Move to Ban Square Circles Fails

Males form sexual associations with females not out of a tiresome, dutiful, pious, half-unwilling obedience to the demands of the culture but in fulfillment of the biological nature of the beast. The family is not the creation of culture: without the family there would be no culture! --Weston LaBarre

As always, I begin this post not knowing if it will go anywhere or whether I will be able to finish it. Except that today I’m doubly unsure, because I don’t know if I can put my feelings into words. This must be how liberals feel all the time, but they don’t seem to have the slightest bit of difficulty in finding the words to express their unthinking.

But I wanted to say something about the “homosexual marriage” issue, for there is almost no one on either side of this debate that discusses it with any depth or substance. Both sides are reduced to strong feelings that are merely backed up with boilerplate language. In the case of the left, they imbue their feelings with the language of human rights, whereas the right frames it in terms of religious values, tradition, and the welfare of children.

Although it is surely a truism that children ideally require a mother and father for optimal psycho-spiritual development, the materialistic left is always able to find some deeply flawed psychological study that disproves the obvious. Psychology is a field which is dominated by people with no intellect properly so-called, so they produce “studies” as a debased replacement for their inability to know metapsychological truth directly. Scientific psychologists have also in the recent past proven that pedophilia is normal, that children are not harmed by sexual abuse, that dreams are meaningless, that early childhood experience has no impact on adult development, and that treating boys and girls the same will eliminate gender differences. So psychology as a field (individual brilliant psychologists notwithstanding) has little to contribute to the issue.

“Psyche,” of course, means soul or spirit, so a true psychologist is someone who inquires into the spiritual basis of humanity, which is to say, the human basis of humanity. At its deepest level, our humanness is coterminous with the very foundations of the cosmos. It cannot be otherwise, for if we eliminate the subject that apprehends it, the cosmos vanishes into nothingness. Can you imagine a cosmos that cannot be imagined, perceived and experienced? Of course not. When we inquire into the nature of the psyche, we are ultimately examining the metaphysical foundations of the cosmos, not just individually but collectively. Any psychology that doesn’t recognize this fact is both trivial and subhuman.

These deeper layers of the psyche are covered over by various accretions, to such an extent that we no longer see and understand them. Rather, we generally only feel them. If we turn our gaze within and try to apprehend the foundations of our being, we get no further than looking at the night time sky and trying to see the edge of the universe with the naked eye. Although we cannot see it, we know that it’s actually there. As matter of fact, at its farthest edge, it meets back up with the subject at the bottom of the psyche.

Religious language is a way to talk about these ultimate terms of existence that are beyond the horizons of mere egoic knowability. Genesis, for example, deals with the hidden roots of ontology, anthropology and psychology. Genesis is not about our horizontal existence--i.e., about the world literally being created in six days, or about a garden and a serpent. Rather, it is trying to resonate with the deepest layers of our being. It is trying to tell us something about ourselves that we already know--we cannot not know it--but which we can easily forget or be unable to articulate. In fact, Genesis is so sophisticated that it even takes this perpetual self-forgetting into consideration in a self-referential way.

One annoying aspect of the marriage debate is that it is automatically framed in the misleading, two-dimensional language of the left. Thus, on Drudge there is the headline “Gay Marriage Ban Falls Short,” as if there was ever such a thing as “Gay Marriage” and that someone is trying to “ban” it. The headline might as well read “Square Circles Banned.” If you live in the two-dimensional secular world, then there really is no reason why “gay marriage” shouldn’t exist. Divorced from any deeper ontology, human beings are merely animals with special rights, including the right to marry anyone whom they please.

But what is marriage, anyway? This reminds me of one of my mentors, the psychoanalyst W.R. Bion, who would never inquire into whether or not a patient was married, because he wanted to discover for himself whether the person was married internally, regardless of whether they were married in the technical, legalistic sense of the term. For marriage is--and can only be--the union of two primordial categories of existence, male and female. Legal marriage is simply an acknowledgment of this existential fact.

Obviously, the marriage of male and female is a “naturally supernatural” institution that exists prior to the state, for it is the foundation of the state, not vice versa. The state did not come into being and then invent the thing called marriage. Rather, its legitimacy can only be founded on its respect for the human nature or “natural rights” that precede it.

Of course, it is always possible to have a state that not only doesn’t respect human nature, but violates it or even tries to reinvent it, such in communist or socialist regimes. Unfortunately, even in the United States we are well down the road of trying to remake and redesign human nature, not just with regard to the marriage issue, but in many other aspects of humanness as well. This is why I scoff at secular humanists, because theirs is a philosophy that is specifically subhuman, for any philosophy that severs human beings from their transcendent source is ipso facto a barbarism that reduces us to animality and regards us as beasts.

For me, the marriage issue has nothing whatsoever to do with homosexuality, regardless of whether one adheres to the fashionable theories of a genetic basis for it. It should go without saying that I have nothing against the individual homosexual. However, when the “homosexual movement” joins forces with a larger movement that wishes to redefine the very basis of humanness, then I get concerned. But opponents of this anti-humanistic movement must be able to articulate exactly what it is that they are concerned about. It won’t do to sputter like a liberal about your deepest feelings. Reduced to the language of feelings, liberals will win every time.

The family is a moral structure, a biologically validated “truth” now permanently imbedded in the physical and physiological nature of man....

.... A man has the pride and privilege, with his maleness, of returning to a woman a shared pleasure, like but unlike that which another woman, with her breast, conferred upon him first as a baby. Cherished and nurtured to strength by his mother, he may then protect and cherish another woman in his turn. And of all the things in this world these two, maternal and conjugal love, are without any qualification wholly good.

.... A boy must become a man by similarly admiring manliness--in a rival he may hate or envy--through the mysterious love of male logos, not of physical males. --Weston LaBarre