Wednesday, May 23, 2007

¡Viva España!

Total coincidence in my Inbox this evening, two items about Spain:

First, a gay bridal shop is going to open in Barcelona next week.
Porrero said gay couples in his shop will be able to buy from a set collection or have a tailor-made suit, all envisioned for their wedding, from daylight to night ceremonies, in the city or at the countryside or even on the beach.
Second, Spain's divorce rate is now the EU's highest.
Three in every four Spanish marriages now end in divorce, the investigation by the Family Policy Institute (IPF), based on Spanish legal records found. ... The country also has one of the world's lowest birthrates.
Move along people, no connection here.

Well, strictly speaking, I guess that's true. There's no reason gay "marriage" in itself should raise the divorce rate. But that's to crudify the notion of causality, to reduce it to nothing more than identifiable isolated cause and identifiable isolated effect, like one of Hume's billiard balls crashing into another. But as an understanding of the organic society, of human behavior, of the self-conscious actor ... that model is worthless.

No, Adam and Steve making the weekend jaunt to Massachusetts (and that is hardly happening any more) is not going to "make" Adam and Eve divorce. Rather, a society that views sex and marriage in a certain way is going to have both gay "marriage" and a high divorce rate, each being the logical consequence of viewing sex as a form of recreation and marriage as a self-regarding lifestyle choice. Said society will be indifferent to Adam and Eve staying together and make it easy as possible for them to split, forget the kids (if any). Said society will not be able to think of any reason why Adam and Steve cannot or should not "marry."

If today's reigning philosophy of sex is a flu germ, then gay "marriage" is merely the runny nose and high divorce is the cough (and so on ... falling birthrates can be the sinus congestion, VD rates the sneezing, etc). Runny noses don't technically cause coughs. But they are both symptoms of the same disease.

3 comments:

DP said...

Exactly! We've only gotten to gay marriage because the civil institution itself is so badly compromised that the mentality is, "Well, why not? I'm pretty well done with it."

Which is one of the many infuriating things about Sullivan's "conservative" argument for gay marriage. On the one hand, he's talking about the "domesticating power"/whatever it would have over gay life. But an instant later, he kvetches because of the instant marriage/quickie divorce culture among hets.

The institution, as it presently exists, can't "domesticate" anyone who doesn't want to be domesticated. All the other societal reinforcements have been pretty much kicked away in the past two generations, and the gay community never had any such reinforcements in the first place.

Dad29 said...

Umnnhhh...

There are those who argue that the Divorce Rate is intimately connected to the use of the Pill.

We could talk about sterility as a cause...

Anonymous said...

Interesting statement about classic causee-and-effect versus a more biologic organic system.
Very interesting, in fact.