Is the slaveowner doing harm to the abolitionist? Or is the abolitionist doing harm to the slaveowner? Neither is hurting each other, physically or economically--they're just arguing. But look a little closer: each would like the other to be trapped in a world he sees as injust. The slaveowner would like the abolitionist to live in a country where people are oppressed and enslaved--to live in a world the abolitionist sees as intolerably unjust. The abolitionist would like the slaveowner to live in a world where the government can keep him from keeping slaves--something the slaveowner sees as intolerably repressive."I'm for a man's right to keep slaves if he wishes; you can free yours, if you believe it's right, but don't go telling me what to do."
"I can't allow you to do that--the slaves you keep share the same right to freedom that you have."
"You may believe that, but I don't. We're not doing any harm to each other by each doing as we like."
What they're fighting over is justice. Since they disagree over what is just, each is trying to force the other to live in a country that--from his perspective--condones injustice.
What is just is not the sort of thing that everyone agrees on, and it's not the sort of thing that a country can be neutral on. Necessarily things are either outlawed or condoned, and such moral values are the common heart of a culture.
To stand for one moral value is always to stand against others. The slaveowner stands for his own freedom to choose on the issue of slavery, but he necessarily stands against universal human freedom. The abolitionist stands for and against the opposite things--he stands for universal freedom at the cost of asking the government declare a morality the slaveowner doesn't endorse. Freedom to choose always stands opposed to the freedom to live in a culture that has chosen. The anarchist stands against the right to property, because he is not willing to make stealing illegal; that's what a "right to property" looks like in law.
Opposed views of justice annihilate each other. People following them may live, physically, at peace with each other... but not always. This is the sort of thing that wars and revolutions are fought over. People die for justice.
We have such opposed views of justice on a lot of political issues today. Take abortion. One side fights for the right to choose, and the other fights for everyone's right to life. One side wants everyone to have to live in a country where women are forced to carry their babies to term; the other wants everyone to have to live in a country here children are daily killed. At stake is who, exactly, counts as human. That's no small thing. Someone is going to have to live in a country where intolerable injustice goes on.
Take affirmative action. One side wants to see the injustices of the past remedied, and feels society owes it to some. The other wants to see equality--judgement based on character, not color--today. If one side wins, the other will automatically have to live in a world they percieve as badly unjust. At stake is what "all men are created equal" really means. Both sides are standing for a particular idea of equality, and against a particular other idea of equality.
I could go on. Some political differences are caused by simple misinformation--that is, some people simply have their facts wrong. (For example, people simply disagree on whether the absence of expected WMD in Iraq is due to effective deception by Saddam or Bush--that is, there is a factual agreement about the president's motivation. Somebody's gotta have their facts wrong.) But even when all the facts are agreed upon, there's still a lot of disagreement left. Often people simply have irreconcilable standards of justice. Those come from competing views. They come from competing values that they think the country should stand for. At stake is who we are as a people.
Gay marriage can be expressed this way. If you will forgive me the indulgence, let me talk a little bit about how the conservative sees this issue. (I try to be as evenhanded as I can in these metaposts, but the other side of this issue is quite unfamiliar to some, so I feel I need to explain.)
Meaning comes from exclusion as well as inclusion. Let me illustrate with a less charged idea. Suppose I define the idea of "science" -- the method of learning about the natural world by rational observation, deduction, and experiment. Suppose I think that science is something worthwhile, and I start a foundation to support it. What happens if the definition broadens? If my foundation decides that "science" is defined by the individual discipline, and anyone who wants to call themselves a scientist is one, then the meaning departs from the term. If I want my foundation to defend and support science, it has to be willing to exclude and judge. The meaning comes from the intelligent exclusion.
The conservative fear in the gay marriage debate isn't a fear of homosexuality, or even a fear of homosexual marriage, exactly. It's the fear of living in a society where marriage means everything, and so means nothing. A soceity that wants to defend an idea of marriage has to be a society willing to exclude certain relationships as marriages. And the conservative senses that the gay marriage advocates aren't truly willing to exclude anyone. That is, they don't stand for an idea of marriage from which they will demand that the govermnent exclude others--they stand for marriage defined by the individual. A marriage that can mean anything to anyone means nothing to everyone. That is what the fight is about.
I have heard no good, alternative definition of marriage that includes gay marriage that anyone is willing to take a principled stand for. This is the debate that needs to happen--which pieces of marriage are essential? Commitment? Love? Two people? Husband, wife? Children? Shared property? Permanence? Could two men and three women and a dog all mutually proclaim love for each other and be married? This is not a wide-eyed slippery slope argument; this is asking where people think the line should be. What marriage means to you--what marriage means to this culture--is defined by who we are willing to include, who we are willing to exclude, and especially, especially, especially why.
So return to the gay marriage debate. Half the world sees things they count as marriages--loving, committed couples--unable to marry. To them, that's injustice. And half the world sees things they don't consider marriages--no husband or wife--marrying. Like the government grant endorsing pseudoscience, it's a step closer to destroying the real thing.
People so often think, naively, that the only freedoms in the world are freedoms to do what you want. But that's only half the picture; a whole host of other freedoms come from depriving other people of the ability to do what they want--that is, they're freedoms to live in a certain world. We have the freedom to have good conversations here precisely because we deny others the freedom to post spam. We think the discussions we have here are valuable, and we'll fight to defend them. That's a freedom that's based on exclusion.
Freedom to do what you want has one sort of cost--the cost of keeping the government from interfering. Freedom to live in a particular sort of society, to define what that society is, has another sort of cost--the cost of excluting alternative definitions. Neither of these is cheap. Unless you're historically very lucky, war is the price of freedom, war is the price of peace, and war is the price of defining who a people are.
that is the whole point. If you want to bow out, that is certainly your choice.
