Reflections of a stormy petrel

The very fact of starting a group of Christians in my f-list started the very kind of argument I had hoped to avoid. Clear enough?

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In spite of what

solitary_summer saw fit to write below, I will thank you to remove this from my LJ. This is the first time since I have known you that you have said a mean and shameful thing, and unfortunately it had to happen here and now. If I want it said of someone that he or she is "barking", I will do it myself, and for the record and in no uncertain terms I do not say so here. I do not approve of her views, but it is disgraceful to connect them to insanity or violence. HAVE I MADE MYSELF CLEAR?

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guarani

Very much so, Fabio. I apologize for this... I didn't mean to be rude, but to "un-quote" Cervantes. Please accept my excuses for this gaffe, for lack of a better word.

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It is not really to me that you should be apologizing, but:
One - you had no idea that I have a very high esteem for the very person who is fighting me on this [stupid] matter, and,
Two - I very much doubt whether she is willing to accept apologies from anyone.

Oh, and three - I really ought to crack the old Lepanto veteran open again. I last read him 30 years ago - shameful, I know.

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guarani

Thank you very much, Fabio. To the extent that it's possible from here, I believe I somehow understand the situation. My apologies are offered to this person too if she wants to accept them.

And going back to the bad quote, the original form (the way I didn't write it) is one of the most cited parts of El Quixote, even though Cervantes never wrote it. Go figure.

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"Play it again, Sam"
"Elementary, my dear Watson."
"I disapprove of your views, but I will fight to the death for your right to hold them."
"A man of courage makes a majority."
"Qui si fa l'Italia o si muore." ("Today we'll unite Italy, or die trying" - ascribed to Garibaldi at the battle of Calatafimi, 1860)
And then there are all the famous jokes by Talleyrand, Groucho or Churchill that neither Talleyrand nor Groucho nor Churchill ever spoke.

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I appreciate this, thank you.

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One of us allowed the other to speak her mind on his LJ even where he regarded her views as totally misguided. The other did not. So sorry, but I do not accept your gratitude and at this point I am not even flattered.

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I was both too angry and too tired yesterday, but there are a two things I'd like to say about this issue.

1) I don't want people on my friendslist, who already experience discrimination in their daily lives (in, say, more conservative corners of the US, just for example; it happens, even if you don't want to believe it) having to read a straight man telling them they're only imagining it. That has happened all over livejournal during the race/cultural appropriation debate earlier this year when white people kept insisting how they don't see race, how racism doesn't exist anymore, and they cannot, ever, possibly, be even slightly racist, while blithely ignoring or rudely shouting down POC who kept telling them that it wasn't like that at all. This kind of thing is not going to happen on my livejournal, and this is why I deleted your comment and banned you.

2) I'm aware that debating this with you is fruitless, but I'm going to ask you one question here. I'm not arguing that things haven't vastly improved over the last decades, but if we're already living in this happy world where there's no stigma attached to being gay anymore and everyone can be as out and proud as they want, why can't I think of one single out gay Hollywood actor? Sure, a few Brits coming from a theatre background who have worked there (Ian MacKellen, Rupert Everett, Alan Cumming), but American actors? None that I can think of, besides Jodie Forster, who seems to be pretty much out by now, and none that google would turn up. A few stage/tv actors like Neil Patrick Harris, and quite a few of those have more or less been forced out of the closet, but no big name Hollywood stars. This is the planet I'm living on.

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I have repeatedly given your talent and personality the highest praise in my vocabulary. If you delete and ban me for not agreeing with you about the proper use of a vagina or of a penis, you have proved beyond reasonable doubt that my original charge - that you care more for what is between your legs than what is within your skull - is correct.

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I just told you what I banned you for. Don't try to purposefully misunderstand me, I was very clear.

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In that case, answer the matter below. And the fact that you banned me because of your obsession with homosexuality and your unwillingness to hear anything against it is all too clear. I am speaking to the purpose, although you refuse to hear.

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So you are fighting for the right to have a gay Hollywood actor? There's an earth-shaking cause.

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You were the one who claimed that everyone could be open about their same-sex relationships: There may be some place in the Muslim world where to " want to be happy with their partners, to be able to be open about their relationships, and to be respected" is an issue, but it is not anywhere in the West.

I was arguing that the lack of openly gay men and women even in the acting business, much less in, e.g., professional sports, strongly implied that it still isn't such an non-issue as you want it to be.

Don't try to derail, you're more intelligent than that.

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Your persecution complex leads you to make statements that a child would find ridiculous. Hollywood is the world engine for gay propaganda. No other section of the media has done remotely as much for the cause. There has hardly been one Oscar ceremony in the decades in which some piece of gay propaganda has not been honoured and clapped to the skies, pushed on the public by every means. We had one this year, one last year, one the year before... Hollywood prejudiced against gays? Are you sure you do not mean "Christians"? And as for openly gay stars - Jodie Foster the first and only? Please. Ever heard of Marlene Dietrich, Greta Garbo and the other "girls"? Ever heard of Katharine Hepburn, who kept her bisexuality in the open and her love for Spencer Tracy hidden? Ever heard of Montgomery Clift? I am not even a movie buff - they could come up with a lot more.

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...there has hardly been one Oscar ceremony in the last few decades...

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...let me make a few points.
One: your whole rant had nothing whatever to do with my actual point. You answered nothing I said. My whole point was about the nonsense of "gay marriage". Your rant about racism had nothing to do with it, and neither had your insulting statement that I was trying to deny that prejudice exists. Welcome to planet Earth. Prejudice exists - try being an Italian in, say, Sweden. What I was saying was that the whole "gay marriage" bandwagon was and remains fraudulent and anti-rational. If you wanted to deal with anything I said, you should have tried to defend that. You did not do it; instead, you tried to make me sound like a prospective member of the Nazi Party by implication - which is not only insulting, but plain stupid and wholly unworthy of you. I was in the house when one of my gay friends came in bleeding and cut from a queer-bashing attack; and I was one of those who went to court to defend them against an unfair lawsuit by another house-sharer. If you had been where I have been, you would apologize to me for what you said - not that I expect it. The fact that your argument is no argument at all, that it answers nothing I said and instead tries to defame me, only shows that you are too caught up in this ridiculous obsession to see straight. Which I find tragic, but not surprising.

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To clarify matters a bit: prejudice exists and will always exist. It is at best a minority thing, and has no bearing on large-scale societal facts, except as an excuse for constant new demands. Ninety per cent of people don't give a damn; and to try to make someone like me feel guilty for the thug who assaulted a friend of mine is plain foolish. (Incidentally, the online kerfuffle about appropriation is the most incredibly pointless, self-regarding - on both sides - and plain dumb display of self-righteousness I have seen since Heidi8 was in charge at FictionAlley. I regard both sides as ridiculous and deliberately avoided involving myself, because I would have been bound to attack both.)

What I do care is marriage, because, in a sane society, marriage is the centre of most people's lives. To reduce it to a feeble parody of what it was supposed to be is to condemn most people to the certainty of misery and personal failure. People invest their lives in marriage, and that cannot change, because that is the nature of it. But to arrange matters so that most marriages end in divorce means to arrange them so that most men and women end up being miserable, hating each other, and making continuous and unappeasable claims. Divorce that is not miserable simply does not exist; even people who have made each other miserable for decades - and they do exist and I have seen them - get no relief whatever from the supposed clean break. Separation may be necessary; it is never clean, never pleasant, and hardly ever, long term, even a relief.

"Gay marriage" is the gravestone on the tomb of marriage. The murder has been carried out before; and in a sense, it is a compliment, since it shows that even the ghost of the most epic and heroic feature in the lives of most men is still strong enough to draw the imagination after itself. But it is the final confirmation of the destruction of marriage, because it is the final confirmation of the two false ideas that have poisoned it to death: first, that marriage is what you want it to be, and, second, that it has no native and inherent relationship with fertility. No wonder that in the Scandinavian countries people no longer get married at all. And yet even they go see romantic comedies and Disney movies - poor souls.

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"Divorce that is not miserable simply does not exist;"

Amazing how many counter-examples I know.

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In that case, they were never married. Or they are lying.

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You may need to unpack that, because to someone who doesn't have in mind the narrow sense of marriage which I expect you do, it is an extraordinarily broad claim.

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Anyone who has gone through the form of marriage with the expectation that divorce might or would come after a while or when the glow had worn off has not been married in any serious way. Every moron on the planet will tell you that marriage is a commitment, but where is the commitment if you assume you can get out of it at will and - this is central - without fault? Obviously, what you have done is not to enter into a commitment, but to prostitute your body for a given time. Incidentally, some parts of the Muslim world use "temporary marriage" as a lawful ersatz for prostitution.

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...

If you define contradictory evidence out of existence, then there's not much to talk about.

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If you insist on using the term "marriage" for something that has nothing to do with what I have been talking about for several posts, you will find you are talking to yourself. I started this debate and this is my blog. These are the parameters.

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There's a serious question which I think ought to have been asked, especially as I'm not personally inclined to assume that your "happily divorced" acquaintances were lying. Would you say that it is likely that they entered into marriage with the advance understanding that it was an arrangement which could be freely dissolved if desired?

In a Catholic context, under Canon Law the revelation that a marriage had clearly been contracted with such an understanding -- that it was conditional on future outcomes -- would adequate basis for a legal finding that no valid marriage had been contracted because full consent had been withheld. My understanding is that, prior the widespread acceptance of no-fault divorce, the requirements for marriage in civil law were generally similar.

Something to think about if that is the case: as people have become widely accustomed to the idea of no-fault divorce, it is very likely that a great number of heterosexual couples have been entering arrangements, under the form of marriage, which, if closely examined, would not have been previously recognized as actual marriage.

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Well, the two closest to me are my parents -- both had had an earlier marriage, in the 1950s. How easy was divorce then, in California? I have a dim memory my mother at least had to push the right buttons to get out, no no-fault yet. Both were hasty marriages, but I can't say what the conscious mindset or consideration of alternatives was, and I can't ask any more. My mother remained on good terms with her ex; my father... not bad terms, they just didn't have much in common, apart from their daughter. Civil and friendly, certainly.

If marriage with the possibility of divorce means that it's not really marriage, then much of the world's population has considered itself married without being so by your definition. Every Jew and Muslim, for example, at least for the men. Classical Chinese men. Roman men and women. Men and women in many tribes, where the woman can divorce by putting the man's things outside her home. In both the common and anthropological parlance, and to themselves, these people are and were married.

I can see how that's not the case to a Catholic perspective, and I won't tell a Catholic blogger that he's doing it wrong on his own journal -- but to an outsider it sounds very odd to say that most of the world which considers itself husband or wife is not really married. And I doubt they'd appreciate it, any more than Catholics appreciate definitions of "Christian" which exclude them.

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It's not about Catholicism, it's about natural law. Ask yourself which is the archetype and which the ectype; which has the power of positive reality and which reduces itself to a series of ever-feebler, ever more compromised, ever more ritualistic and meaningless echoes.

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Natural law -- as seen by a Catholic.
I don't know what you mean by "positive reality".
As for what's natural, marriage with divorce seems more common and more 'primitive' than marriage without. The Egyptians, Greeks, Romans, and Jews had divorce, the Muslims had divorce, the Christians didn't. If divorce has been around for 5000+ years, worry about "ever-feebler" seems misplaced.

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And the Egyptian, Greeks, Romans and Jews were of course primitive Naturvoelker without thousands of years of civilization and refinements of every sort behind them. Please. The day you can lecture me about the influence of monetary concepts on the earliest layer of Roman law, or on the problems of Greek marriage law and whether such a thing even existed, you can enter this kind of field; till then, leave it to those who have made a study of it. Natural law is a different conception from any specific ancient law, and the ancients themselves knew it. The Romans made a clear distinction between ius nationum or international law, ius Romanum/Graecum/Aegyptiacum/etc., and ius naturale, which informed and underlay all others. And they also knew that special interest, degeneration and folly could and did detach any kind of local law from ius naturale; and indeed it would be difficult to explain differences in usage between nation without it.

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I don't know what you mean by positive reality.
Well, I dare say.

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Please do not think that I am speaking seriously, but:
According to science and the theory of evolution, the human race (homo sapiens) has been around for something like 170,000 years.
According to creationists, the whole world has been around for less than 10,000 years.
You seem to think that the existence of something for 5,000 years proves that it is fundamental to the human race.
This does not really hold well if you believe that the human race is 170,000 (that is, 34 times 5,000) years old.
You don't happen to be a Young Earth creationist, by any chance?

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Extrapolating from existing hunter-gatherer tribes, divorce would be a lot older than 5000 years. But written records cut out before then, so there's no hard evidence either way.

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Which is why people generally define ius naturale differently. The same argument would justify male paedophilia, which is popular across many civilized and primitive groups. Not to mention cannibalism (the Aztecs), incest (the Zoroastrian Persians) and brother-murder (the Ottoman Turks).

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Exactly the same argument applies to the Naturvoelker of the world. It took just as much time for the Inuit or the Khoisan to develop to their present (or recent) state of culture, as it did the Italians or the Chinese. You cannot deduce natural law from the law of any nation currently in the world, even if we assume that it existed with the original human tribe, and that the original human tribe was hunting-gathering.

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The reason I brought up sacramental marriage is that (as Fabio noted) I think it closely reflects the archetype. What I wanted to draw attention to in doing so was that (whatever the classical world did), marriage in the West from the Christian era on was until very recently much closer to that archetype than it is now.

But my point is this: since the advent of no-fault divorce, many marriages have been contracted which secular law would have, not all that long ago, deemed invalid. The decline has been recent and very dramatic.

As a matter of fact, the Church does recognize a broader category of "natural" marriage outside the Church, which would apply to at least some of the classical examples. I suppose there is still a problem in that we have now departed much further from the ideal than even the classical world -- the classical world, for example, at least understood reproduction as an ordinary integral part of marriage.

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On the other hand, I think that even our friend would have some trouble with Cato's "loan" of his wife Porcia.

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(I think you meant Marcia.) Wasn't that also an aberration from the point of view of Cato's contemporaries?

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nicked-metal.livejournal.com

I am divorced, and really quite amicably so.

And yet, when two people have promised to spend the rest of their lives together, the collapse of that promise is something that really should cause both parties involved a profound sadness, and 'misery' is a good word for it. Happy divorced people? Sure, they exist. But if you can walk away from someone who you loved and promised to spend your life with without misery, then I would have to agree with

fpb - either you're lying, or you were never serious about the promise.

Having said that, I contemplated the possibility of divorce during my wedding ceremony, and I got married anyway. I recognized divorce as preferable to the horrors that people can inflict on each other when they are trapped together.

It is possible to be happy and divorced. And divorce is (by definition) liberating, and that can be quite positive. But if it doesn't break your heart, it's because your heart wasn't committed to the marriage.

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Well, I can't say that the divorces themselves might not have had misery for my parents. But though I didn't quote it in full, I was more responding to

even people who have made each other miserable for decades - and they do exist and I have seen them - get no relief whatever from the supposed clean break. Separation may be necessary; it is never clean, never pleasant, and hardly ever, long term, even a relief.

To claim divorce is never or hardly ever a relief? *That's* defining reality away, as I see it. So I think you and I would agree on the substantive point here.

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Oh, right. The sick man claims in a thin, reedy voice, while he is shaking all over, his skin purplish and clammy, that he never felt better; and you take him at his word. I used to do that, too, till I started noticing the symptoms. I do not mean to say that there can be people who bury their loss so deep that they forget about it, but if you were able to destroy the primary relationship in your life without misery, then it was not the primary relationship in your life - end of story.

Falling in love is not for everyone. There are many people who have never experienced it, and perhaps never will. But if you meet the real thing, you will not mistake it for anything else, and you certainly will not believe that it can go away as if it had never been.

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But marriage has often not been about love, instead being about family alliances, or parental judgement that the arranged marriage will be conducive to contentment and stability (and hence, grandchildren).

And if the person one had thought to be a true love turns out to have been an abusive liar, the divorce may be accompanied by misery *and* relief. Misery for what has been lost -- but that would have been lost without the divorce. Relief for what is escaped.

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You are both bringing in individual cases - which is no way to argue about universals - and trivializing them. It may sound strange to the modern mind, molded by media campaigns and manipulative dichotomizing, that a person may both be a lover and an abusive monster, but to anyone who has any idea what fallen man is and what depths they can sink to - and still keep the touch of the divine in their nature, however perverted - it is not even very hard to understand. By the same token, "loving the abuser" is treated as an incomprehensible conundrum only by very naive people. Transfer it to your country, and it becomes easier to understand. It was not an uncritical patriot, but a man who was at war with the institutions of his own native land, who gave the beautiful title "Cry, The Beloved Country" to his book. Nobody ever loves one's nation more than exiles and rebels.

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But marriage has often not been about love, instead being about family alliances, or parental judgement that the arranged marriage will be conducive to contentment and stability (and hence, grandchildren).

Back up a moment. I thought we were talking about divorce in the modern West?

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