Marriage - It's More Serious Than We Thought

 Recuse this, bitch!

From a piece in the New York Times Magazine, a profile of Robby George (D.Phil, Oxford University; JD, Harvard University; AB, Swarthmore College),  America's foremost homophobic deep thinker. Of course the following analysis by yours truly (Mt. Lebanon High School '71) is based on what some guy said about what another guy thinks. That's hardly fair to Guy #2. But, then again, I'm hardly a researcher:

"He admits the argument for marriage between a man and a woman can require “somewhat technical philosophical analysis.”

Go for it.

 It is a two-step case that starts with marriage and works its way back to sex.

I think he's got it backward.

 First, he contends that marriage is a uniquely “comprehensive” union, meaning that it is shared at several different levels at once — emotional, spiritual and bodily. “And the really interesting evidence that it is comprehensive is that it is anchored in bodily sharing,” he says.

Like a tapeworm.

“Ordinary friendships wouldn’t be friendships anymore if they involved bodily sharing,” he explained to me.

No, they would be conjoined twins.

 “If I, despite being a married man, had this female friend of mine and I said, ‘Well, gosh, why don’t we do some bodily sharing,’

Gee willikers, can I bone you?

 and we had straightforward sexual intercourse, well, that wouldn’t be friendship or marriage

How about if it was straightbackward sexual intercourse?

." It is bodily, O.K...."

OK

 "...but it is not part of a comprehensive sharing of life."

OK

"My comprehensive sharing of life is with my wife, which I just now violated.”

OK, you're a pig. So what?

 "But just as friendships with sex are not friendships, marriage without sex is not marriage."

I'm free!

" Sex, George said, is the key to this 'comprehensive unity.'He then imagined himself as a man with no interest in sex who proposed to seal a romance by committing to play tennis only with his beloved. Breaking that promise, he said, would not be adultery."

Tennis anyone?

"The second step is more complicated, and more graphic."

Now you caught my interest

 "George argues that only vaginal intercourse — “procreative-type” sex acts, as George puts it — can consummate this “multilevel” mind-body union."

Yay for the va jay jays.

" Only in reproduction, unlike digestion, circulation, respiration or any other bodily function, do two individuals perform a single function and thus become, in effect, 'one organism.'

Um, I think that would be 3 organisms in one orgasm. One - three, whats the dif? It's a Trinitarian view of the "Act".

Each opposite-sex partner is incomplete for the task; yet together they create a “one-flesh union,” in the language of Scripture. “Their bodies become one (they are biologically united, and do not merely rub together) in coitus (and only in coitus), similarly to the way in which one’s heart, lungs and other organs form a unity by coordinating for the biological good of the whole,” George writes in a draft of his latest essay on the subject.

I'm sorry, but this porn does not work for me. Neither does the analogy. I wonder how long he keeps Mrs. George waiting while he thinks this whole thing through?

" Unloving sex between married partners does not perform the same multilevel function, he argues, nor does oral or anal sex — even between loving spouses."

Maybe not multilevel but definitely multitasking.

Infertile couples, too, are performing this uniquely shared reproductive function, George says, even if they know their sperm and ovum cannot complete it. Marriage is designed in part for procreation in the way a baseball team is designed for winning games, he says, but “people who can practice baseball can be teammates without victories on the field.”

Kind of like the Pirates. Well, I know he's trying to dumb it down for guys like me with the baseball analogy but he fucking well lost me. Sex is "designed" for procreation. Marriage is about property rights.

"George argues that reason alone shows that heterosexual sodomy and homosexual sex are morally wrong, just as the Catholic Church, classical philosophers and other religious traditions have historically taught."

But not practiced.

"Unlike marital union in his special sense, he contends, such acts treat the body as an instrument of the mind’s pleasure."

Invasion of the meat robots.

" As both a practical and a philosophical matter, he argues, the law should not necessarily police such things."

I agree.

" But the need for the state to establish a proper definition of marriage is a different matter, he says, because the law has always regulated it in the interest of parenthood and community. “Marriage in principle is a public institution,” he said. “I don’t think it can be like bar mitzvahs or baptisms or the Elks Club.”"

And there is no evidence at all that allowing gays to marry injures children or communities. And if there is a nugget of a premise buried under that big pile of bullshit, I certainly can't find it. Strange that all the countries that have legalized gay marriage have not collapsed in utter social disarray and that people in those countries are still having babies. Another big picture guy so worried about who's sticking what where that he feels compelled to leave behind this little worm casing of reason. And he hangs with Scalia - that's probably all you need to know.