Pseudogamy

Anthony Esolen at Mere Comments has posted a blog entry on "Pseudogamy".

Our problem is pseudogamy, false marriage, and it assumes many forms. Same-sex pseudogamy is but the latest and most flagrantly absurd, but it is not the first. We find the most fundamental form, from which other corruptions rise up like diseases, when a man and woman go through the ceremony and utter the traditional words "as long as you both shall live," while harboring the mental reservation, "as long, that is, as I am happy," or "as long as the marriage 'works,'" whatever that is supposed to mean.

Click through to read the whole thing. It is mostly about divorce and harboring reservations when marrying. I disagree with him where he knocks pre-nups as either the bride, the groom, or both planning for divorce, and thus negating the spiritual aspect of the marriage. As long as divorce, especially no-fault divorce, is a legal reality (and I don't expect it this will change prior to the return of Christ), the laws and courts already amount to a de facto pre-nup. Why should a bride and groom let strangers decide for them when they can decide as a couple while on good terms?

Pseudogamy 102:

Man and woman unite in marriage to bring into being a new generation; and even when they cannot do so, because of age or some physical defect, they may well wish to do so, or they stand for others as exemplars of the act that naturally brings forth children.

From Pseudogamy 103:

To play at marriage before marriage causes one to play at play-marriage after marriage; the sharp distinction is lost ("It's only a piece of paper!" laugh those who fear the marriage certificate), and both the unmarried and the married states are thereby corrupted.

I do not doubt that there is a connection between other forms of psuedogamy (among other things) and the push to neuter marriage. We would not be at this point unless without much previous error. Error begets error, unfortunately. Some of my own past actions have contributed to this mess. However, I admit that those things were wrong to do. I do advise others not to do them. I don't make excuses, or demand approval and affirmation for those or any legal entitlements because I did them. I am not trying to get any media portrayal or school or church to say those actions weren't wrong. I don't pretend that those actions were no different than being married.

From Pseudogamy 104:

Masculinity and femininity are like languages, each with a certain noticeable character, with delimiting features that are ineradicable from that character. As with a language, you never know what a culture will "say" with its men or women, or what any particular man or woman will "say" with the physical and mental makeup, not to mention the cultural expectations based upon those, which he or she is provided with. There is, literally, an infinite number of possible things to say; but there is also an infinite number of things that will not be said or that cannot conceivably be said.

From Pseudogamy 105:

You cannot, in a vow, reserve the right to change your mind, because a vow is precisely the sort of tossing of choice away that makes changing your mind irrelevant. When I spoke the words to my wife, that I would remain faithful to her, for richer or for poorer, in sickness and in health, as long as we both should live, I made a sacred vow. Did I know what that would entail? Of course not; hence the vow. We don't know whether we will be deliriously happy with the person we marry, or whether our lot will be trouble and suffering, or some all-too-human tragicomedy.

From Pseudogamy 106:

A culture of divorce, I'm suggesting, produces a lot of divorces, true, but mainly by producing a lot of people whom only a fool would trust. It makes everyone worse, because it attacks at the root the principal means by which the common person can do something godlike in its freedom and nobility: to cast one's lot forever with another human being, loving not by seeking one's own pleasure, but instead seeing that the greatest delight is only to be found in that freedom-tossing and therefore liberating love. It produces a culture of people who cannot be trusted with money, or with paper profits from supposed future investors, because they cannot even be trusted with rings; they are as good as their word when keeping their word profits them, or when breaking their word would cause them too much trouble. But make the price right, in money or in pleasure or in those vanities called "my dreams," and they can be bought out.

From Pseudogamy 107:

It is that we have come to consider permanence of any sort to be an affront to our beings, to our sovereign "choice". Which means that "culture," such as it is, is demoted to a smorgasbord to meet Mike's taste in Bach and Marty's taste in jazz, with nothing really to unite everyone in acts of general love or worship or celebration. Divorce, as I've written in an old article for Crisis magazine, is the sacrament for this new anti-state of affairs.

Marriage is more than "just a piece of paper", and there are very real differences between men and women. That many people have forgotten those truths or haven't learned them to begin with creates many problems for today's society.

Pseudogamy 108:

It occurs to me that the pseudogamy of the male homosexual is essentially related to the need to put on an act, an act that the man not burdened with same-sex attraction can hardly understand.