Posted by
TheChair on Saturday, April 11, 2009 1:10:22 PM
Political science professor
Matthew Franck has written one of the best criticisms of any judicial opinion legalizing same-sex marriage. Specifically, the piece attacks the new Iowa Supreme Court decision, but most of its legal and all of moral reasoning expose any such opinion as tyranny and moral fraud. I was a poly sci. major and am now a lawyer. Lawyers and judges who make it to the lofty levels of Supreme Court justices often believe they have special qualifications and insights that equip them over legislators to decide moral issues. Such self-esteem is usually unjustified. This piece shows that a non-lawyer can reason legally more soundly than a lawyer, and more importantly, can interweave it with the moral philosophy that entirely escaped the court. Read the entire thing... it's worth it. My favorite paragraphs:
From this vantage point, the feelings individuals have for one another are the authoritative wellspring of moral principle. Now, only a great fool would deny the connection of love and marriage—they go together like a horse and carriage, as Frank Sinatra famously sang. But emotion and desire, without more, are a treacherous foundation for law and public policy. As Pascal remarked, the heart has its reasons of which reason knows nothing. From society’s vantage point, that’s not good enough. Marriage and family are a moral institution—the teacher of right conduct between the sexes, the school of morality for the young, the founding scene of our moral obligations, the refuge from a wider world where respect for those obligations is a much chancier proposition. These may sound like lofty ideals often unrealized, but that both is the point and is beside the point. Society has an interest—none of its interests is higher—in encouraging the successful formation of marriages and families that point by their nature toward the achievement of these ideals. Within the metes and bounds of the law that expresses society’s conclusions about these matters, the rest is up to us.
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Lost from view is the true ground of our common public morality: reasoned judgment about the natures of things and the good of human persons, families, and communities. About such matters, religion can be instructive (to say the least), while a mere desire to “affirm” our “relationships” cannot be. And so, in both its reductive approach to religion and its empty invocations of feelings, the Iowa Supreme Court has done an injustice to religion, to the possibility of lawful public morality, and—yes—to our relationships themselves.