Michael Bradley, Editor-in-Chief
Editor’s note: On October 26, the Rover sat down with Sherif Girgis and Ryan Anderson—two of three coauthors, along with Princeton professor Robert George, of the highly publicized book What is Marriage? Man and Woman: A Defense—to discuss the marriage debate and the duo’s upcoming campus appearance as part of the annual Center for Ethics and Culture Fall Conference.
Girgis and Anderson will participate in a panel conversation, along with Joseph Bottum and University of Saint Thomas law professor Charles Reid, titled “Marriage, Catholicism, and Public Policy” at 8:00 p.m. on Saturday evening in the auditorium of the McKenna Conference Center.
Irish Rover: Sherif, how did you get into doing what you’ve done for the marriage debate?
Girgis: I think we both got into it in a pretty similar way, which is, we started out with the very simple project of helping Robby George, who had been a mentor and, in my case, a professor, work on an op-ed that he had been asked to do for the Wall Street Journal. From there we thought, well, we should expand on this in an article, maybe for National Review or something. We sent around a first draft a couple times and it came out to 6,000 words and then 12,000, and so that became an article, and then that became a book.
And when did that op-ed project begin?
Girgis: That was in the summer of 2009.
Ryan, same question.
Anderson: So it was when I was an undergraduate that the first state to redefine marriage did so; the Massachusetts Supreme Court redefines marriage for that state. So I first just needed to figure out what I thought about the issue. So I read the Andrew Sullivan, Stephen Macedo, Jonathan Rauch stuff on the left, and I would read some of Robby’s stuff, some of Maggie Gallagher’s stuff on the right. And for me I just became quickly convinced that the better arguments on this issue were with the traditionalists, or the conservatives.
And yet none of my classmates at Princeton saw it that way, and they were really smug and arrogant about it, as well. So that was kind of the initial prompt for me to do some research and writing about it.
One of the things that I did when I was working at [Princeton’s] Witherspoon Institute was to help Jean Elshtain and Robby George with the collection of essays on the meaning of marriage. This was a project back in 2005 that brought together a dozen different scholars from different disciplines: economists, sociologists, historians, legal scholars, people like that. Each did a different essay about marriage from their respective discipline.
Then when I was at First Things as an assistant editor there, I did writing for National Review and the Weekly Standard on this. Then it was when I came out to Notre Dame that we started working on this piece for Robby, and the rest of the story is as Sherif tells it. [Editor’s note: Anderson entered Notre Dame’s political science doctoral program, specializing in political theory and American politics, in fall of 2008.]
In your opinion, Sherif, what is something about the marriage debate that you don’t think folks who believe the Church’s teaching realize?
Girgis: I don’t know if it’s a lack of realization, but one mistake that’s made is not to take charge of the framing of the issue. We allow the culture to frame it in a way that immediately puts us on the defensive, and we think we’ve succeeded if we escape the conversation not being hated. That’s a problem.
The real framing of the debate is not whom to let marry, it’s what marriage is and why we’re involving the state in the marriage business in the first place. And those are questions to which no proponent of redefining marriage can give a cogent and consistent and complete answer.
Obviously you have to work that out and show that, and that’s what we try to do in the article and in the book, and in lectures and debates around the country. But I think the framing of the debate is the first thing that people tend to get wrong.
Same question for you, Ryan.
Anderson: I would just add to what Sherif said that the slogan “marriage equality” intentionally obscures what the debate is about.
Everyone wants the law to treat all marriages equally. The heart of the debate is about what type of relationship constitutes a marriage. Even the redefiners who want to include same-sex couples will draw the line that excludes “throuples”—and what about marriage equality for those groups?
So just appealing to the principle of equality doesn’t answer the question of, what is it that you want to be treating equally, and that requires thinking about what marriage is, why marriage matters and then also what the consequences are of redefining it.
I think New Jersey was recently the 14th state to enact a law for same sex marriage, and in Hawaii they’re opening up this conversation.
Anderson: Illinois as well. [Editor’s note: On November 5 Illinois became the 15th such state.]
That being the case, what is your vision for the future of this debate? In what baskets, primarily, should one place one’s eggs?
Girgis: Well, the first thing to note, I think, is that there are no permanent political victories and defeats. The way that most of the people who are involved with the marriage debate today, on the traditional side, got involved was in trying to push for the repeal of no-fault divorce laws. That was looking like more and more of a real possibility—with social scientists on the liberal side of the aisle coming to acknowledge the real harms that those policies have had—until the same-sex marriage debate became live.
So the way they got into the debate shows that we can’t take for granted that what’s happened is permanent, and I think the same is true now of the changes that some of the states have already made on this issue.
If we see this as a long-term battle—not on any particular deviation from the ideal, but as just one more stage in an overall fight to strengthen the marriage culture, to give every child the best chance of being reared by his or her own mother and father—then it becomes more possible and more valuable to keep fighting on this issue just as part of a broader effort.
Anderson: I think in the short-term, defenders of marriage need to make a public argument about marriage: what it is and why they’re standing for it as a permanent, monogamous, exclusive relationship of sexually complementary spouses, so that precisely in the states that have redefined marriage, we retain liberty protections to live that truth about marriage and operate our institutions according to that truth without being branded bigots and racists and being coerced by the government.
If the other side is successful at treating sexual complementarity and that aspect of marriage as the equivalency of thinking that racial purity is somehow an essential part of marriage—so that people who are in favor of sexual complementarity are just as bigoted as people who thought that racial purity was an aspect of marriage—if that happens, the consequences for our adoption agencies, and for civil charities, institutions in civil society, our businesses and things like that really become problematic.
The ability for individual families to pass on a healthy vision of marriage to their own children, for the Church to pass on a healthy vision of marriage to her flock, becomes much more difficult when the law has now equated that vision of marriage with hatred and animosity and bigotry.
You two are having a conversation with Joseph Bottum and Charles Reid at the [Center for Ethics and Culture] Fall Conference. Can you speak a bit to how that conversation will unfold, and to why Notre Dame students especially should come to this event, whatever their views are?
Girgis: The Church’s teaching on what marriage is and on its social value is pretty clear. But even within the Church there’s a lot of debate about those issues, but also among people who identify as being faithful to the Magisterium about the prudential questions of whether it’s a fight worth having, of whether it’s still possible to win in the political arena.
We’ll be trying to discuss both of those issues. We’ll be making the case for why this isn’t just a matter of theology but it’s also a matter of right reason; for why this is something in which Catholics as well as non-Catholics and even non-believers should take an interest and have a stake; and why the Church as a whole and people within the Church working in the public square shouldn’t give up.
Michael Bradley is a senior philosophy and theology major living in Dillon Hall. Contact him at mbradle6@nd.edu.
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