Gender Roles and Marriage 

Brian Moore 

Brian Moore has a Ph.D. in literature from the University of Dallas. He is a free-lance writer.

By now, all this is old news. Lawrence Summers, president of Harvard University, in a forum putatively designed to be provocative, suggested, with the qualification of enough subordinate clauses to satisfy any ordinary, sensitive soul, that perhaps, just perhaps, mind you, one element determining the number of women practicing science and engineering at the highest levels might have something to do with innate gender differences. At the highest levels, men might be better at math and spatial reasoning; women might opt to bear children and relax the singular concentration necessary to rise to the top. So outrageous and terribly hurtful were these comments, a decorated female professor had to choke back tears, had to vacate the premises where the odious man had blasphemed, had uttered such obnoxious language. She had to leave, dare I say it, in order to avoid making a scene. (I have not noticed, by the way, any passionate desire among women to denounce similar findings that imply a more powerful verbal capacity in females.)

The declaration that there are givens in nature that circumscribe the individual will to achieve perfect self-esteem is one of those anathemas the liberal university cannot abide in the name of tolerance and critical thinking. On the one hand, any suggestion that homosexuality isn’t hardwired into nature, as irrevocable as racial identity, is considered manifest bigotry. Now I do not know--and no one knows--to what degree homosexual proclivities are rooted in nature, just as I do not know to what degree sociopathic behavior has a natural bias. What I do know is that it is not bigoted or immoral to discourage tendencies to abuse small animals. There is, one surmises, a certain crude obtuseness to the thinking employed by champions of “higher consciousness” and superior emoting. What with the move to empower so-called transgendered folk, remove sex specific markers to latrines, you know, you can pick your own gender now, be as nuanced as you please, (I await the day when government forms will list M, F, and O for other)--but same-sex attraction has nothing to do with choice.

The academic elites are proud of their exploration of novel ideas regarding sexual identity and social structures. A creativity rooted in the assertion of the individual is preferred to an understanding of human beings that bears the image of God. Ironically, the most fundamental human otherness is that which exists between man and woman. It is easy to love the habits and sensibilities of those who share one’s sex. The other sex is mysterious, confusing (at least if you are male), certainly difficult to live with much of the time for either gender. Yet this natural polarity that doesn’t go away, no matter how much sophistry is supplied by talking heads with degrees in an attempt to make it disappear, the unique and unmistakable play between man and woman is an analogy for the far greater and absolutely primary otherness, the difference between God and his creatures. Authentic efforts to discern and promote wisdom about the Divinity is notably absent in the current rage for Otherness.

Into this malaise of shoddy moral reflection, enter one Justice Richard Kramer, who recently struck down the California restriction of marriage to heterosexual couples. The on-line version of the San Francisco Chronicle, SFGate.com, trumpets Kramer as “a brilliant guy,” “compassionate, respectful, unbiased.” The shock of it all is that Justice Kramer is putatively a Republican and a Catholic, designations that the intelligent readers of SFGate.com will have been trained to suspect inassimilable with the list of admirable characteristics. Of course, one can claim to be anything, presumably a bestialist and a Satanist, so long as one votes or adjudicates along lines favorable to the enlightened throngs following their bliss.

Justice Kramer can find no rational basis for denying marital status for consenting adults of the same sex. One might suggest that Judge Kramer examine the place of custom and common law in English jurisprudence. If he had the wit for it, I would ask him to peruse Alasdair MacIntyre’s fine work, Whose Justice? Which Rationality? MacIntyre would instruct Judge Kramer on just how historically conditioned and parochial his notion of reason might be. Aristotle, for instance, would not have thought the idea of divinity irrational, while the modern secularist clearly believes the notion of God a literary creation disproved by science and thus, sustainable only by Nazi types who invoke God to prop up fascist social agendas or Bible-thumping boobs too ignorant to know better.

What is so poignant in the current, treacherous moment asserted with such untroubled righteousness by progressive forces is the utter inability to appreciate the beauty of the thing that is supposed to be passing. Try renting the classic Irene Dunne film, “I Remember Mama,” or reading a Jane Austen romance before you easily shunt aside the glory of traditional marriage and the difficult adventure of family in the name of blind innovations blithely adopted and not easily revoked once seen by even the dull to be meretricious. This is not to minimize the complexity of reality or the hardness of pursuing goodness under any circumstances. There never was any golden age, except perhaps as a trace of historical memory reaching back into an idyllic Eden--though to invoke Eden and history in any proximity is to invite the laughter and scorn of the intelligentsia. No matter, let them laugh.

Today, if any traditional Catholic, Evangelical or Jew dares to stand up for the truth of revelation, one should expect, at the very least, to be labeled a fundamentalist, a term the average secularist equates with the Appalachian trail and unhappily narrow family trees. The earliest Christians faced stoning, beheading, being thrown to the lions or lit up like a torch, all for the jeering entertainment of the pagan mob. Today, the persecution is more subtle and, one fears, more effective, perhaps because the zeal of the faithful has palpably waned. Being called stupid by the in-crowd from the enclaves of blue state America is the least a religious believer can do.     *

“The enemies of truth are always awfully nice.” –Christopher Morel