Adopt That as Our Anthem

by Frank Turk


Yes: I have tricked you again.  You were expecting the Best of Phil and rather you got me spouting off about something which caught me late in the week and it needed to be set straight.  (A turn of phrase which, after you have read this post, will be very funny)

Also: warning.  Adult topics ahead.

The Huffington Post has been experimenting with me for LiveStream chats because they don't know any normal conservatives and they ran into me one week hoping they could find a stereotypical rube they could use to say they have diverse voices.  You can imagine how that turned out -- but they do keep calling me and somehow the video never makes it to the web.  In their defense, the first video had to be scrapped because one of the other bloggers interviewed did the LiveChat without headphones on, and the reverb through his/her computer ruined all the audio; the second video was a little stilted because they invited the guests for one topic and sprung another on us after we were all linked in -- it's hard to say anything useful when you're caught flat-footed and the host is a harridan.

Now, here's the thing: this week HuffPo ran what I would call an Op-Ed on the question of why there was a media kerfuffle over the fact that Anderson Cooper's boyfriend was caught out-out in NYC with someone other than Mr. Cooper. Here's the money quote from that essay:

If monogamy works for you, more power to you. If you and your girlfriend want to sleep with other people on occasion (or invite someone home with you at the end of the night), do it. If three men want to live as a throuple, let them live as a throuple. If a husband and wife want to take separate vacations and sleep around while they're apart, who is anyone else to say that that's unsavory?

I'm not saying that everyone is -- or should be -- throwing key parties or hunting for a plot of land to start a sex-based commune with 40 of their closest friends. I'm saying it's time to start breaking down our antiquated ideas about romance and relationships, many of which are largely based on ideas of control and fear, and start talking openly and honestly about what really works best for each of us.

Now, when I found this, I threw a line to soon-to-be-published atheist chaplain Chris Stedman to see if he would be helping us find out why we would be better together with that kind of thinking.  His feedback:

@frank_turk Not sure I'll write on it - I have a bunch of essays I'm still trying to finish up. But I do think it's a valuable discussion.
— Chris Stedman (@ChrisDStedman) August 15, 2012

Which, as we say around here: Aha!

This is the valuable conversation which, it turns out, nobody wants to have.  Look: I sort of gave Maury Povich the side-eye last week in pointing out the kind of morality which, allegedly, nobody wants to have.  We can watch Maury parade legions of self-destructive relationshipwrecks out of the docks and we can say in every case, "Wow -- at least I'm not that screwed up."  We can, on the surface, agree that whatever it is we think we want out of our emotional and family lives, it ain't that.  That, as they said in the gauzy and Rockwellian past, is wrong.

And while we have been told that, fortunately, there is no slippery slope from abandoning a traditional definition of marriage down to all manner of relational ruin and absurdity, suddenly Anderson Cooper ought not to be abashed or abased that his lover is not just his lover.  In fact, in spite of the third-rate sports entertaiment you can find on Maury Povich, maybe none of that is actually anything to be ashamed of, according to Michelson.

Think about this: last week, I did in fact state that the LGBT lifestyle was personally dangerous to the people in it -- and spelled out the public health reasons why.  But under those health reasons, there are clear and present emotional reasons that this lifestyle is hazardous -- as made transparently-clear by Noah Michelson at HuffPo.  And those reasons, frankly, are not because people like me object to this behavior or because we hold to an antiquated moral code which isn't relevant to our advanced society.  They are because that lifestyle is, ultimately, in the psychological and intellectual thrall of the reasoning Michelson has spilled upon the readers of HuffPo.

Listen: years ago, when the sadly-deceived Lisa Miller sprung it upon us in the pages of Newsweek that, in fact, it was the Bible which was foisting upon us a definition  of "marriage" which looked a lot more like a loose polygamy for the sensually and spiritually weak, or a vehicle only for the satisfaction of urges one cannot control for the fulfillment of promises one doesn’t think God is willing or able to keep, of course, she said: nobody really wants that.

And yet it seems that such a thing is exactly what the editorial staff at HuffPo says should be utterly blasé -- and they are a significant infotainment company.  They are allegedly main-stream.

Now, to wrap this up: so what?

There are a lot of things wrong with this.  This is the internet, after all.  But the thing which, it seems to me, must be mulled over immediately is the fact that the darkly-funny claim that people like Chris Stedman make about the ways we can be "better together" is suddenly exposed as desolately vacant.  I have asked him (often) how exactly we can establish any kind of common ground when the most-essential issues of interpersonal relationships cannot be part of our common ground.  How do I know what is and isn't even courteous let alone morally virtuous and exemplary when we ought to make moral equivalence between sleeping around and 50 years of monogamous hetero marriage -- both are fine, apparently, for whomever's boat is floated?  And when we find an example like this, where the rubber meets the road on that claim, he has other things to do.


But while there might be a demand for this breadth of activity to be accepted as patently bourgeois, the problem that these are really not morally equivalent has to rear its ugly head.  If not, Maury will go out of business: the shocking and subtle self-aggrandizing salve for our conscience dries up if these people entertaining us with their moral tragicomedies are suddenly not morally-entertaining at all.  There's no comfort in it if we are not better than they are.  If being joined as one flesh until death do you-all part ought to be just as acceptable as treating others' emotions and well-being like yesterday's newspaper, we might as well substitute a wet whoopee cushion and an inverted trash can for the brass and timpani in "Fanfare for the Common Man," adopt that as our anthem, and see what other innovative, open, and honest best practices we can concoct for our society.

Let me say this plainly: this is the kind of so-called "good" people figure out without God, especially the naive ones who are on about how they can definitely be without God.  The Bible says this is what seems right in our own eyes.  And it's the grand obstacle to having a purely-secular discussion about what we ought to do to improve our society: we don't know what's best for us, and we trade the true God for a fake god of our own creation, and we worship the god we desire instead of the God who made us.

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What Child is This?

by Frank Turk

First of all, I intended to write a review of a documentary which is coming out later this month which I received from one of the subjects of that film.  The film is called Holy Rollers: the True Story of Card Counting Christians, and it's quite a challenging review to write because the right thing to do is to judge the movie for what it is rather than what it is not, and I'm still working on that.

But in the midst of trying to do justice to a movie about a topic which I find radically incongruous, I ran into this story coming out of Florida.  Apparently, ... um, here's how the Associated Press put it:

A custody battle in Florida between two lesbians could fuel the growing national debate over the definition of motherhood. ...

The women, now in their 30s and known in court papers only by their initials, were both law enforcement officers in Florida. One partner donated an egg that was fertilized and implanted in the other. That woman gave birth in 2004, nine years into their relationship.

But the Brevard County couple separated two years later, and the birth mother eventually left Florida with the child without telling her former lover. The woman who donated the egg and calls herself the biological mother finally tracked them down in Australia with the help of a private detective.

Their fight over the now 8-year-old girl is before the state Supreme Court, which has not announced whether it will consider the case. A trial judge ruled for the birth mother and said the biological mother has no parental rights under state law, adding he hoped his decision would be overturned.

The 5th District Court of Appeal in Daytona Beach obliged, siding with the biological mother and saying both women have parental rights.

Let me make something clear before we get into the tall grass over there: there is something unrelentingly-sad about this story even in the sparse way the AP puts it.  There's something unambiguously-melancholy in the phrase "their relationship."  There's something soul-aching in the phrase "separated two years later."  There's something morally unmerciful about the clinical way the child involved here is described as having been brought into the world -- as if it was a fortuitous science experiment. And that this has all turned out to be a fight in court over what the law ought to do about it … it's numbing.  It makes you want to turn off your humanity so you can ignore it.

So as a consequence of this, the state of Florida is now trying to re-read and re-write its entire civil code of justice to decipher the rights of two women and how to, as the article says in a sort of Dickensian way, "come to grips with what is best for the child."

I'm having a hard time seeing "best" as a word which can even come into this discussion.  What is unmitigatedly best for a child is that it come into this world as the fruit of a covenant between two people -- that a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh, as it has become rather quaint to say.  But instead we have a world in which we do what we think is right in our own eyes, and any ol' two people (three actually, since the father here is only a contributor to a test tube who, frankly, has no skin in the game) can have a child and then decide that they can simply "separate two years later" with no shame which lawyers can't fix up for them.

In that, Piers Morgan has the audacity to say this:

some people would say that telling kids that being gay is a sin, or getting married is a sin or whatever – that in itself is incredibly destructive and damaging, in a country where seven states now have legalized it.

You know: he thinks what he has said here is an absurdity.  That is: to say gay marriage is "a sin" is completely inhuman and more damaging than, for example, what is happening in Florida.

Because consider the example I started with here.  In this example, two people made some sort of agreement to live together, and even decided to have a child together.  And when they decided it didn't work out, they parted ways.  If our response here is that it's just unnatural that this is two women rather than one man, one woman, the other side wonders how we can keep a straight face (pun intended).

In this view -- that is, Morgan's view -- this happens all the time to one man, one woman.  In their view, straight people don't even bother to get married anymore -- and when they do, they have an equal chance to break up as not break up without regard to whether there are children involved or any other objective measure.  So why not just let anyone who wants to roll those dice roll the dice?  They want ...

... now get this, please, because it is actually the point ...

They just want to be happy.

But here's the other thing: the really crazy thing here is that they -- that is, the other side -- know this is not what ought to be.  Even if they can't define the real issues here, they know that a child ought not to be somehow without parents.  And they know, frankly, that everything I said in the first paragraph after the AP citation is tragic and heart-rendering and makes less of those who are involved.  It ruins them -- a fact we can see in everything from pop music to pop literature to the way they dramatize their lives in movies and theater and TV.

What we do not disagree with them about is the human toll involved when families are ill-defined, and ill-made, and ill-kept, and ill-maintained, and torn asunder.  What they cannot bear, it seems to me, is to admit that we agree with them that families ought to be a refuge from whims of emotionalism, and personal caprice, and selfishness, and so on.  We agree that what ought to happen is that a marriage ought to be formed, and something happen there that is not a matter of law but of something greater than the law, and as a consequence of that union, that one flesh, a family is made -- both as a beginning and as it grows through the birth of children.

And that is the real tragedy of the story here from the AP: how it seeks to imitate what a family ought to be, and how deeply it fails in that regard.  And in the end, it is also a parable of how far those involved are willing to wander from the truth and into what seems right in their own eyes by forcing the Law to do things for them which, if they are honest, they were unable and unwilling to do for themselves.

Is it really a matter of how many American States issue a legal verdict that this sort of thing ought to be legal and be called "marriage"?  Does that actually improve what has happened here, and what happens thousands of times every year?  Or does it simply make a bad  system of reasoning and living worse by giving permission to people to do it more often?

That's the root of it: what else will we permit?  How far will we go to show that in fact we do not have to let a man to leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and the two to become one flesh, in order to have a marriage and a family?  At what point are we actually destroying this thing we think we are longing for?

And then where is the refuge from our own work?  That is: how do we get out from under the way we have made the world, doing the things we want to do, and suffering for it because what we want is at the same time somehow apparently-necessary to us and so utterly futile and broken?

If all the things I want to do I cannot do, and all the things I should not want I do with gusto, how terribly faulty, flimsy, forlorn, gloomy, hapless, hopeless, and hurting am I?

And who can save me -- the law?  Look at how good the law is doing in Florida.  I think the law probably can't come to grips with what is best for the child.  The law can't even figure out who the mother of this child is.  How can it decide -- let alone create and nurture -- what a family ought to be?

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