Gay marriage--good idea or bad? Please weigh in.

My last blog post sparked a spirited but civil exchange of views; I'm grateful to the contributors for their time. On the assumption that most people don't follow a comment thread all the way down, though, I wanted to bring the discussion back to the present.

The point I was really trying to make--and it's up for debate whether or not I made it very effectively--is that people who oppose making gay marriage legal are by and large not motivated by 'hate,' and that accusations to that effect are not only hateful, themselves, but counterproductive.

Personally, I support the idea of gay marriage, but I refuse to demonize people who don't. Some of them may be motivated by homophobia, but I believe the vast majority of them have reservations which are motivated by sincere religious convictions, or sincere concern over negative consequences for society. It is the latter of these two that I am most interested in hearing from people about. Obviously, if the objections are religious in nature, there is no real basis for discussing them--one either believes in the validity of the strictures or one doesn't. If one does believe in them, but accompanies that belief with respect and kindness to individual gays and lesbians, I cannot condemn such belief, although many do.

What follows is a column I wrote in August of 2003 for the Wilmington Star-News, when the issue of gay marriage was beginning to be much in the news. I was teaching history at the time, so there was an emphasis on giving the controversy some historical perspective. I was gratified that it generated a lot of mail, and that virtually all of it, no matter the opinion of the writer, was thoughtful.

August 27, 2003

It's virtually impossible to avoid the influence of our own preferences, prejudices, and fears when forming opinions about issues. We're even more likely to do it when the issue is controversial, which compounds the problem. It is a challenge to relegate those emotions to secondary status--to acknowledge that they're not sufficient for forming an intelligent opinion about what government should do to deal with complex problems.

Whether or not gay people should be allowed to marry is an issue that's picking up a lot of steam. So far at least, public discourse seems civil, which is good. I hope that people on both sides of the question can maintain an awareness that the majority of those who disagree with them are good people who care about the future of our society, but who simply disagree fundamentally about what is in that society’s best interest. Any time policy must be made that deals with something as sensitive and personal as human relationships, the going won’t be easy.

The issue of homosexual marriage has to be considered from two completely separate perspectives—the legal and the religious. And while the question of morality figures in both, it is important to remember that the first can be dealt with by our public institutions—legislatures and courts—but the second cannot. After much thought, I am leaning towards the view that gay marriage is inevitable and, from a legal standpoint, the right thing to do.

If civil marriage is a legally binding agreement between two people who make certain promises about fidelity, property, and commitment and who then receive certain guarantees about insurance benefits, property, and custody of children, then it seems unjustifiable to deny it to any consenting adult American who wishes to engage in it. Whether these civil marriages will be celebrated in churches, though, as unions blessed by God—well, that is a matter for the churches (as individual congregations and as members of larger institutions) to decide. Which of those—the individual churches or their parent institutions—has the greatest influence, will depend on the denomination.

The most frequently voiced argument against gay marriage (and I suppose this falls into both the legal and the religious categories) is that it will “threaten” the institution of marriage as it now stands. This seems to me not only vague, but specious. The existence of homosexual marriages is not going to dissuade heterosexual couples from marrying if that’s what they want to do; I doubt it would affect them much at all. The concern of opponents that deserves the most consideration is the welfare of children being parented by gay couples. To my knowledge, there have been no studies that have included enough subjects and have followed them long enough to really give reliable information about the long-term effects of being raised in a household headed by a same-sex couple. If denying marriage to those couples meant they would not be raising children, then the situation would be different. But it doesn’t. Gay couples are living together already—and raising children—all over the country. It’s a fact. Perhaps legal recognition of homosexual unions would actually be a step forward in terms of protecting the interests of children affected by them.

We may like the idea of homosexuals marrying or we may not, on an elemental level, but with regard to civil rights and their equal application to all citizens, the Constitution and the law prevail, not our gut feelings or our religious convictions. How this all plays out in the religious arena, though, promises to be very interesting. I think it might, to some extent, even galvanize a sort of third “Great Awakening,” with schisms appearing in many denominations. The Episcopalians are already feeling the repercussions of ordaining a gay bishop, and the rank and file are speaking their minds through donations or the withholding of donations, just as the Catholic faithful have done over the sex abuse scandal in their church. It’s not a bad thing, really, and very typical of our history.

A European clergyman once told me that he feared faith was dying on his continent and that he was amazed by the religious vitality he saw in America. I told him that continual waves of immigration have meant a history of clashes between established groups and groups who were outside the mainstream, between the ‘status quo’ and new ideas. Upheaval and discord might be the immediate results of these clashes, but accommodation, assimilation, and toleration had to be the final ones if we were going to continue to live together as Americans devoted to the principles of liberty.