Biopolitical Tyranny

I am grateful to the author of gentlemind for the following summary of recent academic work on this most important subject:

Key points in bold type

1.    “The Audacity of the State” by Douglas Farrow (excerpt)

Naked Before the State: To make matters very much worse, the parens patriae power has recently received an enormous boost from another feature of the contraceptive society: same-sex “marriage.” Though most people have not yet realized it, the advent of same-sex marriage has transformed marriage from a pre-political institution conferring “divine and human rights,” as the Roman jurist Modestinus put it, into a mere legal construct at the gift and disposal of the state. The legal terrain has thus changed dramatically, along with the cultural—something I have tried to show in a little book called Nation of Bastards. The family is ceasing to be what the Universal Declaration of Human Rights confesses it to be, viz., “the natural and fundamental group unit of society.”

Replaced by a kaleidoscope of transient sexual and psychological configurations, which serve chiefly to make children of adults and adults of children, the declining family is ceding enormous tracts of social and legal territory to the state. At law, parent-child relationships are losing their a priori status and privilege. Crafty fools ask foolish fools, “What harm does same-sex marriage do to your marriage, or to your family?” The truthful answer is: Same-sex marriage makes us all chattels of the state, because the state, in presuming to define the substance rather than the accidents of marriage, has made marriage itself a state artifact.

Those who have trouble connecting the dots here—which lamentably includes many defenders of the traditional institution—should take time to consider the fact that the new “inclusive” definition, in striking procreation from the purview of marriage, has left both parents and children without a lawful institution that respects and guarantees their natural rights to each other.

Opening up marriage in principle to non-generative unions really means closing it in principle to the inter-generational interests on which it has always been based. From now on, the handling of those interests will be entirely dependent, legally speaking, upon the good graces of the state. Every citizen will stand naked before the state, unclothed by his most fundamental community, unbuffered by any mediating institution with its own inherent rights. Nor should it be overlooked that, what the state has the power to define, it has the power to define again and again, and even to dispense with.

Admittedly, even the state has not yet fully connected the dots, but that is happening with remarkable rapidity, as concurrent moves in education demonstrate. States and international agencies are increasingly prone to argue that children have the right to a state-directed education and that this right must be protected by the state against the interference of parents. The logic is not difficult to follow: If marriage is procreative, it is also educative; but if it is not procreative, it is not educative either—educative rights and responsibilities are up for grabs, and it is the state that will do the grabbing. The pillar that is the family appears to have cracked nearly through.

2.    “The impossibility of gay marriage and the threat of biopolitical control”, by John Milbank (excerpts) 

The push for gay marriage is not about gay rights or natural justice, but the extension of a form of biopolitical tyranny. It is part of the modern state's drive to assume control over reproduction

During the course of recent debates in the British Parliament over the proposed legalisation of gay marriage, it has gradually become apparent that the proposal itself is impossible. For legislators have recognised that it would be intolerable to define gay marriage in terms equivalent to "consummation," or to permit "adultery" as legitimate ground for gay divorce.

Many may welcome such a development as yet a further removal of state intrusion into our private lives, but that would be to fail to consider all the implications. In the first place, it would end public recognition of the importance of marriage as a union of sexual difference. But the joining together and harmonisation of the asymmetrical perspectives of the two sexes are crucial both to kinship relations over time and to social peace. Where the reality of sexual difference is denied, then it gets reinvented in perverse ways - just as the over-sexualisation of women and the confinement of men to a marginalised machismo.

Secondly, it would end the public legal recognition of a social reality defined in terms of the natural link between sex and procreation. In direct consequence, the natural children of heterosexual couples would then be only legally their children if the state decided that they might be legally "adopted" by them.

And this, I argue, reveals what is really at issue here. There was no demand for "gay marriage" and this has nothing to do with gay rights. Instead, it is a strategic move in the modern state's drive to assume direct control over the reproduction of the population, bypassing our interpersonal encounters. This is not about natural justice, but the desire on the part of biopolitical tyranny to destroy marriage and the family as the most fundamental mediating social institution.

Heterosexual exchange and reproduction has always been the very "grammar" of social relating as such. The abandonment of this grammar would thus imply a society no longer primarily constituted by extended kinship, but rather by state control and merely monetary exchange and reproduction.

From this it follows that we should not re-define birth as essentially artificial and disconnected from the sexual act - which by no means implies that each and every sexual act must be open to the possibility of procreation, only that the link in general should not be severed. The price for this severance is surely the commodification of birth by the market, the quasi-eugenic control of reproduction by the state, and the corruption of the parent-child relation to one of a narcissistic self-projection.

3.    “The Freedom to Marry – a Liberal Value that Conservatives Should Reject”, by Jennifer Thieme (excerpt)

A few months ago, a new group launched called “Young Conservatives for the Freedom to Marry.” This is a group sponsored by a larger organization called “Freedom to Marry.” The objective of these groups is to promote gay marriage.

These young conservatives have been beguiled by leftist language, and my conclusion is that they must not be familiar with the philosophical underpinnings of true conservatism. They wrongly believe that “the freedom to marry is not a partisan value and is consistent with basic conservative values of responsibility and community, limited government and individual freedom.” But the so-called “freedom to marry” is not a conservative value. It’s a liberal value, plain and simple. Here’s how it works. It’s a bit complex (which is one reason people on my side of the debate have trouble defending it), but I’ll break it down into the smallest segments I can:

“Gay marriage” really means “genderless marriage.” Genderless marriage means references to gender must be removed from the law. Words like “bride,” “groom,” “husband,” “wife,” “mother,” and “father” must all be replaced with genderless terms such as “partner,” “party,” and “parent.” This happened in Canada when the Canadian government redefined marriage in 2005. For example, the term “natural parent” was replaced with “legal parent.” Recently the French government made it clear that it’ll be removing the terms “father” and “mother” from the French legal code in order to accommodate gay (genderless) marriage.

Removing gender references from the law removes the recognition of natural bonds between mothers and fathers with their children. These natural bonds are replaced with legal, artificial, and therefore subjective, bonds.

Removing gender references from the law affects every member of society, not just gay couples. It redefines marriage for the entire society.

Replacing natural bonds with state-defined bonds absolutely goes against the natural law founding of our country. Our Founding Fathers understood natural law to mean that we had certain rights that come to us from God. They referred to these as “unalienable rights.” If there are any unalienable rights whatsoever, certainly the natural bond of a child to his own mother and father is chief among them.

By replacing natural bonds with artificial bonds, we’ll be allowing the government to decide who counts as a parent, instead of biology. This will result in a significant amount of government intrusion into our lives. Legal challenges for the control of children will rise and we will see example after example of natural bonds being disregarded. Genderless marriage has already harmed people in places where it is legal; I’ve discussed a couple of actual cases here and here.

Most people do not realize how many legal changes must occur in order for marriage to accommodate gay couples. Some conservatives hope that by supporting gay marriage, they’ll strengthen marriage and families. But only marriage based on and respecting natural bonds can do this. Genderless marriage cannot, since it requires artificial, state-defined bonds. By definition, genderless marriage has already increased the scope of the government just by coming into existence. And it must be clear to anybody that requiring all of society to replace natural bonds with artificial bonds harms the family structure — it does not strengthen it.

4.    Amicus Curiae brief submitted by Coalition for the Protection of Marriage (excerpt)

Man-woman marriage protects rights in family relations against the state’s impulse to act as if it were the source and dispenser of those rights and hence to infringe them

A genderless marriage regime is inimical to the concept of natural parenthood, as Canada’s experiment demonstrates. It is likewise necessarily inimical to the concept of the natural family as an institutional buffer between family members and the state and as the situs of rights on which the state cannot impinge. Genderless marriage “is nothing more than a legal construct. Its roots run no deeper than positive law. It therefore cannot present itself to the state as the bearer of independent rights and responsibilities, as older or more basic than the state itself. Indeed, it is a creature of the state.” As a consequence, a genderless marriage regime “de-naturalize(s) the family by rendering familial relationships, in their entirety, expressions of law. But relationship of that sort – bled as they are of the stuff of social tradition and experience – are no longer family relationships at all. They are rather policy relationships, defined and imposed by the state.” The chilling consequence is that, by displacing man-woman marriage, genderless marriage

“does away with the very institution – the only institution we have – that exists precisely in order to support the natural family and to affirm its independence from the state. In doing so, it effectively makes every citizen a ward of the state, by turning his or her most fundamental human connections into legal constructs at the state’s gift and disposal.”

5.    http://www.theaustralian.com.au/opinion/its-all-about-the-children-not-selfish-adults/story-e6frg6zo-1226099613917

“It’s all about the children, not selfish adults”, by Margaret Somerville (excerpt)

Marriage is a compound right in both international and domestic law: it's the right to marry and to found a family. Giving the latter right to same-sex couples necessarily negates the rights of all children with respect to their biological origins and natural families, not just those born into same-sex marriages. The Canadian Civil Marriage Act 2005, which legalised same-sex marriage, demonstrates this in providing that in certain legislation the term "natural parent" is to be replaced by "legal parent". In short, the adoption exception -- that who is a child's parent is established by legal fiat, not biological connection -- becomes the norm for all children.