A good professor
The following excerpt comes from an interview by World magazine with Robert P. George--a specialist in constitutional law and jurisprudence at Princeton University. The full interview can be found here, but I thought his defense of the traditional view of marriage and the pro-life position was excellent enough to earn a posting.
WORLD: Most readers of this magazine have a biblical worldview and are inclined to accept your arguments. What do you say to those coming from a secular liberal perspective?
GEORGE: Most of my professional life is spent interacting with secular liberal academics. What I tell them is that they are living off the cultural capital of Judeo-Christian moral understanding and depleting it quickly. Most liberal academics say they favor marriage and just want it to be available to homosexuals and heterosexuals on equal terms. They support "tolerance," they say, and oppose "discrimination," but they misconceive both toleration and discrimination.
I try to show them the unsavory logical consequences of their willingness to equate sodomy with marital sexual love. To justify same-sex "marriage" one must abandon the concept of marriage as a one-flesh union of sexually complementary spouses. But if we do that—if we embrace the idea that marriage is fundamentally an emotional union of people who find their relationship enhanced by mutually agreeable sex acts of any type—we eliminate the rational ground for restricting marriage to two people (as opposed to three or five or eight) and for regarding marriage as intrinsically requiring mutual pledges of exclusivity and fidelity. People who accept same-sex "marriage" have no basis of principle (as opposed to mere sentiment or subjective preference) for opposing polygamy, polyamory (group marriage), promiscuity ("open marriages"), and the like. What then is left of marriage? Nothing.
Similarly, most secular liberal academics do not want to join Peter Singer in endorsing infanticide and the mass production of children to be killed in infancy for the purpose of harvesting transplantable organs. I try to show them that by accepting abortion they remove any principled moral basis for objecting to such a nightmarish view. After all, birth is of no moral significance. The child a moment or a month or nine months prior to birth is the same living human being as the child a moment or a month or nine months (or 90 years) after birth. My argument against the rather chaotic collection of moral views held by many secular scholars is not that they violate the tenets of Jewish or Christian faith (though they do); it is that they fail—sometimes spectacularly fail—the test of reason.
