GAYS DEFEND MARRIAGE

Pam’s House Blend user “Locke” brought up an excellent analogy to same-sex marriage. He thought he was supporting same-sex marriage when he wrote: “saying 18 is the age of adulthood would apply equally to all citizens, even though some religions say it happens earlier. We don’t throw out the idea of a civil age of adulthood just because religions don’t agree about what the age is, we let them have their ceremony but just ignore it, legally.”

But really, that provided me a great opportunity to explain why my support of man-woman marriage isn’t unconstitutional:

Great point, Locke!

I think your reference to 18 as the age of adulthood is a great analogy. Let’s say 18 was the age of bar mitzvah instead of 13, and the government was proposiing to change the legal age of adulthood to 21.

Would it be invalid for Jews to speak out, lobby, and vote to get Congress to keep the age of adulthood at 18, because in the Jewish tradition, that is the age of adulthood?

Would it be “imposing their religion on others” for Jews to oppose a “redefinition of adulthood”?

I don’t think it would. I think it would be fair for people of every religious persuasion to use their one vote, and their ability to blog and write letters to the editor and to lobby Congress, to support the age of adulthood they believe in. And secular people could use whatever secular ideas they have to push whatever age of adulthood they believe in. And our democratic system, with its one-person-one-vote principle, and its checks and balances, would determine whose definition of adulthood becomes law.

To say “everybody gets to push for his or her definition of adulthood except Jews” would be what is discriminatory and unconstitutional, not “the Jewish definition of adulthood wins because it got the most votes.”

Thanks, Locke. I may use this in an upcoming opinion piece.

So San Francisco’s mayor and adulterer-in-chief Gavin Newsom has expressed shock and outrage that San Diego County might allow clerks with religious or moral objections to let another clerk “marry” same-sex couples next month.

(I think it’s really interesting that Newsom and Eliot Spitzer have been perhaps the two most prominent straight elected officials backing marriage equality, given that neither one has any business telling the rest of us what marriage is.)

Newsom suggested that clerks who don’t feel comfortable “marrying” same-sex couples should lose their jobs.

Let me remind you, Mr. Mayor, that supporters of man-woman marriage range along a broad spectrum in terms of our attitudes toward protections and legal recognition for same-sex couples. Some of us would like to see a compromise in which same-sex partners get the right to hospital visitation and inheritance, for example. Others don’t want to give an inch to radical gay activists who have been trying to destroy a central societal institution. Given that supporters of man-woman marriage are in the majority both in California and nationwide, Newsom and his allies would be smart to be flexible and compassionate in the short five months during which the law is on his side, because when the law is not on his side beginning in November, he’s probably going to want man-woman marriage defenders to be flexible and compassionate.

Threatening to fire people who took their jobs as clerks during a time when “marrying” men to men and women to women was not part of the job description is neither flexible nor compassionate. If Newsom’s attitude prevails during the brief window of marriage equality, I know I’m certainly not going to be feeling charitable and eager to expend energy toward compromises in the future when same-sex couples ask for protections in various states after the California Marriage Protection Act passes.

A frequent trope in the attack on traditional marriage defenders by same-sex marriage advocates is to the claim that referring to religiously based truths is a violation of the separation of church and state. If we want to oppose same-sex marriage, we must use purely secular arguments.

Some examples:

• African-American columnist Sheryl McCarthy wrote in the USA Today, “I see marriage as a civil right, and no group’s religious beliefs should be allowed to deny the rights of others. And because blacks have suffered from bigotry and injustice that were cloaked by religion and morality, we should avoid doing the same thing to others.”

• An “Open Letter to the U.S. Senate from America’s Clergy” told the senators: “we respect the right of each religious group to decide, based on its own religious teachings, whether or not to sanction marriage of same-sex couples. It is surely not the federal government’s role to prefer one religious definition of marriage over another.”

• Early gay-marriage pioneer Andrew Sullivan wrote in the New Republic, “the religious content of marriage is irrelevant in this case. No one is proposing that faith communities be required to change their definitions of marriage…. The question at hand is civil marriage and only civil marriage. In a country where church and state are separate, this is no small distinction…. Many citizens adhere to no church at all. Should they be required to adhere to a religious teaching in order to be legally married?”

Now, these points of view are certainly legitimate. It’s just that they represent a tiny minority of the attitudes toward faith and politics in American history. Many outspoken Americans – from abolitionists to civil-rights practitioners of civil disobedience to conscientious objectors during the Vietnam War – have justified their activism in religious terms. Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King even quoted the Book of Isaiah during his famous “I Have a Dream” speech.

The most prominent and persuasive articulator of my attitude that religious arguments are perfectly proper in civil discourse happens to be running for president. And it’s not Bob Barr or even John McCain.

In an outstanding speech to a Christian social-justice group in Washington, DC, two years ago, Obama articulated how using religious arguments to achieve social change is not only legitimate, it is quintessentially American. Some excerpts:

If we scrub language of all religious content, we forfeit the imagery and terminology through which millions of Americans understand both their personal morality and social justice. Imagine Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address without reference to “the judgments of the Lord,” or King’s I Have a Dream speech without reference to “all of God’s children.” Their summoning of a higher truth helped inspire what had seemed impossible and move the nation to embrace a common destiny….

I think we should put more of our tax dollars into educating poor girls and boys, and give them the information about contraception that can prevent unwanted pregnancies, lower abortion rates, and help assure that that every child is loved and cherished. But my Bible tells me that if we train a child in the way he should go, when he is old he will not turn from it….

Secularists are wrong when they ask believers to leave their religion at the door before entering into the public square. Frederick Douglas, Abraham Lincoln, Williams Jennings Bryant, Dorothy Day, Martin Luther King – indeed, the majority of great reformers in American history – were not only motivated by faith, but repeatedly used religious language to argue for their cause. To say that men and women should not inject their “personal morality” into public policy debates is a practical absurdity; our law is by definition a codification of morality, much of it grounded in the Judeo-Christian tradition.

McCarthy has written of Obama’s “extraordinary gifts.” The conservative Sullivan practically drools over the liberal Obama in his blog, calling him “the right candidate for right now.” I wonder how such public intellectuals justify their enthusiasm for someone who clearly agrees with me on the legitimacy not only of speaking in religious terms about civic issues, but of codifying religious values into law.

Let me be clear: anyone who thinks I mustn’t cite the Torah or the Talmud in justifying my support for man-woman marriage will get no flak from me for voting against the California Marriage Protection Act, as long as they also vote against the likely Democratic nominee.

When confronted about the real religious-freedom dangers posed by “marriage equality,” proponents of same-sex marriage have frequently spouted a very specific kind of nonsense.

“Comments” sections all over the Web are full of examples, but people who should know better have made the same argument. For example, Democratic Pennsylvania Representative Daylin Leach said in a press release about same-sex marriage, “no church or synagogue will be forced to perform or recognize a marriage that goes against their beliefs.” Religioustolerance.org promises that under marriage equality, “churches will continue to be able to discriminate, on any basis that they feel justified, against couples who seek a same-sex marriage or civil union.”

Even California Supreme Court Chief Justice Ronald M. George reassured people in his decision that “no religion will be required to change its religious policies or practices with regard to same-sex couples, and no religious officiant will be required to solemnize a marriage in contravention of his or her religious beliefs.”

How stupid do these people think we are?

No intelligent defender of the traditional definition of marriage is going around scaring people into believing that churches will be forced to marry same-sex couples. Anyone with even a tiny bit of knowledge of the freedom of religion guaranteed by the First Amendment knows such a move would be grossly unconstitutional. Even the Human Rights Campaign’s top attorney, Lara Schwartz, told me “the Free Exercise and Establishment Clauses would prevent the government from requiring a congregation to solemnize a marriage that did not meet with the congregation’s requirements.”

So why have the marriage-redefining legislators in Maryland and California named their bills the “Religious Freedom and Civil Marriage Protection Act”? Even Illinois’s civil unions bill is called the “Illinois Religious Freedom Protection and Civil Union Act.”

All these bills – plus the New York, Vermont, and Rhode Island same-sex marriage bills and the New Mexico domestic-partners bill – contain “religious freedom” provisions that prohibit nothing that isn’t already clearly unconstitutional. Clearly, the religious-freedom language and the misleading titles of these bills are meant to fool people into thinking redefining marriage poses no threat to traditionally religious people.

Whereas the real dangers to the freedom of traditionally religious people if we redefine marriage are ignored. For example, HRC’s Schwartz has repeatedly refused to say whether “marriage equality” means a traditionally religious public school teacher should fear being fired for telling her students that marriage is the union of a man and a woman. She also won’t say whether a business owner should be able to use G-d’s definition of marriage instead of the gay community’s definition in deciding who gets a “marital discount.”

If the other side can get away with this “bad faith” approach, I propose we rename the California Marriage Protection Act the “California Wedding Diversity and Marriage Protection Act.” We can add a line about how no person’s wedding will be prevented, postponed, canceled, or shut down by the government on the basis of the number and gender of the celebrants. Then, when gay-marriage defenders accuse us of trying to discriminate on the basis of gender in who can marry, we can say “Under this act, no person’s wedding is ever in danger. People will have the right to have wedding ceremonies for people in any combination they desire.” Who cares that no gay-marriage advocate has been warning that the act would ban gay weddings, and that such a ban would be unconstitutional? What matters is scoring rhetorical points, right?