We can be thankful at least in Rauch's book that he doesn't paint those of us who are conservative Christians as homophobes who hate homosexuals. I don't know any who are around me and if I encountered them, I would try to remind them that Christ commanded us to love people regardless of what they do. However, Rauch doesn't really have new arguments and doesn't address the main issues. Instead, I felt like I was being taken on an appeal to emotion throughout the whole book. That's how the very first chapter starts even!
Now I'm not entirely discounting an appeal to emotion, but if that is what seems to be the fundamental underlying principle, there's a problem. Take the abortion debate. If all I had was emotion, that'd be a problem. If I make a case however that this is a living human being from conception and then point out the realities by speaking of 4,000 babies dying every day, I have appealed to your emotion, but I have also given you facts. The emotion is useless without the facts. I have told you the truth and then how I expect you to respond.
I plan to write a fuller review for my own work later, but I'd like to touch on some issues for Amazon readers. First off, Rauch will not address issues such as the morality of homosexuality or even that there is clear scientific evidence that homosexuality is genetic and even if there was, why it would follow that it is moral. He speaks of homosexuals in a world upside-down. It's just the reverse. The world by and large is right-side up. It's the homosexual community that is upside-down.
Rauch rightly traces much of this to the 60's which got me thinking throughout this book that much of the blame is on we conservatives today. If we had been honoring marriage throughout the years as we should have, we would not be in this mess and I pray when I marry a beautiful young lady and hopefully someday soon, I will be part of the solution and not part of the problem.
Another problem has been our lax morality. I believe there are more homosexuals today not because of genes being spread or laws growing lax, but morality growing lax and people seeking to find themselves. At my workplace, we were talking about this topic recently and noted how our society has fallen in that men don't know what it means to be men and women don't know what it means to be women. No wonder they're so confused about sexuality.
Rauch brings out many of the arguments that others have commented on such as the question of infertile couples. What Rauch forgets is that they still represent the institution that society recognizes is capable of bringing forth children. The reason they cannot is a problem within the system. For the homosexual community, it is not a problem within the system but the system is the problem.
Note that marriage is the only relationship that gets this treatment. I live with a roommate as a Seminary student. I didn't need government clearance. I don't need that for my family. If I get married, I have to go to the state. Why? Why does the state care? It cares because the man-woman relationship is that which can produce children and gives the best environment in which to raise them. Why should we give our children anything less than ideal when we don't have to? That's why I'm for marriage. I believe children have the right to be raised by a Mom and a Dad. A man cannot be a Mom and a woman cannot be a Dad.
Rauch might counter that as a Seminary student my position is religious, and he doesn't deal with religion at all. He just says we don't agree and moves on, as if all secularists agreed on everything or if agreement even made something true! I would instead say that my religious belief is in accordance with Natural Law thinking. The question of objective morality is one I don't see Rauch addressing and probably for good reason. After all, before asking if "gay marriage" is good for homosexuals, straights, and America, we need to first ask if it is good.
Now there are many things we condone here in America that aren't good. We condone adultery, gluttony, pornography (excluding child), etc. Now I think these are wrong actions, but I also think that the government is not to be the police until things start interfering with the societal good. Do we want the government monitoring bedrooms, monitoring restaurants, and monitoring our internet usage? We are willing to allow people to error in these ways for the greater good of the whole in the freedom to do good on their own.
Rauch does refer to marriage as a lifelong commitment between two people to put each other in the hands of the other. Good friends could do that however. You don't need the state's approval to do that, which I think is what this all boils down to. This is not about equal rights. This is about approval which makes this situation different. I don't condone adultery. I'm willing to avoid prosecuting it, but I sure won't celebrate it and treat it as a valid action. That's what the state's recognition of homosexual marriage would do. It would make the homosexual relationship equal to the heterosexual, which it is not.
Rauch throughout treats love as a need. I can agree with that. I don't think marriage is a need however. No one dies from lack of sex or lack of marriage. They might not be as pleased, but they live. Also, our notion of happiness today is just wrong. Happiness is really living in conformity to the way the world really is and realizing your niche in it. It is not "having a good time" or "enjoying yourself" or "an emotional high." It can produce those things, but it is not those things.
He refers to a long dark age when homosexuals were constantly persecuted and now we have seen the light. Unfortunately, there is nothing that tells where this light came from or what this light is. Ironically in this on page 65 he says he does not want to compare the homosexual situation with that of the slaves. They are not remotely comparable. Yet on pages 101-103, he does just that!
He also assumes 3 to 5 million Americans are homosexual, which is just simply the Kinsey numbers trotted out again. The work of Judith Reisman on Kinsey is simply monumental and we need to go back in history and undo anything that was based on the false Kinsey data.
Page 78 has the final paragraph stating "If it is true that marriage creates kin, then surely society's interest in kin creation is strongest of all for people who are less likely to have children of their own to rely on in old age and who may be rejected or even evicted....." I wish to concentrate on that part at the start, the "if, then."
I read this paragraph. I read it again. I read it again. I read it I don't know how many times. I took it to others and read it to them, men trained well in logic and said "Am I missing something here?" No connection could be found in these statements. There is no logical connection I see between the "if" and the "then" here.
Very revealing however is on page 100 where he says that if he could have designed himself in the womb, he would have designed himself heterosexual. This seems to be common in homosexual writings. They have this deep sorrow and he does sense he is missing something in life. Unfortunately, Rauch has already written off a cure as impossible. On the other hand, as one with a legitimate disability, I considered it quite tasteless to make a comparison to the disabled community.
On Page 106, he tries to summarize the arguments of Rick Santorum. He has it in five parts saying the first is that marriage is uniquely good for raising children. From then on, all the rest is a miss. He says that without children, marriage is not worth having, which is not Santorum's position. He is saying the institution is there for the raising of children. If some couples don't have children, that's their choice. Now I think that's a bad choice and I'm against birth control, but they have made the choice. Like adultery, I don't condone it, but I allow it so the greater good can be got of people who do realize the blessing children are meant to be.
It is the "Anything Goes" chapter where Rauch is at his weakest. On page 125, he states that homosexuals are not asking for the right to marry anybody that they love. They want to marry someone that they love. My first thought is, "I wasn't realizing someone was fighting for the right to marry somebody they didn't love." However, on page 127 he says that there is no group like homosexuals who are barred from marrying anyone they love, and he emphasizes anyone. Which do you want? We have a contradiction within a few pages.
His arguments against polygamy are quite amusing. Rauch states that the law simply says you can only marry one person you love. The polygamist would rightly argue "Well you changed that. Why aren't I allowed to change it? Why are you excluding the love I have for these multiple women?"
The same with incest. Rauch says he doesn't know of people arguing for incest. Maybe so, but in ethics, you have to deal with these tough cases. Rauch says many of us fall in love with people we can't marry, such as those who are already married. We just have to move on. It's amazing Rauch complains about how homosexuals are excluded when they just want to marry someone they love, but he's very quick to exclude polygamists and incest promoters and just tell them they need to recognize what the law is. All of a sudden, the law is right!
Now I could go on, but I think I've said enough for the time being. I would like to say that we conservatives need to take this as a wake-up call. Start taking marriage seriously. It was because of ideas like the sexual revolution and the problem of no-fault divorce that we eroded marriage to nothing more than a pleasure ride of sex. We need to recover what it is. This issue of homosexuality will either be our finest hour where we reclaim the joy of what marriage is, or it will be our uttermost defeat and we will look over the ruins of what once was and realize where we went wrong and beg to turn back the clock, only to find it too late.
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