In arguing against same sex marriage, Maggie Gallagher makes a very puzzling statement I am unable to ignore. Here's a long version of the quote, to keep it in context:

But fundamentally marriage is sustained by culture, not biology. Why then is it universal? Because it is the answer to an urgent problem that is biological and innate: sex makes babies. Nature alone won’t connect fathers to children. Children need a society in which both men and women are committed to their care.

When anthropologists in the thirties went out into the vanishing world of human diversity, the reason they found marriage everywhere is that societies that do not hang onto the marriage idea do not survive very long.

But marriage in a particular society is not inevitable; death by sexual disorganization is always an option. Happens quite a bit actually. cf. Roman empire.

What's new here is that homosexuality is not directly stated to be the culprit. Nor is same sex marriage -- which would have been a laughable oxymoron for the Romans, even though there are a few reported instances of it happening.

HISTORICAL NOTE: Interestingly, the Family Research Council makes much of Nero's so-called "wedding" -- although the writer strains rather hopelessly to bootstrap Tacitus's disapproval of Nero's notorious public debauchery to disapproval of all homosexual conduct. What the Romans found offensive was the public nature of the event, which typified Nero, and was as unseemly as any of his other public outrages. As Tacitus wrote:

On the margin of the lake were set up brothels crowded with noble ladies, and on the opposite bank were seen naked prostitutes with obscene gestures and movements. As darkness approached, all the adjacent grove and surrounding buildings resounded with song, and shone brilliantly with lights. Nero, who polluted himself by every lawful or lawless indulgence, had not omitted a single abomination which could heighten his depravity, till a few days afterwards he stooped to marry himself to one of that filthy herd, by name Pythagoras, with all the forms of regular wedlock. The bridal veil was put over the emperor; people saw the witnesses of the ceremony, the wedding dower, the couch and the nuptial torches; everything in a word was plainly visible, which, even when a woman weds darkness hides.

To return to the topic, the force which caused the death of Rome is (according to Maggie Gallagher) now said to be "sexual disorganization."

Let me preface my remarks by reminding readers that I'm not one of those anti-Maggie Gallagher bigots who writes stuff like this comparing her to Nazis. Quite the contrary; I've gone out of my way to praise her, and even used one of her comments as a starting point for a series of posts.

So going to try to be fair here (and I even intend to argue that she might be unintentionally right....)

Here's the question of the day: what is sexual disorganization?

Say what you will about the Romans, but they were anything but sexually disorganized. They had numerous rules -- rules which might not be acceptable to modern Americans, but rules nonetheless. Here's a typically simplistic reaction by a modern writer to some of them:

Sometimes on the wedding night, the husband would not sleep with his new bride but arranged to sleep with another woman. The Roman state wanted fertility among mothers. Widows were not allowed to remarry. Husbands went out of their way to keep their own wives locked up like slaves. They deprived their wives of a life outside the home. It was forbidden for wives to possess money. The legal age for marriage in Ancient Rome for a woman was age 12, whether she had reached puberty or not.

Virginity upon marriage was valued. Roman men were allowed to engage in adultery, but their wives were not. Female sexuality was entirely defined in their patriarchical value: sex with wives for legitimate children and procreation of a man's children and prostitutes, concubines and slaves for a man's sexual leisure, rape for power over any woman.

There's no evidence whatsoever that the Romans' sexual habits led to the death of Roman civilization, but it never ceases to amaze me how often the argument is made that Roman "sexual decadence" brought on the "Fall of Rome." What is being forgotten is that Roman civilization lasted for many hundreds of years before the eventual collapse, and that the empire had been Christianized for well over a hundred years before the fall (in the East it took longer, of course). During that period, Christian bishops did their damnedest to see to it that their form of Christian morality was imposed on Roman culture. Houses of prostitution were closed, sodomy laws were passed, and while I think it would be arrogant to maintain that these things caused the death of Rome, I think it's just as fair to ask whether in the ensuing chaos, the old Roman sexual organization might have been replaced with a new (and often quite vicious) form of sexual disorganization.

To be fair, I think it could at least as reasonably be argued that in the struggle, the older forms of Pagan sexual organization were repressed by what might be called the forces of "Christian sexual organization," and that such a clash might well have produced what we might call sexual disorganization.

But is that what Maggie Gallagher is talking about?

A late Roman/early Dark Ages culture war? If she is condemning that as deleterious to Rome and deleterious to the advancement of Western civilization, then I agree with her. (Whether she would want me to or not!) If culture wars can be said to produce cultural disorganization, then it's logical to assume that sexual culture wars would tend to produce sexual disorganization.

I don't know whether that kind of sexual disorganization could cause the death of a society. I realize that my definition of sexual disorganization is probably not the same as Ms. Gallagher's because she seems to be identified with one particular "side" of the so-called "Culture War."

Much as I'm sympathetic to Ms. Gallagher's stated concern about the place of Western civilization in the future world, I'd rather see the Culture War end, because I think it's constantly ratcheting up the forces that promote sexual disorganization by forcing people to take sides on personal matters, forcing them to define themselves by what they do with their genitalia, and making it impossible to use ordinary words like "family."

I never wanted to do these things, and it's never been my goal to "mess with marriage."

(The damned Culture War has already done a fine job of that.)