Weekly Features Post
Issue XIX
Our first Weekly Features Post since switching over to The Daily Eudemon. To readers of Eric Scheske's weekly column on Catholic Exchange who have visited for the first time since last Wednesday, we hope you like the new format. If you logged onto The Eudemon more often, you would know the story behind the lay-out changes (007esque spy plots, sex intrigue, corporate scandal, Vegas gambling angles), but we had to delete the sordid story before too many people saw it. Anyway, welcome.
We apologize for the early posting. Eric Scheske's Uncle Joe has come to town from Florida, and Eric has been beckoned to a family conference at the Hillcrest Lounge (or maybe the local Elks Club), there to discourse on topics weighty: religion, politics, music, Elvis, pull-tab lottery tickets, whether to switch from beer to wine, why the damn Tigers game isn't being broadcast. We could've delayed the post until Eric got home, but it would have been quite late and technically quite difficult.
Libertarians Against Gay Marriage
Jennifer Morse has written an analysis of gay marriage from the libertarian standpoint. LINK. The piece deserves study. Among her premises: libertarians should disapprove of gay marriage because it's part of the effort to knock down the cultural and societal norms that preclude the need for governmental interference. The premise is a basic truth about government and society (to wit, if society regulates itself, we don't need much government), but many armchair libertarian "thinkers" don't know about it or fail to appreciate its importance.
Self-styled libertarians in our circle of acquaintances typically equate liberty with license, usually of the sexual and narcotics sort, but Morse firmly rejects such an idea: "Being free does not demand that everyone act impulsively rather than deliberately. Libertarian freedom is the modest demand to be left alone by the coercive apparatus of the government. Economic liberty, and libertarian freedom more broadly, is certainly consistent with living with a great many informal social and cultural constraints."
As an example of the state interference that arises when sexual norms are forgotten, she sites the example of the couple who decide to have a child out of wedlock:
A man and woman have a child. The mother and father have no permanent relationship to each other and no desire to form one. When the relationship ceases to function to their satisfaction, it dissolves. The mother sues the father for child support.
The couple argues through the court system over how much he should pay. The woman wants him to pay more than he wants to pay. The court ultimately orders him to pay a particular amount. He insists on continuing visitation rights with his child. She resists. They argue in court and finally settle on a periodic visitation schedule to which he is entitled.
The agreement works smoothly at first. Then the parents quarrel. At visitation time, the mother is not home. He calls and leaves a nasty message on the answering machine. They quarrel some more. She says his behavior is not appropriate. He smokes too much and overindulges the child in sweets. She says the child, who is now a toddler, is impossible to deal with after visits. He quits paying child support. The court garnishes his wages to force him to pay. He goes to court to try to get his visitation agreement honored. The court appoints a mediator to help the couple work out a solution. The mother announces that she plans to move out of state. He goes to court and gets a temporary order to restrain her from moving. She invents a charge of child abuse and gets a restraining order forbidding him from seeing the child.
It's a good example. Yes, it recounts a scenario that's worse than most child custody disputes, but it can't be denied that child support issues require a large amount of state interference in private lives. How many local prosecutors have won election by promising to chase deadbeat dads?
The concluding three paragraphs of the essay provide a good summary of her overall argument:
The advocates of the deconstruction of marriage into a series of temporary couplings with unspecified numbers and genders of people have used the language of choice and individual rights to advance their cause. This rhetoric has a powerful hold over the American mind. It is doubtful that the deconstruction of the family could have proceeded as far as it has without the use of this language of personal freedom.
But this rhetoric is deceptive. It is simply not possible to have a minimum government in a society with no social or legal norms about family structure, sexual behavior, and childrearing. The state will have to provide support for people with loose or nonexistent ties to their families. The state will have to sanction truly destructive behavior, as always. But destructive behavior will be more common because the culture of impartiality destroys the informal system of enforcing social norms.
It is high time libertarians object when their rhetoric is hijacked by the advocates of big government. Fairness and freedom do not demand sexual and parental license. Minimum-government libertarianism needs a robust set of social institutions. If marriage isn't a necessary social institution, then nothing is. And if there are no necessary social institutions, then the individual truly will be left to face the state alone. A free society needs marriage.
Stoic's Porch
"I will then die. How? Like a man who gives up what belongs to another." Epictetus
Flattery
Flattery. It's a bad thing: "Next to hating their enemies, men are most inclined to flatter them." Alexis de Tocqueville. "A man flatters the land he fears, but not the land he loves." G.K. Chesterton
But at times flattery might be necessary: At full moon, Caligula would invite the moon goddess to his bed. One night he demanded of Aulus Vitellius, "Did you not see her?" Vitellius replied, "No, only you gods can see one another."
Vitellius later become emperor.
Strays
From Joseph Epstein's essay, ”What's So Funny?"
"The world is a comedy to those that think, a tragedy to those that feel." Horace Walpole
"Humor is the element missing from most bores." Joseph Epstein
One shows oneself "a Man because he can laugh, a wise Man that he knows at what to laugh, and a valiant Man that he dares to laugh." John Donne
"One of the things that make pornography so damnable, in my view, is its humorlessness." Joseph Epstein
Comedy is "life caught in the act." George Santayana
"He has occasional flashes of silence, that make his conversation perfectly delightful." Sydney Smith about Thomas Macaulay
The Last Word
Infrendiate: To gnash the teeth. "We infrendiate just thinking about the NHL."
