Saturday, February 21, 2004
What conservatives may fear most about gay marriage
What conservatives may fear most about gay marriage (paraphrasing the NYT) is that sanctioning it isn't going to change much one way or another. The demeaning of heterosexual marriage by television continues apace, with vulgar"reality" programming. The divorce rate remains approximately the same for all. Drive-thru wedding chapels in Nevada do not close, nor do the brothels. Gays & lesbians get hitched & return to their practically invisible middle class lives & lifestyles: no "Married Queers Here" signs in front of houses & condos & apartments already occupied by these couples. No proportional upsurge in numbers of gay people. These marriages are civil marriages, the only marriages the government cares about, obtained with licenses one purchases at city hall & has signed by an authorized person & a couple of witnesses. An actual "ceremony" is optional; so are rings & flowers.
View gay marriage not as a new & dangerous freedom - in most of America gays are about as free as everyone else nowadays - but as a reasonable, necessary & inevitable extension of justice, which only seems radical but will in fact play out over the long term with rather ordinary, even mundane consequences. Which is exactly the sort of marriages gays & lesbians are seeking or are in any event likely to have. Religious conservatives, who irrelevantly believe marriages are - or ought to be - made in heaven, just do not make a convincing case for defining marriage as only between "a man & a woman," an unsupportable moral judgement in a civil society, & hypocritical as well.
Bush's team wants to make gay marriage part of the national presidential debate - a smokescreen - Bush doesn't need to defend his Jesus put me on the wagon so I could be President Southern Methodism to the Southern Baptist Convention - he has to account to everyone for his actions in Iraq, on the economy, the environment, Medicare, & a host of other issues that touch us - from this administration - severely.
"If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be." Thomas Jefferson
View gay marriage not as a new & dangerous freedom - in most of America gays are about as free as everyone else nowadays - but as a reasonable, necessary & inevitable extension of justice, which only seems radical but will in fact play out over the long term with rather ordinary, even mundane consequences. Which is exactly the sort of marriages gays & lesbians are seeking or are in any event likely to have. Religious conservatives, who irrelevantly believe marriages are - or ought to be - made in heaven, just do not make a convincing case for defining marriage as only between "a man & a woman," an unsupportable moral judgement in a civil society, & hypocritical as well.
Bush's team wants to make gay marriage part of the national presidential debate - a smokescreen - Bush doesn't need to defend his Jesus put me on the wagon so I could be President Southern Methodism to the Southern Baptist Convention - he has to account to everyone for his actions in Iraq, on the economy, the environment, Medicare, & a host of other issues that touch us - from this administration - severely.
