For example, Warner is shrewd enough to see that the standard defense of gay marriage by gay activists is wrong. This defense holds out marriage as just one more lifestyle option. It is available to heterosexuals, so it should be available to homosexuals as well, and that's all there is to it. But this is wrong. Marriage, as Warner aptly puts it, is "a social system of both permission and restriction." Spouses and society alike view matrimony as something special and exalted; it is not merely allowed, it is encouraged. Far beyond merely creating legal arrangements, it is freighted with the social expectations and implicit requirements of hidden law. It is a bargain not just between two people but between the couple and society: The spouses agree to care for one another so that society does not need to, and society agrees in exchange to view their commitment to each other as inviolable and sovereign and, indeed, sacred.
Traditionalist conservatives understand that marriage confers special status under hidden law, which is why they so fiercely oppose extending it to homosexuals. I understand that marriage confers special status, which is why I favor extending it to homosexuals. And Warner, piping up from the radical left, also understands marriage's special status, which is why he opposes gay marriage. When marriage is available to gay people, he understands, gay people will be expected to marry, and married homosexuals will conduct themselves with the same (let's face it) smugness that characterizes married heterosexuals. "The effect," Warner says, "would be to reinforce the material privileges and cultural normativity of marriage." Homosexuals who do not marry will be regarded as less respectable or less successful than those who do.
In Warner's view, that would be a profound miscarriage of social justice. For Warner is against not just the sexual norms of the moment but the very notion of sexual norms. That is not to say he would decline to pass harsh judgment on a rapist. But where consensual sex is concerned, he insists, society should just butt out. Not only should the law stay out of the bedroom (a standard libertarian position), so should norms, because all norms create "hierarchies of respectability."
Warner opposes sexual norms for two reasons. The first is that he is a radical egalitarian. He believes in the moral virtue of diminishing differences--moral, economic, or political--between people and groups. There is no arguing with a radical egalitarian on that point, so I won't.
The second reason goes a little deeper. Warner makes a move which ordinary classical liberalism rejects out of hand but which has an undeniable kind of deep sense to it. In standard liberal theory, coercion and force involve violence or the threat of violence: "Your money or your life." Because, in modern democracies, the state possesses a monopoly on legitimized violence, a coercive policy will be, by definition, a state policy. Nothing that private people or institutions do by way of criticism or exclusion is coercive.
To Warner and others of his school, that view of coercion is laughably narrow and naive. Norms use the clubs of stigma and shame to punish deviants, nonconformists, and radicals. Many people would much rather be jailed than humiliated or ostracized, which is one reason American prisons are so crowded. In a psychological sense, the denial of respectability can be just as coercive as the denial of physical freedom. Nowhere in his book does Warner argue the theoretical case for his extended notion of coercion, but it is apparent on every page. He regards moralizing as a kind of mandating, speaks of "the effect of coercion in the politics of shame," and refers to the "deep coerciveness" of the sort of thinking that privileges marriage. In his world, all social norms are more or less coercive, which means that all of them are oppressive when applied to consenting adults' sexual or social lives.
Whatever its theoretical shortcomings, this sort of thinking exerts a broad attraction in today's America. Lots of people view Gary Bauer's or Jerry Falwell's strident condemnations of the "homosexual lifestyle" as being every bit as oppressive and intrusive as, say, sodomy laws. For that matter, lots of people believe that moral criticism causes violence by fostering hate, or that moral criticism actually is violence ("words that wound"). Many people in America--a majority, maybe--feel queasy talking about "virtue" and "vice," because that sort of talk implies judgmentalism, which implies a "hierarchy of respectability." People prefer sanitized expressions like "values." I would be curious to see what would happen if you visited a randomly selected college campus and asked the students whether it is right to judge other people's lifestyles. My guess is that most students would be appalled at the notion.
What is useful about Warner is that, being both bright and radical, he has no use for the mushy middle, where most ordinary people are content to leave such ideas. He understands the implications of his view of coercion and does not shrink from embracing them. The sort of nightmare society that a Falwell or a Bauer dreams up in order to scare donations out of church ladies is precisely the sort of society Warner wants to create. To be sexually free, we need to be able to explore all possible sexual avenues with an open mind, and thus without fear of shame or stigma. Keeping certain sexual behaviors hush-hush means that most people never think about trying them, which amounts to "constraint through ignorance." There should be no more closets of any sort. Rather, says Warner, let "all the gerbils scamper free."
And so, in the end, it is not gay marriage Warner opposes: It is marriage, and all the conventional notions of shame and responsibility that go with marriage. He does not actually demand that marriage be abolished, because, being a pragmatist, he would rather undermine it by extending all its benefits to unmarried partners--in fact, to everybody. He is likewise not foolish enough to imagine that sexual norms could be eliminated anytime soon, but he believes that the proper role of socially enlightened activism is to favor de-norming at every turn.
Although Warner's view is extreme, it is more influential than you might suppose. All three of the states and all but a handful of the municipalities that offer domestic partner programs for their workers include opposite-sex couples, who, of course, could perfectly well get married if they wanted the benefits of marriage. The large majority of corporate partnership programs also allow heterosexuals to participate. Who is to say, after all, that marriage is better than some other arrangement? Only recently, and with great effort, was the national welfare debate retrieved from the hands of nonjudgmentalists who argued that government's job was to help the indigent, not to judge them.
I am not a soft communitarian because I think shame and stigma are sweet and lovely things. They are not. A weakness of the soft-communitarian position is its unwillingness to admit the truth in much of what Warner says. In some respects, norms are oppressive and shaming is coercive. Having admitted this, however, one can go on to see what Warner, and other anti-communitarians, do not: that soft communitarianism is less oppressive, usually much less so, than the real-world alternatives. Shame and hypocrisy are not ideal ways to deal with philanderers and small-time mashers, but they are better than Paula Jones' litigators and Kenneth Starr's prosecutors. Shame is valuable not because it is pleasant or fair or good but because it is the least onerous of all means of social regulation, and because social regulation is inevitable.
The implication of Warner's view is that the only just society is one without any sexual norms regulating the conduct of consenting adults. But, of course, a normless society is as inconceivable, literally, as a beliefless individual. What would a culture without shame or guilt or "hierarchies of respectability" look like? How is a shameless society even imaginable, given the unbudgeable fact that humans, like dogs and chimpanzees, look to each other for guidance and approval and clues on how to behave?
The fact is, there are going to be norms; the question is always, What sort of norms? In Warner's world, the norm would be one of extreme social permissiveness. People who expressed anything but approval of sexual adventurism would be stigmatized: shamed for engaging in the oppressive act of shaming. If you don't think this can happen, ask any student or professor who has been on the receiving end of a P.C. vilification campaign.
It is also a fact, I think, that shame is a core constituent of a social animal's temperament. Human beings crave the admiration of other human beings more than they crave anything else-- even, in many cases, life. Warner seems to view shaming as a political sanction that, with enough effort, we can teach ourselves not to use. But not to shame or be ashamed is like not loving, not laughing, not eating or talking. So the Warnerian project is to repeal not just shame but humanity. In that sense, Warner's utopia is like the Marxist utopia, which repealed greed. My guess is that Warner's normless sexual utopia would be about as successful, and about as good for the downtrodden and marginalized, as Marx's classless economic utopia turned out to be.
Oddly, the words child and children scarcely ever appear in Warner's book. This is an astonishing blind spot in a work of social criticism. Being a defender of gay marriage, I'm as tired as the next fellow of people who use children as a cover for all sorts of authoritarian arguments. Still, Warner seems to find the very concept of parenting unfathomable. The thought that sexual adventurers might be expected to keep certain of their activities out of the sight of 10-year-old boys and girls, in exchange for being left alone, does not seem to have occurred to him. ("No, darling, that's not a game. Those two people are doing what we call `fistfucking.'") If you believe, as seems plausible, that there is a genuine clash of interests between parents and sexual adventurers, then the old dictates of hidden law--"keep it out of sight," for instance--seem to be a pretty ingenious way to strike a balance.
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2 comments? This has gotta be the best article Reason has ever published. Kudos to Mr. Rauch.