Why Supporting Same-Sex Marriage is the Only Moral Choice
Steve Shives
June 20, 2007
When Thomas Jefferson (with a little help from his friends) wrote the Declaration of Independence in 1776, he declared that all men were created equal. That isn’t what he actually meant, of course; “all white men” was closer to the truth in Jefferson’s time. It was nearly one hundred years before black Americans were officially freed from slavery and given basic legal rights as citizens. It was yet another century before the descendants of those former slaves finally won full protection under the law for their civil rights.
Just as left-out by Jefferson’s statement of equality in the Declaration were women. They had to wait until 1920 for the right to vote. Today when we read “all men are created equal,” most of us understand it to mean “all humans”—men and women, regardless of race, religion, political disposition, national origin, whatever demographic category you can name..
Not explicitly excluded in the Declaration, but left-out all the same for much of American history, are homosexuals. Last week the Massachusetts state legislature voted down a proposed ballot initiative that would have posed the question of same-sex marriage directly to the people. The 2003 decision by the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court which recognized homosexual marriages would have been subjected to a state-wide referendum.
To earn a place on the 2008 ballot, the initiative needed a mere 50 votes from the 200-member legislature. It received only 45. Kris Mineau, president of the Massachusetts Family Institute, which supported the initiative, framed its defeat as a blow to democracy: “[T]his is a brutal loss for citizen-centered democracy,” he said after the vote.[1]
Following the initiative’s defeat, opponents of same-sex marriage spoke out in the print media, on the internet and on talk radio, repeating their well-worn complaints about judicial activism and the shadowy, sinister homosexual agenda. Some conservatives seem to think cabals of gay people are meeting in dance clubs and bookstore cafés throughout America, plotting their next step in the dismantling of America. As for the judicial activism charge, it’s just one of many arguments offered against same-sex marriage. None of these arguments hold any water, none of them justify denying a significant portion of our citizenry its civil rights. I’ll run through some of the most popular ones:
The people of the United States don’t want same-sex marriage. Whether this is true or not doesn’t matter; on civil rights issues, what the people want is irrelevant. Opponents of gay marriage attack the Massachusetts SJC decision as judicial activism, but name me one significant civil rights victory in the last century that wasn’t the result of judicial activism. We celebrate the anniversary of Brown vs. Board of Education of Topeka, not the anniversary of Congress or the people of Kansas voting to end segregation.[2] The Supreme Court of the United States didn’t leave the question of segregation up to the people; it decided for itself that it was unconstitutional and had to be abolished. Thirteen years later it was another Supreme Court decision, Loving vs. Virginia, which outlawed anti-miscegenation laws, finally guaranteeing the right to interracial marriage.[3]
Does this mean the courts always ought to overrule the people? Of course not. But in matters of civil rights, when the legislature or the people are clearly unwilling to take on the work of reform themselves, the court must act. Would anyone opposed to same-sex marriage today suggest that Brown vs. Board of Education or Loving vs. Virginia were invalid decisions, unwarranted judicial activism, because the people or the legislatures might have decided differently?
Gay marriage opens the door to legalization of other undesirable relationships, including incest, polygamy and bestiality. When the Supreme Court declared all laws banning consensual sodomy unconstitutional a few years ago, then-Senator Rick Santorum predicted “[if] you have the right to consensual [gay] sex within your home, then you have the right to bigamy, you have the right to polygamy, you have the right to incest, you have the right to adultery. You have the right to anything.”[4] The “slippery slope” argument is also favored by Bill O’Reilly, who argues that if homosexual marriage is recognized, then to not recognize the marriages of polygamists, or brothers and sisters, etc., would be discrimination.[5]
I fail to see how gay marriage in this instance is any different than interracial marriage prior to Loving vs. Virginia. Before laws banning interracial marriage were declared null and void, marriages in much of the country were only recognized if involving people of the same race. Recognizing the marriages of interracial couples required a redefinition of marriage, just as recognizing same-sex couples would. Allowing white women to marry black men did not cause the sky to fall, did not send society into a moral and cultural tailspin, did not lead to demands from various fringe groups of polygamists or zoophiles that their peculiar relationships be sanctioned as well by the state.
The fault in this argument is the assumption that homosexuality is inferior to heterosexuality, or that it must be considered an alternate lifestyle. Most homosexuals are just as normal as most heterosexuals. Sure, there are some gay people who, like some straight people, have more exotic sexual tastes, from multiple partners to more morally offensive territory such as bestiality and pedophilia. The vast majority of gay men and women, like the vast majority of heterosexuals, are only interested in one sex partner at a time, and only wish to marry one person, not several people, not an animal. State-recognized same-sex marriage doesn’t open a door for “anything,” as former-Senator Santorum claimed; it only affirms the appeal of one-on-one relationships.
Homosexuals don’t need civil rights guarantees because homosexuality is determined by personal choice rather than genetics. This is the biggest, juiciest red herring served up in this entire debate. Politicians have wasted more time arguing over whether or not people choose to be gay than any other point in the same-sex marriage issue. Here’s the answer: it doesn’t matter. If a person is gay because of a genetic predisposition—if there is a gene that determines sexual orientation just as there are genes that determine skin color, or whether one has curly or straight hair, or whether one has wet or dry earwax—then the discussion is over, and civil rights cannot be denied homosexuals. If a person’s sexual orientation is entirely the result of their personal preference—if, as opponents of same-sex marriage often claim, one chooses to be gay—the discussion is also over, and the denial of civil rights to homosexuals is likewise indefensible.
Why? Individual liberty. One of the founding precepts of any truly free society is that men and women must be allowed to live their lives as they see fit, according to their own morality, their own religion, their own choice of lifestyle. There are limits, of course—murder cannot be permitted because the murderer’s personal moral code tells him it’s all right; religious practices that violate the rights of other people or lead to cruel treatment of animals cannot be allowed—but the limits themselves are rooted in the duty to protect individual liberty. The rights of one person end where the rights of another person begin.
You have every right to be offended by homosexuality, but your offense doesn’t affect the right of someone else to practice it. You are also entitled to be offended by interracial marriage, the theory of evolution, and your neighbor rooting for the Yankees. Your offense has nothing to do with anyone else’s right to practice or believe in any of those things. Seeing the guy in the next apartment wearing his Derek Jeter jersey might make you sick to your stomach, but at the end of the day it, like his sexual orientation, is none of your business.
Gay marriage undermines traditional marriage between men and women. I’ve never understood how this was supposed to work. James Dobson, one of the loudest voices opposed to gay marriage, describes it like this: “These two entities cannot coexist because they represent opposite ends of the universe.” Beyond that irrelevant analogy, Dobson claims that as a result of state-sanctioned same-sex marriage, “the younger generation becomes confused about sexual identity and quickly loses its understanding of lifelong commitments, emotional bonding, sexual purity, the role of children in a family, and from a spiritual perspective, the ‘sanctity’ of marriage.”[6] Do the high rates of divorce, teen pregnancy and spousal abuse do nothing to affect the younger generation’s understanding of those things? It seems to me that we heterosexuals are destroying the sanctity of marriage just fine on our own; recognizing homosexual marriages would only strengthen the institution.
Not only that, to me this is another issue that could be resolved merely by folks minding their own business. How does allowing two men or two women to marry one another affect the right of a man to marry a woman? Guaranteeing rights to people who hitherto haven’t had them does nothing to injure those who’ve been enjoying those rights all along. The argument makes no sense. It’s a scare tactic designed to play on people’s ignorance and intolerance. Which brings me to the next argument.
Homosexuality is immoral, therefore same-sex marriages must not be recognized. Homophobes like Dobson throw out a lot of jive about gay marriage leading to legalized incest and the downfall of civilization, but the basis of their opposition is their belief that God considers homosexuality to be an abomination. They take this belief from the Bible, which states flatly several times that God considers two men making love an occasion for a public execution. Thankfully, most American Christians have mellowed enough that they wish only to subjugate and oppress their gay fellow citizens, not to stone them in the town square.
The Bible is an exceptionally poor moral guide. Not only does the Old Testament demand the death penalty for violation of its laws, and present men like Moses (who leads multiple campaigns of mass-murder and even orders Hebrew soldiers under his command to kill women and male children among an enemy, but keep the virgin daughters for themselves – Numbers 31:15-18) and Elisha (who inspires God to send bears to maul forty-two children whose only crime was mocking the prophet’s bald head – 2 Kings 2:23-24) as great heroes to be emulated, the New Testament preaches sexism and paternalism of the worst kind, declaring that women are unfit to be teachers and ought to dress plainly, keep quiet and bear children (1 Timothy 2:9-15).
The God of the Bible also threatens people with generational curses which punish children for the crimes of their parents. The entire concept of original sin and the fall of man is a form of this, with all men and women born after Adam and Eve punished for all time as a result of Eve eating a piece of fruit from a forbidden tree. No just system of law on the planet would ever consider punishing someone for a crime they are known not to have committed; it is morally reprehensible and indefensible.
So if these Biblical morals (and there are others – consult the articles on the Bible’s “difficult passages” at ReligiousTolerance.org[7]) have been judged inappropriate for our society, why should we continue to defer to the Biblical prohibitions against homosexuality? The answer is simple: we shouldn’t.
Gays don’t need marriage; civil unions are enough. Civil unions allow two men or two women to enter into a contract with each other, each declaring that the other is entitled to the same health benefits and various other rights as a spouse. Instead of being husbands and wives, they are “domestic partners.” Civil unions are the great compromise which allows gutless politicians unwilling to take a stand on either side of the issue to straddle the fence. Candidates in both major parties, at all levels of government, have declared their support for civil unions, but their opposition to same-sex marriage. This cowardly position is designed to appeal to gays who want the same rights as straight people, and to homophobic straight people who don’t want the definition of marriage to include gay people.
The whole thing reeks of “separate but equal,” which is also the opinion of the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts: “The Massachusetts Constitution affirms the dignity and equality of all individuals. It forbids the creation of second-class citizens. . . . [The Commonwealth of Massachusetts] has failed to identify any constitutionally adequate reason for denying civil marriage to same-sex couples.”[8] Offering gay Americans the booby prize of civil unions is not enough. All state-sanctioned unions, be they heterosexual or homosexual, must be recognized as marriages, or none must be. If the courts and the politicians wish to acquiesce to the demands of conservatives opposed to gay marriage, they can solve the problem by, as Jonathan Turley suggested in an editorial published last year in USA Today[9], legally recognizing all marriages as civil unions only, and packing the term “marriage” off to the realm of religion.
That might satisfy some folks on either side. At least it would establish consistency. There is no legitimate reason—moral, social, or otherwise—to grant partners of both orientations the same legal rights, but label one as marriage and the other as a civil union. There are plenty of illegitimate reasons, bigotry and ignorance foremost among them.
The question of whether or not to legally recognize gay marriage has been volleyed back and forth for years, with compromises suggested from both sides. But there is only one answer to the question that is right, moral and American.
That answer is “Yes.” Gay Americans must finally be granted the rights they have so long sought, and the recognition they have for too long been denied.
Just as left-out by Jefferson’s statement of equality in the Declaration were women. They had to wait until 1920 for the right to vote. Today when we read “all men are created equal,” most of us understand it to mean “all humans”—men and women, regardless of race, religion, political disposition, national origin, whatever demographic category you can name..
Not explicitly excluded in the Declaration, but left-out all the same for much of American history, are homosexuals. Last week the Massachusetts state legislature voted down a proposed ballot initiative that would have posed the question of same-sex marriage directly to the people. The 2003 decision by the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court which recognized homosexual marriages would have been subjected to a state-wide referendum.
To earn a place on the 2008 ballot, the initiative needed a mere 50 votes from the 200-member legislature. It received only 45. Kris Mineau, president of the Massachusetts Family Institute, which supported the initiative, framed its defeat as a blow to democracy: “[T]his is a brutal loss for citizen-centered democracy,” he said after the vote.[1]
Following the initiative’s defeat, opponents of same-sex marriage spoke out in the print media, on the internet and on talk radio, repeating their well-worn complaints about judicial activism and the shadowy, sinister homosexual agenda. Some conservatives seem to think cabals of gay people are meeting in dance clubs and bookstore cafés throughout America, plotting their next step in the dismantling of America. As for the judicial activism charge, it’s just one of many arguments offered against same-sex marriage. None of these arguments hold any water, none of them justify denying a significant portion of our citizenry its civil rights. I’ll run through some of the most popular ones:
The people of the United States don’t want same-sex marriage. Whether this is true or not doesn’t matter; on civil rights issues, what the people want is irrelevant. Opponents of gay marriage attack the Massachusetts SJC decision as judicial activism, but name me one significant civil rights victory in the last century that wasn’t the result of judicial activism. We celebrate the anniversary of Brown vs. Board of Education of Topeka, not the anniversary of Congress or the people of Kansas voting to end segregation.[2] The Supreme Court of the United States didn’t leave the question of segregation up to the people; it decided for itself that it was unconstitutional and had to be abolished. Thirteen years later it was another Supreme Court decision, Loving vs. Virginia, which outlawed anti-miscegenation laws, finally guaranteeing the right to interracial marriage.[3]
Does this mean the courts always ought to overrule the people? Of course not. But in matters of civil rights, when the legislature or the people are clearly unwilling to take on the work of reform themselves, the court must act. Would anyone opposed to same-sex marriage today suggest that Brown vs. Board of Education or Loving vs. Virginia were invalid decisions, unwarranted judicial activism, because the people or the legislatures might have decided differently?
Gay marriage opens the door to legalization of other undesirable relationships, including incest, polygamy and bestiality. When the Supreme Court declared all laws banning consensual sodomy unconstitutional a few years ago, then-Senator Rick Santorum predicted “[if] you have the right to consensual [gay] sex within your home, then you have the right to bigamy, you have the right to polygamy, you have the right to incest, you have the right to adultery. You have the right to anything.”[4] The “slippery slope” argument is also favored by Bill O’Reilly, who argues that if homosexual marriage is recognized, then to not recognize the marriages of polygamists, or brothers and sisters, etc., would be discrimination.[5]
I fail to see how gay marriage in this instance is any different than interracial marriage prior to Loving vs. Virginia. Before laws banning interracial marriage were declared null and void, marriages in much of the country were only recognized if involving people of the same race. Recognizing the marriages of interracial couples required a redefinition of marriage, just as recognizing same-sex couples would. Allowing white women to marry black men did not cause the sky to fall, did not send society into a moral and cultural tailspin, did not lead to demands from various fringe groups of polygamists or zoophiles that their peculiar relationships be sanctioned as well by the state.
The fault in this argument is the assumption that homosexuality is inferior to heterosexuality, or that it must be considered an alternate lifestyle. Most homosexuals are just as normal as most heterosexuals. Sure, there are some gay people who, like some straight people, have more exotic sexual tastes, from multiple partners to more morally offensive territory such as bestiality and pedophilia. The vast majority of gay men and women, like the vast majority of heterosexuals, are only interested in one sex partner at a time, and only wish to marry one person, not several people, not an animal. State-recognized same-sex marriage doesn’t open a door for “anything,” as former-Senator Santorum claimed; it only affirms the appeal of one-on-one relationships.
Homosexuals don’t need civil rights guarantees because homosexuality is determined by personal choice rather than genetics. This is the biggest, juiciest red herring served up in this entire debate. Politicians have wasted more time arguing over whether or not people choose to be gay than any other point in the same-sex marriage issue. Here’s the answer: it doesn’t matter. If a person is gay because of a genetic predisposition—if there is a gene that determines sexual orientation just as there are genes that determine skin color, or whether one has curly or straight hair, or whether one has wet or dry earwax—then the discussion is over, and civil rights cannot be denied homosexuals. If a person’s sexual orientation is entirely the result of their personal preference—if, as opponents of same-sex marriage often claim, one chooses to be gay—the discussion is also over, and the denial of civil rights to homosexuals is likewise indefensible.
Why? Individual liberty. One of the founding precepts of any truly free society is that men and women must be allowed to live their lives as they see fit, according to their own morality, their own religion, their own choice of lifestyle. There are limits, of course—murder cannot be permitted because the murderer’s personal moral code tells him it’s all right; religious practices that violate the rights of other people or lead to cruel treatment of animals cannot be allowed—but the limits themselves are rooted in the duty to protect individual liberty. The rights of one person end where the rights of another person begin.
You have every right to be offended by homosexuality, but your offense doesn’t affect the right of someone else to practice it. You are also entitled to be offended by interracial marriage, the theory of evolution, and your neighbor rooting for the Yankees. Your offense has nothing to do with anyone else’s right to practice or believe in any of those things. Seeing the guy in the next apartment wearing his Derek Jeter jersey might make you sick to your stomach, but at the end of the day it, like his sexual orientation, is none of your business.
Gay marriage undermines traditional marriage between men and women. I’ve never understood how this was supposed to work. James Dobson, one of the loudest voices opposed to gay marriage, describes it like this: “These two entities cannot coexist because they represent opposite ends of the universe.” Beyond that irrelevant analogy, Dobson claims that as a result of state-sanctioned same-sex marriage, “the younger generation becomes confused about sexual identity and quickly loses its understanding of lifelong commitments, emotional bonding, sexual purity, the role of children in a family, and from a spiritual perspective, the ‘sanctity’ of marriage.”[6] Do the high rates of divorce, teen pregnancy and spousal abuse do nothing to affect the younger generation’s understanding of those things? It seems to me that we heterosexuals are destroying the sanctity of marriage just fine on our own; recognizing homosexual marriages would only strengthen the institution.
Not only that, to me this is another issue that could be resolved merely by folks minding their own business. How does allowing two men or two women to marry one another affect the right of a man to marry a woman? Guaranteeing rights to people who hitherto haven’t had them does nothing to injure those who’ve been enjoying those rights all along. The argument makes no sense. It’s a scare tactic designed to play on people’s ignorance and intolerance. Which brings me to the next argument.
Homosexuality is immoral, therefore same-sex marriages must not be recognized. Homophobes like Dobson throw out a lot of jive about gay marriage leading to legalized incest and the downfall of civilization, but the basis of their opposition is their belief that God considers homosexuality to be an abomination. They take this belief from the Bible, which states flatly several times that God considers two men making love an occasion for a public execution. Thankfully, most American Christians have mellowed enough that they wish only to subjugate and oppress their gay fellow citizens, not to stone them in the town square.
The Bible is an exceptionally poor moral guide. Not only does the Old Testament demand the death penalty for violation of its laws, and present men like Moses (who leads multiple campaigns of mass-murder and even orders Hebrew soldiers under his command to kill women and male children among an enemy, but keep the virgin daughters for themselves – Numbers 31:15-18) and Elisha (who inspires God to send bears to maul forty-two children whose only crime was mocking the prophet’s bald head – 2 Kings 2:23-24) as great heroes to be emulated, the New Testament preaches sexism and paternalism of the worst kind, declaring that women are unfit to be teachers and ought to dress plainly, keep quiet and bear children (1 Timothy 2:9-15).
The God of the Bible also threatens people with generational curses which punish children for the crimes of their parents. The entire concept of original sin and the fall of man is a form of this, with all men and women born after Adam and Eve punished for all time as a result of Eve eating a piece of fruit from a forbidden tree. No just system of law on the planet would ever consider punishing someone for a crime they are known not to have committed; it is morally reprehensible and indefensible.
So if these Biblical morals (and there are others – consult the articles on the Bible’s “difficult passages” at ReligiousTolerance.org[7]) have been judged inappropriate for our society, why should we continue to defer to the Biblical prohibitions against homosexuality? The answer is simple: we shouldn’t.
Gays don’t need marriage; civil unions are enough. Civil unions allow two men or two women to enter into a contract with each other, each declaring that the other is entitled to the same health benefits and various other rights as a spouse. Instead of being husbands and wives, they are “domestic partners.” Civil unions are the great compromise which allows gutless politicians unwilling to take a stand on either side of the issue to straddle the fence. Candidates in both major parties, at all levels of government, have declared their support for civil unions, but their opposition to same-sex marriage. This cowardly position is designed to appeal to gays who want the same rights as straight people, and to homophobic straight people who don’t want the definition of marriage to include gay people.
The whole thing reeks of “separate but equal,” which is also the opinion of the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts: “The Massachusetts Constitution affirms the dignity and equality of all individuals. It forbids the creation of second-class citizens. . . . [The Commonwealth of Massachusetts] has failed to identify any constitutionally adequate reason for denying civil marriage to same-sex couples.”[8] Offering gay Americans the booby prize of civil unions is not enough. All state-sanctioned unions, be they heterosexual or homosexual, must be recognized as marriages, or none must be. If the courts and the politicians wish to acquiesce to the demands of conservatives opposed to gay marriage, they can solve the problem by, as Jonathan Turley suggested in an editorial published last year in USA Today[9], legally recognizing all marriages as civil unions only, and packing the term “marriage” off to the realm of religion.
That might satisfy some folks on either side. At least it would establish consistency. There is no legitimate reason—moral, social, or otherwise—to grant partners of both orientations the same legal rights, but label one as marriage and the other as a civil union. There are plenty of illegitimate reasons, bigotry and ignorance foremost among them.
The question of whether or not to legally recognize gay marriage has been volleyed back and forth for years, with compromises suggested from both sides. But there is only one answer to the question that is right, moral and American.
That answer is “Yes.” Gay Americans must finally be granted the rights they have so long sought, and the recognition they have for too long been denied.
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