Open Letter to Gay Marriage Opponents
For my first substantive post here at In the Agora, I’m going to repost something I wrote for my own blog, Dispatches from the Culture Wars, a few months ago. It was written as an open letter to those who are opposed to gay marriage and it provoked a lot of responses, but it was posted to a blog where most readers are already sympathetic to the idea. I thought I’d repost it here and see what this audience has to say about it.
Recently I was watching an HBO comedy special starring Ellen Degeneres. I only watched her sitcom a few times when it was on, but I’ve always thought she was quite funny and original. And I’ve always respected the way she handled that big “coming out” show that got so much attention. She didn’t lose sight of the fact that it had to be funny, and it was. At the end of this special, she did something unusual – she turned up the lights and took questions from the audience. And after a few questions, a young woman stood up and started talking about how Ellen’s coming out gave her the strength to be honest in her own life and escape her own closet, and as she talked about how enormously that changed her life, she began to cry. Ellen told her to come down to the stage, and she laid down on the edge of the stage so she could be down face to face with this woman, and she just hugged her. I’m sure there wasn’t a dry eye in the place, and mine were no exception.
As I watched this, I thought to myself, why can’t you see this? Why can’t you see the humanity in this? This was a real person experiencing the same emotions that we all feel, except that their feelings were brought on primarily by the denunciation and judgement aimed at them by you and those who think like you. It brought home to me the message I learned during that comical moment I spoke of before when I tried to tell my lesbian friend that Melissa Etheridge couldn’t be gay because all her songs were about relationships and heartache (!). It was one of those moments when you just smack your forehead and go DUH. Of course they go through the same range of emotions the rest of us go through in relationships. You know why? Because they’re not “just like us”, they ARE us. They’re people, and at the core, we’re all the same. We all laugh and cry and get angry and happy; we all seek out connection and acceptance. It is through our shared emotional experiences that we discover that undeniable fact.
I’ve mentioned before that Lynn has been the head of the AIDS task force at her hospital and president of the local support group, and I’ve told some stories of the people she has befriended there. She has counseled with dozens of AIDS patients and their families. Maybe the worst part of that for her has been how often she has had to make all of the funeral arrangements for someone who died of that horrible disease because their families had shunned them. Many a funeral she has had to attend where no one in the family of the deceased even came to pay their respects and grieve. Can you imagine anything so barbaric, so inhumane, so un-Christian? And in the midst of that inhumanity is a man who owns a funeral home in the area. He has told Lynn that if one of her people dies without the means or the family to pay for the funeral, just call him. He’ll take care of it, and he has for many people already. Which person do you think would draw the approval of God, the one who abandons a loved one because they disapprove of their lifestyle or the one who bears the burden of strangers to make it a little lighter on others?
I’m gonna let a little secret out. When you charge that those of us who push for gay marriage are just trying to “legitimize” gay relationships….you’re right. Guilty as charged. I absolutely want to legitimize those relationships. I want to put them on equal legal footing and, yes, equal moral footing with straight relationships. I want people and society as a whole to view those relationships no differently than they view any other relationship because that is an important step toward allowing gay people the same dignity that the rest of us take for granted and never have to think about. Because maybe when that happens, when it becomes so common that it’s just a matter of routine, no one will ever again have to arrange a funeral for someone they barely know because their family disowned them. And maybe when that happens, we’ll have less of those funerals happen as a result of the self-loathing that your perpetual messages of indignity instill in those you think are different from you.
John Scalzi, many months ago, wrote an essay whose eloquence I cannot match. In it, he said:
On what grounds do I as a married person tell others who want to be married that they are undeserving of the joy and comfort I’ve found in the married state? What right do I have morally to say that I deserve something that they do not? If I believe that every American deserves equal rights, equal protections and equal responsibilities and obligations under the law, how may I with justification deny my fellow citizens this one thing? Why must I be required to denigrate people I know, people I love and people who share my life to sequester away a right of mine that is not threatened by its being shared? Gays and lesbians were at my wedding and celebrated that day with me and my wife and wished us nothing less than all the happiness we could stand for the very length of our lives. On what grounds do I refuse these people of good will the same happiness, the same celebration, the same courtesy?I support gay marriage because I support marriage. I support gay marriage because I support equal rights under the law. I support gay marriage because I want to deny those who would wall off people I know and love as second-class citizens. I support gay marriage because I like for people to be happy, and happy with each other. I support gay marriage because I love to go to weddings, and this means more of them. I support gay marriage because my marriage is strengthened rather than lessened by it — in the knowledge that marriage is given to all those who ask for its blessings and obligations, large and small, until death do they part. I support gay marriage because I should. I support gay marriage because I am married.
Gay marriage, in one form or another, is inevitable. You will ultimately fail to stop it from spreading just as surely as the forces of reaction could not stop the promises of human freedom made in the Declaration of Independence from being extended to other marginalized groups in our nation’s past. But rather than being a threat to the things you hold sacred, I urge you to view this as an opportunity. An opportunity to rethink your prejudices. An opportunity to recognize in those you reject the very things you celebrate in those you accept – their mutual capacity for joy and sorrow, good and bad, laughter and tears. Because the truth, whether you want to admit it now or not, is that they aren’t just like us, they are us. And that is a message that I cannot leave only to my gay friends to send; I am compelled to speak up and say it with them, to embrace our common humanity and refuse to let the voices of intolerance draw lines between us that don’t exist.
Jesus said, “Whatever you do to the least of these, my brethren, you do unto me also.” I can’t think of a more powerful invocation of our shared humanity. When you fire your derision at gays, you not only hurt them, you hurt those of us who care about them. When you deny to them the protections and priveleges that you take for granted, you diminish those protections for all of us. In robbing them of their dignity, you diminish your own as well. If you can find a way to view this as an opportunity instead of a threat, I promise you that American society will be strengthened, not weakened. We will be strengthened because, when faced with the choice, we chose the example of the funeral director’s kindness to strangers over the bigot’s rejection of those he claimed to care for.
131 Responses to “Open Letter to Gay Marriage Opponents”
Well this must be a record, 100+ comments on a first post.
Mr. Biddle wrote: I’ll lay my view of all this by simply quoting the Bible (since some folks want to base their views on religion): Render Caeser’s to Caesar, but God’s unto God. Essentially the bible, if you want to use it, makes it clear that there is a separation between the state and God. Therefore let’s stick to the legal argument versus tradition, procreation, the bible, etc.
There are indeed biblical foundations, as well as the tradition of the church through the ages, to social policy for Christians. But your exegesis of Matthew 22:21 is fairly simplistic; it’s half the story. “Jesus makes a distinction between secular authority and that of God … Yet, secular authority itself, while distinct, is rooted in the divine (see Jn. 19:10-11)” From Catholic Moral Tradition, by David Bohr. p. 304
The claim here is that there is a spiritual reality that informs the world, and that the laws that guide the world ought to be in accord with that spiritual source (for example, through natural law). Paul VI writes, “the Church has a firm conviction that all temporal liberation, all political liberation … carries within itself the germ of its own negation and fails to reach the ideal that it proposes for itself whenever its profound motives are not those of justice in charity, whenever its zeal lacks a truly spiritual dimension and whenever its final goal is not salvation and happiness in God.” Evangelii Nuntiandi, no. 35
So it should be understood that the self- understanding of a Catholic Christian, at least, with a duty to evangelize, must have a voice in the political sphere, to point to and facilitate the liberation of man in Christ. The question, then, for the Christian is whether the proposed law in question is just.
From there, it is a matter of deciding social policy within the framework of the government. Paul Cella’s comments obtain here. The Christian has just as much right to influence the public sphere as any other citizen. Not all Christians will take the same position on an issue, either. So be it.
RiShawn:
There really are legitimate reasons for governments to recognize households or couples, and these recognitions are not merely a money grab by the households. For example, marriage (or universal civil unions in the alternative plan) establishes rules for child custody, end-of-life decisions, immigration, legal immunity, and many other non-monetary things besides.
Although I am a libertarian, and although I favor getting the government out of many different walks of life (I think social security, for instance, should be eliminated), still, I do think that human beings have a fundamental right to establish the types of families that they find proper. Government exists to secure and protect fundamental rights–and thus it should recognize and protect families whenever possible.
(Yes, I know, what about polygamy? I think the laws protecting polygamy would be so difficult to enact and so subject to abuse that it is not a practical matter for government intervention.)
Joel,
Tattooing and smoking are activities (and so is drinking alcohol as in your previous analogy). Yes, someone who does not approve of those behaviors may decide in the interest of liberty that they should not be banned, just like most people who do not approve of homosexuality do not think sodomy should be illegal. (I was inaccurate, BTW, in my last response to you when I said that someone voting against alcohol prohibition is approving of drinking.)
A license to sell alcohol or tobacco, etc., is different from a marriage license. The latter does not give a couple permission to live together; it is granting official recognition and benefits.
Jason:
I would disagre on that. Much of those matters, including child custody, can often be settled by contract either beforehand or after. Same for end of life decisions, which, contrary to what pro-gay marriage supporters would argue, can be done under law at this point in time (at least until SJR 7 becomes an actual constitutional amendment, if ever). Immigration laws itself already treats families different than singles.
Let’s also note that governments must play a role in protecting children; after all, they are also citizens and are the least able to protect themselves from harm. Governments would still, in my thinking, protect women (and men) from domestic battery. More importantly, government, through the courts, would still provide a venue for settling marriage disputes without the risk of people killing each other. Anyone who has ever been through a tough divorce can tell you that such a role is still needed and should be provided.
What I’ve been saying in essense is that government does play something of a role in marriage. Just not the role of actually defining what constitutes a marriage or for that matter, a family. And when you actually think about it, save for the current efforts to define it, the debate over Utah’s statehood (which is when polygamy was banned) and for the efforts to ban miscegenation, our federal and state governments have often stayed out of the business of defining it. Essentially, if a couple wants an open marriage or engage in swinging, they are currently allowed to do so because federal and state governments don’t actually say much on it.
And if you look at the historic trend, getting government out of the business of defining marriage has been the overall trend. Save for polygamy (with which I’m not sure I have a problem as long as women can also have three husbands and women’s rights are protected under law), governments has stopped defining marriage based on racial considerations, on religious considerations and on ethnic considerations. With no-fault divorce, governments don’t even define the reasons for ending a marriage. It’s only sexual orientation and marital constitution (or one wife or three) where governments continue to proclaim it has a right to define the nature of marriage.
Now, let’s note that governments have trended to give marriage protections and privileges not bestowed onto singles; in turn, governments also bestow privileges onto families such as public education — which allow parents to defray the full burden of schooling their children — that aren’t bestowed onto dual-income-no-kids marriages or even (officially) to gay couples. Some would argue that’s discrimination (and I agree), but I’m not sure that the Founding documents (the Declaration of Independence, the Federalist Papers, the Constitution, etc.) or those who wrote it would exactly oppose that form of discrimination. That said, government really shouldn’t be in the definition of marriage business and should trend its way out of that arena.
Would it be okay to you if I could obtain a civil union with my same-sex partner, one that offered all the same legal rights as a government marriage now grants?
Honestly, no. Because for the reasons I spelled out earlier in this thread, I do not consider SSM to have the same benefit to society that traditional marriage has. Therefore, why should it be treated equally?
And because I recognize the emotional response such a frank statement can raise, let me point out that (1) I most certainly believe that gays as individuals have equal rights to straights, and (2) I do believe certain basic modern rights should be included in some sort of domestic contract available to any two people who want one (whether their relationship be romantic or platonic).
If you haven’t read it already, I recommend this post of mine from Josh’s old blog.
Along the lines of Eric’s 9:07 post, the government has given certain benefits to marriages. Congress defined marriage as one man, one woman, in the DOMA signed by the 42nd Pres. If that definition were to change, Congress may well revisit whether “marriage” as then-defined, is deserving of the tax, etc. benefits it granted to the former definition.
I think Congress (especially as currently constituted) would rescind those benefits. Without the advantages of heterosexual-only marriage, why give people economic incentive to marry? Think of the roads we could build with that extra money! I-69 here we come! We would be left with federally recognized marriage with no discernible benefit, a bunch of peeved married people who just lost their tax benefits, and more cash for Congress to spend.
any Marxists out there? I’d be fascinated to see what you think about American liberals ADDING TO the social construct. Are you conflicted?
Eric, I am not proposing that all marriages get equal government treatment. On the contrary, in the plan that Josh, Paul, and I all support, the government would say nothing at all about the institution of marriage, which would now be policed by the churches (and arguably, they should have been doing this all along).
I am proposing that “marriage” be privatized, and that you may treat various unions as “marriages” or “not marriages” as you see fit.
And then I am proposing that the bundle of rights formerly known as “civil marriage” would now be called something else, and that it should be gender blind.
It would take an enormous leap of imagination to think that this would somehow desanctify marriage. If anything, it brings marriage much closer to the churches, which could control the institution in whatever ways they wished.
It would likewise take an enormous leap to conclude that this plan would harm traditionally Christian heterosexual marriages–or does God really need the government’s help to make them good? Surely you don’t believe this.
Lastly, and tangentially, I reject the idea that long-term, stable gay partnerships are harmful to society, as you claim (without evidence) in the linked post. Given that gay people exist–a fact which perhaps you don’t fully concede–then which is better, stable, domesticated, often monogamous gay pairings? Or 1970s-style promiscuity? It’s galling to me, frankly, that when gay people finally want to grow up, we are greeted with so much scorn.
Which one, honestly, does more harm to society? Allowing some people to use a word in a way you do not like–in private? Or discriminating against a set of long-term intimate relationships? One causes obvious harm; the other, I submit, causes only imaginary harm.
Eric, I am not proposing that all marriages get equal government treatment…I am proposing that the bundle of rights formerly known as “civil marriage” would now be called something else, and that it should be gender blind.
Huh? Call it whatever you want, you are proposing that same-sex and hetero unions are placed on the same footing by the government.
It would likewise take an enormous leap to conclude that this plan would harm traditionally Christian heterosexual marriages
I have never said that.
I reject the idea that long-term, stable gay partnerships are harmful to society
That’s fine. I have my opinion, you have yours. My position is that approving gay partnerships as equal to traditional marriage degrades a society in the same way that making prostitution a legal, regulated, relatively safe activity would degrade it. Perhaps some people prefer a society where these things are accepted or even celebrated, but I do not.
Eric,
Isn’t there a difference between sex for money and gay partnerships? In comparing gays to prostitutes I think you have very clearly demonstrated your truest feelings about gays.
My position is that approving gay partnerships as equal to traditional marriage degrades a society…
Can you offer a scrap of evidence to support this opinion? We have repeatedly asked for this evidence, and it has not been forthcoming.
I am terribly sorry if equal government treatment for heterosexual and homosexual relationships makes you feel uncomfortable. Discomfort, though, is not sufficient grounds for a public policy.
My position is that approving gay partnerships as equal to traditional marriage degrades a society…
If married gay couples already exist (they’re simply not recognized as such by the government) and if they’re as degrading to society as you say, would you support government sweeps of areas in which gay couples are known to live in order round them up and jail them, much like is done against prostitutes?
Additionally, the company I work for (a large consumer electronics company – I’m sure you have 2-3 of our products in your home) has domestic partner benefits for spouses of homosexual employees. My partner is named as my spouse on my insurance and is, in the eyes of the company, equal to the spouses of the heterosexual employees.
If this employeer-employee benefit relationship is as “degrading to society” as you say it is, would you advocate immediately rescinding private domestic partner benefits?
Mr. Seymour:
Why do you think gay marriages “degrades a society?” Please explain. Why do you think prostitution “degrades” socity? Please explain.We all want to know.
Erico:
I’m not saying that the religious don’t have a right to play in the political sphere. As the Founding Fathers (namely Madison and Hamilton) had imagined, the religious would, along with those with dissenting or complimentary points of view, play a role in the public sphere. What that means is not, as you believe, that government is subservient to any one person’s view of God. What it means that your religious views can inform and help shape one’s own thinking, which is brought to the table during political discussions. It doesn’t mean ignoring the first principles laid out by the nation’s Founding documents, which basically set out that all men and women are equal before the law.
That, in essence, is why a ban against gay marriage is untenable from a political perspective. If all men and women, the citizens of the government and the source of its legitimacy, are entitled to equal treatment by that government, that extends to homosexual citizens as well. Government discrimination against them, especially preventing them from enjoying the privileges and protections of civil marriage, is illegal. Plain and simple.
Just to second Jason’s 9:42 comment, what I’ve been arguing in my scattered comments is that there are good theological, even biblical, grounds for thinking that Christians do not need the state to police their disputes. I think Jason is right about this, and he’s right to suggest that a central roadblock in the way of SSM (or, on the Jason-Paul-Josh plan, CUs) is the Constantinian idea that the church should be the state and vice versa. I realize there are reasonable theological arguments in favor of Constantine, too, but God how I wish Christians felt more iscomfort about the marriage of church and state than they do about the marriage of two men.
That should be “discomfort,” of course. I don’t know what “iscomfort” means.
That should be “discomfort,” of course. I don’t know what “iscomfort” means.
Jason, from since this is really just a equal access issue to a civil contract that is not really a problem.
Marriage does is not some quality confired by the government, I think it was the supreme court of Kentucky that noted that the state could no more marry you than it could tell you who your brother or father was. Who your spouse is comes from beyond government. the contract is merely a tool to help married people remain that way and the contract issued by the state only functions around with 2 people in an exclusive contract.
So once we’ve clarified that the contract is merely a tool the polygamy issue melts away – would be polygamists already have reasonable equal access to the civil contract – as long as one of the people they want to marry is of the opposite gender (unless you are in Massacusetts). I know a woman who is the third wife of an Islamic man right here in Washington state. Her husband does have a licensed civil contract with a spouse, just not with her. By just allowing all citizens equal reasonable access to the existing contract you avoid having to craft special contracts for every possible kind of marriage.
And that is the risk of making special contracts like ‘civil unions’ and the like. Once you craft something special for some perceived group that makes it much harder to refuse to do the same for someone else.
Some try and say that is what you are doing when you allow a citizen to have a same gendered partner but that doesn’t stand close examination. The civil contract of marriage is gender neutral once entered, i.e. both spouses have equal and reciprocal rights within the contract regardless of gender – the contract is gender-blind. The only place where the two consignee’s gender is an issue is in the licensing requirements and that is why the courts have found them bogus. The requirements are an unreasonable barrier to access to a government feature that has no direct requirement for that barrier for the contract to function or to be beneficial to the contractees, the state, or society.
Allow all citizens reasonable equal access to the existing civil contract and you open no doors for demands for contracts supporting polygamy, bigamy or the like. Equal rights and equal access to government is all that’s being asked for.
Discrimination is the purpose of intelligent inquiry. Whether or not one ought to discriminate between heterosexual and homosexual marriage is the question, to which you cannot just assert a blanket statement that equality applies to all. All what?
An analysis of the human person, and of the nature of marriage, is therefore paramount. I am not an expert on JP II’s Theology of the Body, but find it to be very pertinent. If I can scrape together a coherent presentation of it, I will do so.
You are making an assertion about equality, I submit it is an open question. What if there is a qualitative difference between heterosexual marriage and homosexual marriage? What if “homosexual marriage” is an oxymoron? Not in that some do not claim the title, but inasmuch as they do not understand the nature of marriage?
I am curious whether you support the notion that the pre-born are equal under the law to those of us out of the womb? The point being, without a moral framework within which to make law, the law cannot find its own way to justice. And saying, “well, just decide for yourself” does not redress the positive harm done to others in such a case. We are both trying to hear the voice of the oppressed. The question has yet to be answered, “who is being oppressed?”
I did not mean to fail to respond to Caleb, since he was kind enough to address my prior post. I myself have not figured out how exactly the Christian is to interact with the public sphere, I’m working on it, too. In Romans, it seems to me, Paul was affirming the law as coming from God, i.e. Mosaic law would not have been approving of gay marriage in the first place. E.g. his discussion of adultery. But salvation does not come through the law, rather through faith in Christ. Paul’s discussion does not fit our situation entirely for a second reason. He was not concerned with reforming the public sphere because Christianity was still outlawed in many places, it was in no position of authority. That changed, as you mentioned, with Constantine. Don’t know enough about Constantine’s ‘two swords’ theory to comment.
To Mr. Biddle, I did not imply that a single Christian interpretation has to be law of the land, I said just the opposite, that in America we engage in a democratic process. SSM advocates are doing an end-around through the courts to bypass that process. Which is fine if in fact they have a fundamental right to SSM, but that is the question, and bold assertions do not convince me of the fact.
Eric, I took your suggestion is ready your reasons why you think a citizen licensing the contract with someone of the same gender is somehow less valuable than those who do so with the opposite gender and I’ve some questions:
But children are raised by same gender parents too regardless of any opinions of which is ‘best’. So your choices are:
- children who are raised by parents who are denied license to the contract, or
- children who are raised by parents who are licensed married.
Isn’t it obviously ‘best’ for these children to be being raised by licensed married parents regardless of their parent’s gender combination?
And how does having same gendered couples licensing the contract not also increase social stability? All studies seem to indicate that the qualities and benefits of pairbonded couples is identical regardless of their gender combinations. Shoot a recent study even showed that married gay couples even bicker about the same things as straight married couples! People in couples are healthier, both mentally and physically. They are more economically stable and less likely to become a burden on society. They are more productive and more involved in society. All of these benefits to them, the state, and to society are the same regardless of the couple’s gender combination.
And with that statement you start a discussion about whether blue cows give purple milk and other things. Regardless of how you think it should be, the way it really is remains: every state will license the civil contract to a citizen without any hope of personally procreating. Shoot, in the states that allow first cousins to marry they can only do so if they show medical proof they can NOT procreate! And if they do so then you obviously can not legally or ethically say that a citizen can’t license the contract because they have the very same qualities!
As for raising children, many married same gender couples are raising children: foster parents, children from previous marriages, adopted and all the other possible combinations. As I mentioned earlier 40% of the licensing lesbian couples on the first day the contract was available to all citzens in Massachusetts were raising minor children in the homes. 20% of gay households have minor children, 30% of lesbian, only 24% of currently licensed married couples according to the last census. There is a higher stay at home parent rate among gay married couples with children than there is among opposite gender married couples! If marriage really is for children then its obvious that the parents of these children should be allowed license to the civil contract regardless their gender combinations.
So again, what precisely is so different about these two kinds of married couples that you think the state should give a special right to one citizen because of the gender of their spousal choice and not the other? Isn’t the variation of societal benefit greater within the group of currently licensed couples than it is between the two groups?
“You are making an assertion about equality, I submit it is an open question. What if there is a qualitative difference between heterosexual marriage and homosexual marriage? What if “homosexual marriage” is an oxymoron? Not in that some do not claim the title, but inasmuch as they do not understand the nature of marriage?”
And as a theological or even a social argument, you can argue that it is an open question. But we’re not talking about those spheres. We are talking about government and the law. And in that sphere, a chief concern when it concerns government and citizens is equal treatment under the law. This country, through its Founding documents and through its laws, maintains that every citizen, be it man or woman, heterosexual or otherwise, is supposed to be treated equally by its governments. This argument was settled long before this debate over gay rights, first by the Revolutionary War, then the Constitutional Convention, and then by the Civil War and the Civil Rights movement of the 1950s and Sixties. There really is no legitimate argument that can be made by opponents of gay marriage on this subject: Homosexuals must be treated equally under the law, and that includes being able to obtain civil marriage and the privileges and protections with which it comes.
Which is why in many ways, while I am no fan of the courtroom manuevers engaged in by gay rights activists — I’m an old-style work them out in the legislature type — I can’t necessarily disagree with their tactic. Remember history: It took courtroom battles — along with the PR tactics of Martin Luther King and others — for Blacks to get government to recognize that they are entitled to equality under law. And in light of some of the obstructionist moves taken by anti-gay marriage types such as DOMA and Indiana’s SJR 7, the courtroom approach is even more understandable.
It’s nice to tell homosexuals to win the hearts and minds of their opponents. But remember, discrimination has real consequences on the lives of real people. And if your status as a citizen was in question, you’d also shake your head after hearing all that talk about “winning them over.” Because hearts and minds can only be won over when both are open to change.
Erico, I sense that my veering into Pauline theology has diverted this thread from its major themes, so this will probably be my last post on the subject, at least here. But I did want to respond to this:
[Paul] was not concerned with reforming the public sphere because Christianity was still outlawed in many places, it was in no position of authority. That changed, as you mentioned, with Constantine. Don’t know enough about Constantine’s ‘two swords’ theory to comment.
The form of this argument could be used to justify all sorts of things. For instance, you could say that “Paul was not concerned with militaristic crusades to exterminate non-believers because at the time the church was in no position to put armies in the field. But that changed, so …” I don’t take from the fact that Paul didn’t talk about crusades that he was in fact a crusader. Rather, it seems clear to me from the bulk of his theological work that he would have shuddered at the idea of the Roman emperor putting crosses on military banners; using violence to stamp out faiths was what he did before he became Paul.
Likewise, I don’t reason from the fact that Paul didn’t talk about the state establishment of religion to the conclusion that he would have if he could have. Rather, I conclude that he didn’t talk about the state establishment of religion because he would have been opposed to it. My amateur exegesis of 1 Corinthians 5-6 tried to argue that there is evidence of this within his own writings — he did talk about the relationship between the church and civil authority, and those comments always (at the least) suggesting that their relationship would not be complementary.
“Homosexuals must be treated equally under the law”
Agreed. But what does ‘equal’ mean in this instance? Men and women are equal, too. But does that mean that because men dominate the sciences de facto that women are being discriminated against? Or might there be a biological factor? A dangerous question to ask, as it turns out. We are operating on the level of ideology, still. Let’s get to reality. No one, myself included, has proferred an adequate explanation of the nature of the person, and marriage, that would resolve the issue. I would really like to hear from the pro SSM side, on this.
How you envision the separation of church and state also seems to be pertinent here. I defer to the experts, but I understand you won’t find that phrase in the Constitution, though Jefferson certainly wrote about it.
I’m also interested in hearing from anyone about atheistic and materialistic presuppostions in the argument, if any can be noted. Thanks.
erico:
It would need to be demonstrated to objectively exist, no one has been able to do yet.
Again that would have to be secularly demonstrated to validate denying access to a civil contract. Since there are plenty of example that demonstrate that the ability to personally procreate is specifically not a quality of ‘marriage’, what quality is there that same gender couples don’t have that opposite gender ones do? The need to pair bond is innate in the species, why should it only be supported in those who do so with the opposite gender?
A classic red herring issue since the real issue with the ‘pre-born’ and their hosts isn’t a personal rights issue. Wouldn’t matter if a fetus was doing quadratic equations or composing sonnets since their personhood isn’t the issue, their parasitic nature is. Just as you can not be forced to donate an organ/blood/bone marrow even if by refusing so someone else dies, so the fetal host need not unwilling serve as an incubator. Develop the safe technology to move the fetus to another location for gestation and the problem would be solved because the host’s decision is only about whether they are going to be a host, not on the subsequent status of the fetus.
Regardless any harm that is claimed again must be demonstrated. If you are advocating that people can be forced to provide bodily support to others I concede that a compelling argument of harm to the fetus could then be made. But more on topic what objective harm to someone can be demonstrated by allowing all citizens reasonable access to the civil contract of marriage? The citizens derive the same benefit (which in a society where government exists to serve the needs of the citizen would seem to be enough in itself), the state derives the same benefits, and society does too. Conversely, giving citizen’s unequal access to government objectively harms the very basis of American legal and ethical priniciples. Where is the harm of all citizens being able to license the civil contract with the adult of their choosing regardless of their genders?
Well tangential issues aside, I would like to hear your secular reason for denying a citizen reasonable equal access to a civil contract. What objective quality is universally present in those current able to license it, and universally absent from those who are not other than the relative genders of the cosignees? If there is no such quality, what is the justification for unequal treatment under the law?
I hope it can be seen from my posts that I am asking questions about what is the prudent, reasonable, and just thing to do in this matter, while giving the benefit the doubt to tradition.
The strategy employed in this thread of the blanket statement about equality ends questioning. It does not further it. If a demand for an objective reason to deny SSM is to be given, it will take time. The campaign for same sex marriage waits for no explanation, alas.
I have heard it said that the extremists of both political persuasions abrogate the right to frame the questions, define the terms, accuse and demand answers, not to receive answers but in a campaign for power. I leave it to you to answer for yourselves whether or not this is the case. Not that we need to play nice at the expense of the truth. Let’s be candid.
Do you realize that you just called yourself a parasite. Your mother an incubator? Strange. You’ve reduced the mother and child bond to the barest of connections, in true materialist fashion. Don’t let it be said that you never heard the contrary. Here’s a relevant passage on the problem of materialism from a review of Richard Dawkins’ latest book projecting his inner conflict onto the world which reads in part:
One encounters in A Devil’s Chaplain at least three Dawkinses: there is Dawkins the Humanist, Dawkins the Reasoner, and Dawkins the Darwinist. Each sits on a different branch, sawing away at the branches on which the others sit. Dawkins the Humanist preaches, inveighs, denounces; he bristles with moral indignation. Dawkins the Darwinist tells him, however, that his humanism is speciesist vanity, his moral standards arbitrary, and his indignation empty.
Dawkins the Humanist rebels, proclaiming himself (in human affairs) passionately anti-Darwinian. Dawkins the Reasoner joins the rebellion, declaring that our minds allow us to transcend our genetic inheritance. Dawkins the Darwinist answers with lethal effect that our brains “were only designed to understand the mundane details of how to survive in the stone-age African savannah.”
In any event, the sine qua non for enlisting my support for SSM is that your argument be attentive, intelligent, reasonable, and responsible. This is Bernard Lonergan’s formulation. (A flavor of his thought on materialism is here. You can’t slap the tag ‘equal’ on the issue of marriage just because all parties involved are persons. This too is a materialist reduction. I suspect your notion of separation of church and state may be along the lines of ‘it’s okay for people to hold daft opinions, even religious ones, but …” I’m tempted to say, “you want it, you do the work.” You reply, “I want it, you try to stop me.”
What you see as ‘ending discussion’ I see as ‘focusing on the relevant issues’.
Unless we are also discussing the repeal of the first amendment you nor I can decide which are ‘real’ marriages and which are not. Traditionally marriage was a state decided on by the participants – the old jumping over a broomstick and saying ‘we’re married’ 3 times, etc, and only in the 13th century did the state start getting involved in enumerating and licensing marriage contracts as a civil function.
As to you wanting to discuss the possible nature of ‘marriage’ I just find it irrelevant. Citzens marry people of the same gender, period. That is as indisputable as ‘the ground is down’. Trying to say they aren’t ‘real marriages’ just smacks of ‘the True Scotsman’ argumentative fallacy. Pragmatically they have all the same qualities as those who currently license the contract with opposite gender spouses other than the ability to merge genetic material – a quality we do not require from those that can currently license the contract. They want the same things,the behave in similar manners, and as one study has recently shown they even bicker about the same things. I am of course intensely interesting in any objective difference between the two types of relationships that you can identify. I admit that some of my resistance to revisit old territory is that every single time someone has said these relationships are qualitiatively different they have either failed miserably to demonstrate it, brought up some personal superstitious belief to justify their claim or tried to just rationalize a prejudice from the same source.
So I’m sorry if I seem to have cut off your discussion and if you actually can identify a single consistent secular quality that differentiates between citizens that want to license the contract with someone of the same gender as opposed to one of the opposite gender, please tell me. What factor so marks their relationships that it justifies that one citizen can have reasonable access to this civil contract and the other not?
You think that citizens should have to wait for legal equality, I do not. If there is an objective reason why some citizens shouldn’t have reasonable equal access then it should be easily presented. Looking at other nations that have licensed their contracts to all citizens fewer than 1% have done so with a cosignee of the same gender. I am always fascinated to listen to how people balance such a small change in the status quo against remaining true to our nation’s founding principles. And if there is no objective reason for unequal access how can it be denied? If the change is so small isn’t the result most likely to be just as small? It has been in everywhere it same gender licensing has been implemented so far.
And as far as your red herring of course we were all once parasites, of course we had a womb as our incubator. These are simple facts as indisputable as the ground is down. That you would think it strange to face the truth head on is to me strange.
and your wondering about my opinions of religion and government “it’s okay for people to hold daft opinions, even religious ones, but …”
Absolutely. Most religions are just superstitions based on fear and ignorance. Looking at the evolution of the judeo/christian/islamic mythology we see it move from ‘the dead know nothing’ to the artificial addition of grecoroman concepts of an immortal soul and Paul’s mystery religion and astralgnostic twists to there being specific numbers of concubine available to the dearly departed. Humorous and fine. Religious freedom in the US extends to even toleration of beliefs such as this but tolerable only as long as they tolerate my desire to NOT be of their religion and not to be forced to act as if they were right. I am in agreement with Thomas Jefferson that when theists try and force their religious views on other citizens I too swear eternal hostility to their attempted tyranny.
I am puzzled as to what ‘it’ you are talking about. Equal rights, equal access to government is all I ‘want’ and the work towards that is going on as we speak, even in this discussion. As to wanting you to try and stop me, why would I want to encourage an American to turn their back on the founding principles? Why would I even expect a fellow American to want to do so?
Religions which are most distressed by the idea of Same Sex Marriage have a patriarchal structure, one that doesn’t allow women in the top positions of the church hierarchy. Main stream Protestant churches, those who allow female pastors and bishops, are less likely to oppose SSM and may even encourage it.
Patriarchal religions also oppose abortion, the right of women to make reproductive choices. The Catholic Church also proscribes the use of artificial birth control, another way to burden women with more children, should the “natural” method fail, making them more dependant on their husbands. The Southern Baptist Convention is more direct in their position on the role of women in marriage, admonishing “wives to submit to their husbands.” They surround this expression with qualifiers, we note, but that in no way diminishes the meaning of the words. Mainstream churches, in contrast, tend to see marriage as a partnership between equals that relies on cooperation rather than coercion, however that coercion is manifest and supported by religious doctrine.
SSM would be more like the mainstream church’s view of marriage and the antithesis of the patriarchal view. Whether it’s two men or two women, there is no obvious male in charge, submissive female in these situations. When patriarchal churches say that SSM would diminish “traditional” marriage and that children need both a father and a mother as role models, it’s the patriarchal nature of these relationships that they are struggling to maintain. Equal rights for women and marriage rights for lesbians and gays, are both discordant with their patriarchal view of the world.
When I went to my granddaughter’s Christening, and the pastor said the words and put the sign of the cross on her forehead, I felt twice blessed. The pastor was female and a testament that decades of effort to provide equal opportunities for women was worth it. My little granddaughter would have opportunities that my mother, a school teacher, could only have dreamt of.
Now it is time to provide gay and lesbian families, who are willing to assume the obligations, with the same rights and privileges that my wife, my children and I already enjoy.
As a Christian, I believe that God loves me as He loves all His children as evinced by the life and death of His Son. To show our love for God in return, we follow Christ’s commandment to love God without reservation and to love our neighbors as we love ourselves. That includes the gay and lesbian families who are your neighbors, as well as those who are mine.
Bob:
They want the same things,the behave in similar manners, and as one study has recently shown they even bicker about the same things.
Having been in both same-sex and opposide sex marriages, I can reveal that both bicker about the same thing….money.
No, it does not. By getting hung up on the word “equal” (instead of the full phrase, “equal under law”), you are suddenly able to sneak in a lot of things that have nothing to do with the law. Mandating that women must be hired preferentially in science until they reach parity would be UNequal treatment before the law. And this is exactly why I oppose it.
I am partial to the definitions I gave on March 9 at 9:03 above, even while I recognize that there are two sets of definitions, one for the pro- and one for the anti- SSM side. I don’t think the issue can be solved by resorting to definitions alone, in part because so many people define “marriage” by recourse to their faith, and because so many others see it as a civil contract or a bundle of rights that, qua human institution, may indeed be modified from time to time.
This is why the “civil unions for all, marriage by churces” plan appeals to me. It separates the two functions that marriage serves by recognizing them with two completely independent institutions. In a sense, it completes the work of separating church and state. Josh has convinced me of late that this work is not yet fully complete, and that both sides will benefit from completing the divorce, as it were.
If the faithful fear that their marriages will be spiritually degraded by passing through the same bureaucratic process as homosexuals, then they need not ever obtain a civil union; they may simply get married in the church, and happily think themselves better than everyone else. And if they feel that God somehow needs the government’s help to make a relationship okay–then I will laugh at them and call them superstitious fanatics.
At this point, I think we’re all talking past each other. This is a conflict of how each of us understands the interaction between civil society — through which we form opinions and our lives — and government — which is its own sphere, but has an influence on and influenced by the civil sphere.
Those on this thread opposing gay marriage opponents on religious grounds are going to continue to view homosexuality as an abomination and a sin. After all, it’s their deeply-held religious view. Since homosexuals are sinners, those opposing on religious grounds will never view them as people deserving of full citizenship and nothing — even pointing out that they are citizens under the law and our Founding Principles — will convince them.
Those opposing on the grounds of preserving tradition — or that ending a tradition will lead to a breakdown of the entire social structure — have some of their views based in religion. But more of their views is grounded on the concept that such a change would be damaging to their concept of the world. Essentially, they’re driven by fear. Yet they fail to acknowledge that the world has already changed, that tradition has already gone away. Women now can get pregnant without even having sex with a man; men can pay a woman to act as a surrogate for themselves and their wives. The world hasn’t exactly fallen apart because of all these changes; in fact, things are working themselves out. But traditionalists don’t trust individual actions, they don’t trust society. So they won’t budge either.
For both of the opponents, government is not a separate sphere which occasionally crosses into civil society. Which means that government’s purpose is to translate their view of the world into law. Now, that’s not what the Founding Fathers intended. But then, for the opponents, the Founding Fathers, their Founding Documents — which continually declare that all people are equal under the law and thus deserving of all privileges and protections — and the legal rules of this country — which above all declare that all men and women, no matter their race, gender or sexual preference, are equal under the law — don’t matter much.
Everyone here knows my position on this. Everyone here knows Jason’s position and Ed’s position as well. So we’re just going to have to agree to disagree.