Andrew March of Yale: Opponent of Traditional Marriage, Advocate for Radical Islam
Winfield Myers • January 12, 2010 • Uncategorized
Today the site American Thinker runs an extremely insightful essay written by Janet Doerflinger and commissioned by Campus Watch, which I direct. Titled, “Islam and the West: ‘Overlapping Consensus’ or Capitulation?,” it describes the nihilistic worldview of Andrew March, a young political scientist at Yale University.
Among the links in the article is one to a March essay titled, “What Lies Beyond Same-Sex Marriage? Marriage, Reproductive Freedom and Future Persons in Liberal Public Justification,” published in November, 2009, in the Journal of Applied Philosophy. The abstract at the journal’s site reads:
In this article I consider whether the legalization of sex-same marriage implies a right to incestuous marriage. I begin by suggesting that the liberal state get out of the ‘marriage’ business by leveling down to a universal civil union status. The question is then whether incestuous unions should be both legal and eligible for this status. I argue that the arguments compatible with public reason for prohibiting them outright, or even for excluding them from the permissible types of legally registered partnerships, are quite weak. The objections to allowing such relations are those from (1) child abuse; (2) unfair burdening of society; and (3) the creation of bad lives. I argue that while rape and other forms of child abuse would be no more legal or tolerated than they are now, the concern about any form of weakening a society’s legal and political resources to combat such abuses does indeed register on the justificatory scale, but does not prove that such first-degree incestuous sexual relations are inherently bad enough to warrant intervention in their own right. I then argue that the concern about unfairly burdening society with unhealthy persons is not as dangerously totalitarian as we might initially fear, but nor is it strong enough to justify an outright prohibition. Finally, I argue that a concern to dissuade persons from creating certain kinds of lives (children with extreme birth defects) is also not as dangerously totalitarian as we might initially fear, and in fact goes further towards explaining why we might have a legitimate interest in intervening. Nonetheless, I argue that the criminalization of such acts only make sense when they are indicators of other offenses, namely negligence or abuse, and it thus seems that the act of consanguineous reproduction is itself insufficient.
This intellectually and morally nihilistic approach to marriage, which sees no legal obligation to prohibit incest, is simply the logical extension of all arguments that seek to “expand the definition” of marriage. In her essay, which concentrates on March’s apologias for radical Islamic practices, Doerflinger captures the danger of March’s scholarship:
[W]hat March foresees in his thought experiment, in order to make room for the Muslim custom of polygamy, is a dystopian future in which traditional marriage between one man and one woman receives no particular favor from the government and is only one of an infinite number of lifestyle choices, including gay unions, polyandry, polygyny, and incest. Rather than the easy adjustment implied in the notion of “overlapping consensus,” what he actually envisions is a cataclysmic upheaval of our social system, starting with the family, in order to accommodate the Muslim custom of permitting one man to have several wives.
Dystopian describes perfectly a world that actively seeks to deny natural law. Perhaps March is familiar with the work of Princeton ethicist Peter Singer, who also denies the efficacy of natural law and moral tradition, including that which can be derived via observed phenomena without revelation. That two of the world’s most prestigious universities provide comfortable homes to such nihilists tells us how intellectually decrepit our highest centers of learning have become.
To read all of Janet Doerflinger’s important work, please click here.
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