February 27
On Tuesday, President Bush threw his support behind an amendment that would inscribe the Defense of Marriage Act into the constitution. I don't believe the President is a bigot, and I'm not going to speculate about whether he's simply pandering to his party's right wing; he may well think the amendment would be a good idea. That said, I believe he's wrong.
Though the President didn't use the word in his address, for many people the battle is to protect the "sanctity" of marriage. Sanctity is primarily a religious concept, and purely religious disagreements have no place in the law. But there's also a secular notion of sanctity -- of what we hold sacred and of the larger meaning of our customs, institutions and laws.
We've come a long way on this topic. The very fact that gay marriage is a live issue is a sign of that. There's every reason to think that if the amendment passes, it will turn into a relic within the lifetime of most of the people reading these words. If my guess is right, then within a few decades, we'll honor gay relationships in much the way we now honor more familiar arrangements. When our gay friends celebrate their unions we'll celebrate along with them. When relationships end, we'll comfort. When partners die, we'll grieve. Same-sex unions will soon enough come to have the kind of secular sanctity that we now see in "ordinary" marriage. The marriage amendment -- if it manages to pass -- will widely be seen as a blemish on the face of the law. The anachronism will be even clearer because civil unions will be increasingly common, and more and more religious bodies will have developed rites to honor in liturgy what most of us will honor in fact.
All of this seems to me inevitable, but for many people, it's something to be fought and feared. I don't believe that every opponent of gay marriage is homophobic. I do think that this is an issue on which centuries of prejudice have made it hard for people to think clearly or well. The non-religious moral objections to homosexuality are shockingly poor. Charges of "unnaturalness" are ill-conceived and beside the point. The beliefs that gay people are predators or sex-crazed or willfully "perverse" or out to recruit the rest of the world don't stand up to scrutiny. And the notion that same-sex love can't be mature, sustaining and deep simply flies in the face of the facts.
To repeat what we've already said, purely religious objections have no place in our legal system. But as someone who takes religion seriously, I'd want to add: given how poor the arguments against same-sex relationships turn out to be, if God thought same-sex love was intrinsically sinful, then God himself would be confused. As it is, I don't think a reasonable theology calls for attributing any such view to God, but projecting human short-sightedness onto the divine does religion no service.
The country is poised to begin a long public debate about the nature of marriage. The President said "We should... conduct this difficult debate... without bitterness or anger." I believe he meant it and I hope we take his advice. He also said "Our government should respect every person and protect the institution of marriage. There is no contradiction between these responsibilities." What I would urge is that there's also no contradiction between upholding the honor of marriage and broadening our vision to acknowledge what we've slowly, painfully, but surely been learning about the nature of love.