The ass-backwards arguments against gay marriage.
Another day, another barely intellectually respectable diatribe offering some rationale why gays and lesbians shouldn’t be demanding the right to marriage. Le sigh.
The basic premise is this: that because its arguable whether the state has a legitimate right at all to sanction marriage, or because marriage is itself a flawed institution for whatever reason, that gays and lesbians should merely celebrate their love ipso facto, and not worry about what the state thinks about this at all. By declaring marriage irrelevant, we achieve equality by default.
Stilgherrian’s piece at The Drum is a good example of the former strain, and Michael Carden argues eloquently for the latter on his blog.
This is muddled thinking, and ought to be rejected. Perhaps in some hypothetical future world we can argue over the proper role of the state, but at present, and for the foreseeable future, the state does have a role in sanctioning marriage, and this fact cannot be danced around.
Serendipitously, in California today, Judge Walker provided his decision on whether California’s Proposition 8 ( which banned gay marriage ) breached the U.S. Constitution’s Fourteenth Amendment. It most certainly did - in a tightly-argued decision, Judge Walker shredded the specious arguments put forward against gay marriage. Concluding, he says:
Plaintiffs challenge Proposition 8 under the Due Process and Equal Protection Clauses of the Fourteenth Amendement. Each challenge is independently meritorious, as Proposition 8 unconstitutionally burdens the exercise of a fundamental right, and creates an irrational classification on the basis of sexual orientation.
Let’s just roll that phrase on our tongues ever so briefly: irrational classification. It’s a lovely phrase, and one which will be thrown around for years to come because it gets right to the heart of the matter: the debate over gay marriage is not over the fact of the role of the state, but over the manner of its involvement. Once we accept reality, the arguments I’ve described above become hypothetical diversions.
A funny thing is that the a lot of the most vicious opposition to marriage from within the gay and lesbian community comes from those who reject (as I do) what I’ll call gay exceptionalism: the idea that gays and lesbians form a separate cultural group, with a distinct identity based around sexual orientation. You see the problem here: on one hand, any distinction between gay and straight life is rejected; but when it comes to marriage, then a major, legislated distinction is not only permitted, but encouraged!
I hope to see the day when the statement “John is a homosexual” is no more remarkable than saying “John likes playing with model trains”. But that’s not going to happen while we argue - despite the advances to date - that lesbians and gays should not have exactly the same rights and freedoms as everyone else. Any distinction in rights affirms that gays and lesbians are different, unusual. The dreaded Other. One might even say exceptional.
This same argument undermines any attempt to point out the immorality of killing homosexuals, as done in certain debased countries. We point at their death squads and say gays are equal, and equally entitled to life, while at the same time legislating that gays are - in fact - not equal. I mean, for fuck’s sake! The argument doesn’t just fail morally, it fails logically. I suppose it’s still better than signing an online petition.
Equality is a binary construct: either you have it, or you don’t. There’s no grey area, no room for parallel institutions (e.g. separate-but-equal “civil unions”), no room for compromise. And the sooner people learn this, the sooner they might achieve the aims they think they’re arguing for when they argue against gay marriage.
