Date: 1/21/2000 4:20:37 PM
From: mlynch@reasondc.org
Subj: Marital Bliss
"Nothing in the view of marriage and sexual morality that I am sketching excludes various forms of playful and affectionate foreplay to marital intercourse. Nor does the traditional view have any implications whatsoever for who, if anybody, should be on top of whom in the marital embrace. It carries no brief for the missionary position." So explained Princeton political philosophy professor Robert P. George to a packed house at the American Enterprise Institute.
George was about 30 minutes into his Bradley Lecture, "What's Sex Got to Do with It: Marriage, Morality, and Rationality." It is considered a revealed truth among conservatives that marriage is threatened from many forces, especially gays who want to marry. And gays who don't. Then there's the straights who shack up instead of walking down the aisle. And don't even get them started on married people who want divorces.
Citing an earlier lecture by James Q. Wilson, George explained that it all went bad when individuals, not families, started to choose marital partners. Then came the "tradition-trumping rationalist impulse" of the Enlightenment and pretty soon marriage was a "mere contract," and "sex outside the bond of marriage" was "understood [as] some sort of Constitutional right." A Constitutional right? What country is he from?
George is really bothered by folks who view marriage as "merely an instrumental human good." That is, he's upset with people who look at marriage as a means to an end, the end being something that makes them happy: a family, companionship, a robust sex life. If you agree with David Hume that there are no such things as intrinsic goods, says George, such a view makes sense. But Hume's all wrong, insists the Princeton prof, who prefers Aristotle and St. Thomas Aquinas. If one adopts their philosophy, then marriage turns out to be something else altogether.
Curiously, that something else seems to be mostly about sex. At times George sounded like Larry Flynt under the spell of Eastern mysticism. Marriage, he said, needs to be recognized as "a one-flesh communion of persons that is consummated and actualized by acts that are reproductive in type, if not in effect or even desire to conceive a child." For George, such a "one-flesh communion" is an "intrinsic human good." When it comes to sex, individuals are just "potential parts of a mated pair." "The reproductive act" is accomplished not by individuals, but by a pair, united in "one-flesh unity."
Of course, George maintained, only married folks can merge in such unity, which I gather is why marriage is an end, not just a means to an end, and, conveniently, why only straight people are capable of such "one-flesh unity."
Such talk may make the Princeton coeds come around during office hours, but as George carried on, the mostly male crowd at AEI started to get fidgety, especially when he came down hard on oral sex, even in the context of a marital embrace. "Masturbatory, sodomitical, and other sexual acts which are not reproductive in type, cannot unite persons organically," said George, who obviously has never spent a night marinating in Amsterdam's red-light district.
Date: 1/26/2000 8:39:08 AM
From: mlynch@reasondc.org
Subj: Second Bests
Over at the White House, President Clinton was hosting the U.S. women's soccer team, best known for winning last year's World Cup and then showing off their sports bras. The point was to highlight the inequities women suffer in America's semi-free labor markets and to make a pitch for equal pay. I have no doubt his first choice for the photo op was the women's rugby team from Ohio State University--the gals who famously bared their breasts on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial last November for a fund-raising calendar. But they must have turned the president down. So Bill figured he'd settle for second best and instead invited the sports bra squad to the White House, which I'm sure is lonelier than ever, what with Hillary setting up shop in the Empire State.
After missing the White House event --the press office gave me the wrong time--it was my turn to settle for second best (and a distant second at that). Instead of watching the president ogle America's premier women athletes, I made plans to head to a Chinese restaurant on Capitol Hill to hang with some guys who call themselves the Monday Club. Rep. Charlie Norwood (R-Ga.) was going to explain why heaping federal regulations on managed health care companies is a great idea.
He was, in other words, going to talk about the "Patients Bill of Rights." The issue's polling well and Republicans are trying to figure out how to deal with it. The House and Senate passed different bills last session and it's still undecided which version will prevail. My source on the matter tells me that Congress faces two options. They could pass the Senate version, which fails to give Americans the right to sue their HMOs if they are chartered under a federal law known as ERISA. The president will surely veto that one. Or they can pass the House version, which allows lawsuits but also expands Medical Savings Accounts. That one has the support of congressional Democrats, who will get a cut of any fees earned by trial lawyers, in the form of campaign contributions. And Clinton might actually sign it.
These were the issues I expected Norwood, the Republican sponsor of the House bill, would sort out while I chowed down on chow fun. I was again treated to second best: Norwood was sick, so his press secretary John Stone would talk instead.
The Monday Club, as moderator M. Stanton Evans pointed out, is a conservative cabal whose members generally oppose regulation in the name of the market. Stone's task was to convince this crowd that federal managed care reform is not simply a good thing, but a conservative thing to do.
So Stone spent a lot of time yakking about Thomas Jefferson. "Jefferson in his old age was mighty disillusioned at Monticello," said Stone, in a warm Southern accent. "He had spent his entire life working for a utopian republic modeled after the typical New England village. Common working people would be economically independent and vested with the political ability to control their own destiny."
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