental vision of reality (the purely religious view) after the law has endorsed and actualized their spouses' right to divorce. Such religious people come perilously close to appearing mad in their insistence that somehow they are still married to the obviously divorced spouse. (Isn't that what madness is — a private reality?)

So yes, if you follow the analogy to divorce, parents will still be able to teach their children their own views about what marriage is. But the law will be constantly repudiating that view in a number of public visible ways. Parents are having a very hard time fighting the progressive views of sexual culture, enshrined at law, in any number of ways. This will make it much harder.

When people say the "law is an educator," that's true, but it doesn't go far enough. In this case, the law is an arbiter of reality: Who is really married? Who is really divorced? Who is having an out-of-wedlock child? Who, for that matter, is committing adultery?

The law's power to name reality matters.

By the way, I do understand that is why the "name" matters to gay-marriage advocates. That's what makes this battle difficult to compromise. But all I ask, of the intellectual class at least, is they stop saying therefore that the defintion of marriage in law (which matters so much to Adam and Steve) won't matter at all to anyone else.

(part three)

Labels: culture, divorce, gay marriage

posted by Eve at 2:52 AM VOTE

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