GAYS DEFEND MARRIAGE

Once again, Northwestern University Professor Andrew Koppelman has distinguished himself among supporters of same-sex marriage for his clarity, timeliness, and provocative thoughts. From his latest piece:

Retribution is appropriate only if there is harm. Imagine you discover that someone has spent all afternoon sticking pins in dolls representing some people he doesn’t like (but has no just complaint against), hoping that this will cause their painful deaths. You’re entitled to decide that he’s a nasty person. But does he deserve punishment? For what, exactly?

If they can be rendered harmless, antigay bigots, even the morally reprehensible ones, will be just like the guy with the pins and the dolls. Nasty, maybe (though I know people on that side of the political divide who, I’m convinced, are honestly doing their best to pursue the right as it is given to them to see the right). But why is it important for the law to beat up on them?

More pertinently, why is beating up on them so important that it’s worth letting same-sex marriage die in New Hampshire altogether rather than give those people any accommodation? 

There are people who are reprehensibly embracing self-aggrandizing fantasies that are hurting real people. But I’m sorry to say that they’re not the Christian conservatives. They are the people on my side, the gay rights side, who are willing to sacrifice the hopes of New Hampshire gays who want to marry, out of pure malice toward their political opponents.

As much as I like Professor Koppelman’s challenge, I actually think he’s missing part of the point. My side isn’t fighting for religious exemptions because it’s so important to us to secure the right to Just Say No to catering lesbian weddings. We’re trying (I should say I’m trying since I never got elected anything) to mark territory during the very birth of gay marriage for the concept that it’s “OK” to believe that same-sex marriages aren’t marriages and to treat them as such - in the culture, in our discourse. That is a relatively big fight, and I can understand why gay activists in New Hampshire and elsewhere would go to the mat to protect the concept that not considering gay marriages to be equal is bigotry and thus unacceptable.

The smaller fight, whether Christian photographers in Nashua have to work at same-sex nuptials, is - as Koppelman indicates - only so much voodoo.