March 18, 2004
Dear Concerned Citizen,

UNSPOKEN TRUTHS ABOUT “GAY MARRIAGE”

Arguments defending traditional marriage must not degenerate into anti-gay rhetoric.

That being said, gay marriage is a new idea. It has never existed as a cultural institution and was considered all but unthinkable up to a few years ago. Suddenly, those who oppose redefining marriage are called homophobes and bigots. Let’s not let name calling shut down the dialog, especially on this issue that will have widespread impact on both our children and the culture at large.

So far the gay marriage debate has generated more heat than light.

Defiant homosexuals and their allies insist that marriage is a fundamental right, and to deprive them of this right to practice the most invidious form of discrimination and make homosexuals into second-class citizens.

On the other side, religious activists spurn homosexuality as an illness or a sin, and they warn that a society that condones homosexual marriage is destroying the family and sending our culture the way of Sodom and Gomorrah. In this acrimonious cultural clash, several simple truths have been lost.

Today homosexuality is more about ideology than sex. This distinguishes today’s homosexuals from homosexuals in the past. Among the ancient Greeks, for example, there were lots of homosexuals. Socrates, I suppose, was a homosexual. But this fact tells us nothing about what Socrates thought about democracy, about poverty, or about how Greeks should treat Persians. Now, by contrast, homosexuality has become a political philosophy and a worldview.

Homosexuals are claiming to be “the new blacks” who are merely demanding their civil rights. Thus gay activism is following the discernible pattern of the civil rights movement. The first step is Tolerance, and the basic argument is, “You may disagree with us, but put up with us.” The second step is Neutrality, and it involves a stronger claim: “Make no distinctions between you and us.” Thus if heterosexuals are allowed to marry each other, homosexuals should be allowed to do the same. The third step—pushed when the first two have been granted—is Subsidy: “We have been discriminated against for centuries, so now we want justice.” Thus the military could be required to hire a certain percentage of homosexuals each year.

Gays are not the “new blacks.” Homosexuals are pushing marriage at a time when American society does not support the concept. Essentially gay activists are using the courts to trump American democracy.

But, you may say, isn’t this exactly what Martin Luther King and the civil rights activists did?

Actually, no. Blacks were effectively disenfranchised prior to the civil rights movement. Thus they were demanding something that majorities do not have the right to withhold: the right to participate in the political system.

By contrast, gays have never been prohibited from participating in the political system. Unlike blacks, gays have always had the right to vote. The failure of society to approve gay marriage doesn’t show that gays are disenfranchised; it simply shows that gays have not been able to carry the majority.

To deny “gay marriage” is not to deny homosexuals their civil rights. Homosexual activists and their legal supporters say that, far from being enemies of democracy, they are merely agitating for a basic civil right: the right to marry. But homosexuals today do have the right to marry. They have the right to marry adult members of the opposite sex. Now gay people may not avail themselves of that right, in the same way that people who have the right to vote may choose not to vote. But one’s refusal to exercise a right, for whatever reason, does not mean that one does not possess the right.

Gay activists say, “Homosexuality is simply a form of love. Why should we prevent two people who love each other from getting married?” Here is the problem. Marriage is defined as the legal union of two adults of the opposite sex who are unrelated to each other. This is the basic definition as it has evolved through the centuries.

First, marriage requires two people: polygamy is forbidden, even though historically polygamy has been permitted by many cultures, in contrast with gay marriage, which has been permitted by none.

Second, marriage must be between unrelated persons: I cannot marry my sister, or (for that matter) my dog.

Third, marriage is between adults: you can’t legally marry a 10 year old, although again child-marriage has been permitted, at least under certain circumstances, in both Western and non-Western cultures.

Finally marriage involves persons of the opposite sex.

The point is that love is a desirable but not sufficient condition for marriage. Marriage is a social institution, and society has good reasons for defining marriage in the way that it has, reasons that I intend to explore in future articles. What’s interesting is that gay activists aren’t saying, “Let’s get rid of all these definitional constraints. Let’s legalize polygamy, incest, bestiality, and gay marriage.” Rather, gay activists want to take down one of the fence-posts defining marriage, while keeping all the others.

I suppose to polygamists these gay activist must sound like bigots and polygaphobes.

Is gay marriage a civil right? Let's ask Jesse Jackson.

In Massachusetts, the state that's served as one of the main battlegrounds over same-sex marriage, the Rev. Jesse Jackson declared Monday that the fight of gays and lesbians wanting to marry should not be compared to the fight African Americans faced for civil rights.

The comparison with slavery is a stretch in that some slave masters were gay, in that gays were never called three-fifths human in the Constitution and in that they did not require the Voting Rights Act to have the right to vote," Jackson remarked in an address at Harvard Law School.

But Jackson reiterated his support for the heterosexual definition of marriage, saying, "In my culture, marriage is a man-woman relationship.

Christopher Curtis

The Black Ministerial Alliance, the Boston Ten Point Coalition, and the Cambridge Black Pastors Conference issued a joint statement this weekend opposing gay marriage. They reject the notion that the quest by gays and lesbians for marriage licenses is a civil rights issue.

"As black preachers, we are progressive in our social consciousness, and in our political ideology as an oppressed people we will often be against the status quo, but our first call is to hear the voice of God in our Scriptures, and where an issue clearly contradicts our understanding of Scripture, we have to apply that understanding," said the Rev. Gregory G. Groover Sr., pastor of Charles Street African Methodist Episcopal Church in Boston.

Are all gays keen on marriage? Let's ask Lisa Duggan.

"How about abolishing state endorsement of the sanctified religious wedding or ending the use of the term "marriage" altogether (as lesbian and gay progressives and queer leftists have advocated for decades)?

In a bid for equality, some gay groups are producing rhetoric that insults and marginalizes unmarried people, while promoting marriage in much the same terms as the welfare reformers use to stigmatize single-parent households, divorce and "out of wedlock" births.

If pursued in this way, the drive for gay-marriage equality can undermine rather than support the broader movement for social justice and democratic diversity.

Critics of marriage promotion, located primarily in feminist policy and research organizations, are working to counter rosy views of the institution of marriage."

Lisa Duggan teaches queer studies in the American studies program and the Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality at NYU.

Some theologically conservative Christians support civil unions and remain opposed to same-sex marriage.

"Same Sex Registered Partnership"

Denmark was the first country in the world to legally embrace the gay marriage experiment.
“Yet evidence is in. Marriage is dying in Scandinavia, which has had marriage-like same-sex registered partnerships for over a decade.”

Data from European demographers and statistical bureaus show that a majority of children in Sweden and Norway are now born out of wedlock, as are 60 percent of first-born children in Denmark. In socially liberal districts of Norway, where the idea of same-sex registered partnerships is widely accepted, marriage itself has almost entirely disappeared.”

“The problem with this system is that unmarried parents break up at two to three times the rate of married parents. So as Scandinavians separated the ideas of marriage and parenthood, family dissolution rates rose -- placing first-born children at particular risk. The growing Scandinavian separation of marriage and parenthood made it difficult to deny marriage to same-sex couples. Yet the creation of registered partnerships has only locked in and reinforced the separation between the ideas of marriage and parenthood, thereby accelerating marital decline.”

Stanley Kurtz

"The Civil Solidarity Pact"

France sidestepped religious sensibilities surrounding the issue of “gay marriage” by employing a euphemism. They created the “civil solidarity pact” granting legal status for homosexual couples. Those who enter into a pact can file joint tax returns and enjoy the employment and inheritance rights accorded to spouses.

This super convenient, high benefit, low demand legal arrangement only requires the couple to appear before a court clerk and sign on the dotted line. The pact can be ended nearly as easily when either partner simply provides 3 months notice in writing.

The pact was created to satisfy demand for gay marriage but soon the government was obliged to extend the same options to heterosexual couples in order to avoid political opposition.

“After two years of haggling, the benefits of the pacts have been extended to cohabiting heterosexual couples, to widowed sisters living together, even to priests and their housekeepers. The French have crafted a grand new alternative to marriage, one that offers almost all of marriage's legal benefits and imposes many fewer of its legal obligations. Given French society's already growing distaste for the institution of marriage (about a million French heterosexual couples live together unwed), there is every reason to expect the new pact gradually to crowd out and replace marriage.”

"The voluntary union for life of two persons to the exclusion of others"

After the "landmark" change in the definition of marriage, Parliamentarian Svend Robinson was asked if he would now marry his partner Max.

Svend answered: "It's been an incredible time for those of us who have struggled for full recognition of gay and lesbian couples' equality rights. Yet I'm still unsure if Max and I will marry anytime soon. After nine years in a committed, loving relationship, how would the state's imprimatur change anything?"(Globe and Mail, June 24, 2003)

Even to Robinson, marriage in Canada has now lost it's meaning.