10 Non-Religious Arguments Against SSM: Parts 3-4

Anthony Esolen adds arguments 3 & 4 against SSM.

Summary of reason 3:

the acceptance of homosexuality is predicated upon the tacit assumption that male and female are not made for one another. It defines male apart from female, female apart from male; or it leaves those terms free-floating, without definition. Young men and young women already are growing up without understanding what they are to be for one another.

Summary of reason 4 on how SSM makes chastity an impossibility in culture:

In particular, how can we even talk about chastity when we accept homosexuality? For a homosexual defines himself or herself by the action. A teenager calls himself homosexual because he has performed homosexual acts. It is utterly incoherent to suppose that we can ever recommend to “straight� teenagers a chastity that must be violated by the homosexual in order for him to define himself as such.

While careless readers might argue that these arguments have little to do with SSM, I think Esolen’s critique is broader, against broader ideology that sets up the ideal of what Harvey Mansfield calls the gender-neutral society. Gender neutrality means that people are simply free-floating self-contained Gnostic selves questing for “personal fulfulment.” Such is the import of Esolen’s argument that homosexual chastity is meaningless because the self defines itself by its action. Or as Machiavelli would put it, the identity is found in the “effectual truth” of the matter. That broader ideological context makes things like SSM possible. Put another way, that broader ideological context makes marriage meaningless.
Here are Esolen’s arguments 1 & 2 and our comments on those.