In this interview Mr. Bottum addresses a couple of my own points of concern that I brought up in the previous post: namely about the secular legal argument for differentiating natural marriage from other sorts of free will consenting relationships, and the poor handling of Natural Law:
I said there a couple things I regret—one is I said there’s no constitutional, persuasive legal argument against the emerging consensus on same-sex marriage. And I meant—in my mind what I was thinking is given the way the jurisprudence is going, that’s confirmed for me by what the Supreme Court did. But as phrased—this is a place I regret—I seem to be saying that, you know, all of our legal friends who would put together very good briefs on this were wrong. I regret the way I phrased that.
[…] The second thing I kind of regret is the way I phrased the discussion of natural law. I was using a short-hand for a thesis about enchantment that I’ve been developing, but, you know, the accursed essay was already 9,000 words long…I was trying to say in a way that [natural law]’s simply not persuasive without a level of enchantment, seeing things in the world as “natural.” What I think I ended up saying, if you read it kind of flat, without—as some of our friends have done—without a charity of interpretation, what I seem to be saying is, natural law is false without an enchanted sense of the world. And so I understand why it got misread there and I regret that.
For those interested, especially those who took exception to what he originally wrote or how the NYT handled it, we ought to listen carefully to his clarifications. The audio file is here.
I will "listen carefully" when he posts a complete explanation on the media vehicle he chose for his first essay. He knows Al Kresta's audience is not the Commonweal audience. Like a good politician, he knows how to say different things to different audiences.
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