It's just that same-sex pairs are instinctively unnatural to me. The mental image of a wedding ceremony joining two men who seal the bargain with a deep kiss makes me squirm.
But here's where I think my fellow conservatives have it wrong.
That wedding ceremony wouldn't be about me or my personal discomfort. It would be about those two people who love each other and decided to publicly announce their permanent mutual commitment. Should my personal attitudes prevent them from doing that? Should my religious beliefs keep them legally unrelated even if they remain committed to each other for life?
I will disagree with the "instinctively unnatural" bit -- that's demonstrably not true, and there is a fair part of this commentary informed by ignorance, but Garlock's argument comes back to the basics of conservatism, and is pretty much the same reasoning that Sullivan, Jonathan Rauch and others have used. One key point that Garlock makes that I appreciate greatly:
Marriage is a legal status to which we are free to choose to add religious covenants, but those religious covenants should not govern the legal status of marriage, especially since we are free to choose our religion and even free to reject religion entirely. We shouldn't codify religious beliefs into law.
Bingo!
(With thanks to Waldo.)
Timothy Kincaid, at Box Turtle Bulletin, notes an article in the Baptist Standard featuring Maggie Gallagher and Barry Lynn. In light of Garlock's comment on marriage as a legal institution, I have some objections to Maggie Gallagher's "solution" to the problem of same-sex marriage (and if you follow these things at all, you know it is a major problem for Gallagher):
Gallagher argues that the government should recognize only such marriages are are determined by religions:
“A real alternative would be for government to recognize and enforce religiously distinctive marriage contracts so long as they serve the government’s interest—say, permanent ones for Catholics,” she continued. “But what people who talk about ‘separating marriage and state’ really propose to do is simply to refuse to recognize religious marriage contracts at all. This is not neutrality; it is a powerful intervention by the government into the lives of religious people.”
Oddly, I could be persuaded to support this idea. If the government were to allow churches to define marriage and then recognized and enforced those religiously distinctive marriage contracts, gay people could marry in every state of the union and in any nearly every city that had a Unitarian Universalist fellowship, a Quaker meeting, or a United Church of Christ congregation.
This sort of "solution" ignores the history of marriage and its fundamental nature, and as far as I'm concerned represents an attempt to appropriate marriage for the benefit of religious hierarchies. Gallagher is, as usual, running to extremes on this, and of course, there is the requisite scare message: refusing to recognize religious marriages interferes in the lives of religious persons. Again, a patent untruth: just exactly how is that an intrusion, pray tell? If anyone wants to do so, they can have a religious ceremony without government recognition (which has been fine for gay couples and their "commitment ceremonies" for years, but apparently is not enough for straight couples). No one is stopping them. Ah, you say, but what about those government benefits? What!? I say, can we be reducing marriage to tax breaks and Social Security checks? Oh, wait, haven't I heard that argument before? I don't know if Gallagher has ever used it, but I wouldn't be in the least surprised.
And of course, I sharply disagree with Kincaid about allowing churches to define marriage, simply because I think churches already wield too much clout in this country, and I'm not willing to turn over the enforcement of any part of the law to them. Let me repeat one more time: marriage as an institution has been a going concern probably since there have been recognizable societies; it has always been a contract, and has always been governed by the civil law. The Christian Church didn't recognize it as a sacrament until the early 12th century. Little bit slow on the uptake, don't you think? And now Maggie Gallagher (who is demonstrably not rational on this issue: you can google her to see just how unhinged she can get -- oh, and ignore that paid administration shill controversy in the corner) wants it all to be turned over to the churches? I don't think so.
Kincaid goes on to note that Barry Lynn thinks government should offer civil unions to all and sundry and let the chuches, once again, control "marriage."
No. Under any circumstance, No.
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