Thesislog

That I seem to have deleted much of the first part of a “More Problems in Greek Ethics” post that I thought was actually quite good. Here’s the second part:

gay marriage: in religious-right politics/language, really just code for “sodomy”—note jonathan katz’s stuff, how what he describes as the anti-sodomy, anti-procreative sex rhetoric of the 19thC is really the same as anti-gay marriage rhetoric today. Not just the “one-flesh union,” natural law stuff, which was totally going around then, but also “crimes against nature,” Leviticus, bestiality/pedophilia (note 19thC DEFINITIONS of sodomy, which often encompassed bestiality!), slippery slope. Danger to children, danger to fabric of society. This is how sodomy was discussed in the 19thC, and it’s how gay marriage is discussed today.
Obviously it’s all ridiculous, but the problem is that 21stC progressive, civil-rights types are responding to the anti-gay marriage folks as if they’re presenting an argument against gay marriage. They respond with expert testimony as in Perry v. Schwarzenegger: their statistics say children do as well with same-sex parents as they do with opposite-sex ones; they talk about the economic inequalities of not being able to get married; they talk about how normal same-sex married couples are; they talk about the historical mutability of definitions of marriage. But the reason the religious right just keeps going is because they’re not actually talking about marriage—they’re actually still talking, as they have been for nearly 200 years, about how something squicks them out about people inserting their penises into other people’s recta.