Not in their control
I’ve been doing some thinking since I read this post over on Friendly Atheist. Hemant Mehta reported on a vote in Goshen, IN to add sexual orientation and gender identity to its list of qualities protected in its anti-discrimination laws. They didn’t—the proposal failed 4-3.
In response to a man who asked in a local news interview, “Where do we draw the line?” Hemant said:
You draw the line in favor of helping people who are being discriminated against for things that are not in their control. That’s what the moral thing to do would be.
It really got me thinking about how some people make the crazy argument that by allowing same-sex marriage, the government is endorsing pedophilia and all sorts of other actually objectionable things. That argument is still crazy, but Hemant’s statement gave me a little bit of insight into where that argument might be coming from. (I say “might” because I doubt that many people are actually thinking it through to this degree. There is some chance that what I’m about to explain is happening on a subconscious level, and in any case, I think having logically sound reasons for our beliefs is important, even if no one has noticed a hole in your logic yet. But I’m getting ahead of myself.)
The point it sounds like Hemant is making is that if a quality is innate to you, you shouldn’t be treated poorly because of it. This is almost true, but it raises some big questions about free will. What about people who were “just born with” violent tendencies or compulsive urges to steal? Is it discrimination to charge them with assault or robbery? In the limited context of this story, it’s being used to say that LGBT orientations are something that people are born with, and nobody chooses what they are attracted to or what gender they identify with. But what about people who are attracted to young children? It’s easy to imagine that they didn’t choose that attraction, any more than people choose what body type or hair color appeals to them most. I have no idea what goes on in the mind of a pedophile, but it seems reasonable to contend that they “didn’t choose it.”
Of course, even if you are sexually attracted to children, we believe you have an obligation not to act on those desires, and it’s okay for society to punish you if you do. And if you were born a violent person (whatever that means), it’s okay for society to punish you if you allow yourself to act on your violent inclinations. But! But! protests the Religious Right. Can’t we make the same argument about homosexuals?
And there we have our problem. Because you can make the same argument. But that was never the real argument in the first place. The difference between homosexuality and pedophilia isn’t that one is innate and the other isn’t, it’s that one is fine and one is bad. There’s nothing actually wrong with homosexuality; it doesn’t hurt anyone in any way. Two individuals of the same gender freely consenting to be in a romantic relationship with each other? That’s great for both of them, and as good for the rest of society as every other stable relationship. I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that even if someone has certain brain chemicals that make them want to molest children, acting on those desires still constitutes coercion and assault, and it’s completely acceptable to punish them.
When we make laws about how people should be treated, we have to think about what is good for society (or at least, what society is indifferent to) and what is bad for society. The innateness of a particular quality only comes into play insofar as it means we have to be more careful to be right when we come to a conclusion about its goodness or badness. (See: strict scrutiny.) I don’t know if it’s possible to have a public discussion about discrimination against homosexuals on these terms, but it feels more intellectually honest than simply repeating, “That’s just who they are!”
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I think your logic is sound. To take it a step further then, how would a government that allows gay marriage under that logic oppose incest or polygamy?
Thanks. I think your examples fall in exactly the same step, though. People are having fits about how legal gay marriage would imply legal just about anything, possibly because we are all subconsciously justifying it based on innate behavior tendencies. If we own up to the fact that the real reason to allow gay marriage is that gay marriage makes everyone involved happy and harms no one, we can see why all these horror scenarios are unrealistic, because for them we do have a laundry list of people who are oppressed and traumatized. (Or, if we can’t come up with any good reason why they’re harmful to society, we’ll see why they might not be horror scenarios after all.)
My contention for a long time is that I will become a proponent of gay marriage when they are honest about it leading to polygamy, etc and lend them their support. Until then it’s just, “Open the door for my oppressed group but don’t let anyone else in.”
I assert that polyamorous marriage (provided it is equalistic) isn’t an issue in any way. The logistics might be iffy, but from a morality standpoint, there is absolutely nothing wrong with loving and being with multiple people.
Everyone just has to be on board. The rules of the relationship as set by the members of the relationship must allow it or it can’t happen. But if you have three people (as an example) who love each other dearly and are all three of them each in a relationship with each other, the monogamy model of marriage unfairly and immorally impacts that perfectly stable relationship and the legal rights poly folk can access.
I won’t speak on incest, because I don’t know much about it, but from what I understand incest in and of itself isn’t inherently bad. What’s bad is when unequal power dynamics show up in incest. A father and a daughter would be a dangerous and unequal power dynamic. A brother and a sister (or a brother and a brother) wouldn’t be.
And from what I understand on the biology end, incestual breeding actually has a ridiculously low chance of birth defects. It’s only if you have a long running line of incest heritage that it starts to become a problem. And when I say a long line, I mean generations. In the same family.
I have my doubts that incest will run through a family like that unless something else troublesome is going on (like isolation from general society of the kids)
What really drives me nuts about the whole marriage thing, is that there are a lot of rights that really ought to not be tied to marriage but be available normally. Hospital visits for instance. I have close friends who are like family to me, moreso than blood family. I would want them able to see me in the hospital.
Why can’t I just make an Allow Visit list? Sign a document, and list the people who are allowed to see me in the hospital. Why does it just have to be a spouse or a family member?
So this whole marriage thing seems like a giant useless lateral move to me, in the end. For everyone. Straight folk too.
Mike: I’m confused; it sounds as though you’re saying you would be all for gay marriage if only it allowed you to simultaneously express your pro-polygamy and pro-incest stances. But I doubt that is what you meant to say.
The point I was making in my post is that these issues are only being jumbled up together because we are thinking about them as all related to innateness, but innateness isn’t the real reason we give something legal protection. What I’m saying we ought to do is look at each issue separately and consider the benefits and drawbacks. Is anyone coerced, threatened, physically or emotionally harmed? If yes, then ban (or ban selectively, drawing a line around the situations in which harm is caused). If no, then allow.
This logic doesn’t imply anything at all about polygamy, incest, what-have-you. (For that matter, neither does being pro-gay marriage.) The whole point is that each issue should be considered separately. Recursiveparadox does a great job of laying out several relevant arguments, and illustrating the kind of discussion we should be having. (Thanks, RP.) I hope that sometime soon our society is mature enough to face these issues head-on and actually have those discussions in the open.
Z,
What i’m saying is that i think gay marriage proponents are being naive or intentionally disingenious when they say that polygamy and other redefinitions of marriage won’t follow. I think if they were honest they would endorse ALL ‘alternative’ lifestyle arrangements (because quite frankly I doubt many of them are troubled by polygamy). The fact that they appear to be just as opposed strikes me as taking the political route i.e. opposing other arrangements to get support for their own.
Until gay marriage proponents are honest about the logical next step in the redefinition of marriage and discuss how we deal with it, I can’t endorse their cause. It’s not because I think gay marriage is icky…it’s because I think most of its proponents are being hypocritical.
You keep saying that legalizing incest and polygamy and whatever else is included in “etc.” is the “logical next step” that will obviously happen once gay marriage is legal. Can you please explain why you think that is the next step? What is the mechanism by which the one causes the other?
I’m not aware of any conspiracy among gay marriage proponents to hide our secret agenda of legalizing anything anyone’s ever called an “alternative lifestyle.” I’m sorry that you think such a thing exists. I suspect that you see this hypocrisy because you perceive a causal link between legalizing gay marriage and “ALL ‘alternative’ lifestyle arrangements”… but I really don’t think that link is there.
Do you stop polygamy on moral grounds? Do you stop incest on moral grounds? Otherwise it’s just a matter of logistics and that’s hard to argue against.
Redefining marriage is just that. Once you do it, the door is open.
Sure, you can raise moral objections about coercion, manipulation, and abuse. Those things are immoral, and we have laws against them in many other situations as well. Or by moral, did you mean religious?
I’m not sure what you are thinking of when you say “logistics.” I also don’t see why “the door is open” to anything at all once you change the definition of marriage in any way. Marriage has not always had the same legal definition throughout history. Sure, the door is open to having another debate about what the definition of marriage ought to be, from some new angle, but the door was already open to that kind of debate. (You’ll notice, we’re having one now.)
But couldn’t a case be made for coercion, manipulation, and abuse for gay marriages? Certainly at least a small % of those who are gay are a product of their environment, not their DNA. There have been plenty of instances in recent years of folks who were openly gay for awhile and then went back to the opposite gender. That kind of confusion could give pause.
The ‘logistics’ are this: gay marriage would require the law to be changed on the basis of gender. Polygamy would require it to be changed on the basis of numbers. I don’t see how one case is stronger than another.
And if you allow gay marriage, how do you stop two brothers or two sisters who want to get married?
Mike, you’re missing the entire point of the post. Yes, you could make an argument that gay marriage involves coercion or logistical difficulties, but those arguments could be true about gay marriage while being false when applied to polygamy or vice versa. It’s an entirely separate issue, and you still haven’t given a reason why legalizing gay marriage implies you should legalize polygamy or incest.
You are also giving extremely bad arguments against gay marriage. Even if we grant you the (not well-supported) claim that many people are gay because of their environment, that does not constitute evidence of coercion under any definition anyone with half a brain cell has ever used. All decisions anyone ever makes are a product of the environment the decision is made in, and yet we still think most contracts are signed without coercion having been applied to either party. Besides, wouldn’t the fact that people have switched from gay to straight and from straight to gay during their lives imply just as much concern about heterosexual marriages as homosexual marriages?
And no, the logistics argument is not that we have to change the law. Changing the law is easy. State legislatures pass more complicated legislation every day. The logistical argument against polygamy is that things like child custody disputes and inheritance would require us to write a huge amount of new family law. It could be done, but it’s harder. Not a problem for gay marriage.
Your last point, though, really blows me away. How can you stop two brothers from marrying if gay marriage is legal? You stop them the same way you stop a brother and sister from getting married even though heterosexual marriage is legal – with a clause in the marriage law banning incest. I really don’t see how this is complicated.
“I think if they were honest they would endorse ALL ‘alternative’ lifestyle arrangements (because quite frankly I doubt many of them are troubled by polygamy).”
You must not have met many gays in your life to come to this conclusion. One person loving another of the same sex has nothing to do with one person supporting the idea that it is ok to enter into polygamous relationships. Additionally, it’s not any one person’s business to be “troubled” by another relationship preference – unless, as Z has pointed out, such a relationship is hurtful. This can happen in any relationship but is inherent in child molestation, for example.
I stop short of judging others, but polyamory is not ok in MY relationships. Yes I am also gay. Most of the gays I’ve come to associate with also do not warm to polygamy or polyamory in their own relationships as well. Many of the gays I’ve become acquainted with are also religious, and those beliefs certainly affect their views on monogamy. However they probably stop short of judging others who enter into such relationships. It doesn’t affect them and it is not in their place to judge.
Where multiple-partner relationships cross the line in the marriage debate is that marriage is a two-person contract. Religious requirements aside, legally adding more partners complicates things a bit, and the word “marriage” in the *civil* sense has, to my knowledge, always been about a contract between 2 human beings rather than 3 or 4. It’s about terminology.
The claim that a same-sex relationship is inherently abusive (or more likely to be based on abuse) is absolutely bogus and there is not a single piece of reputable research that proves this.
But why would you ban two brothers from getting married? if gay marriage is legal, both are consenting adults, and there is no danger of child being born with birth defects…on what grounds do you tell them no?
Well, many would argue that the relationship dynamics between brothers growing up and the family pressures that might exist would make it very hard for someone to trust that brothers were making a rational decision. But that’s not the point.
If brothers marrying is actually bad, then there must be a reason why it’s bad, and we’ll ban it on those grounds. If there isn’t a reason, then we shouldn’t ban it. However, there are an infinite number of possible arguments you could make for or against it. Those arguments are all either good or bad, and they’re good or bad regardless of whether we legalize gay marriage. Yes, some of the arguments are the same. But if they’re good arguments, you can’t just make them bad by not legalizing gay marriage. The two debates can be had totally independently of each other.
The point is that the only grounds on which you can ban two brothers from marrying is moral. I’m fine with that…but once we introduce morality into the discussion, gay marriage becomes much less manageable. The success of the gay marriage movement depends on a lack of morality in the discussion. They need to reduce the debate to a matter of simple rights. My arguement is that once you divorce morality from marriage, that is when the door to all sorts of other redefinitions is opened.
Emily – a friend of mine just signed on as the third partner at a plant nursery that two other guys own. The paperwork was relatively simple and the logistics of writing it up were pretty straight-foward. I don’t really see that as a hindrance to polygamy.
I’m curious on what religious / moral grounds gays would be opposed to polygamy but not find their own relationships problematic. Please elaborate.
There are other possible reasons to ban incest besides moral ones, and you could debate whether they are good.
It’s possible that an individual has decided gay marriage should be legalized because it’s unfair to criminalize immoral behavior that doesn’t harm anyone else. If that’s your reasoning, and you also don’t think any of the other anti-incest arguments are good, then you should also support legalizing incest. You should not, however, reject that argument just because it would also imply incest – if you don’t have a logical reason to reject the argument, and no other argument against incest is good, the logical thing is to change your view on incest, not reject the argument despite it being logically sound.
I also, though, reject the idea that supporting legalizing gay marriage depends on a lack of morality in the discussion. If you gave me a good, logical reason why I should believe that gay marriage was immoral, I would stop supporting it. I have never heard such an argument, and I would love to hear one if you have it. The only moral argument I’ve heard against gay marriage is a religious one. I obviously don’t believe religion can be supported logically, so I don’t see arguments based on it as logically convincing. I also think religious motivation should be kept separate from law (as I’ve explained in old posts).
In fact, I support gay marriage explicitly because of moral concerns. I don’t care about violating the rights of homosexuals primarily because of some sort of blind legalistic motivation. I care about the violation of those rights because I think it’s morally wrong. I would argue that any normative statement, including ones of the form “the law should be X” are utterly impossible to debate without considering morals. There must be some goal you’re trying to promote (happiness of people, fairness, etc.) that you believe has moral importance.
My problem is not with morals. My problem is with just deciding that some action is immoral without any logical reason for thinking so.
Isn’t the idea of “marriage” indeed a moral decision to spend one’s entire life with another individual? Especially when such a relationship is entered into under the eyes of God in a house of worship?
Why would gays have trouble endorsing and accepting polygamy? Because we are not a monolithic group. We don’t all automatically believe the same things simply because we love others of the same sex. We aren’t all liberal leather daddies and ultra-feminist biker dykes. Really, we aren’t. Being attracted to members of the same sex has as much to do with accepting polygamy as being exclusively attracted to obese people, or red-heads. In other words, nothing.
If you pay attention to the gay blog http://www.ExGayWatch.com, you will see an abundance of morally conservative gays commenting there – people who pray to God, believe in Jesus, salute the flag, and only enter into monogamous relationships.
I would also be careful in reducing complex human familial relationships to nothing more than the equivalent to a business partnership “with morals”. I don’t really see how the two are at all the same. Beyond that, the word “marriage” for people implies a couple committing to one another – the word “couple” meaning “two put together.” Again, terminology.
Your argument implies that gays are creatures without morals, or at least incapable of making moral arguments. I suggest stopping by your local Log Cabin Republican office some time. You’ll probably find you have more in common than not. (If there’s one in your area.)
A, Emily,
Neither of you have atempted to explain why gay marriage is morally acceptable and polygamy and/or incest are not.
A,
If the morals are not rooted in religion then they are rooted in members of society mutually agreeing on them. Therefore slavery is now considered morally wrong when previously it was not. Generally speaking, in lieu of a civil war where the victor sets the new moral agenda, or a non-moral legalistic justification for a change in things, morals only evolve when a majority accepts a new moral concept. Therefore polygamy is just a majority-supported moral change away from being legal.
I am claiming gay marriage is morally acceptable. I am making no claim at all about polygamy or incest. I think they’re utterly unrelated, and I have yet to see you give a reason why they are.
As far as an argument for why gay marriage is morally acceptable, I don’t think I need to give a reason. That’s like asking why it’s morally acceptable to fly kites on Thursdays. Why wouldn’t it be? I think the burden of proof is always on someone claiming that an action is immoral.
As for morals being rooted in religion or societal norms, I claim a third option – logic. Yes, slavery is now considered wrong. Yes, previously it was considered ok. That doesn’t mean that slavery was morally acceptable in 1820. That means that 1820s societal convictions were wrong. I (and I assume everyone else) can make a perfectly good logical argument for slavery being bad that doesn’t depend on everyone else thinking that it is, nor on God saying so.
A,
So then you admit that morality is subjective, yet you’re suggesting we accept gay marriage on moral grounds. If it’s subjective, group majority morals are firmly opposed to gay marriage in this country. Support only rises above 50% when we remove morality from the discussion completely and make it a legalistic matter.
Gay marriage and polygamy are related in the sense that both ask for a redefinition of marriage. One asks that gender no longer be a factor, one asks that numbers no longer be a factor. If we’re going to really look hard at them both, there’s a much greater tradition for plural marriages. 2 religions in the US, the Mormon church and Islam, both have a tradition of plural marriages. Histotically speaking plural marriages are seen all over the world…not so much on gay marriage. So there’s your similarities and your case for why one actually should have more support behind it.
No, I don’t admit that morality is subjective. I argue exactly the opposite. I say that even though people thought slavery was moral it wasn’t actually moral.
The point that I was originally making, and that A has been trying to help me make, is that each of these “factors” have nothing to do with each other. You can call them both “factors” but that doesn’t mean that the conclusion we draw about one, based on careful consideration, will have any relationship to the conclusion we draw about another.
Let’s look at another two factors to see why this is true. In some marriages, the couple lives together in a house, and in other marriages they live in an apartment. That seems fine, no reason to prefer one over the other. Now what if I said to you: there are some marriages where both spouses are aware of and legally consent to the marriage, and other marriages where one spouse has no idea that he or she is married until after the fact. Is that okay? No! But why not? it’s just another factor — you know, what sort of living space you have, whether or not you were aware of your marriage, etc. etc. It’s all the same — isn’t it?
A,
But that’s just it, morals ARE subjective. They are shaped by any one of a million different external factors. The only reason we have societal morals at all is because we agree on them as a group.
Z,
Marriage is not a biological construct. It’s a legal construct. It’s primarily defined but why the parties are not. They aren’t close blood relatives. They aren’t of the same gender (traditionally). They aren’t already married to someone else. They They aren’t under a certain age. What gay marriage proponents ask us to do is to remove one of those barriers. Polygamy supporters want us to remove another. You can say that the factors are apples and oranges but they are the same in that they are both traditional barriers to marriage. If one comes down, all become suspect.
Z,
I will also add that interracial relationships were formerly a barrier to marriage. That barrier fell and gay marriage proponents have regularly pointed to that as an example of why the gender barrier should fall.
Mike, you said, “If one [barrier to marriage] comes down, all become suspect.” I actually think that all our laws are always suspect, in the sense that we should be thinking critically about what good policy actually means, and fixing unjust laws that accidentally made their way onto the books.
I agree that some gay marriage proponents have pointed to interracial marriage being legalized as part of an analogy about why gay marriage should be made legal (saying that certain qualities are “not in their control” and we shouldn’t discriminate) but that kind of argument is exactly what I’ve been saying is illogical. Race and sexual orientation are two different issues and should be considered separately (even if some of the same lines of analysis happen to apply to both of them). People shouldn’t be using interracial marriage to justify gay marriage.
However, I think it does provide a great example of why your fears about the floodgates opening are unfounded. We removed a barrier to marriage, but it didn’t require us to instantly remove all others.
But removing more barriers is the next logical step is it not? Rarely do we put barriers back up when it comes to access to social institutions.
No, it is not the next logical step; that is the point I have been making. “Is it not?” is not a refutation.
If you think that removing more barriers is the next logical step after we remove one, do you think that supporters of the legalization of interracial marriage should have been “honest” and made explicit their support for legalizing polygamy and incest? How about the people who worked to allow women property rights after their marriage? Should they also have admitted their agenda of legalizing incest? Would you have refused to support these movements because they did not?
I think that moving towards gay marriage is enough of a sea change that we can expect further revisions to follow in relatively short-order.
To be quite honest, I don’t find polygamy particularly problematic and I’m at about 49% on gay marriage (supportive). But I think it’s wise at this juncture to admit the liklihood of further revisions and start thinking about how to deal with them.
“I think that moving towards gay marriage is enough of a sea change that we can expect further revisions to follow in relatively short-order.”
This statement makes the most sense out of any statement from Mike so far. I’m certain that back in the 50′s and at the turn of the century people were convinced that each “redefinition” was going to be “a big enough of a sea change” to rattle the entire concept of one person being attached to another, or one segment of a population being considered equal to other segments. So it’s perfectly understandable that someone who is so put off by same-sex relationships could think they are just so foreign that allowing them to be acknowledged legally would rocket us toward Armageddon.
People have been getting same-sex married for decades – in ceremonies put on by affirming friends and family or by affirming religious circles. So really, the fact that people in love with someone of the same sex believe that they can indeed live for the rest of their lives with the person they love has already “redefined” the institution of marriage. Gay couples aren’t going to split up and they’re not going away from public life.
Culture moves at a much, much, much faster pace today. That’s impossible to deny. Technology, improved communication, etc. Comparing cultural shifts to 1950 isn’t realistic at all.
I can deny that culture “moves much faster today” because I cannot see any evidence that it does. Unless someone has been measuring since the beginning of time, there isn’t a way to “prove” that culture moves any slower or faster, whatever that might mean.
The gay rights movement has been going on since the 1950′s – look up “Daughters of Bilitis.” Frank Kamanny started his activist days in 1965. Stonewall, of course, was in ’69; Harvey Milk happened in the 70′s. AIDS happened in the 80′s. But 10 years after “Will & Grace” first aired in primetime on NBC, gays are still far from being considered civil equals.
Maybe you’re mistaking the ease at which one can find gay (or any other kind of) pornography on the internet with the “ease” of convincing someone to adopt a more accepting attitude through the use of AIM. (in that, it’s not easy at ALL.) Change will continue to happen. Slowly and surely.
Come back when you have proof of this seismic eruption of cultural change that has occurred thanks to “today’s technology.”
I’m sorry Emily but you’re incredibly wrong on this point. Let’s look at the span of US history. We can be certain that there were gays in the US since its inception. So for roughly the first 175 years there was no movement at all. Then in 1950 there was a very small start. Within 25 years you had openly gay officials being elected, marches, etc. Within 15 years you had anti-discrimination laws including gays all over the country. Within 10 years you had gay-centered television shows. Within 5 years you had gay marriage becoming legal in the first state. Within 3 years it was legal in several states.
When I was workin gon my anthropology degree we explored exponential culture change all the time. We would see a culture that would spring up, stay relatively the same for hundreds of years and then there would be one change. Then another in a much shorter time period. Then another, then another, etc. The timeframe between each of these leaps is shortened until at some point there is a a terminal velocity reached and the culture will change so dramtically a new era begins. If you look at the period leading up to the Renaissance you will see the exact same thing.
Technology has advanced more in the last 5 years than in the 5,000 years before it. Why do you think that is? Because each change brings about other changes and it spreads exponentially. Culture is no different.
So you’re saying that at any given time any culture anywhere could be exponentially developed, no matter what it is. In other words, it doesn’t matter when, the exponential movement will still be relatively the same. For example, the suffrage movement started 100 years or longer before the gay movement did – although one could argue that the coinage of “homosexual” by a German scientist in the 1800′s could have been the beginning, since it was the first time we were not referred to as “sodomites” but a scientifically separate group of people, a la heterosexuals. And Freud addressed homosexuality at the turn of the century, in a relatively tolerant light. But the right to vote for women was not achieved until 1920. Women today still earn less than men. Double standards still plague us, just like any other subgroup. Slavery was abolished in the 1860′s but today we still have racism and classism meshed. Racism is alive and well. You can see it in the epithet “marxist nigerian muslim” hurled at the POTUS. Rush Limbaugh called for a re-institution of segregated buses, because blacks can’t be trusted not to assault whites.
And gays are likened to sexual predators, as I’m sure you do with me. We’re just lustful entities constantly trolling for the next sexual encounter.
But all of this is truly truly irrelevant.
Mike, what exactly are you so afraid of if two of your male neighbors get married? What exactly is incomprehensible about love between two people of age who happen to have the same gonads? And what if those two people were both intersex – possessing both sets of gonads? Would it make a difference then? What if one of your children happened to be gay and wanted to get married? Would you call him or her a detriment to your family and marriage?
I’m not going to respond until you answer those questions – although A and Z are welcome to. I’m done dancing around this topic. You seem to be obsessed with invisible “what if’s” and I can’t even tell what thsoe “what if’s” are.
I’d also like to add that marriage equality is inevitable, so you better get used to it. Time is on MY side, not yours. Don’t worry, once it’s okay’ed at the Federal level, I promise little kids won’t be forced to watch gay porn in public school.
Emily,
Your first paragraph is all over the place so I’m just going to ignore that one.
As for your questions, you seem to have the impression that I am Jery Falwell. I’m not. I have gay friends and I even let my kids around them. I’m not scared of gay people. What I DO believe though is that gays are asking for a radical redefinition of what marriage (and yes, it IS radical given the historical definition of marriage). If you look back through my comments I never once discussed the topic of whether or not gay marriage was good, bad or zero impact. What I suggested is that it is LOGICAL that the next battle that will be fought is going to be over polygamy. It is my belief that gay marriage will give polygamists more leverage in that debate. Compound that with more historical tradition supporting plural marriages and the fact that there are already hundred (thousands) of plural marriages in our country…it won’t be long before that barrier falls as well. I think gay marriage proponents have a certain obligation to admit that their success will likely lead to plural marriages and take a position on it in advance.
I realize that gay folks like yourself have a knee-jerk reaction to any criticism that compells you to characterize it as hate or bigotry. That’s why you like to ask personal questions like, “What would you do if your child was gay,” because you think it will bring about some tortured hand-wringing on my part or force me to make a hypocritical statement…but there are a lot of us who have a much more nuanced and intelligent view on the debate that doesn’t start with, “I hate them fags…”
If my daughters turn out to be lesbian I suspect I will still love them just as much, be secretly glad I don’t have to worry about unwed pregnancies, try to be nice to their partners, hope that they choose to still look like girls and not like the fairly masculine lesbians I work with and continue to be a dad.
I don’t hate you Emily, as much as I’m sure you want to believe I do. I think you’re entitled to your sexual preferences just like I am entitled to mine. I’m almost to the point where I’m willing to accept gay marriage…but I think it’s irresponsible to not explore the likely effects it will have on our culture.