"Don't make me come back there"

Thirteen years ago,  Jonathan Rauch wrote about his creed of "soft communitarianism," an alternative to both the most anarchic forms of libertarianism and the bureaucratic formalism that is strangling our country:

In standard liberal theory, coercion and force involve violence or the threat of violence: "Your money or your life."  Because, in modern democracies, the state possesses a monopoly on legitimized violence, a coercive policy will be, by definition, a state policy.  Nothing that private people or institutions do by way of criticism or exclusion is coercive. 

To [radical gay activist Michael] Warner and others of his school, that view of coercion is laughably narrow and naive.  Norms use the clubs of stigma and shame to punish deviants, nonconformists, and radicals. . . .  In his world, all social norms are more or less coercive, which means that all of them are oppressive when applied to consenting adults' sexual or social lives. . . . 

I am not a soft communitarian because I think shame and stigma are sweet and lovely things.  They are not.  A weakness of the soft-communitarian position is its unwillingness to admit the truth in much of what Warner says.  In some respects, norms are oppressive and shaming is coercive.  Having admitted this, however, one can go on to see what Warner, and other anti-communitarians, do not:  that soft communitarianism is less oppressive, usually much less so, than the real-world alternatives.  Shame and hypocrisy are not ideal ways to deal with philanderers and small-time mashers, but they are better than Paula Jones' litigators and Kenneth Starr's prosecutors.  Shame is valuable not because it is pleasant or fair or good but because it is the least onerous of all means of social regulation, and because social regulation is inevitable.   The implication of Warner's view is that the only just society is one without any sexual norms regulating the conduct of consenting adults.  But, of course, a normless society is as inconceivable, literally, as a beliefless individual.  What would a culture without shame or guilt or "hierarchies of respectability" look like?  How is a shameless society even imaginable, given the unbudgeable fact that humans, like dogs and chimpanzees, look to each other for guidance and approval and clues on how to behave? 

THE fact is, there are going to be norms; the question is always, What sort of norms?

Rauch favors a rejection of mindless, intrusive zero-tolerance legalism that he variously calls the Hidden Law, genteel hypocrisy, tacit decency codes, and a determination to avert the public eye from anything that's not scaring the horses.  What this approach lacks in logical consistency it makes up for in humane effect:

Without Hidden Law, life in society becomes like the home life of a 15-year-old boy whose parents never stop shouting, "Billy! What are you doing in there?"

Rauch poses interesting questions on soft communitarianism and gay marriage:

Warner is shrewd enough to see that the standard defense of gay marriage by gay activists is wrong.  This defense holds out marriage as just one more lifestyle option.  It is available to heterosexuals, so it should be available to homosexuals as well, and that's all there is to it.  But this is wrong.  Marriage, as Warner aptly puts it, is "a social system of both permission and restriction."  Spouses and society alike view matrimony as something special and exalted; it is not merely allowed, it is encouraged.  Far beyond merely creating legal arrangements, it is freighted with the social expectations and implicit requirements of hidden law.  It is a bargain not just between two people but between the couple and society:  The spouses agree to care for one another so that society does not need to, and society agrees in exchange to view their commitment to each other as inviolable and sovereign and, indeed, sacred. 

Traditionalist conservatives understand that marriage confers special status under hidden law, which is why they so fiercely oppose extending it to homosexuals.  I understand that marriage confers special status, which is why I favor extending it to homosexuals.  And Warner, piping up from the radical left, also understands marriage's special status, which is why he opposes gay marriage.  When marriage is available to gay people, he understands, gay people will be expected to marry, and married homosexuals will conduct themselves with the same (let's face it) smugness that characterizes married heterosexuals.  "The effect," Warner says, "would be to reinforce the material privileges and cultural normativity of marriage."  Homosexuals who do not marry will be regarded as less respectable or less successful than those who do.