An enormous 11 page piece in the NY Times on Gay Marriage titled “What’s Their Real Problem With Gay Marriage? (It’s the Gay Part),” which is, on balance, a pretty fair piece on the issue of gay marriage and the political forces aligned to stop it. While the article (at least to me), seemed to be pretty balanced, some passages are bound to create and uproar among some. These include:
But for the anti-gay-marriage activists, homosexuality is something to be fought, not tolerated or respected. I found no one among the people on the ground who are leading the anti-gay-marriage cause who said in essence: ”I have nothing against homosexuality. I just don’t believe gays should be allowed to marry.” Rather, their passion comes from their conviction that homosexuality is a sin, is immoral, harms children and spreads disease. Not only that, but they see homosexuality itself as a kind of disease, one that afflicts not only individuals but also society at large and that shares one of the prominent features of a disease: it seeks to spread itself.
That passage will cause problems for the obvious reasons. Same with this:
Of course, this view of homosexuality — seeing it as a disorder to be cured — is not new. It was cutting-edge thinking circa 1905. While most of society — including the American Medical Association, the American Psychiatric Association, the American Academy of Pediatrics, the National Education Association, the World Health Organization and many other such groups — eventually came around to the idea that homosexuality is normal, some segments refused to go along. And what was once a fairly fringe portion of the population has swelled in recent years, as has its influence.
And then there is this:
Several anti-gay-marriage activists drew my attention to a study showing that since gay civil unions became legal in Denmark, Sweden and the Netherlands, the rate of out-of-wedlock births in those countries has increased. When I made the observation that, of all things to lay at the feet of homosexuals, the birth rate was surely not one of them, Laura Clark had an answer: ”When marriage can mean anything, it means nothing. Why bother to get married at all?” And indeed, she is accurately reflecting the analysis of Stanley Kurtz, a research fellow at the Hoover Institution whose articles on the topic in The Weekly Standard make the rounds of the activists. Kurtz links rising rates of cohabitation and out-of-wedlock birth to the legalization of gay unions. He follows a British demographer in studying cohabitation rates in three groups of European countries: the Nordics, those roughly in the geographic middle and the southern tier.
Read the whole thing.
Bob
Of course, the birthrate in Western countries has been more or less been going down for decades. Marriage is Western Europe has been going down. Out-of-wedlock births are somewhat up. So let’s blame it all on gay marriage?
The anti-gay movement is right in that the institution of marriage, as they knew it, is crumbling. It has throughout history.
At some point in the past there were no ceremonies for marriage. No wedlock. Everyone was out of wedlock. At some point later on, go back and read the Bible, multiple wives was kosher. Unwilling women are packed off with dowries. There are all sorts of rules and regulations that each social structure will create, and when that society is deformed by changing conditions, the most reactionary, the most attached to those constructed morals, feel the most need to defend them and to find blame for the threat to them.
Right now there are good people in the Muslim world who are indignant that outside forces are trying to stop the killing of women who marry or have a relationship against family wishes and bring dishonor against the family. How dare we intrude on their social institutions?
Another point: Gay marriage would further legitimize gayness. Submerged sexuality has long been a psychic fuel used to drive people to greatness, whether that greatness was in acquiring wealth, power or whathaveyou. Imagine how many politicians, egos engorged with blood by the thought of a homosexual dalliance, stride to the podium to thunder about the evilness of gay marriage!
Arthur Greenwood
I honestly do not understand all the fuss over gay marriage. Why should heterosexuals be the only ones to suffer the horrors of this wretched institution? Any law that allows gays to escape this absurd and unnatural civil imprisonment should be abolished immediately. I’m sick to death of a govt that privileges minorities over the rest of us.
Jaybird
I’m one of those who tends to see Religion as D&D for grownups.
If you want to have your little group and play by these little rules and have all of these weird little taboos and totems and all that stuff, knock yourself out.
Hey, if you enjoy your gaming sessions so much that you want me to show up and play along, good for you. Come on in. We can talk about it. I’ll put the kettle on.
Hey, if you even want to say “Our gaming group has a rule against elves”, that’s fine. I think that you’re likely to alienate a lot of gamers out there who want to be elves… but it’s your basement and it’s not like there aren’t games in other basements where elves are welcome.
But when you try to pass a law that says “nobody can play an elf in any basement”, you’re forgetting your place. It’s just a game. Leave other people who want to play alone. If you’re part of the SCA (Society for Creative Anacronism) and that’s how you want to spend your free time, that’s great. But you don’t get to tell me that I should not be wearing denim or my glasses have inappropriate frames unless I sign up and say “I want to play by your rules”.
I tend to feel the same for gay marriage. If your church doesn’t want to provide the sacrament to gays, that’s fine. It’s your church.
If you try to make it so that the unitarians can’t give the sacrament to gays? I ask: “What the hell?” Moreover, if the government wants to provide some measure of rights provided to married people to gay people in long-term life-partnerships, that’s pretty much between the two people and the government and it’s none of your business. If the two homosexuals come to your church and say “we want to have a wedding”, you can say “we reserve the right to withhold sacraments from the following groups of people” and have whomever you want on that list… but you don’t get to tell other churches and institutions about who they can or can’t give similar sacraments to. Withhold your own. Talk about how people who aren’t married by your particular Holy Man aren’t *really* married. Talk about how, after they die, they will spend an eternity in hell. That’s fine. But it’s wrong for you to actively try to prevent people in other basements from playing elves.
I do not suggest, however, that pro-gay marriage proponents adopt this argument. I think that it would do their cause much more harm than good. As a matter of fact, if this stuff started being said in public, it would alienate pretty much everybody with even the slightest amount of sympathy for Religion (which, as we’ve seen in the last few elections, is enough to push the outcome one way or the other).
So if I were going to try to get gay marriage accepted by as many people as I possibly could, I wouldn’t invoke religion at all. Point out that churches wouldn’t even have to worry about homosexually sullying their altars. As a matter of fact, it shouldn’t even be called “marriage”. Hell, even “civil unions” is too loaded a term. I would come up with the most boring name ever. “The CP-45a Tax Relationship.”
Point out that it’s not marriage. Keep saying over and over and over that it’s not marriage. Point out that all it does is allow for 100% tax-free inheritance between the two members of the CP-45a tax relationship. Point out that it allows for one to be covered by the other’s insurance (if the policy itself allows such a thing). Say that one person in a CP-45a tax relationship can visit the other in the hospital over the objections of, say, the other’s parents. Keep hammerring over and over and over that it’s not marriage, it’s just a tax relationship that is recognized by the government that allows a handful of benefits between the two partners who are, we’d like to point out, *NOT* married. (And, by the way, CP-45a tax relationships are only available to people who are not already in one and who are not married.)
I honestly feel that most people out there don’t *CARE* about whether homosexuals are able to visit each other in the hospital, or if they require a will between the two of them if one dies, or if one is eligible for insurance coverage the other gets from work. It’s not that they’re for it, but they’re just not against it. They don’t care. A CP-45a tax relationship would play off of this apathy for the tax workings of others and most people will start yawning right around the hyphen in the name.
Just let the Christians keep their own gaming groups unsullied by elves and they will allow something like the CP-45a tax relationship to exist (and if the Unitarians want to hold a marriage ceremony for the two guys who signed the CP-45a Tax Relationship paperwork yesterday, well, that’s offensive but the Unitarians aren’t *REAL* Christians anyway, destined to hell forever and all that).
Far too often, I get the feeling that the gay marriage proponents are less interested in allowing gays to marry than they are interested in a thumb to the eye of Christians.
I sympathize with this. I really do. Just read the top part of this essay again, if you don’t believe me. But, at the end of the day, if they want to keep to their basements playing their little games, they have every right to do that… just so long as I can allow elves into my games.
Stormy70
The point I have with Gay marriage is get it passed in the Legislatures, not the courts. I prefer Gay marriage, but it seems to be out of reach at this time. Work to get civil unions passed, and Gay marriage will come along in time. Demographics will see it happen, since the younger generations are more open to gays marrying.
Ben
The interesting thing about this article is that not one of the religious fundamentalists interviewed said a word about the real causes of the destruction of marriage… 50% divorce rate (even among evangelicals), 1.5 million abortions a year, adultery and illegitimacy. Those are the activities that are ruining “marriage”, “the family”, and “children”. Banning gay marriage should only be offered up as a portion of the solution, the other being outlawing divorce and enforcing adultery laws.
Chris Owen
I think we’ve been down this road before…
Jay C
Thanks, John for this post: curiously, yours is the first blogosphere reference to the NYTM article I’ve seen today (Sunday 6/19). AFAIC, this piece is far from “balanced”, as it tends to spotlight the “true” motivation of many anti-gay activists. AS the author points out, it is NOT the “marriage” part of “gay marriage” that bends them out of shape, but the “gay” part. I have always thought that this is the true wellspring of the anti-gay “movement” in this country; that all the marriage/civil-union/constitutionality/jusicial-activism polemics are just a cover for the main, underlying ideology: homosexuality/homosexuals is/are intrinsically evil (according to the teachings of religion), and that Society MUST condemn it/them or…….
Well, it’s the “or” bit that has me (wicked and foresworn secularist that I am) a bit baffled: other than a sort of generalized “God won’t like it” attitude – it really is hard to see what the supposedly dire results of treating gays like any other citizens will be. Other, of course, than denting the self-righteous authoritiarianism of organized religion (which, IMO, is the whole issue).
At any rate, at least the mask is partly off now: homophobia is now its own reason for actions – and the “religious right” can now flaunt its prejudices openly.
gratefulcub
Kurtz is a hack. I have ‘cohabitated’ for 5 years. It had nothing to do with Gay marriage. just because 2 things increase simultaneously, doesn’t mean there is a connection.
shinobi
Correlation does not equal causation.
Just because two things happen simultaneously does not mean that one causes the other. In fact, maybe the illegitimate births were the cause of the gay marriage. Or maybe both of them a symptoms of a shift in societal beliefs that is the cause of both of them and the result of a more educated populus.
Also I wonder if part of the fear of the gay has to do with parents fearing that legalizing gay marriage will make all their children want to be gay since it is no longer taboo.
Compuglobalhypermeganet
From your quote of the Times:
“I found no one among the people on the ground who are leading the anti-gay-marriage cause who said in essence: ”I have nothing against homosexuality. I just don’t believe gays should be allowed to marry.” Rather, their passion comes from their conviction that homosexuality is a sin, is immoral, harms children and spreads disease. Not only that, but they see homosexuality itself as a kind of disease…”
From your Gay Marriage = Hitler post below:
“This demonstration is the people’s response to the government’s provocations,” said Fr. Jose Ramon Velasco. “We’re not against homosexuals but allowing them to marry degrades matrimony.”
So, while this (I’m sure) hardworking reporter for the Times insinuates that he couldn’t find ONE anti-gay-marriage activist who wasn’t anti-homosexual, CNN obviously had no such problem in Spain.
Kind of makes you wonder whether the Times reporter even WANTED to find someone like Fr. Velasco, doesn’t it? Or would the Times just like everyone reading to believe that EVERYONE who is anti-gay-marriage hates gays (despite the facts that opinion polls don’t even come close to bearing out that notion). The Times is surely above demonizing opponents of their paper’s policies…uh, I mean, objective reports…aren’t they?
Seems the Times is doing its thing again. Next time, could you link to a little more credible source, like…commondreams.org?