GAYS DEFEND MARRIAGE

I’ve been thinking about the group-but-not-individual exemption in Connecticut’s and Vermont’s gay-marriage bills. How would that apply, for example, to a Christian rock band? They’re certainly a “religious organization,” right? Does that mean that a Christian rock solo artist could be forced to work at a same-sex wedding, but if she threatens to bring a drummer, she’s exempt?

What’s the deal with that?

More evidence that the gay-marriage debate is not entirely black and white. Ari, one-half of a matched set of “hitched” female “queer vegan artists and activists,” liked my piece in the New York Daily News:

I wrote what appears to be the first piece anywhere highlighting the Vermont Clause I blogged about earlier in the New York Daily News (online) today. An excerpt:

…the Vermont Clause certainly could go farther. I would like to see protections for individuals – not just organizations. Still, it’s a vast improvement over the other states that have implemented gay marriage without concern for its repercussions on the traditionally religious.

Without serious religious freedom guarantees, disturbing punishments have been meted out to people and groups who have acted consistent with their belief that marriage is between a man and a woman and that children are best served with both a mother and a father….

Being forced to perform a medical procedure or take photographs when you don’t want to smacks of involuntary servitude. Why do organizations like “Freedom to Marry” feel that gay freedom has to be won on the backs of other people’s lack of freedom to work or not work based on their beliefs?

If some states are going to have gay marriage, people like me need to be protected if we choose to continue to behave as if the definition of marriage that we think comes from God is correct, rather than that of the gay and lesbian community – and the government.

It’s not a coincidence that the first real protections for religious organizations in a gay marriage state came in the first place to implement same-sex marriage by legislative action rather than judicial fiat. The legislative process usually involves compromise, and the need to get a majority often leads to amendments that incorporate each side’s concerns.

The courts in Massachusetts, California, Connecticut and Iowa, however, have implemented same-sex marriage unilaterally, with dissenting voices relegated to, well, the dissents. It’s much healthier for our democracy to deal with its most heated issues in the legislative arena rather than in the courts.

Ideally, we would have federal legislation guaranteeing individual conscience rights when it comes to marriage. Barring that, conservative lawmakers ought to push for strong “Vermont clauses” in all future gay marriage legislation.

With all the Green Mountain State’s double-bride and double-groom celebrations, nobody has seemed to notice that the Vermont gay-marriage law contains a clause offering some of the same protections I’ve been calling for here at GaysDefendMarriage.com:

§ 4502. PUBLIC ACCOMMODATIONS

* * *

(l) Notwithstanding any other provision of law, a religious organization,

association, or society, or any nonprofit institution or organization operated,

supervised, or controlled by or in conjunction with a religious organization,

association, or society, shall not be required to provide services,

accommodations, advantages, facilities, goods, or privileges to an individual if

the request for such services, accommodations, advantages, facilities, goods, or

privileges is related to the solemnization of a marriage or celebration of a

marriage. Any refusal to provide services, accommodations, advantages,

facilities, goods, or privileges in accordance with this subsection shall not

create any civil claim or cause of action. This subsection shall not be

construed to limit a religious organization, association, or society, or any

nonprofit institution or organization operated, supervised, or controlled by or

in conjunction with a religious organization from selectively providing

services, accommodations, advantages, facilities, goods, or privileges to some

individuals with respect to the solemnization or celebration of a marriage but

not to others.

I’ve expressed in the past my opposition to the “get the government out of marriage” so-called compromise to the SSM controversy. I have said that it’s not a compromise because one side gets nothing. But I’m starting to rethink that.

If the government gets out of the marriage business, and every person and organization gets to decide for themselves what marriage is or isn’t, maybe that’s a compromise that would accommodate my religious-freedom concerns. Why can’t, for example, a caterer only accommodate those weddings she believes are actually weddings? The government has no stance on what marriage is.

If the government has no stance on what marriage is, it seems to me that a lesbian teacher could teach that marriage can be between two women, and an Orthodox Jewish teacher can teach that marriage cannot. Curriculum on marriage and the family can be written by each school district with the guidance of the elected or appointed school board.

I’m not saying I’d support such a compromise. But I would acknowledge that it is, indeed, a compromise.

The anti-gay-marriage folks in Washington state are using the most unfortunate phrase I’ve written in 10 months of op-ed writing. In my second op-ed during that time, which appeared in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, I wrote:

Openly gay Washington state Sen. Ed Murray, D-Seattle, and a representative of the largest Michigan gay-rights group, the Triangle Foundation, have both told me that people who continue to act as if marriage is a union between a man and a woman should face being fined, fired and even jailed until they relent.

While Murray and the Triangle Foundation rep did say that people continuing to behave as if marriage is between a man and a woman should face being fined, fired, and even jailed, they did not say “until they relent.” Murray did refer to Martin Luther King and Gandhi, who were jailed until they relented, but that’s no excuse for the sloppy paraphrase. (Note: it’s not a misquote because I didn’t quote them. It’s a poor paraphrase.)

As soon as this was called to my attention I apologized.

Anyway, the phrase has now made it into a campaign commercial against a gay-marriage bill in Washington state.

I of course like being quoted, but not in this case.

Yesterday, Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.), his party’s presumptive nominee for president of the United States, gave an outstanding speech here in St. Louis (I couldn’t go because of Shabbat) in which he embraced the role religion has played in his life and politics. I’m not planning on voting for him, but if he’s elected, I believe Obama will have the most nuanced, carefully considered view on faith and politics of any American president in history.

For example, in a speech interrupted by shouts of “Amen,” he said yesterday:

The values we believe in – empathy and justice and responsibility to ourselves and our neighbors – these cannot only be expressed in our churches and our synagogues, but in our policies and in our laws.

I am moved to hear the leading candidate for the nation’s highest office speak about his belief that we should try to express our church- and synagogue-based values in our nation’s laws in part because of the difficulty I’ve had with “marriage equality” supporters who have been nearly hysterical in their insistence that doing with Obama and I have been doing is unconstitutional, theocratic, and downright rude.

Some examples:

Popsiclestand at boxturtlebulletin.com wrote: “The one mistake I might have made was not realizing that your particular interpretation of Judaism calls for a theocratic government. Sorry about that, but I’m afraid you’re in the wrong country for that crap.”

SammySeattle at Joe.My.God wrote “Mr. Benkof once again cannot get past religion and see this as a civil matter. Separate is never equal. The government will not ‘redefine’ marriage in the Jewish religion, it will only enhance marriage in the civil forum. ”

Bruce Garrett, of boxturtlebulletin.com wrote “It’s about forcing people into one way of life versus letting them live their own lives. If you think same sex marriage is immoral, then don’t have one. If you think sex outside of wedlock is sinful then don’t do that. By all means, live your life according to your ‘traditional’ religious values. But you need to extend the same respect to your neighbors.”

RobertinCali at Joe.My.God wrote “Religious zealots who use the shield of ‘I’m one, so listen to me’ should be shouted down by the chorus of supporters. Benkof and his ilk are using old arguments to try and deny rights to us. They think that our right to marry is going to harm their marriages in innumerable ways…. Benkof needs to call his argument what it is, his religious belief, not the opinion of the ‘Community.’”

PiaSharn, of boxturtlebulletin.com wrote “I’m not a member of your religion. So I don’t understand why I should be forced to live my life according to your beliefs. Not all religions think that same-sex marriage is wrong. But you seem to be saying that everyone should be legally forced to conform to your religious beliefs.”

Now, please understand: I have never tried to impose my beliefs upon the nation as a dictator or a theocracy. All I have done is try to use my one vote and my freedom of speech and freedom of the press to promote policies that are motivated in part but not in whole by my deeply held religious beliefs.

If that approach is dangerous, it is a million times more dangerous when Obama does it than when I do. After all, he appears to be a few months away from the most powerful and most symbolic office in the land.

But where are the protests of popsiclestand and SammySeattle against Obama? It appears that promoting policies based on faith is OK when a Democrat does it, and offensive and unconstitutional when a Republican does it. In other words, they’re making absolutely no point at all.

I’m going to keep doing what I’ve been doing. My hunch is Obama will as well.

More than once in the last several weeks, on Web Sites such as Pam’s House Blend and GaysDefendMarriage.com, I’ve pointed out a double standard held by many of those advocating for same-sex marriage.

Basically, many “marriage equality” activists I’ve spoken to have said that public-school teachers who tell their students that marriage is the union of a man and a woman should be disciplined or even fired for teach contrary to “the facts”; and journalists who describe a couple as unmarried despite their having had a legal same-sex marriage should be subject to libel suits.

However, advocates of “marriage equality” have been completely free to do precisely the opposite for years without fear of punishment. For example, in 1999 the Gay, Lesbian and Straight Educators Network published and promoted a curriculum that encouraged public school teachers to instruct their students about marriage using a definition that makes no reference to gender. And I’ve seen dozens of examples in the gay press and even in mainstream publications such as People Magazine and the San Francisco Chronicle in which a prominent gay or lesbian person’s partner who is not legally married to them anywhere in the world is nonetheless called their husband or wife. I am very confident that no gay-friendly teacher or journalist has ever been disciplined, fired, or sued for libel for using a definition of marriage that is consistent with his or her values but not with the legal reality.

So my question is this: why is it OK for gay advocates to use their own definition of marriage without punishment when it doesn’t match the government’s, yet traditionally religious people cannot use their own definition of marriage without punishment when their definition doesn’t match the government’s? Wouldn’t it be better to use a system where everyone is free to live their lives consistently with their beliefs? In the marriage debate, the only position that allows such a system to operate is the old system in which marriage is between a man and a woman.

And saying that it’s unconstitutional to collect damages from a newspaper for saying Del Martin is a bachelorette or to fire a teacher for saying marriage is between a man and a woman isn’t enough. We should all live in a country in which no one has to fear harassment and lawsuits for using their definition of marriage – even if they end up victorious. Where are the fair-minded advocates of “marriage equality” who want to amend gay marriage bills or state constitutions to make it clear that people can continue to run their businesses, perform their jobs, and raise their families using whatever definition of marriage they believe in?

Now, there are some pretty intelligent, completely reasonable proponents of same-sex marriage like Andrew Koppelman and Jonathan Rauch. What is their response to my challenge above? Or the smart, passionate proponents of “marriage equality” who comment at blogs like mine and all over the Web? Do any of them have a smart, clear, fair way to explain why their side gets a free pass to use its illegal definition of marriage but my side doesn’t? If not, do any of them have a lame way to explain it? Because so far, I haven’t even heard that.

Because of my opposition to same-sex marriage, some people perceive I don’t have any respect for marriage-equality activists. That’s just not true. A small minority of the leadership of the movement for same-sex marriage (maybe 5 percent?) really “gets it” and advocates for more freedom and fairness for everyone, rather than trying to force all Americans to espouse GayThink and to shove gay marriage down the throats of an unwilling nation. I believe that if two people with such attitudes got in a room with Maggie Gallagher and me (or another pair of reasonable defenders of man-woman marriage), we could hammer out a compromise that everyone could live with.

I’ll focus on just three examples, but I know of others.

• Lynne Bowman, the executive director of Equality Ohio, a statewide LGBT political group. Lynne has acknowledged to me that traditionally religious people do have legitimate concerns about their rights to continue using their religious beliefs regarding marriage in states that adopt the kind of marriage laws she favors. She sounded enthusiastic about the idea “that folks just get in a gosh darn room and find a way to hammer the thing out so that everyone wins as much as possible.” Compare that to Steven Goldstein, the Lynne Bowman of New Jersey, who said his movement “will settle for nothing less than 100 percent marriage equality.”

Lynne wrote me: “We believe that equality – whether in employment or relationships or other areas – is not a zero-sum game. One person does not have to be denied something in order for someone else to receive something. We believe that everyone has the right to their personal opinion. Our challenge as a society – and therefore as an organization and as a state – is to figure out how our laws can be crafted to make that possible.”

Her organization’s slogan is “we envision an Ohio where everyone feels at home” and they actually mean everyone, not just gay people.

• Christoper Sanders is the president of the Tennessee Equality Project, a statewide gay and lesbian political organization. Christopher identifies as a traditionally religious gay person (yes, there are others besides me) and he told me that many of the gay activists he works with in his state do too:

“Because many of our members grow up in and remain involved in churches and synagogues, I think the conversation is less threatening for us…. I met with a volunteer in Clarksville last month who without my asking simply stated that the top three influences in his life are God, his family, and his political party. While his forwardness of expression might be unusual, I don’t think that the cluster that he identified is unusual among the activists in our state.”

When I asked activists in places like California and Michigan if a business owner, a teacher, or a journalist should be allowed to use their own values about marriage in doing their jobs in a marriage equality state, most refused to answer and those who did generally said absolutely not. Christopher’s reaction can be summarized in one word: persuasion. He suggested the best way to deal with a business owner with policies that don’t treat same-sex marriages equally is to try to change the businessman’s mind. If a newspaper was not treating same-sex marriages as marriages, his group’s “preference would be to work with journalists’ guilds and put pressure on the paper in that way.”

In Yiddish, we have a term for someone like Christopher. It’s called “mensch.”

• Marianne Puechl is the co-founder of the Rainbow Wedding Network. She echoed Christopher’s modesty and practicality, without a hint of anger or vindictiveness. She told me that “suing, based on these circumstances, is not going to be the most productive measure.” She suggested that someone who doesn’t like the marriage policies of a traditionally religious business owner could blog about the company, write letters to the editor, publicize it at the local LGBT community center, and let the shopowner know that his discriminatory policy is losing him business.

I feel a little bad about quoting these outstanding activists, because inevitably the stormtroopers at the BoxTurtleBulletin and people like that will now put pressure on them to join the “Endorse Our Opinion or Else” crowd. But I think it’s really important that everyone understands that there is a way to advocate gay marriage that will gain the respect and admiration even of people like me. In the long run, I think, that’s a much smarter, fairer, and more ethical way to pursue social change.

My longtime gay friend Tom Chatt recently posted a really good criticism of my “Same-sex marriages can do harm” piece. Because I was in a rush to get a piece to newspapers that could run on Tuesday, and because I only had 800 words, my point about same-sex kissing being a reason to oppose gay marriage appears as a total non-sequitur. Since I now have the leisure to more fully explain what I mean, and because blogging gives me an unlimited word length, I will now try to elucidate exactly what I was trying to say. The basic point relates to my belief that given the uncompromising attitudes of “marriage equality” advocates, a world without gay marriage will have more freedom for more people than a world with gay marriage. More on that below.

First off, to clarify, I think gays should be allowed to kiss in ballparks, but I think they shouldn’t. I think Hare Krishna people should be allowed to try to convert people in airports, but I think they shouldn’t. I think racists should be allowed to teach their children that blacks are inferior, but I think they shouldn’t. I think lesbians should be allowed to make a brand-new baby without a father, but I think they shouldn’t.

Based on my long history of involvement with the gay community, my Internet surfing and my many conversations at this blog and others, I have come to believe that at least 90% of gay and lesbian people have a set of attitudes I’ll call GayThink. One of the most important tenets of GayThink is that believing that gay sex is immoral and that man-woman marriage is better than same-sex relationships and that it’s best for children to have both a mother and a father is by definition bigotry. According to GayThink, it is as offensive to hold such beliefs as it is to believe that interracial sex is immoral and that people should marry their own race.

If LGBT readers of this blog do not in fact hold the beliefs of what I’m calling GayThink, please correct me. I’m not out to misrepresent anyone.

Now, according to GayThink, my views about sex, marriage, and the family are bigoted. Through most of my life, that hasn’t been a problem. I’ve had my views and LGBT activists have had theirs. But in the last few years, the gay community’s lobbying and especially lawsuits have begun to get more and more goverment units to adopt GayThink. And the more that happens, the more freedoms I lose.

One example is that if I want to start an adoption agency in Massachusetts, I will be shut down if I use my values about what’s best for children instead of GayThink’s values. I have heard from more than 15 gay activists, some of them quite prominent, who think a teacher should be disciplined or fired for using the definition of marriage she believes in with with her students instead of the GayThink definition. Now, a decade ago the gay group GLSEN convinced many public schools to use a curriculum that contained a definition of marriage that made no mention of opposite sexes. I am quite certain no teacher was disciplined or fired for teaching the GayThink definition of marriage, which was purely imaginary and legal nowhere at the time the curriculum was published. Yet under gay marriage, people with my values will find our jobs at risk if we don’t adopt GayThink in the way we perform our tasks.

Now, kissing. GayThink believes that it is bigoted to want to wait until your children get older to teach them about homosexuality but to teach about male-female love when they are quite young – especially if your reason is to be able to teach them when they are mature enough that your family considers gay sex immoral and that they should plan on marrying a member of the opposite sex when they grow up. (LGBT readers, again, tell me if you don’t agree with this tenet of GayThink.)

So LGBT people in Seattle grew quite angry when a mother tried to get lesbians to stop kissing because it was confusing her son. Some gays even proposed the solution of arranging for lots of same-sex couples to make out in front of children at the ballpark. That is a reasonable strategy in GayThink because any parent who would object is a bigot, and for the sake of her children – especially if someday they grow up to be gay – they should be exposed to homosexuality right away, rather than when the parents desire it.

If gay “marriage” becomes permanent in California, I am quite certain that the folks at GLSEN and the gay caucus of the National Education Association will start looking for ways to teach younger and younger children that when they grow up they can marry a man, or a woman – it’s up to them. (I will withdraw this statement if those groups pass a resolution never to support curricula such as I have described.) Parents who want to teach their children that they should only marry an opposite-sex person will have some of their freedom taken away. Now, any time a public school teacher tells her students that homosexuality is immoral or gay relationships are inferior, the gay-education lobby goes ballistic and makes sure the teacher stops saying that, or is even fired. Yet if GayThink becomes part of the law, traditionally religious parents will have no recourse when their children are taught at school that their family’s values are a form of bigotry similar to racism.

So you see, even freedom-loving people who personally see no reason gays shouldn’t get married should vote for the California Marriage Protection Act. If it passes, same-sex couples will lose no rights other than the word “marriage.” Gays and straights will continue to be able to teach, write, run their businesses and raise their children using the definition of marriage they believe in. If it fails, only people who accept the tenets of GayThink (an extreme ideology most Californians don’t agree with) will be able to use their own definition of marriage in running their lives. For anyone who cares about living in a free country, the only possible vote on the CMPA is yes.