GAYS DEFEND MARRIAGE

Supporters of same-sex marriage frequently make racial analogies in their attempts to argue that gay marriage is the defining civil rights movement of the 21st century. Most often, these arguments refer to Loving v. Virginia the 1967 Supreme Court decision that declared anti-miscegenation laws unconstitutional, thus ending all race-based restrictions on marriage in the United States.

I find such analogies unpersuasive and unhelpful. Here are five reasons why:

1) The racial analogy is frequently needlessly insulting to African-Americans. Certainly some blacks like Coretta Scott King and Mildred Loving have approved of the analogy. But they would likely get behind any liberal cause. I think it’s important to pay attention to non-elite African-Americans, too, such as the woman who posted the following about same-sex marriage at the Huffington Post blog: “Please stop desecrating and insulting the history of African-Americans by trying to compare racial issues with sexual orientation issues. They aren’t even CLOSE to being the same.”

2) The civil rights movement of the 1960s was fighting real injuries to African-Americans, whereas the California “marriage equality” movement is focused on the purely symbolic and semantic issue of whether the equal rights granted to same-sex couples is called a “domestic partnership” or a “marriage.” If Virginia gave interracial couples all the rights of married couples except the name, I am certain that civil rights activists in the Old Dominion would have focused their energies on the real harms to African-Americans, such as still-segregated schools, courts that treated black defendants unfairly, and the barriers to the election of African-Americans to local, state, and federal offices. The notion that they would have spent millions of dollars on a word when blacks were suffering every day from real discrimination, poverty, and injustice is ludicrous.

3) Loving v. Virginia was decided under the federal Constitution, particularly the Fourteenth Amendment. I am certain that amendment does not guarantee the right of same-sex couples to marry each other, just as many “marriage equality” advocates are certain that it does. When there is a substantial disagreement about the meaning of the Constitution that deals with an important issue in American life, the proper arbiters are not people like me or people like the marriage equality crowd, but the United States Supreme Court. I have repeatedly said I would like the Washington Nine to hear a same-sex marriage case and decide this issue once and for all. However, LGBT activists have shot down promising federal lawsuits by same-sex couples arguing that they have a constitutional right to marry. It is not reasonable to claim that a federal right to marry exists while refusing to let the people whose job it is to determine whether it exists do their jobs.

4) I believe discrimination against interracial marriage is wrong. I believe discrimination in favor of man-woman marrige is right – and necessary. I understand that some people disagree with me. But saying, “Well you’re like a racist” is utterly unpersuasive to me, since I agree that racism is wrong, while I think privileging relationships that form the best environment in which children should be raised is right. I could easily point to kinds of relationships you would think are wrong – like parent-child or brother-sister marriages – and suggest that since you want to redefine marriage maybe you want the state to privilege those unions too. But I’m smarter than that. I know that you (probably) think those relationships are wrong, and same-sex marriages are right, so the analogy is unlikely to persuade you. And I am more interested in persuading you than making you look bad.

5) If Loving v. Virginia means there is a right to marry, that it insufficient to prove that same-sex couples have a right to marry. American law is based on individual rights, and gays and lesbians absolutely have a right to marry. I know many who have done so. I plan to marry some day. What gays and lesbians do not have is the right to redefine marriage to fit their minority idea of what marriage is. If they did have that right, then I would surely have the right to re-re-define marriage to fit my majority idea of what marriage is. And where would it end?

There are other reasons, but I think five is a good start.