Perspective on Same-Sex Marriage

JUSTIN TAYLOR|9:46 PM CT

Voters in North Carolina Did Not Vote Today on Banning Gay Marriage

According to reports, North Carolina voters today decided to ban gay marriage.

But Ryan T. Anderson objects to how this is being framed:

How we talk about an issue affects how we think about it. . . . Today’s vote in North Carolina is not about banning anything. Nothing will be made illegal as a result. In all fifty states across the nation two people of the same sex can live together, have their religious community bless their union, and have their workplace offer them various joint benefits—if the religious communities and workplaces in question so desire. Many liberal houses of worship and progressive businesses have voluntarily decided to do so. There’s nothing illegal about this. There’s no ban on it.

What’s at issue is whether the government will recognize such unions as marriages—and then force every citizen and business to do so as well. This isn’t the legalization of something, this is the coercion and compulsion ofothers to recognize and affirm same-sex unions as marriages. . . .

The same-sex marriage debate is so frequently framed in terms of granting gays and lesbians the freedom to do what they wish that few people realize that they already have that freedom—the question is whether the rest of society will have the freedom to choose which type of relationship to honor as marriage. Public discourse needs to more carefully reflect the issues at stake. . . .

Voters in North Carolina today are not voting to ban anything. They are voting to define what marriage is. They are voting to protect the union of a man and woman as something unique and irreplaceably important.

You can read the whole thing here, including interaction with Vice President Biden’s defense of gay marriage.

An Idea from Justin Taylor at the Gospel Coalition.

JUSTIN TAYLOR|5:52 PM CT

A Proposed Compromise on the Same-Sex Marriage Debate

This proposal—a rapprochement of sorts between the revisionists and the traditionalists—was first offered in 2009 by Ryan T. Anderson and Sherif Girgis. It is unlikely to happen, but I think it’s an interesting idea to have on the table. An excerpt:

The revisionists would agree to oppose the repeal of the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA), thus ensuring that federal law retains the traditional definition of marriage as the union of husband and wife, and states retain the right to preserve that definition in their law.

In return, traditionalists would agree to support federal civil unions offering most or all marital benefits.

But, as Princeton’s Robert P. George once proposed for New Jersey civil unions, unions recognized by the federal government would be available to any two adults who commit to sharing domestic responsibilities, whether or not their relationship is sexual. Available only to people otherwise ineligible to marry each other (say, because of consanguinity), these unions would neither introduce a rival “marriage-lite” option nor treat same-sex unions as marriages. Their purpose would be to protect adult domestic partners who have pledged themselves to a mutually binding relationship of care. What (if anything) goes on in the bedroom would have nothing to do with these unions’ goals or, thus, eligibility requirements.

This proposal will, no doubt, meet with resistance on both sides of the marriage divide.

Traditionalists will regret any move that appears to capitulate on the distinctiveness of marital relationships by granting same-sex couplings similar status, even if we would make recognition available to presumptively non-sexual relationships to avoid equating gay unions with marriage. (We ourselves do not favor civil-union schemes of any type, but we are prepared to accept them as part of an honorable compromise among reasonable people of goodwill.)

At the same time, revisionists will have to compromise by supporting DOMA, the current Clinton-era federal law that retains a traditional definition of marriage for federal purposes while leaving each state free to define marriage as it sees fit, regardless of what other states do.

But we believe that for both sides, the benefits could outweigh the drawbacks.

First, this approach would avoid the hornet’s nest of church-state issues engaged by the Rauch-Blankenhorn proposal. Since neither the presumption nor the legal possibility of sex would be a condition for recognition, homosexual activity would not be incentivized or institutionally normalized. Thus, traditional religious communities would not have to rule out support for our proposal as an implicit endorsement of homosexual activity. And with renewed support for DOMA, they would be free not to promote or treat same-sex unions as marriages. As a result, no special religious-conscience protections would be necessary.

For traditionalists, though, there is another worry. Two state courts have already used existing state civil-union laws as part of their rationale for insisting that the legislature enact same-sex ‘marriage,’ on the ground that “separate but equal” institutions are unjust. If, under the Rauch-Blankenhorn proposal, we enacted same-sex civil unions identical in their structure and purposes to marriage, courts could again use these as a steppingstone to same-sex ‘marriage.’ The benefit of our proposal is that it avoids this possible breach of the compromise by reaffirming DOMA and establishing civil unions that differ in substance, not only in name, from marriages.

Our proposal would still meet the needs of same-sex partners—based not on sex (which is irrelevant to their relationship’s social value), but on shared domestic responsibilities, which really can ground mutual obligations. It would provide a practical compromise that need not offend either side’s nonnegotiable principles. And it would lower the emotional temperature without chilling debate, which would continue at the state level, perhaps now more fruitfully.

Perhaps another case for homeschooling.

MONDAY, MAY 7, 2012

The Toronto District School Board is putting the “cult” back in multiculturalism

I was at a cult meeting last Friday and Saturday. At least it felt that way being in a large hall with over 300 teachers from all over Ontario who were at the Toronto District School Board’s “Futures” conference that was created to discuss and advance ‘equity’ in education.

Let’s be clear about this, there are some very intelligent teachers that are out there every day dealing with the challenges of  providing our children an education that will give them the tools for success in life. But the teachers predisposed towards the type of thought that led them to the Futures conference and the ideas espoused there make those challenges even harder.

Many of these well meaning, muddle-headed educators are people of at best average intelligence who have convinced themselves they are more intelligent, more enlightened, and should be the guardians of thought and speech for everyone else.

Anyone concerned with the direction of public education in Toronto should be aware that:

  • TDSB personnel admit that they intentionally discriminate against Christianity.
  • The TDSB feels we need to focus more on race, and that our system is debased by white privilege. (Although this will come as no surprise given the board has already created a racially exclusionary Afrocentric school and wants to create more.)
  • Anyone who dares to challenge their notion of multiculturalism and questions their idea of integration for immigrants and the direction Canadian culture is taking is a hatemonger.

Hearing the attitudes of some of the people with the authority to decide how our children should be educated was a terrifying experience. It was made all the more alarming knowing it had the full support of the top levels of the Toronto District School Board and the Ontario Ministry of Education.

One of the keynote speakers was a race-huckster named Tim Wise, who blamed all of educations ills and inequities on “white privilege.” Yes, racism still exists in our society. It’s deplorable and should be exposed and rooted out wherever it’s found. But it is not as pervasive and systemic as Wise says and it and white privilege is most certainly not, as he suggested, the sole explanation for inequities in society. As even TDSB Director Chris Spence acknowledged, socio-economic factors play the most significant role in determining a child’s outcome. Unfortunately this admission came with  a startling display of cognitive dissonance as he subsequently downplayed the role poverty has in outcome and reiterated Wise’s call to focus on race and racism.

I have no idea if Tim Wise has ever held a real job in his life – he spoke about being a community organizer before his current career as polemicist and motivational speaker to organizations stupid enough to pay him (with your tax dollars). But in between insulting George W. Bush to the approbation of the TDSB Equity gang, and Marxist paeans to the lack of equality of outcome which he attributes to racism and white privilege, Wise betrayed a total lack of understanding of how the world of business and society work outside the bubble of the school system. That ignorance was reflected by all too many teachers at the conference.

As anyone who has worked in the real world knows, a lot of jobs come from personal connections and indeed, nepotism. From the employers’ standpoint, having someone you know and trust recommend someone else serves as a measure of risk mitigation when taking on a new employee. The fact is that immigrants are less well established than people who have been here for generations and have had the opportunities to build that infrastructure of contacts through family and social circumstances. It has nothing to do with race and everything to do with culture and socio-economic status. As proof, Wise’s theory doesn’t account for why certain non-white immigrant groups like Sikhs and Koreans, which place high cultural emphasis on education, family, commerce and community, fare far better than people from cultures that don’t have those attributes, like Jamaica and Somalia, and parts of Latin America.

Either North America practices a very strange, selective racism, or Wise is full of hot air.

The problem is that the hot air Wise is blowing is being sucked up by and filing the heads of our top academic administrators. Watching Wise’s speech get a standing ovation from a hall full of mostly white teachers whose white privilege and unacknowledged racism he blamed for the inequities of their students performance was like being at an Orwellian show trial where accused thought criminals proudly confessed their crimes against Big Brother.

Even more appalling was the acceptance of Wise’s proposal that race should addressed just as disability is in schools. According to Wise, we aren’t blind to disability, so why should we be blind to race? And therein lies the problem and the best illustration of the dearth of insight possessed by such racist anti-racists. Being non-white is not a disability, and it demeans non-Caucasians  to condescend to them by treating them as if it were. The disability is in the hatred and stupidity of those archaic people who judge others on the basis of their skin color. And the reality of today’s world in North America is that if you are a racist, you will be deservedly shunned and ostracized by just about every intelligent, credible person.  This is a lesson the full implications of which Wise and TDSB Director Spence regrettably have not learned.

But that’s only one part of the problem. In our school system, which TDSB Director Spense said he wants “to esteem other cultures as much as our own,” we actually are intentionally discriminating against the founding culture of our nation.

In one session titled Limits of the Law: Guidelines and Procedures for Religious Accommodation, the session leader, a former TDSB Curriculum Project Manager and Equity/ Human Rights Reviewer, admitted that the Toronto school board actively discriminates against Christianity.

That admission came about when she discussed a case study of a Toronto school where the Parent’s Council wanted to put on a Christmas Concert, renamed to a Holiday Concert, since the school had also had celebrations of Eid and Ramadan. Even though every reference to Christmas and Jesus was excised from the program, it remained problematic after an organized campaign by Muslim parents to exclude their children from the event.

This led me to ask about the obvious discrimination against Christianity where Muslim holidays are actively celebrated but Christian beliefs and references to Jesus are verboten.

TDSB says this is hate – others may think it’s reasonable
discourse about public policy

She said that it is true Christianity is discriminated against in the TDSB and her rationale was a 1990 Ontario Appeals Court decision, known as the Elgin County decision that resulted in a school board no longer being able to open and close the school day with Christian prayer.

The incredible thing about this is that it appears that the TDSB hasgrossly twisted their interpretation of the court decision into guidelines that only prohibit Christianity while embracing any other religious practice.

In another session, called Learning and Understanding; Cultural and Religious Differences/Faith and Inclusivity: An Equity-Based Framework for meeting the needs of Muslim Students, one of the seminar leaders named Kalpana Malkan, who works for the Elementary Teachers Federation of Ontario and said she works to help form curriculum,  put up a powerpoint slide with the quote, taken from the online comments of a newspaper article, which said, “People once chose to come to Canada for things like prosperity and freedom. Now people come here because we accommodate to the point of self-sacrifice… This is not the Canada I grew up in. We used to have a culture, now we have none..

Ms Malkan and a subsequent seminar leader in the session both identified the quote as “hate.”

The debate regarding multiculturalism and the degree to which Canadian society should attempt to integrate immigrants as opposed to accommodating foreign cultures is an important public policy question. There are no identifiable groups or people in the quote targeted for hatred. But in the minds of TDSB sanctioned seminar leaders, questioning current multiculturalism policies qualifies as hate. This totalitarianism of thought in the hands of people forming school curriculum is more frightening than any of the so-called hate they described.

As is far too common among radical would-be social engineers, context was almost completely absent from the Futures conference. One of the keynote speakers, Uzma Shakir, the City of Toronto’s Director of the Office of Equity, Diversity and Human Rights, criticized Canadian racism and this country’s paternalistic prejudices against immigrants. There is always room for improvement when it comes to issues of fairness, but what was never mentioned by any of the speakers at the conference was exactly to whom Canada was faring so badly by comparison.

It couldn’t be to Shakir’s native Pakistan, of which she fondly spoke, where Hindus and Christians are routinely persecuted and subject to the death penalty for blasphemy laws. Nor could it be in Saudi Arabia, where no religion but Islam can be legally observed. In fact among all the pessimism of the conference, there was no mention of any country that was more progressive in its attitude towards race and immigration than ours. But that observation, were it to be made, may have been counterproductive to the pervasive pessimism   the event appeared to intend to convey.

It needs to be said that TDSB Director Spence is an extremely intelligent individual, far more so than any of the senior Administrators at the head office or among the city`s elected School Trustees that I have yet encountered. He is obviously deeply committed to the well being of the city`s student population and wants them all to succeed. Every day, he hears heart-wrenching accounts from parents with disadvantaged children  who are struggling to help them get a fair shot at life, and he knows that education is their best, if not their only chance at that. Spence seems desperate to do something to help his students in need.

There are innovative, equitable approaches to education that were never seriously discussed at the Futures conference, like Salman Khan`s idea for an academy of remote learning with classroom supports.

But by instead grasping at the poisoned, racialist straws that people like Tim Wise are offering for self-flagellation while neglecting to do more to instill knowledge of core subjects, far more harm will be done to both students and society as a whole.