I thought I had posted my last on this, but alas, one more try.
To Chad: The reason why government ought not get out of the marriage business, as Elder writes and you condone, was already addressed by me here, here, & if that’s not enough, here.
The short answer is that government exists to secure natural rights. Once you have answered what is natural, or what is Right, you have answered the proper role of government. Sadly, Elder is in the same ideological place as the liberationists. I have been reading Thomas West lately. A quote follows out of the journal Perspectives on Political Science 31 (Fall 2002): 242. Perhaps it will facilitate understanding:
“Now it is true, as Mansfield points out, that for Aristotle, natural necessity cannot be the sole ground of politics. That is because the ultimate purpose of politics is not mere life, but the good life, as Aristotle says in Politics, book 3, and again in book 7. Nature does not produce this end spontaneously, as the acorn always, automatically produces the oak under the right conditions. In the human case, nature is not as teleological as one might wish. Human art must intervene. This point is supported by Aristotle s remarks at the end of his Nicomachean Ethics. The Ethics is Aristotle’s account of the good life, the life of virtue plus equipment. But how do men become virtuous? Education. And where are they to get this education? From their families? Aristotle says that the family by itself cannot do the job, that the government of the city must help. This is the reason for his turn to politics at the conclusion of the Ethics: as a means to implement the end proposed in that book. Therefore, concludes Jaffa, there is a second Aristotelian beginning behind or before politics that provides a guide or basis for politics, namely, Aristotle’s account of the good life in the Ethics.”
To JH: Since it seems we have devolved into questioning the merit of studies–always a defensive position of modern education institutions that believe we cannot know anything until a study has been completed–I submit this. BTW, how are homosexuals being treated as someone else’s end?
