Protests by religious groups opposing same-sex marriage have intensified in recent weeks in anticipation of a ruling by the Council of Grand Justices.
The major force behind these rallies is a potpourri of various local civic and religious organizations. On the agenda of the former is — as their speakers persistently reaffirm — the defense of traditional values and related moral codes.
For them, marriage is exclusively a union between a man and a woman, the mission of this union being procreation for the nation’s benefit in demographical terms.
Here we have the ingredients of the anti-gay marriage coalition in the nation: religion and traditional thinking, complemented with the demonization of unusual (for whom?) sexual practices.
How do the defenders of traditional values defend their missionary position? What are their arguments? What are traditional values?
Let us begin first with some thoughts on social values. They function as behavioral guides for the majority of people living in a given culture; they help organize social life and facilitate communication.
Values are not facts; they have no reality in themselves. They depend on being acknowledged by individuals agreeing with them. Such values require consent; otherwise, they are just routines of life, like drinking beer on Fridays.
Value preferences vary because they are expressions of individual life designs. Modern societies guarantee this freedom of expression.
However, values might become tools of repression when imposed on individuals against their will.
Values change with time, because people change with times. Narratives people have of themselves evolve as history progresses. This is an open process and social institutions are to be adjusted accordingly. That is why laws need to be changed as well, for they reveal changes in human self-understanding at an institutional level.
Modern laws, for instance, no longer deal with the burning of witches, because we no longer think that witches exist. Individual, social and legal paradigms are in permanent flux.
However, defenders of traditional values believe there are specific cultural values — ie, particular forms of communication that defy historicity.
They believe that those values are to be esteemed in the present, because they have been esteemed in the past. They are legitimized not necessarily by consent, but by the function they have had in the past. Filial piety, for instance, is such a value in this region.
Traditional values are therefore backward-oriented: They are good today because they were good yesterday. There is no reflection involved that would provide other reasons.
However, questions immediately arise: Is the duration of the validity of values in itself a value, in the sense that older traditions are more valuable than newer ones? Who has the legitimate authority to interpret them? Why should we still follow them?
These are questions traditionalists need to answer when insisting on the superiority of their values.
Yet, if values are not facts, but merely an invitation to follow them, then individuals are free to accept or reject them.
However, traditionalists do not think so. They think that such freedom would eventually lead to social chaos and that it should therefore be restricted by traditional norms.
Obviously, they do not have much confidence in the people for whom they claim the right to speak. And they are wrong.
Societies with a long tradition of anti-traditional education function quite well — at least they are not worse than traditional ones.
“Getting to Denmark” has become an international slogan in view of the high quality of life and stable social conditions there. Denmark is one of the most liberal countries in the world. There are other Denmarks.
Traditional values are prescriptive. They do not invite others to follow them, but insist on being followed. However, who has the right to impose them on others?
In liberal societies, individuals define the rationales of their lives themselves, whereas in traditional societies that entitlement usually belongs to the elderly and the influential; they dominate social relationships and the values shaping them.
Typically, traditional values privilege the elderly and the influential: They are good because they are good for the privileged. Take, for example, local family values. Who usually gets it in his or her way: daddies or daughters?
Modern values — ie, values that require consent — would undermine such privileges.
Traditionalists therefore have little consideration for people, especially the young, who choose to live lives beyond traditional ideas. Traditional values have an intrinsic component of selfishness. Their defenders want you to think and live like them; otherwise, traditional values would not work.
Reasoning is not the strength of the self-appointed defenders of traditional values in Taiwan. Their mantra-like repetition is that marriage is to be a union between man and woman ideally resulting in children, but why should this definition to be accepted by others as well? Because of existing laws, they often claim. It is true: Laws define marriage.
However, existing facts do not automatically entail their legitimacy. Laws might change, and this is what is now at stake in Taiwan.
The arguments defending the existing marriage law are not convincing. Traditionalists do not really argue. They just make statements, often circular ones: Traditional values are good. Why are they good? Because they are traditional.
Or take a variation of that argument: Same-sex marriage is wrong. Why is it wrong? Because it is not traditional.
You would be hard put to find a better reasoning for their case.
The demographical argument they use is also empty — as if married couples had no right to remain childless.
Their health concerns regarding “unusual” sexual practices are likewise empty arguments, even hypocritical — as if you could not get venereal diseases or AIDS through standardized sexual activities. Why not, then, propose total abstention?
The eminent historian Eric Hobsbawm once characterized tradition as being invariant and repetitive.
Indeed, for years, the statements of the anti-gay marriage coalition in Taiwan on this matter have been invariantly repetitive. This indicates a deplorable lack (or unwillingness) of understanding of the desire of many, especially young Taiwanese, for social change.
They do not want to live the lives of their grandparents.
The huge majority of my students favor same-sex marriage — why would they not if nobody is harmed by that arrangement in the name of love?
I find the views of those groups rejecting same-sex marriage in Taiwan morally dubious, politically outdated, and intellectually — to put it at its mildest — unchallenging.
I wonder why anyone should listen to them.
Herbert Hanreich is an assistant professor at I-Shou University in Kaohsiung.
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