Longtime readers of this blog will recognise my latest BHL post, on same-sex marriage, as a shameless mashup of several of my previous AAE posts on the same topic.
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Tag Archives | LGBT
The Atrocity of Hope, Part 20: The Dear Leader Deigns to Authorise Your Marriage
I think it’s sweet that our mass-murdering, civil-liberties-shredding President has finally (for the second time) “evolved” all the way to the Dick Cheney level of enlightenment on gay marriage. I’m sure that’ll be a great comfort to Bradley Manning.
Americhristian Exegesis
Oh, and one more. This was published in The Daily Tar Heel (the student newspaper of UNC Chapel Hill) on 28 January 1994:
To the Editor:
Matt Osman’s Jan. 20 letter (“Columnist Obviously Doesn’t Understand Ways of Baptists”) offers two defenses of Christian intolerance of homosexuality.
Mr. Osman’s first defense is the claim that “this country is founded on Christian principles,” and America’s founding documents are cited as evidence. But Mr. Osman’s memory of those documents seems a bit shaky. The Constitution of the United States contains no reference to God or Christianity. The Declaration of Independence contains a passing reference to God, but nothing distinctively Christian. (This is hardly surprising, since its author, Thomas Jefferson, was a Deist, not a Christian.)
Mr. Osman mentions the Pledge of Allegiance. This hardly qualifies as a founding document, since it was written in 1892, and the words “under God” were not added until 1954. In any case, it too contains no reference to Christianity or any distinctively Christian doctrine.
A more relevant document is the 1796 Treaty of Peace and Friendship with Tripoli, drafted under the authority of George Washington, in which the administration of our nation’s first president officially puts itself on the record with the declaration: “The government of the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion.”
Osman’s second defense is that Christians are required to be intolerant because the Bible requires it, and such Christians must “believe in the Bible …. The Bible is an all-or-nothing deal.” But Mr. Osman’s memory of the Bible appears to be a bit shaky as well. The Bible is full of injunctions that few Christians take seriously, from the prohibitions on self-defense (Matthew 5: 39-41) and the eating of oysters (Leviticus 11: 9-12), to the insistence that slaves must obey their masters (Colossians 3: 22) and the endorsement of witch-burning (Exodus 22: 18).
Why should the Bible’s crude and ignorant animadversions on homosexuality be treated any differently? In practice, no Christians really treat the Bible as an all-or-nothing deal, or regard themselves as bound to obey all its literal commands down to the last bizarre detail.
More to the point, even if Mr. Osman were correct in claiming that Christianity requires a literal adherence to the Bible in every detail, this would be irrelevant as a defense of Christian intolerance. If Christianity really did require intolerance, then Christianity would be an evil and ungodly religion, and Christianity would be morally obligated to renounce it. Fortunately, Mr. Osman’s assertions are as groundless in theology as they are in American history.
Roderick T. Long
Marriage 2000: A Time Odyssey
The following passage (CHT Jesse Walker) from Ehrlichman’s Witness to Power: The Nixon Years, quoting Nixon on same-sex marriage in 1970 –
I can’t go that far; that’s the year 2000! Negroes [and whites], okay. But that’s too far!
– irresistibly reminds me of these lines toward the end of the recent Doctor Who episode “Day of the Moon,” set in 1969:
DOCTOR: Canton just wants to get married. Hell of a reason to kick him out of the FBI.
NIXON: I’m sure something can be arranged. … This person you want to marry – black?
CANTON: Yes …
NIXON: I know what people think of me, but perhaps I’m a little more liberal –
CANTON: … he is.
NIXON: I think the moon is far enough for now, don’t you, Mr. Delaware?
CANTON: I figured it might be.
It struck me because I’d seen DW viewers complaining that it was “unrealistic” that Nixon would even have so much as considered the issue of same-sex marriage.
The Logic of Marriage, Part 2
The following letter appeared in today’s Opelika-Auburn News:
To the Editor:
Bruce Murray argues [Tuesday] that gays’ right to marry has not really been violated, since they have the same right to marry that straights do – namely, the right to marry someone of the opposite sex.
With equal logic, a Roman emperor could have argued that Christians under pagan rule had the same religious freedom that pagans had – namely, the freedom to worship Jupiter.
How would Mr. Murray feel if the government were to permit only same-sex marriage, and to assure him that straights have the same marriage rights that gays do – the right to marry someone of the same sex? Would that be genuine equality?
Oddly, Mr. Murray complains that “homosexual unions are far from monogamous.” But if this is a bad thing, as he clearly supposes, then why further discourage monogamy by denying to gays access to the institution of marriage? That seems inconsistent.
Mr. Murray points to the supposedly harmful effects of same-sex marriage in other countries to bolster his support for special rights for heterosexuals; but then he admits that the same effects are occurring here without same-sex marriage, thus undermining the plausibility of the putative causal connection.
Finally, Mr. Murray maintains that the purpose of marriage is to “encourage mating couples to establish a permanent home for their children.” This claim raises several questions.
First, why are infertile or aged couples allowed to marry, then?
Second, gays have children too. Why does Mr. Murray seek to discourage them from raising their children?
Third, since when is social engineering a proper function of the law? The Declaration of Independence limits government’s legitimate powers to the protection of individuals’ rights to control their own lives. Encouraging particular patterns of family structure is none of the
government’s business.Roderick T. Long
The Logic of Marriage
I’ve heard that my letter below was published in today’s Opelika-Auburn News; I haven’t seen a copy yet so I don’t know whether they cut anything.
To the Editor:
The arguments one hears nowadays against treating gays like human beings all seem to be recycled from the arguments 150 years ago against treating women like human beings.
In the 19th century, a married woman had no legal right to control her own property, to have access to her own children, or to resist being raped by her husband. Those who fought against this legalized oppression of women were accused of seeking the abolition of marriage.
The male supremacists’ argument was that the subordination of the wife to the husband had so long characterized marriage that it should be considered part of the very definition of marriage, so that no relationship between legal equals could count as a marriage.
If we were to apply that standard nowadays, we would have to say that there are no married couples in the United States today. If we’re not willing to say that, then we must admit that marriage’s history does not define its boundaries.
Just as the 19th-century male supremacists rejected same-rights marriage as contradictory, so today’s hetero-supremacists reject same-sex marriage as “impossible,” as Bruce Murray does in his letter [Sunday]. But if we reject the former argument, we must reject the latter for the same reason.
The anti-marriage-equality act (calling it the defense-of-marriage act is the equivalent of calling the old prohibition on women’s and blacks’ right to vote the defense-of-voting act) is trivially unconstitutional; there’s no way that granting special rights to heterosexuals and denying them to homosexuals can be considered “equal protection of the laws.”
More importantly (since justice is always more important than legality), the anti-marriage-equality act is a sin against human equality, and an oath to enforce it would be just as illegitimate as an oath to commit any other crime.
Roderick T. Long
For previous posts on the definition of marriage, see “Who Defends Marriage?” and “The Form of Sound Words.”