My prejudice against same-sex marriage, or, the palimpsest of human nature

My basic moral intuition regarding marriage (call it a prejudice if you will) is that it is an institution between a man and a woman. I find my intuition reinforced by the vocabulary of my natural language, English, which includes such words as marriage, wedding, husband, wife, bride, groom, spouse, matrimony, nuptials, and conjugal, all of which have traditionally been used to refer to a relationship between a man and a woman. I do not feel any moral compunction or unease about having this intuition; that is, my natural sense of morality or sense of natural right or justice does not persuade me that there is something morally wrong with feeling the way I do; in brief, I have no sense of guilt for feeling this way.

Holding these beliefs, how do I make my way in today's modern world? Suppose that my son came to me and said. "Dad, I am gay. I want to marry my same-sex partner. We want you to attend our wedding as a sign that you publicly acknowledge that our union is, in fact, a marriage." How would I respond? Well, I certainly would be happy that my son had apparently found the love of his life. Furthermore, I would certainly be eager to attend the ceremony to share in the joy of the celebration. On the other hand, I would have to wrestle with the intuition I outlined above. One possible course of action I could take would be simply not to be frank with my son about my feelings and, instead, silently do whatever he asked me to do. Parents often follow this course of action with their adult children, biting their tongues. And, almost certainly, this is the course of action I would choose, if only for the sake of preserving the peace in my family.

However, if I were to be frank with my son, I would be forced instead to say the following:

Son, I do not believe that this union is a marriage. I could pretend that I do, but then I would simply be concealing the moral intuition -- call it a prejudice if you will -- that I hold in my heart of hearts, namely, that marriage is an institution between a man and a woman. Just as you expect me to respect your beliefs, I hope that you will respect my beliefs and not condemn me for holding those beliefs. On the other hand, if you do condemn me and you (and possibly the rest of society) think that my views are evidence of some kind of moral depravity or evil on my part that merits condemnation and opprobrium, there is nothing I can do to change that judgment and I respectfully submit to it. It may truly be that my soul has been deformed beyond repair by years of bigotry and that you and the rest of society are better able to recognize this depravity and avoid being infected by it yourselves. Perhaps, society will evolve to a higher, better plane when individuals like me have died off or been purged from the planet. I simply do not believe, however, that I am going to burn in the lower rings of Hell for thinking that marriage is an institution between a man and a woman. I do not believe that my opinions are a sign of moral deformation but instead think them sound and defensible. Furthermore, I think a higher good is served by allowing different people to have different opinions on this matter than is accomplished by forcing all people to think the same way. Please do not interpret the fact that I hold these beliefs as evidence that I have some kind of moral objection to your homosexuality or that I am not happy for you or that I somehow find fault with your partner as a person [I have a gay brother-in-law who is a saint] or that I am somehow rejecting the legality of your marriage. The question of whether your marriage is legal has been answered, at least for the time being, by the recent Obergefell decision of the Supreme Court, which, while it stands, declares your marriage a legal fact. But, the legal status of your marriage and my personal feelings on the matter are two distinct things.

This is what I would have to say if I were being frank with my son. If I had chosen the path of not being frank with my son, there would have been a disconnect between what I was saying publicly and what I was thinking in my heart of hearts and I certainly would have felt some moral distress about the existence of this disconnect. A similar disconnect existed between the public pronouncements and the private thoughts of many people who ended up voting for Donald Trump in the recent election. These people kept their preference for Trump to themselves in an attempt to avoid the opprobrium and condemnation that would be heaped upon them if, before the election, they publicly avowed their support for Trump and his policies (or opposition to Hillary and her policies). But, then, when they entered the privacy of the voting booth and consulted their heart of hearts, they could not bring themselves to pull the lever for Hillary and instead cast their ballot for Mr Trump. The polls failed to capture this disconnect between public declaration and private thought, which is why they wrongly predicted a comfortable victory for Hillary.

More importantly, this disconnect points to a more general condition in American society today: one segment of society -- we may call them, arbitrarily, the influence makers -- is trying to drag other segments of society away from traditional ideas about morality and justice and towards new ideas and thinking on these subjects. One of the main tools the influence makers use to try to move people and society in the direction they want is scientistical argumentation, which is the misuse of the methods characteristic of the natural sciences to try to persuade the state to enact policies that have a bearing on man and society. If people resist these sophistical, scientistical arguments, they are labeled "deniers" and condemnation and opprobrium is heaped on them for continuing to "cling bitterly" (to use Mr Obama's phrase) to traditional ideas about morality and justice. The threat of this opprobrium prompts people to conceal their true opinions and prejudices and not to state them publicly. The organs of our society that measure popular opinion, namely the polls and the media, then conclude, based on their observations of public declarations (and probably their own prejudices in favor of the new morality), that the influence makers are doing a better job of moving society than they actually are.

The phenomenon of the disconnect between what one is willing to say publicly versus what one thinks or does privately is referred to in the social sciences as social desirability bias. This disconnect is also inherent in such phrases as "the silent majority," which implies that a large segment of the population holds certain beliefs that they are unwilling to acknowledge publicly because they might subject themselves to the opprobrium of being labeled as, say, "deplorables." Nevertheless, in their heart of hearts they, yes, cling to their private intuitions, believing sincerely, as I do, that these intuitions are morally unexceptionable in spite of the drumbeat they hear every day against these opinions in the media and from the influence makers.

The nature of these intuitions may best be captured by the term "prejudice," which I have already used several times above. In today's parlance, the term has a uniformly negative connotation. (This can be seen by the almost uniformly negative examples supplied by the Wikipedia article on prejudice.) But, that was not always the case. I use the term prejudice in the positive sense that Edmund Burke, the 18th century British political and moral theorist, ascribed to it, as described by Russell Kirk, in his book The Conservative Mind:

At times, Burke approaches very nearly to a theory of collective human intellect, a knowledge partially instinctive, partially conscious, which each individual inherits as his birthright and his protection. Awake to all the mystery of human character, interested in those complex psychological impulses which associationist theories cannot account for, Burke implicitly rejected Locke's tabula rasa concept as inadequate to explain the individuation of character and imaginative powers which distinguish man from the animals. Human beings, said Burke, participate in the accumulated experience of their innumerable ancestors; very little is totally forgotten. Only a small part of this knowledge, however, is formalized in literature and deliberate instruction; the greater part remains embedded in instinct, common custom, prejudice, and ancient usage. Ignore this enormous bulk of racial knowledge, or tinker impudently with it, and man is left awfully afloat in a sea of emotions and ambitions, with only the scanty stock of formal learning and the puny resources of individual reason to sustain him. Often men may not realize the meaning of their immemorial prejudices and customs -- indeed, even the most intelligent of men cannot hope to understand all the secrets of traditional morals and social arrangements; but we may be sure that Providence [or perhaps the process of evolution], acting through the medium of human trial and error, has developed every hoary habit for some important purpose. The greatest of prudence is required when man must accommodate this inherited mass of opinion to the exigencies of new times. For prejudice is not bigotry or superstition, although prejudice may sometimes degenerate into these. Prejudice is prejudgment, the answer with which intuition and ancestral consensus of opinion supply a man when he lacks either time or knowledge to arrive at a decision predicated upon pure reason. [comment and emphasis added]

In Burke's understanding, then, prejudice is a positive force in the human community, a set of intuitions that organizes and structures society, not unlike language or religion. The intuitions I listed at the beginning of this post, intuitions that have been considered unexceptionable since time immemorial, fall under the heading of this kind of positive prejudice that Burke had in mind. In recent times, however, the term has acquired an almost entirely negative connotation: if someone accuses me of acting out of prejudice these days, that is perhaps the most serious charge that can possibly be leveled against a moral being. The term does not even need to be qualified as "bad prejudice," so utterly has it been drained of any positive connotation.

On Burke's view of prejudice, the recent Obergefell decision runs the risk of being just the kind of "impudent tinkering based on the scanty stock of formal learning and the puny resources of individual reason" (scientistical argumentation) that we might want to avoid. Obergefell is a giant step away from the traditional prejudices and moral intuitions of the human race that have prevailed for thousands of years and represents perhaps the most significant attempt to reengineer traditional morality that has ever been attempted. And this monumental alteration of the relationships in society was based on the votes of a mere 5 judges in Washington. The magnitude of the change was aptly captured by Justice Scalia in his dissent in the decision:

But what really astounds is the hubris reflected in today’s judicial Putsch. The five Justices who compose today’s majority are entirely comfortable concluding that every State violated the Constitution for all of the 135 years between the Fourteenth Amendment’s ratification and Massachusetts’ permitting of same-sex marriages in 2003. They have discovered in the Fourteenth Amendment a “fundamental right” overlooked by every person alive at the time of ratification, and almost everyone else in the time since.

Actually, Scalia's assessment understates the enormity of the change. There can be no doubt that, if this decision stands, it will be not merely the overthrow of 135 years of American law, but a watershed event in human history.

It is highly questionable, however, whether such a step, so contrary to age-old human -- perhaps even biologically conditioned -- moral intuitions can survive on a permanent basis. The Obergefell decision would have us believe that human nature is essentially a tabula rasa on which the court can inscribe whatever views it rationally has concluded all good citizens should hold. Whether human nature is such a tabula rasa, or is more like a palimpsest, on which the original, underlying scribblings of nature will begin to seep back to the surface, remains to be seen. It may turn out that it is as impossible to disabuse people of their intuition that same-sex marriage is not real marriage as it is to convert a gay man or woman to heterosexuality. Naturam expellas furca, tamen usque recurret.