The Amazing Power of The Culture (Part 3)
...the law creating unilateral divorce changed not only individuals' incentives before the law, it privatized the older concept of marriage as a permanent vow — indissoluable in the Catholic tradition (which was never the law in this country) and severable only for serious cause in the Protestant common-law version.
I can still hold the view that divorce is wrong — that I have no right to divorce because I made a vow to stay married. But with the advent of unilateral divorce, my views became a privatized view of marriage, not part of the shared reality defined by the law.
(so if same-sex marriage is legalized,)
...parents will still be able to teach their children their own views about what marriage is. But the law will be constantly repudiating that view in a number of public visible ways. Parents are having a very hard time fighting the progressive views of sexual culture, enshrined at law, in any number of ways. This will make it much harder.
When people say the "law is an educator," that's true, but it doesn't go far enough. In this case, the law is an arbiter of reality: Who is really married? Who is really divorced? Who is having an out-of-wedlock child? Who, for that matter, is committing adultery?
The law's power to name reality matters.
The Amazing Power of The Culture (Part 2)
What is culture? Sometimes we use that word as the opposite of economics or law. Here I mean something very specific. Culture, as James Davison Hunter put it, is the power to name reality.
In this sense, law is not the opposite of culture, but a particularly powerful player. What the law names as reality, is (in America at least) probably the single most powerful player in our shared reality.
If you doubt that, think about divorce for a minute.
When no-fault divorce was passed, its proponents promised us that the change in the law would not affect marriage generally — it would only affect bad marriages, which should be dissolved. And in recent times, gay-marriage advocates I've debated have asserted that my views about marriage, after gay marriage, will have a similar status in law and culture, to my views about divorce. (I'm Catholic)...
When the law actually endorsed unilateral divorce, it changed the terms of everybody's marriage....
If you have a right to divorce at will, what you lose is the right to make an enduring marriage — at least if you live in consensual (shared) reality.
I do want to explain, in a serious way, for anyone who is seriously interested, what I mean about how and why the public meaning of marriage matters. Call it: the Amazing Power of the Culture.
....
How do ideas have consequences? I want to share over a couple of posts, what I think I have actually seen — a report from the front, as it were.
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