Also, I know that some of the people reading this essay will be
progressive Christians—those in favor of marriage equality across the
board. Obviously, this essay is not
aimed at you. It’s for people who
believe the “traditional” definition of marriage should be the law of the land;
I have seen neither hide nor hair of a non-religious person who uses the word
“traditional” to defend their position against marriage equality.
This argument does not address many of the issues religious folks
have about marriage equality: the (false) idea that gay parenting is bad for
children; the (ridiculous) idea that homosexuality is culturally contagious;
and let’s not forget the offense to God—If the Southern Baptists are to be
believed, He gets so angry about which hole a man’s penis enters that he sends
natural disasters to slaughter and dispossess the wicked—tens or hundreds of
thousands them at a go.
Actually, that last paragraph gives those “arguments” all the
attention they deserve, so I’ll say they’ve been addressed.
The only argument against marriage equality that has any business
in the public discourse (and this just barely) is the ongoing struggle to
define marriage as either a religious consecration, out of the scope of human
legislation; or as a public, federally endorsed institution, with all of the
benefits suggested by such an institution.
If our government is going to continue to endorse your religious
marriage, they must also endorse non-religious marriages or they are making
laws with respect to the establishment of religion. It's not something to be "avoided",
it's something that would have to be undone.
Keep in mind, if we take the government
out of marriage, then all of the currently married people get no government
perks whatsoever; no health care for your spouse, no power of attorney, no tax
incentives--until you go back to the J.P. and get a Civil Union.
Making laws with respect to the establishment of religion is
nothing new to our government, to say nothing of the regular assaults to other
promises of the Bill of Rights. Churches
are tax-exempt organizations, even though they all qualify as non-profits
whether or not they engage in charity work.
In addition, the current ban on marriage equality is a clear failure of
our legal and political culture to execute the very First Amendment of our much
vaunted Constitution.
I see nothing in that unfortunate truth to suggest that these
abuses, this happy marriage of Church and State, should be allowed to continue.
A favorite argument of the conservative Christians I’ve “discussed”
this issue with is to posit a moral equivalence between two men or two women getting
married to each other, and: a 40-year-old man marrying a 12-year-old girl; men
and women marrying non-human animals; people marrying inanimate objects, and
anything I’ve left out that’s on their slippery slope. This is because conservatives have a hard time
understanding the idea of consent, as can be further evidenced in the Catholic
Church’s sustained, vigorous defense of a growing cadre of “holy” men.
Gay marriage does not lead to pedophilia. You know what leads to pedophilia? The
Catholic Priesthood. Those of us who
don't like euphemisms in these situations call it child rape.
"Where do you draw the line on what can be defined as
Marriage?" This is another popular
question I’ve received or witnessed in multiple long discussions on the topic. I’ve got plenty of ideas there, but I think
most progressives agree that it’s certainly not a line derived from the Bible, and emphatically not from Tradition. Tradition is the enemy of progress, and in
America, for the last 230+ years, progress always wins. In the final analysis,
progress is what the vast majority of Americans want, whether they call it by
that name or not.
If the Church’s marriages are going to be recognized in any way by
the U.S. Government, then Clergy should absolutely
be forced to marry whomever the Government deems eligible. My tax dollars currently endorse marriage
discrimination on the basis of religious beliefs, and that is unacceptable to
me, and hopefully, to any taxpayer who believes in the separation of Church and
State. We’ll know we’ve won this fight
when the Department of Justice begins to prosecute Clergy who refuse to comply
with the law. Of course, we can’t even
seem to put child-rapists in prison when they perpetrate their crimes while
wearing a white collar, so we have a long way to go on that front.
Marriage has not been an exclusively religious rite for more than
50 years in this country, and the collective conclusions and statements of the
very religious parrot the words of the "tolerant Christians" from the
1950s who "just weren't ready" for interracial marriage.
The believers and faithful of this country may not be ready for
marriage equality, but that's going to have precisely zero effect on the end
product. Progress is going to happen. In
this case, the objections of those who wish to further entwine Church and State
(despite their claims they want the opposite, as evidenced by exactly none of
them offering to give up their civil perks for the sake of their
"religious" partnership) will be remembered as shameful--just as the
fight against interracial marriage is remembered now.
Additionally, what people are “ready for” has no bearing on what
is Just. It has no place in legislation
regarding what people do with their own lives.
There is no harm you can point to; no threat to anything you do in your
own life other than raising hateful protest signs. Your readiness is not our concern.
The South wasn’t ready to give up slavery; they were forced into
ignoring Biblical morality at the point of a gun. Thankfully, the vast majority of our citizens
would not like to see a repeat; hence we have hashed out our issues in
Congress—a much better method, I hope you’ll agree. The issue of marriage equality is playing out
in the same fashion, and I have every faith that the level of violence it would
normally take to accomplish a large push in Civil Rights will be nowhere in
sight.
Okay, maybe not “every faith”, but one can hope.
The Catholic Church changes it’s doctrine and it's dogma on the
regular. This is well-known. They modify and sometimes bowdlerize previous
"deeply held convictions" and "Biblical wisdom" to better
reflect modern values, and thus gain/stop losing adherents. They’re cynical like that. It’s a big tent religion, that Christianity,
but only when it suits the needs of dogmatic adherence.
Marriage, in the Bible, is defined as a rite between a man and a
woman.
Also, a bride who cannot prove her virginity is to be stoned to
death (Genesis 2:24).
Also, concubines fit the definition of traditional marriage, as
condoned in the stories of the lives of Abraham, Gideon, Nahor, Jacob, Eliphaz,
Caleb, Manassah, Solomon, and Belshazzar.
Also, the man gets the woman’s property (Genesis 16); Ploygany
(one man, many wives) is encouraged; a widow who has not born a son—not just
any child, but a son, mind you—is
required to marry her brother-in-law or any eligible man who steps forward
(Genesis 38:6-10); a virgin who is raped must marry her rapist (Deuteronomy
22:28-9); and, just for icing, the virgin daughters of the losers of war must
marry the soldiers of the occupying force (Numbers 31:1-18; Deuteronomy
21:11-14).
Oops.
Why do you reject all of these other Biblical instructions for
marriage, but accept the only instruction that supports your argument?
If all of these stories and instructions are somehow “just
analogies”, where does that leave your Biblical definition of marriage? You can’t have it both ways; either all of
these conditions apply, per Biblical literalism; or none of them apply, per
“the Bible is full of stories and metaphor.” At the very least, that decision has to be
made for the books of the Bible in which marriage is mentioned.
I suspect that, like most modern Christians, you recognize that
the Bible contains some very outmoded passages, written by some fusty old folks
who had nothing but barbaric, Bronze Age morals to guide them. Why not extend the same courtesy to your gay
friends and family by recognizing that the whole "gays are an abomination
unto..." bit in Leviticus (a book of much angry, violent, "holy"
rape and genocide; a book that modern American Christians ignore completely
until it comes to homosexuality) is actually just another cock-eyed, old-timey,
amoral, superstitious passage written by fallible men?
Leviticus is chock-full of instructions from God, instructions
which in today's society can only be thought of as evil; laws requiring stoning as a punishment for people who wear
synthetic fibers; instructions to male adherents that women should not be
allowed to acquire knowledge.
Christa and I got married in a greenhouse by a friend of ours who
bought his marriage license on the Internet. The only part of our marriage that would look
anything like a "religiously based" or "traditional"
partnership is the fact that we are opposite-gendered. The good Reverend Josh S. read the words of
Khalil Gibran before marrying us, at our request. Christa did not take my last name, and she has
a PhD in science. Her dress was purple, and had very few natural
fibers in it. Also, don't tell her I
mentioned this, but she wasn't
a virgin before our wedding night. God must be real pissed off.
But also, so much for the "war on traditional marriage".
We still get to be called
"married" by the State, and enjoy all the same of the aforementioned
civil perks that being married affords us.
Does that make you want to argue that we are trying to re-define marriage?
If your definition of marriage still mandates that the union of one
man and one woman is the only true marriage, then I have bad news for you: you are the person trying to re-define
marriage.
The word "marriage" and the tradition of Marriage may
have originated in religion (and that is cause for much debate among social
anthropologists), but that hasn't been what it's meant in a long time. Things
change, whether we want them to or not--only in this case, most Americans want
it to.
Why not be desirous of freedom and equality for your gay friends
and family, rather than absolute consistency on the public definition of
Marriage? This is isn't the end of
religious autonomy in America, it's just an acknowledgement that something we
value very deeply isn't what it used to be; that we've being denying people
their equal rights because of some very old words in a very old religious text.
That exact thing happens to be 100%
illegal and unconstitutional.
Religious
rites which bestow civil benefits must be extended to all Americans, regardless
of the religion's opinion about which Americans they should be excluding from
their rites. You're free to say,
"It's not a right, it's a privilege" all day; you're still missing
the point that within religion, marriage is still seen as a privilege--but
to civil society, and to the government, marriage is absolutely considered a right, and has been since before we
were born. The Bill of Rights are
not the only rights afforded to Americans.
Finally, I would like to address the concept of “homophobia”. This accusation is lobbed at the opposition
all the time, and I think the opposition should know why.
Homophobia does not imply hatred
of gay people—just fear of them. Phobia.
And yes, myself and everyone I know that is a part of the marriage
equality movement thinks that every single person who is even remotely against
gay marriage has got to be at least a
little bit afraid of the gays.
Homophobia: Emotion, not reason. Panic, not grace. Fear, not piousness. That's what it looks like
to us, even when you are making well-fashioned arguments and not losing your
cool.
"We ignore what the
Bible says about slavery, because the Bible got slavery wrong...if
the Bible has got the easiest moral question that humanity has ever faced wrong, what
are the odds that the Bible got something as complicated as human
sexuality wrong? One hundred percent."
-Dan Savage
