Ryan Anderson on natural law

The current issue of WORLD Magazine includes an interview with Ryan Anderson, senior research fellow at The Heritage Foundation and the author of the newly released Truth Overruled: The Future of Marriage and Religious Freedom. This interview took place in front of students at Patrick Henry College. For other excerpts from the interview, see “Growing up Ryan Anderson” and “Silence kills: More from Ryan Anderson.”

The gay lobby makes a parallel of racial inclusion and sexual-preference inclusion. In your new book,you argue for the reasonableness of one and the unreasonableness of the other. In Chapter 6, the basic idea is that the bans on interracial marriage were both unjust and ahistorical because race has nothing to do with marriage. A man and woman can unite as one flesh regardless of their racial or ethnic heritage. Children deserve a mom and a dad regardless of their race or their skin color. No great thinker in human history had ever thought race was essential to marriage. The Bible’s spousal imagery is husband and wife, not black and white or white and white or black and black. Plato and Aristotle, Augustine, Aquinas, Luther, Calvin, Locke, Kant—none thought race went to what marriage was about. They all thought sexual complementary went to the heart of what marriage is about.

But it was different in those British colonies that became the United States. The U.S. Colonies were the first political communities in the history of the world that banned interracial marriage. They did that because we had an unjust system of race-based slavery. So if you’re enslaving people on the basis of their race, and if race is visible based upon skin color, you need to prevent interracial marriage to prevent interracial children, because after a couple of generations of this, “We won’t be able easily to say who is and who isn’t eligible to be owned.” They saw that their unjust system would slowly be undone.

So they banned interracial marriage. Not because they thought it was impossible, but because they didn’t want it to happen—which is why courts struck this down. They were simply returning marriage to what it had always been: a common law with a natural liberty to enter into a marriage provided it was a male-female union. Marriage law needs to be color-blind, but it shouldn’t be gender-blind because a man and a woman can unite as one flesh regardless of their race.

What about the general parallel of discriminating on the basis of sexual preference to discrimination by race? You say the latter is unreasonable, but many “reasonable” people were racists. Isn’t the real dividing line not reason—which is also fallen, due to the noetic effects of sin—but the Bible? Since the Bible is color-blind but hardly sex-blind, racism is wrong but differentiating between the sexes is right? Yes, at any given time, the effects of sin can cloud our reason, and so it can make us think something is reasonable that’s actually not. At the time, racism might have seemed reasonable, but in actuality, racism is not reasonable, and we now have a better grasp of what is reasonable with respect to race and what’s not. Martin Luther King Jr. cited both Augustine and Aquinas in his letter from the Birmingham Jail when he said an unjust law is a law that’s not in accord with the natural law or the eternal law. He cites both: God’s law that’s revealed and the natural law, God’s law that can be understood through reason.

How effective is natural law in changing thinking? In the pro-life movement it’s been to our advantage to say that both faith and reason point to the conclusion that the unborn child is a member of the human family and has a right to life. Some people persuaded first by the natural law later convert to Christianity: Robert Novak, the famous journalist, and Hadley Arkes, the famous political philosopher, were converted on the abortion issue. When pro-lifers see the people they keep running into at pro-life events are Christians, maybe they wonder if there’s something true about the gospel as well. Sometimes we can be too pessimistic about the limitations of reason.