GAYS DEFEND MARRIAGE

In the last few weeks, a number of gay activists (Timothy Kincaid, Emily Kesselman, Wayne Besen, and others) have been blogging and campaigning to try to convince the LGBT newspapers who have run my columns to discontinue doing so. They have lied (one editor said she was told I was “ex-gay,” a preposterous accusation) and pressured and threatened and been pretty successful. Now that I have no regular gay-press subscribers (though I have been invited by one of the largest gay newspapers in the country to occasionally write pieces specifically for them), I have stopped writing more installments. But the four installments I had written but not yet published are not going away. I plan to eventually place them all in mainstream newspapers. I just began distributing the first of them to mainstream publications, and a few hours ago I made a deal with one of the dozen largest metropolitan dailies (with a circulation significantly higher than the San Francisco Chronicle) to run the column probably Wednesday, or if not, soon thereafter. They are paying me far more than I would have received in the gay press.

For me, it’s a win-win. I make more money, I get far, far more readers, and I can focus on actually convincing people (my goal in the mainstream press) rather than just making them think (my goal in the gay press).

How this is a win for Kincaid et. al. is beyond me. Presumably they support “marriage equality,” which means it’s in their best interest to have my stuff run in places where the fewest people could be convinced to oppose gay marriage. Nobody intelligent would think my column in the gay press would have any such effect on more than a handful of people. But in a publication with a circulation of more than 300,000, I could potentially change the minds of hundreds if not thousands of undecided Americans.

The only way to understand this silly activism is with something I’ve been saying for a long time. Gays and lesbians are far more focused on symbolic goals (like getting their first-choice term for the exact same rights in California or keeping an anti-gay-marriage voice out of the gay press) than on actually getting something done (like fighting lesbian alcoholism, prison rape, or the FDA’s gay blood ban, or like refocusing the energies of someone like me away from the forum where they can hurt their cause the most).

In this case, my cause has clearly triumphed absolutely. But most of the time, this selfish symbolism-over-results attitude hurts lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender Americans who are really in need. In those cases, it’s not silly. It’s just sad.

Most “marriage equality” activists have no interest in any sort of compromise, or in finding way to accommodate the legitimate concerns of male-female marriage defenders. That’s because they openly state that we have no legitimate concerns.

But since starting to blog on this issue in early May, I have run across a small minority on the other side that has strong marriage-equality goals but that respects and wants to be fair to the other side. One of the most impressive of those activists is Michael Taylor-Judd, the president of Washington state’s Legal Marriage Alliance. Michael and I disagree on most points of contention on this debate, but we have exchanged several long, heated, yet nonetheless respectful E-mails about same-sex marriage.

Still, I was floored when he wrote me recently with a proposal which, while problematic, directly solves one of the serious problems I have with “marriage equality.”

He wrote me:

Putting more power back in the hands of private business owners is a conservative proposition I would support, but it would cut across everything. Owners don’t get to just choose to recognize only marriages of opposite-sex couples. Changing the existing laws, would also have to mean owners could discriminate on the basis of sex, race, ethnicity, marital status, and religious belief. If someone gets to treat same-sex couples differently, then I get to treat Orthodox Jewish couples differently, for example.

To understand Michael’s proposal, try thinking about discrimination laws like we think of free speech. I would be a happier person if I lived in a country in which Holocaust denial was illegal, lesbian couples could not be legally described as “married,” and people could go to jail for referring to ferrets as “rodents” (they’re mustilids). But if my language preferences become law, what things that I want to say will be banned and enforced by the language police? It is much better to live in a country where everyone can say pretty much whatever they want.

When the government says a business cannot discriminate against same-sex couples, Orthodox Jews, and women, but can discriminate as much as it wants against Republicans, short people, and transgender people (as is true in many places), it is taking a stand judging people’s personal opinions. You think lesbian marriages aren’t really marriages? You could lose your business. You think transgender women are really guys in dresses? No problem. Have a nice day!

Of course, I would be appalled if Michael’s idea meant a Woolworth’s in Greensboro, North Carolina, goes back to refusing to serve African-Americans. But that’s in a state where a once-racist Democratic Party just voted overwhelmingly for an African-American candidate for president. Somehow I think such a store would lose more business than it would gain.

I don’t want to see ice cream shops in Berkeley, California, refuse to sell smoothies to Republicans wearing John McCain buttons, nor do I want bed and breakfasts in Provincetown, Massachusetts to publish a policy that only same-sex couples may lodge there. But if I have to live with that so adoption agencies could choose the kinds of families they think are best for children and so fertility clinics can inseminate the kind of women they believe will make good mothers, I can live with it.

What do people think?

One frustrating aspect of the same-sex marriage debate is that most but not all gays and lesbians take it personally if someone they know believes marriage is between a man and a woman. It’s staggering – they’re the ones wanting to change a longstanding social institution that wasn’t anywhere on the gay agenda until a dozen years ago, yet if someone thinks about it and decides to stick with the old way, the gays and lesbians in their lives go ballistic.

For example, my friend “Paul” told me several months ago that if I get involved in the campaign to pass the California Marriage Protection Act, he would have a hard time staying my friend. Confused, I pointed out that the amendment makes only a semantic difference. Every right of domestic partnerships, which are completely equal to those of married couples, will remain the same. Paul’s response was that I was trying to make him a second-class citizen. Given that same-sex marriage seriously limits my freedom to run my life using my own values instead of his, I had little sympathy that he didn’t like the symbolism. Since I’ve been blogging and publishing opinion pieces on marriage, he thankfully hasn’t stopped being my friend altogether, although he does answer fewer of my E-mails. I think there may be hope for that friendship yet.

That’s not true of “Regina,” who decided several years ago once she realized I not only supported but publicly advocated keeping marriage limited to man-woman couples, that I was now officially “anti-gay” and we were no longer friends. Of course, she never directly told me. But once I found out, I asked her why it was OK for her to cut an Orthodox Jew out of her life for doing what Orthodox Jews do, but not OK for someone to cut a lesbian out of his life because she did what lesbians do. I mean, it’s not like we have a lot of choice here. Orthodox Jews are called upon to oppose gay marriage. Even very pro-gay Orthodox Jews like Rabbi Shmuley Boteach and Sen. Joseph Lieberman (I-CT) oppose gay marriage. It’s who we are. If anyone should be offended, it’s we for the fact that some of our friends are meddling with a crucial societal institution that’s been working effectively for, well, ever. That our sticking to our beliefs would be treated as treason makes me come back to my belief that the gay movement is terribly selfish.

Another example: a top linguist at Berkeley told me that in his several decades’ worth of professional expertise, he was very confident no language lacked different words for mother and father. And then he hastened to ask for confidentiality because he has “some close friends and colleagues who are gay and married to their partners. I’d prefer not to have to explain to them why I’m quoted by someone opposed to gay marriage.”

Let’s consider the implications of that statement. He’s very pro-gay, but he’s also a professional scholar and feels a duty to report the facts of his discipline as he sees them. Yet he doesn’t want his gay friends and colleagues to find out he told the truth because he assumes they will take it personally. This is an academic at the second best university in California! (Yes, I went to Stanford.) Ideally, he’d prefer to feel free to tell the truth, using his name, but he feels constrained because he doesn’t want to betray his gay friends.

Knowing the above, what could we expect if a sociologist or psychiatrist were to stumble across some data that if published would suggest that being gay is a choice or that children should ideally have both a mother and a father? If the data would have made gays look good, she would probably publish it. But knowing the pressures from gays and lesbians who take it personally when a scholar writes the truth that nonetheless makes them look bad, I have to wonder whether she might figure it’s not worth the trouble and bury what she’s found.

Even if only 10 or 20 percent of academics feel that kind of pressure, it seems that the research coming out of universities is unfairly skewed toward gay-friendly findings.

As a Jewish historian, I have often asked my colleagues, “What would you do if you found out the Jews really did kill Jesus?” and “What would you do if you discovered Anne Frank’s diary was a hoax?” Overwhelmingly the answers have been that scholars have a duty to the historical record to publish what they find. (One professor actually said, “The diary is a hoax.” But that’s a story for another day.) And I never met a Jew who would take it personally if a scholar wrote an academic paper critical of Jews in history. (Critical of Israel is another story.)

In an attempt to investigate how widespread this phenomenon is, I wrote 100 academics to ask if they would hesitate to report information they discovered that made gays look bad, but got only a statistically insignificant 7% response rate (as opposed to the 56% response rate I got from linguists). A recognized expert at gay research, Dr. Robert-Jay Green has encouraged me to collect “independently verifiable evidence from professional ethics committees or scientific review boards that researchers have falsified or otherwise distorted their findings on LGBT issues because of external pressures.” I think it’s a great idea, but I’m hardly the person best qualified to perform such a study.

I want to encourage Dr. Green and others involved in gay research to investigate to what extent the attitudes of the Berkeley linguist are widespread, or alternatively to what extent his request for anonymity so his gay friends don’t take his research personally is a fluke.

In the meantime, I will from now on be skeptical and dubious toward every piece of research on gay and lesbian issues that comes out of academia. That includes studies that suggest being gay is inborn, and studies that claim children do just as well with two mothers as they do with both a mother and a father. If those in academia working on gay and lesbian topics can prove that researchers like them have no or next to no pressures to find and report only gay-friendly results, I will be happy to reconsider.

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.

One of my favorite same-sex marriage advocates (and an occasional commenter at GaysDefendMarriage.com) is Fannie, of the fine blog Fannie’s Room. A little over a week ago, she complained on her blog about the excessive use of quotation marks by marriage defenders (her term, not mine – thanks Fannie). Fannie describes the practice as:

excessive unnecessary quotations marks to cast suspicion on the legitimacy of same-sex relationships. Like stubborn segregationists blocking access to white schools, they fail to concede a loss when they have, in fact, lost. Scare quotes, or more accurately “sneer quotes,” are non-direct quotations used to indicate scorn, sarcasm, and/or disagreement with another person’s usage of a word.

As someone who uses such quotes around gay marriage some but not all of the time, I thought it might be useful for me to delineate three reasons why I do so, and give same-sex marriage advocates a chance to respond. We may not change each other’s minds, but at least we’ll understand each other better.

1. Liberals do it too. I have frequently seen quotation marks around terms conservatives use that liberals don’t like. For example, many pro-choice people will say someone is anti-choice, but sometimes they’ll call that person “pro-life.” In other words, he calls himself pro-life, but in actuality his policies are anything but. He favors the death penalty, and he cares about the fetuses of poor women only until they’re born, but then he cuts every program that might help the child have a successful life. Another example is referring to right-wing religious people as “Christian.” They’ll say the president of the California Values Alliance is a “Christian” who forgets the call of Jesus to help people in need. I wonder if Fannie and others like her object to the examples I gave above when used by liberals?

2. I have to do it. I know and understand and respect that Fannie thinks that Phyllis Lyon and Del Martin are married. I also know that the state of California considers them married. But in my opinion, they are not now and never can be married, for marriage is a union of a man and a woman. In fact, that’s precisely what we’re arguing about. Why should I give in when the debate has only begun? An analogy: Most opponents of the reparative therapy movement, including myself, refer to people who credit their therapy for a transition from gay to straight as “ex-gay.” That’s because I don’t believe, and most LGBT people don’t believe, that therapy can make a gay person straight. If I stopped using the quotation marks, I’d be surrendering on the debate before it even began. For the same reason, I refer to Messianic “Judaism” because no serious Jew of any movement considers it to be Judaism.

3. I think it’s more respectful. Yeah, respectful. If I stopped referring to same-sex “marriage,” which I’m open to doing if people on the other side tell me it’s important to them, I’m not going to start using the term marriage to refer to things I do not believe are marriages. Instead, I’m going to look for creative ways to refer to same-sex marriages, husbands and wives. So: “Del and Phil had a same-sex legal ceremony of commitment at City Hall” and “Ellen DeGeneres and the woman in her life had a California lesbian union in front of several hundred friends.” (Not Ellen and her wife got married.) I find it more respectful to use the word my opponents want to be used, but to put it in quotes to indicate I do not agree with it, but that’s the term they prefer. Do you think a Muslim would rather I said that Islam is a “religion of peace” – or that Islam is a hate-filled faith of genocidal murderers? I think the former.

If anyone has a suggestion for how I can be more respectful of the other side of this debate without violating my conscience, I’m interested in hearing it.

In the past 20 years, if you heard there was going to be a mass wedding you could usually figure out who was participating if you had two guesses: Moonies or gays and lesbians.

While there were a variety of joint weddings of straight couples here and there, only the Unification Church and the gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender community staged events like those at the 1993 and 2000 marches on Washington in which literally thousands of couples exchanged vows.

Other examples include the mass weddings held in San Francisco after that city’s mayor, Gavin Newsom, started illegally handing out marriage licenses on Valentine’s Day 2004, and a mass wedding, concert, and fundraiser for a group of parents of gays and lesbians scheduled for Balboa Park in San Diego this October.

Even if the government recognizes such unions, those taking part in them simply do not understand what marriage is. A wedding is a deeply personal event in which two people join together with a promise to devote their lives to caring for each other. They invite their loved ones to join in support of their specific union. There’s no fundraising, unless you count the loving gifts shared by friends and family to help the new couple get a head start in life.

A wedding is not a political demonstration, and no, a wedding is not a circus.

There’s at least some progress, now that a few LGBT voices have begun to discourage mass weddings, given the unfavorable publicity received by such events in the past. In 2004, openly gay Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.) criticized the events in San Francisco as “spectacle weddings” and told the New York Times that “The thing that agitated people were the mass weddings…. It was a mistake in San Francisco compounded by people in Oregon, New Mexico and New York. What it did was provoke a lot of fears.”

After the 2008 California rulings, San Francisco wanted to avoid repeating its mistake. Among rules about looking “normal,” the Mayor’s office told the San Francisco Chronicle they were trying to avoid mass weddings: “The only people who do mass weddings in our culture are Moonies – and they don’t exactly have high poll numbers with the public.”

Note they’re not concerned about being faithful to what marriage means. They just don’t want to hurt the cause with bad publicity and, Heaven forbid, bad poll numbers.

I have never seen an LGBT complaint about mass weddings that pointed out the ignorance of what marriage is supposed to be that is shown by those who plan and participate in such carnivals. Instead, the complaints all focus on what will help convince the country that same-sex couples are “equal.”

I stand by my statement that most of the people fighting to change our country’s marriage laws have no idea what marriage is.

hat tip: GayPatriotWest

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.

A very helpful site user new to GaysDefendMarriage.com, Musicguy, posted a comment that helped me clarify something about the “marriage equality” movement I have felt for a long time but could never quite articulate.

We have a burden of proof problem in the marriage debate in America.

If I was proposing a major change to one of the most important traditions in America – say, whether we adopt the Euro or whether all drugs should be legalized – I would understand that the burden would be on me to convince the rest of society that my idea is good. I would carefully try to build a coalition and over a number of years try to at least get a first vote in Congress (even if we lose) and hopefully bring enough people on board to build an influential movement and lobby politicians and voters to take our position so we eventually triumph several years later.

Many, many LGBT activists have operated the opposite way. If you read Musicguy and many other posts, it’s as if the default position (Gemara term, sorry) is that same-sex marriage is legal and moral and accepted – and it’s the traditionalists who are trying to take rights away from people who have had them for centuries. It’s as if, ridiculously, the burden of proof is on the traditionalists, who must defend their position or give in. Well, I’m sorry, that’s not how social change has ever worked. Yet the “marriage equality” movement has basically asserted that same-sex marriage is a civil right (despite the fact that nearly all the experts such as the Supreme Court and Barack Obama don’t think it is) and then gotten offended that huge swaths of society would have the temerity to want to keep things the the way they have been throughout American history.

Well, get over yourselves. I acknowledge that at some point legal marriage as an institution may change in certain places. But LGBT people are the ones who have to prove it’s a good idea – it’s not my job to prove it’s bad (though I’m pretty good at it and am willing to do it whenever invited). The plan of the “marriage equality” movement appears to be to win by any means necessary in state after state (including outright cheating in Massachusetts, California, and New York) and then to quickly change the laws as radically as possible so that not only does their side get to define marriage, but so everyone else’s definition must change too if they don’t want the power of the state limiting their assets, their occupation, and their freedom.

Some LGBT activists I’ve debated have gotten angry, raised their voices, hurled terrible insults, insinuated death threats, and I’m told I made one lesbian cry (not on purpose). Why? Because I have the chutzpah to defend the system as it has always been. I found out yesterday a lesbian I really like has decided we’re no longer friends because of the marriage issue. I asked her why cutting an Orthodox Jew out of your life for doing what Orthodox Jews do is any more acceptable than cutting a lesbian out of your life for doing what lesbians do. She ignored the question. I could have sympathy for someone being upset at a friend for advocating an offensive kind of extreme social change, like interning American Muslims. But it is both selfish and childish to join a radical social movement and then insist that everyone you know also abandon the old system, or be cut out of your life.

The “marriage equality” movement shows a great deal of righteous indignation. If anyone should have righteous indignation, it is those who have been blindsided by sneaky, fraudulent and arguably illegal advocacy of an extreme political position, which would not only change society’s definition of a cherished social institution, but would come down hard on the “bigoted” people who lost the debate and are asking for nothing more than to continue using the old definition in the way they perform their jobs, run their businesses, and raise their families. Given that nobody stopped gays and lesbians from pretending their nuptials were real when they were completely unrecognized by the law, the fact that when marriage law changes LGBT people want to use state power to impose their definition universally is truly scary.

I wish both sides of this debate had some interest in compromise, because I think there’s lots of room for it. Instead, we are headed straight for a disaster in which huge numbers of Americans (which ones may depend on the state) get nothing they want while their adversaries get everything they want. This situation is not good for America, but given the lack of flexible people on each side, I have no idea how to fix it.

Every time I have claimed that “marriage equality” activists don’t understand what marriage is, I have used the fact they see no firm link between sexual fidelity and marriage as my evidence.

I now have a shocking second set of data: the attitude toward some gay marriage proponents toward adult consensual incest.

Yesterday, on this Web site, frequent commenter Mark Barton, an articulate and passionate defender of same-sex marriage rights, said he saw no reason “marriage equality” should not extend to adult twin brothers. (Shades of Life in Hell‘s Jeff and Akbar – Matt Groening asked “are they brothers or lovers or both?”)

An Orthodox Jewish gay supporter of same-sex civil marriage – we’ll call him “Allen” – complained that in arguing with me over who should be allowed to marry that I claimed he said a father should be allowed to marry his 14-year-old son. He insisted that he said “parent,” not father, and it was homophobic of me to focus on same-sex incest. My reaction was that I was giving him the benefit of the doubt since at least with father-son incest there’s no problem with inbreeding. And he verified he sees no reason a mother and her young teenage son shouldn’t have civil “marriage equality.”

Do I really have to argue why people who think identical twins – and parents and their teenage offspring – should be legally allowed to marry have no idea what marriage is?

If I do, let’s duke it out in the comments section below. Any gays and lesbians who agree that the above people do not understand what marriage is are encouraged to say so.

A side note: This is an example of the perversity (hey, I almost never use that word in gay debates but here it’s perfectly appropriate) that arises when a person decides what’s moral based his own argumentation and rationalization rather than allowing historical tradition or Revelation or both influence him. Mark has made it clear that he thinks his approach is an argument whereas my approach is not. I do not disagree at all. I do believe, and think when most people think about it they will believe, that my system leads to more moral behavior than his. The proof is in the pudding.

I believe that before our society makes a big decision like whether to expand marriage to include same-sex couples, we need to consult every relevant discipline – psychology, history, biology, philosophy, sociology, and more. In my wide-ranging reading about same-sex marriage, I have never read an article that applies the skills of linguists to the issue, and that’s a shame – because linguistics has a lot to offer.

It is widely accepted that the way a language describes a phenomenon reveals the values and experiences of the culture that speaks it. For example, Estonian uses the same word, mägi, to mean both hills and mountains. I’m told that if I ever saw the landscape in Estonia, I’d understand why.

I’m fluent in Hebrew, a language that does not differentiate between liking and loving. Both are ahavah. That probably relates to the relatively low priority Judaism places on romantic love as compared to other cultures.

Serbian has only one word for church, but Polish has two – one meaning “Catholic or any other church” and one meaning “Orthodox church.” The difference may reflect attitudes toward minority Christian religions by the dominant groups in each society.

Finally, we all know that English has only one word for you, but the Japanese language, which is spoken in a nation obsessed with politeness, has thirty words for you.

So it is directly relevant to the issue we’ve been debating that it appears that every language in world history has had a different word for mother and for father. If a group speaking a particular language saw no particular distinction between parents of both sexes, it very well could have used a single word to mean “parent.” That appears to have never happened.

Dr. Jay Jasanoff, the chairman of the linguistics department at Harvard (yes, I said chairman, and yes, I said Harvard), told me he’s never encountered any language without a specific word for mother and a separate word for father. In fact, he said, he “would frankly be surprised if such a language existed.” Confirming his perspective is his colleague Dr. Patrice Speeter Beddor, who chairs the linguistics department at the University of Michigan. She said “All languages with which I am familiar, including languages from many different language families, have words for both mother and father.”

In addition, a professor at UC-Berkeley who asked to remain anonymous so he doesn’t offend his gay friends, said “I have never seen a language that does not have distinct terms for male parent and female parent…. This is the kind of thing that would make the rounds on the linguistic urban myth mill. ‘Say, I’m working in a language that doesn’t have a word for mother.’ I’ve never, in several decades in the field, heard anyone say such a thing.”

So?

Well the first thing we can conclude is that the notion that mothers and fathers provide nothing different for children, is a radical, even revolutionary notion in the context of world history. If not, at least a few of the more than 6,000 languages spoken would have only one word for parent. In my mind, that is sufficient reason to keep marriage between a man and a woman. But let’s say I’m wrong and there are other factors worthy of overriding the linguistic evidence that all cultures have always believed children get different things from their mothers and their fathers.

Nonetheless, do we really have enough evidence to declare that the old way, really the only way of every single culture in history through the very end of the 20th century, had a bigoted and offensive – rather than merely different – idea about children and parenting? Because that is the official policy of the first gay-marriage state, Massachusetts. If you want to run a Boston adoption agency, and to give just a slight preference – not an absolute one, but a tie-breaker preference – to families that provide both a mother and father, you cannot do so without being shut down by the government.

Even if the gay marriage movement has the preponderance of the evidence and is campaigning for the right thing to do, have they really proven their case so overwhelmingly that law enforcement should shut down the businesses of people who agree with with every single society in history until eight years ago?

There’s a word for folks like the gay and lesbian community, among whom I’m one of very few voices to have ever condemned the Massachusetts policy. It’s called arrogance. California voters will be able to decide in November whether to take the gay-marriage movement down a notch.