Author: Ophelia Benson

Hey the Family Research Council has gone all Darwin and sciencey on us.

Some people believe that religious dogma is the only reason why anyone opposes same-sex marriage. Those who believe the human race began with Adam and Eve, and that their relationship was God’s model for marriage, believe marriage should be between a man and a woman. But those who don’t believe in the Bible, who think Adam and Eve are a myth, and who don’t accept a Christian view of the human person, have no reason to believe marriage is an opposite-sex union. Right?

Well, no, not exactly. Those who don’t believe the Bible is some kind of magic rule-book and who don’t want Christians telling them what to do, have no reason to think that the word ‘marriage’ has some absolute for-all-time set in stone meaning that can’t ever be changed, or that the word ‘marriage’ is the same thing as the institution of marriage and that both (or both in one) should be treated as sacred and inviolable and immune to alteration. Those who think Adam and Eve are indeed a myth have no reason to think that we can’t shouldn’t mustn’t alter our practices and domestic arrangements as our ideas about people and sex and morality change. It’s more like that. It’s not that we disagree that marriage has always referred to the legal union of a woman and a man* – it’s that we disagree that it can’t now expand its meaning to cover other kinds of couples. It’s that we think it’s a human arrangement, intended to meet human needs of some kind, and that we are free and entitled and allowed to adapt it to meet other needs, or the same needs of other people, or both.

But never mind that, go ahead.

The scientists believe that a primate skeleton found in Ethiopia is that of a human ancestor—one that lived 4.4 million years ago. Almost at the end of this long piece, the article describes what C. Owen Lovejoy, an anthropologist at Kent State University, says about the social organization of this species:

The males, he argues, pair-bonded with females. Lovejoy sees male parental investment in the survival of offspring as a hallmark of the human lineage. So, how long has marriage (i.e., “pair-bonding”) been a male-female union? About four million, four hundred thousand years, if this secular scientist is to be believed.

Uh…..pair-bonding isn’t the same thing as marriage, which is kind of the point. Gay pair-bonding already exists and is now mostly legal, but many gay people want marriage. Ardipithecus didn’t have marriage. Furthermore, the fact that males, according to Lovejoy, pair-bonded with females, of course doesn’t necessarily mean that all males pair-bonded with females or that all females pair-bonded with males. Obviously Lovejoy would have no way of knowing that, and it’s most unlikely that he meant to imply that. He meant, it seems fair to say, that in general males pair-bonded with females – as opposed to abandoning them after mating and playing no role in child-rearing. And furthermore again – what does the Family Research Council care what some pesky secular scientist says?

It cares because it wants to say

Marriage is not merely a religious institution, nor merely a civil institution. It is, rather, a natural institution, whose definition as the union of male and female is rooted in the order of nature itself.

Fine. Marriage is the institutionalization of a natural tendency to pair-bond, if you like. Fine. But so what? Pair-bonding has fostered a vast array of elaborations and decorations over these 4.4 million years, so what is the problem if some people want to avail themselves of the institutionalized version even though they don’t match the male-female child-rearing model? The old model gets to continue, complete with quarrels and divorce and bad jokes, so what difference does it make if other people join the party too? None. But the FRC isn’t going to mention that aspect of the story.

*Though of course we do disagree – since it has meant other things too, such as polygamy.

So the Church Times review of Does God Hate Women? is considerably more favorable than was Sholto Byrnes’s in the Independent or Cristina Odone’s in the Observer, to say nothing of Madeleine Bunting’s reception. There’s a profound irony in that, which I will not belabor.

I must say, I wish Mooney would not be at it again. I wish Mooney would go do other things now. I wish he would find other despised minorities to smear with accusations of aggression and assault and bashing and other forms of wickedness. I wish he would do that so that I could go back to ignoring him (also of course because then he wouldn’t be doing the thing which I resent his doing and thus feel compelled to rebuke him for doing). Of course, I could go on ignoring him, speaking literally – I’m not forced to retort to his manipulative campaign against overt atheists. But I think his campaign ought to be rebuked, so in that sense I can’t ignore new instantiations of it. I don’t think it’s enough to deliver one overall rebuke of his campaign and leave it at that, because he keeps on. I could ignore his blog with no trouble, but items in major media, which includes Huffington, I can’t.

That’s the main reason a critic told me I’m a nasty mean aggressive bully last week – because I was ‘relentless’ about Mooney. It’s true, I was. I didn’t like being so relentless myself – not least because I think all the repetition is just boring – but also because yes, it did feel too aggressive. Not, I’m afraid, in the sense of being unfair to Mooney and Kirshenbaum – because I thought then and still think that they needed to be persuaded to stop – to stop at least using violent rhetoric and other scapegoating tactics, and I thought there was some chance, however tiny, that persuasion would work. More in the sense of being ugly. More an egoistic concern than an altruistic one. No maybe that’s not quite it – because being ugly is harmful in its own way. Yes that’s it. I didn’t like being as ugly as I thought M&K were being. I didn’t like debasing the discourse that way, so often and so ‘relentlessly.’ But but but – there they were – in one national media outlet after another. It was a relief when they’d done all the media they could do, and I could shut up about it. So…I wish Mooney would shut up, or get a different subject. I would like nothing better than to ignore him.

Chris Mooney is at it again, this time with an article at the Huffington Post explaining that Dawkins really has changed his tune even though he explicitly and emphatically said he hasn’t when Jerry Coyne asked him while they were both at the Atheist Boys’ Alliance (emailing from room to room, apparently, as opposed to just talking, but then that means the money quote was in writing, which is always useful). Mooney acknowledges this clarification (though not the implied rebuke to the spin he and Rosenau rushed to put on it) but he turns it into a Point For His Side anyway.

But what’s truly noteworthy is where Dawkins hints as to how this all happened-e.g., he’s got an evolution book to sell now, and he’s sick of people thinking it’s an atheism book, so he’s trying to steer interviewers away from that, and seems frankly annoyed that they don’t get the difference…In other words, Dawkins appears to be grappling with a communication problem. Linking together atheist advocacy and the defense of evolution, as he has done so prominently, poses a pretty big problem when you hit the US media with a new book on the latter. After writing a million-selling atheist “consciousness-raiser” and “come-out-of-the-closet” book, is it at all surprising that Dawkins now finds his evolution book being prominently linked to atheism in the media mind?

Says the guy who has done perhaps more than any other single individual to make that true – the guy who, with his co-author, wrote an article in the LA Times announcing that Dawkins’s new book wouldn’t educate people because they would be too turned off by his evil atheist reputation. Mooney first worked hard to discredit Dawkins’s new book on the grounds that Dawkins is a vocal atheist, and now expresses pious concern about this ‘pretty big problem’ with getting people to talk about the new book when they interview him ostensibly about the new book. In other words it could be that one reason Dawkins is ‘frankly annoyed’ that reporters insist on talking about the old book instead of the new one is because of the role played by mischief-makers and scapegoaters like Mooney and Kirshenbaum.

That’s certainly a huge part of my annoyance. That’s because I think the whole thing is illegitimate, and underhanded, and somewhat dangerous, and irresponsible, and fundamentally unfair and unreasonable. It’s dressed up as a tactical thing, to do with reaching the Silent Majority, the excluded middle, the good normal everyday common sense Folks who just wanna blurghurghurgh, but behind that it seems to tap into a much deeper well of anger and hatred. I have absolutely no idea why Mooney apparently hates overt atheists so much, but I do think that’s what’s going on. Why? Because if it were just pragmatic, there wouldn’t have been all the stonewalling of critics and the serial misrepresentation of same. At least I don’t think there would. Disagreement over tactics doesn’t seem worth it, and doesn’t seem likely to motivate it either.

If Dawkins wants to change minds about evolution, and break down barriers, it makes a heck of a lot of sense to move to the center on religion, and not alienate religious believers or the U.S. media any more than he has to. Dawkins’ followers may complain that the master is being misrepresented, but the truth is that Richard Dawkins may be something else: a savvy, adaptable communicator.

There speaks the true scapegoater and marginalizer and shunner and minority-punisher – ‘it makes a heck of a lot of sense to move to the center on religion’ – and on everything else, of course, because ‘the center’ is where all decent people are, because anything outside the center is by definition evil and weird. Gotcher stones ready?

What does ‘the center on religion’ even mean? The land of split the difference? But different people have different differences to split. In any case…what’s at stake with this disagreement – atheism v vague woolly whateverism – is basically epistemological, and that’s not about what is or isn’t in the center. It’s not about majorities, it’s not about polite conformity, it’s not about not alienating people. That’s what Mooney always refuses to get, or else to accept, or else to care about – that there are principled reasons not to compromise or split the difference or ‘move to the center’ on epistemic issues, and we bristle at being told to treat truth claims the same way we treat campaign promises or votes on highway bills.

Andrew Sullivan really does have a down on Jerry Coyne, doesn’t he. He quotes from Jerry’s post on the Atheist shindig and then comments:

They’re really charming, aren’t they? It is as if everything arrogant about the academy and everything sneering about cable news culture is combined into one big snarky smugfest. Maybe these atheists will indeed help push back the fundamentalist right. Maybe they will remind people that between these atheist bigots and these fundamentalist bigots, the appeal of the Christianity of the Gospels shines like the sun.

Or maybe they will remind (different) people that some of us are tired of theists telling everyone what’s what without a whisper of (public, unapologetic) opposition. Who knows – the future is hidden from our mortal eyes. But the more people like Sullivan blow a gasket merely because atheists are atheists, the more obvious the social pressure will become. Next step – The Revolution.

(I’m kidding, Sully.)

It’s interesting to know there is such a thing as ‘Quiverfull families.’

Quiverfull families tend to believe in male headship – the principle, also derived from the Bible, that men should lead households. Feminists are perhaps the fiercest critics of the budding Quiverfull movement. They accuse it of trying to undo the equality and freedom won for women over decades of struggle, and claim that the idea of automatic male leadership is anachronistic. But Robert Sanford sees his approach to family life both as authentically Christian, and as the best training for children to take on what he sees as the moral decay afflicting American society.

Here’s what I want to know: what is that ‘But’ doing there? Feminists think (or ‘claim’) that the idea of automatic male leadership is anachronistic

but Mr Quiver thinks it’s authentically Christian? How are those two incompatible or disjointed in any way? They’re not. That ‘But’ should be ‘And.’ Feminists see reactionary ‘Christian’ patriarchy as anachronistic and oppressive and unjust, and reactionary Christians see reactionary ‘Christian’ patriarchy as a good thing. That’s clear enough, I should think.