The Secular Case Against Gay Marriage

Newsweek ramps-up the gay marriage debate with its cover story this week, "The Religious Case for Gay Marriage."

The piece starts with numerous examples of Biblical figures whose manners of living were diametrically opposed to what today's religious conservatives would champion as an appropriate traditional lifestyle for society: For example, "Abraham, Jacob, David, Solomon and the kings of Judah and Israel—all these fathers and heroes were polygamists."

Read the essay. The problem I see is the author argues an exclusively literalist case against faith-based opposition to same-sex marriage, when in fact most Americans would more likely argue an essentialist religious foundation against gay marriage, one that sees religious tradition - rather than literal prophetic realism - as the basis for an ethics privileging heterosexual marriage.

Here's how Newsweek paints religious literalism as a straw man in favor of a more holistic religious acceptance of same-sex marriage:

As a civil institution, marriage offers practical benefits to both partners: contractual rights having to do with taxes; insurance; the care and custody of children; visitation rights; and inheritance. As a religious institution, marriage offers something else: a commitment of both partners before God to love, honor and cherish each other—in sickness and in health, for richer and poorer—in accordance with God's will. In a religious marriage, two people promise to take care of each other, profoundly, the way they believe God cares for them. Biblical literalists will disagree, but the Bible is a living document, powerful for more than 2,000 years because its truths speak to us even as we change through history. In that light, Scripture gives us no good reason why gays and lesbians should not be (civilly and religiously) married—and a number of excellent reasons why they should.

As I have argued many times here, the case for an expansive religious interpretation of a homosexual right to marry was rejected decisively at the polls this year, and Newsweek's own poll that accompanies this article found only 31 percent of Americans in favor full-blown marriage equality for gays and lesbians.

But we can leave all of that aside for the moment, since the increasing secularism in American society seems like a steamroller at times, and its proponents have no qualms of adopting Soviet-style show-trial tactics to dehumanize those who suppor the majoritarian political process.

The fact is, conservatives may have to battle gay rights advocates on the secular battlefield, as contentious cultural issues like this are essentially uncompromising for people of faith.

Susan Shell, in a masterpiece of an article, "The Liberal Case Against Gay Marriage," lays out a classical and secular liberal case against gay marriage ("liberal" is used here in the Lockean form, with a stress on "liberty of rights," not "liberal" as used to describe the American left).

The core of Shell's argument is that marriage historically is recognized as a practice that his essentially procreative and regenerative. Not all couples bear children, but the institution's social foundation is anchored in the elevation of the basic biological union of spouses, and it is protected under the law as available to only one man and one woman, as a matter of civil principle. Shell argues, for example, marriage should only be available for the regenerative union of spouses in the ideal, as funerals are in fact only available to the dead:

When considering the institution of marriage, a useful comparison exists between how society addresses the beginning and end of human life. Like death, our relation to which is shaped and challenged but not effaced by modern technologies, generation defines our human nature, both in obvious ways and in ways difficult to fathom fully. As long as this is so, there is a special place for marriage understood as it has always been understood. That is to say, there is a need for society to recognize that human generation and its claims are an irreducible feature of the human experience.

Like the rites and practices surrounding death, marriage invests a powerful, universally shared experience with the norms and purposes of a given society. Even when couples do not "marry," as is increasingly becoming the case in parts of western Europe, they still form socially recognized partnerships that constitute a kind of marriage. If marriage in a formal sense is abolished, it will not disappear, but it will no longer perform this task so well.

A similar constraint applies to death. A society could abolish "funerals" as heretofore understood and simply call them "parties," or allow individuals to define them as they wish. Were the "liberationist" exaltation of individual choice pushed to its logical conclusion, would not a public definition of "funeral" as a rite in honor of the dead appear just as invidious as a public definition of "marriage" as an enduring sexual partnership between a man and woman? If it is discriminatory to deny gay couples the right to "marry," is it not equally unfair to deny living individuals the right to attend their own "funerals"? If it makes individuals happy, some would reply, what is the harm? Only that a society without the means of formally acknowledging, through marriage, the fact of generation, like one without the means of formally acknowledging, through funeral rites, the fact of death, seems impoverished in the most basic of human terms.

Like generation, death has a "public face" so obvious that we hardly think of it. The state issues death certificates and otherwise defines death legally. It recognizes funeral attendance as a legal excuse in certain contexts, such as jury duty. It also regulates the treatment of corpses, which may not merely be disposed of like any ordinary animal waste. Many states afford funeral corteges special privileges not enjoyed by ordinary motorists. Funeral parlors are strictly regulated, and there are limits on the purchase and destruction of cemeteries that do not apply to ordinary real estate. In short, there are a number of ways in which a liberal democratic government, as a matter of course, both acknowledges "death" and limits the funereal rites and practices of particular sects and individuals. I cannot call a party in my honor my "funeral" and expect the same public respect and deference afforded genuine rites for the dead. And it would be a grim society indeed that allowed people to treat the dead any old which way--as human lampshades, for example.

Once one grants that the link between marriage and generation may approach, in its universality and solemn significance, the link between funereal practices and death, the question of gay marriage appears in a new light. It is not that marriages are necessarily devoted to the having and rearing of children, nor that infertility need be an impediment to marriage (as is still the case for some religious groups). This country has never legally insisted that the existence of marriage depends upon "consummation" in a potentially procreative act. It is, rather, that marriage, in all the diversity of its forms, draws on a model of partnership rooted in human generation. But for that fact, marriages would be indistinguishable from partnerships of a variety of kinds. The peculiar intimacy, reciprocity, and relative permanence of marriage reflect a genealogy that is more than merely historical.

Seen in this light, the issue of gay marriage can be reduced to the following question: Is the desired union between homosexuals more like a marriage between infertile heterosexuals, unions that draw ultimate psychological and moral sustenance (at least symbolically) from the experience of human generation; or is it more like insistence on attending one's own funeral--a funeral, one might say, existing in name only? This question is not easily answered. Progress can be made, however, by attending to the stated goals of most gay marriage advocates.

Someone who is living cannot attend their own funeral, and thus, according to this logic, someone who is gay cannot attend their own marriage, as marriage has been historically constituted heterosexually in law and culture.

But Shell adds another paragraph indicating the likely backlash militant homosexuals will engender through their hardcore gay marriage advocacy:

American citizens should not have the sectarian beliefs of gay-marriage advocates imposed on them unwillingly. If proponents of gay marriage seek certain privileges of marriage, such as legal support for mutual aid and childbearing, there may well be no liberal reason to deny it to them. But if they also seek positive public celebration of homosexuality as such, then that desire must be disappointed. The requirement that homosexual attachments be publicly recognized as no different from, and equally necessary to society as, heterosexual attachments is a fundamentally illiberal demand. Gays cannot be guaranteed all of the experiences open to heterosexuals any more than tall people can be guaranteed all of the experiences open to short people. Least of all can gays be guaranteed all of the experiences that stem from the facts of human sexual reproduction and its accompanying penumbra of pleasures and cares. To insist otherwise is not only psychologically and culturally implausible; it imposes a sectarian moral view on fellow citizens who disagree and who may hold moral beliefs that are diametrically opposed to it.

Keep in mind that Shell argues this point with the acknowlegment that political libertarianism would accord homosexuals the same rights that accrue to traditional couples, such as adoption. And as we saw in the Newsweek survey, on every other gay rights issues outside of marriage equality majorities of Americans are tolerant and expansive in affording full inclusion for same-sex partners.

But the current militant authoritarianism for same-sex marriage rights - which we've seen demonstrated with nauseating clarity in the No on H8 attacks following the passage of California's Yes on 8 initiative - will almost certainly generate the kind of backlash against gay marriage equality that Shell envisions.

So, while there may indeed by a growing generation tolerance for full-blown same-sex marriage equality, the logical extension of full public affirmation of such marriage rights may well create the the kind of reaction capable of setting back the clock on gay rights altogether.